When the news of the shooting spree at Virginia Tech was hitting the airwaves, my tv was still off, I was still snugly in my bed, at my apartment, sleeping.
I heard my phone ring and it was the ringtone of my best friend at the time, Melanie.
Because it was her, I decided to look at it. I was hoping she was trying to invite me to Shafer for some breakfast (God knows how much I love Shafer Dining Court at VCU).
It was a text message and the text message read something like "Are u awake? u watch the news?" I responded that I hadn't and that her text message had awaken me. She told me to take a deep breath and turn the tv on.
I have anxiety so I was really freaking out in my head. I am also my mother's daughter and I immediately started thinking worst case, end of days scenarios. I turned on the tv (to CNN, no doubt) to live coverage of the shooting spree at Virgina Tech.
Melanie and I were on the phone by this point and I really could not hear anything she was saying. My little brother goes to VTech, and the prospect of him caught in a madman's crossfire was worse than the end-of-days scenario I was sweating over.
I immediately hung up with Mel and called my brother. Of course! It went straight to voicemail. God wouldn't make it any less dramatic. I called him several times, wanting to know I would see him again.
It then occurred to me that my parents and all of our huge extended African family was probably trying to call him too. And he was probably trying to call out as well. Calm down Zainab. Just call Dadddy. So I called the house to speak to the parentals. My mom was at work and had not been told yet. We don't usually tell mom about crises until we have concrete information because the woman just goes wild (later on, I found out she was at work with her younger sister. My aunt told her about the shooting after we found out my brother was okay. She fell to the floor in thorough Afrakan dramatics before her sister could mention that her baby was okay. She is just wild).
My Daddy hadn't spoken to Sheikh yet and he said no one has been able to speak to him. Well, the panic began. I didn't even know what to do. I wasn't sad or even really panicking that he was dead. I was just fixed on how am I going to get in contact with my baby brother? It hadn't occurred to me yet that he could be dead.
Half an hour later, my Daddy called to say he spoke to my brother and that he is safe in a friend's dorm room. My brother is a computer engineer major and had all his classes, save for one, in the very building, in one of the very classrooms in which students were murdered.
He said that when he was walking to his nine o'clock class, he heard gunshots. He says that because of the farmland and forestry that surrounds the campus, one often hears the gunshots of cattleherders and hunters. But he said these gunshots sounded uncomfortably close to campus so he turned his Black self around and went to a friend's dorm room, so as not to have to walk all the way to his own dorm room. He said it freaked him out.
I used to make fun of my baby brother for being a "punk". I used to strongly perpetuate the hyper-macho, masculine ideal to my brothers all the time. Sheikhy was in no way interested in investigating things, finding out sources, etc. He was adventurous and aggressive in play like most boys are, but anything that he was afraid of or weary about, he stayed away from. And really, in all my ridicule, it was his "scaredie-catness" that kept him alive.
In the days and weeks following, as investigations and commentary flowed through the news and our living rooms, we students on our social networks put up profile pictures (like the one featured in the beginning of this entry) in support of the Virginia Tech community and in remembrance for the lives lost on that day.
I remember going to a vigil held on our campus for the murdered students, crying so bitterly about the crazy world we live in, as if parents don't have enough to worry about when they send their children off to school; about the loss I almost had to deal with; about the loss people are actually dealing with.
Over the summer, after the news frenzy had waned a little bit, I came across an article about the www.lansing.com cartoonist who created the cartoon image I use for this blog entry. The article, written by an HBCU alum, discussed the lack of HBCU mascots in the social network campaign to support VTech. He (or she, can't remember the author) said it was difficult for him to find something that expressed a unity of his alma mater and VTech. Many universities had flags with their mascot and Tech's mascot linked by a compassionate message of support and condolences.
The article also wondered why in the construction of that cartoon, the artist did not consider the HBCU's of Virginia who were also feeling the pain of the massacre, or students of HBCU's who suffered a personal loss because of the massacre.
I guess in the safety of not suffering the loss of my brother and being some months removed from my initial emotional reaction, I could entertain the message of the article.
Such an article begs the question "Why does it matter?" Why does it matter that the HBCU's were left out?
In the grand scheme of things, given that 32 innocent people died that day, I would say it doesn't matter. But on a smaller scale, within the contextual conversation of race relations, I think it is very significant. This White artist failed to consider the Black institutions' response to the massacre, which was the same as all other institutions. All of us with breath and soul were sad for Virginia Tech and sad for the turn American culture has taken into violence.
The artist who drew the cartoon is not a racist because he left out the HBCU's. But what does it say about our culture, about White culture, about the relationship between Black people and White people (in higher education, mind you) that the HBCU's had a hard time finding symbols, illustrations, flags, etc. to express their condolesenses to the Virginia Tech community?
Is it because we (all of us who reside in America) don't consider HBCU's to be serious institutions? We don't consider them to be 'mainstream' because they are for Black people? We just don't consider them. What are the social experiences that Mr. Lansing drew from (no pun intended) that caused him to fail to include HBCU's, as if people who go to HBCU's had no opinion or sentiment about the massacre?
That is the point of the conversation, I believe. In almost anything that seemingly affects us all, regardless of any group characteristics, Black people are often left unconsidered. I say that Mr. Lansing is not necessarily a racist because he did not include HBCU's in his drawing because it is possible that it did not occur to him that there are HBCU's in Virginia. It is possible that he doesn't know any HBCU's in Virginia.
As a White man, belonging to the dominant, oppressive culture, he does not have to look to either side of himself to see the marginalized groups and how they live. If he did know of HBCU's and deliberately decided not to include them, then he would be a racist. I have no way of knowing which case is true (which is the grand conundrum of being a person of color and experiencing racism. In this day and age of legislated equal rights, few instances are outright and inarguably racist. Some circumstances are more subtle and draw on the past experiences of the person of color being discriminated against, which allows a person to assume they are being discriminated against).
This is a controversial example of how race informs so much of what we do and how we do it because innocent people were murdered. The conversation I address in this blog entry is seemingly just a distraction from the facts of the matter: 1) 32 murders 2)Virginia Tech's negligence evidenced by their failure to shut down school after the first 2 early morning murders 3)the transition from college (or anywhere) from a place of institutional business to a place vulnerable to the attack of any given sociopath.
If I had lost my brother on that day, I would not give a damn about this conversation. I mention only because I find it so interesting that conversations of race are relevant to almost everything in this culture.
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