Today marks a week since the Paris attacks, and with it a renewed sense of anguish and grief over the loss of innocent life.
Millions have shared their condolences on social media. Facebook transformed into the blue, white and red of the French flag, and Twitter feeds were overwhelmed with #PrayerForParis.
Millions, too, have expressed dismay at the (lack of) response to other sources of oppression and mass violence. Where is this grief and outrage when Beirut and Baghdad experienced similar attacks of terror days earlier? When Israeli occupation forces slaughter Palestinians daily? When police brutally murder Black and brown youth on our streets? What of my friends in Beirut, Baghdad, Palestine and Amerikkka? What of their safety?
At home and abroad, grief has transgressed to white terror, Islamophobia and xenophobia. In North Carolina, Gov. Pat McCrory and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Roy Cooper both called for a halt on the resettlement of Syrian refugees. Locally, a refugee resettlement organization where a friend of mine works has been warned of potential threats. Alert Carolina called for an increased security presence on campus and awareness of “unusual” activity — coded language for further surveillance, policing and terrorization of Black and brown people.
This begs the question: Whose safety are we protecting and at whose expense? Who has the privilege of being humanized and who does not?
I did not change my profile picture to the shades of “France.” To do so would require me to express selective grief, value white lives over Black and brown lives and validate a narrative predicated upon Western victimhood and exceptionalism.
In her poem, South Asian blogger Karuna Parikh lamented, “Not one person’s status update says, ‘Baghdad,’ because not one white person died in that fire.” The white world is unfazed by Black and brown victimhood and incited to racialized violence by white victimhood. Mass violence against people of color — often at the hands of Western colonialism and capitalism — is treated as commonplace, victimless and agentless. On the other hand, white victims are imagined as martyrs to justify further violence against people of color. Selective grief begets a two-tiered valuation of humanity in which white blood is sanctified and Black and brown blood is collateral and surplus, pathological and criminal.
The attacks in France last week were labeled the “bloodiest” in French history. I suppose French history has been absolved of the blood of Algerians massacred on the streets of Paris in 1961 or the blood of millions in Southeast Asia, India, Syria and Saharan Africa murdered during French colonialism.
The French flag has flown as a symbol of victimhood for a week, but as an emblem of colonial oppression, violence and terrorism against people of color for centuries.
