My Mother Warned Me About Men Like Lindsay Graham
by Valerie Morales
This happened in one of my favorite movies: a hunter of human cargo was creeping through 1873 Ohio. He was desperately looking for a woman named Sethe who had escaped slavery by boating across the Ohio River with her newborn daughter named Beloved.
When the slave catcher finally cornered Sethe and Beloved away from the house and in the barn, a defiant I ain’t gonna be a slave no more Sethe stared him down. Then she knifed her own baby’s throat.
For those who found the scene stunning and extreme, and grisly, and for those who can’t comprehend that slavery is a worse circumstance than death, let me remind you what a butterfly in a jar knows. It is far worse to be owned than to be let free.
Cinematically, the barn scene is a visual reminder of the zero-sum game of runaway slaves and points to the reprehensible acts black women have had to enact and endure on freedom’s behalf.
The novel Beloved was inspired by the true story of runaway slave Margaret Garner who slit her daughter’s throat with a butcher knife, and wounded her other children before she was captured by slave catchers and the U.S. Marshals.
At her trial, antislavery activist Lucy Stone informed the court that “rather than give her daughter to that life, she [Margaret] killed it. In her deep maternal love she felt the impusle to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe…”
By that life, Stone meant servitude, black womanist despair, and cruelty.
Her words remained with me years after I read them and that barn scene in Beloved was what I thought about when I saw Lindsay Graham’s bulging eyes and frothy mouth “questioning” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Supreme Court nomination hearing. I thought about how [some] white men try to shame black women who determine their own freedom. I thought of how hate lasers north, south and around the body politic, stunning like darts, maiming innocent flesh. I thought of white cruelty and black pain and how irresistible it must be to disrespect black women because of perpetually shifting alliances on their behalf.
Historically, white men have treated black women with an explosive amount of violence. Sexual violence. Emotional violence. Generational trauma violence. As a defense, white men explain themselves by saying black women are looking at the past through a broken mirror they themselves cracked. Margaret Garner was the one who butchered her daughter’s neck, they say. Yes. True. But slavery drove her to it. Oppression drove her to it.
What made the Graham-Judge Jackson torment even more sickening to stomach was that thousands of black women were celebratory in this very unique moment in American history that Lindsay Graham pissed on.
It reminded black women of our ancestors’ trauma, their scars, and belittlement, their abuse, and grace when tortured. Change has not been swift nor complete because the hearts of white men have remained unchanged.
Absent remorse, Graham used the she’s qualified…but card as an excuse to demean Judge Jackson’s credentials. His face was contorted with venom, spittle flying as he wanted black women like me and like my mother and like my aunts to know that we heard him correctly, we saw him correctly. Undiginified. Lacking any sort of moral compass and character. Shadowy and bankrupt. Frankly, it was a Shakespearean tragedy shit show. It went beyond absurd.
Graham’s performance reminded me of the long ago dead who were made to feel shame in the face of white rage and had to act in desperation. His ancestors were perfectly callous. Mine were of God and grace.
Graham’s confrontational approach against a woman who had done everything the right way, and who, as he put it, was well qualified, but was not the black woman he wanted so he was going to burn the house down, well, it was one more checkmark on the side of things white men do to traumatize black women because it gives them a meth kind of high. I don’t want to hear how it was a sucky brand of politics Republicans have retailed to their white supremacist sycophants. Because as an excuse that kind of fallacious reasoning liquifies what really went down. Graham undermined a qualified candidate for racial reasons, GOP reasons, misogynistic reasons- the why is irrelevant.
Angry white men like Graham are in a perpetual poetic pout because nothing lasts forever. The power they are losing because of abortion and demographics, because brown is the new white, because they can’t erase the narrative of black lives mattering no matter its consequences upon people they care zero fucks about, none of it has the power or wherewithall to stop evolution and time.
Lindsay Graham is super bothered. After three Republicans announced they were voting to confirm Judge Jackson he was whiny. He reminded us that if they [the GOP]were in power a Ketanji Brown Jackson nomination would not have occurred.
You think?
But let’s look at data. When Republicans were in power they gifted us with January 6th. COVID-19 was infantilized. Karens ran roughshod every time a black woman was in her space. They trivialized Asian hate.
But isn’t that how white privilege works? You and all your baggage use someone else as the scapegoat for your rage? It took a black man [Corey Booker] to remind those watching the hearings (dispirited at what we were witnessing) that black women are valued, respected, honored, that we are worthy. Not one white man, Democrat or Republican, would ever have launched into such a theological defense on behalf of a woman with brown skin the way Corey Booker did and it had me and every black woman I know who watched it in tears. No one ever claps for us, unless they are angling for something. A vote. An endorsement. Likes.
They said Michelle Obama looked like a monkey. And Anita Hill was a slut liar. And Judge Brown embraced sex porn dude. And Serena Williams looked like a man.
Graham’s behavior was far worse than any kind of gamesmanship political strategists think up in the shadows. And yet it wasn’t the worst example of obfuscation, not when school districts think its okay to cut off a black child’s hair. And teachers embrace the telling of historical lies like slavery didn’t oppress black people. And white people are wonderful.
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When despondent about racial cruelty my mother used to say me that it rains on the just and the unjust. That might be true in theory. But black women get the monsoon and the hurricanes and the tornadoes while white men like Lindsay Graham get the drizzle and then just move along to the next target to disrespect.
My mother also said to be wary of men like Lindsay Graham, men who don’t see you, who look right through you, who minimize your experience and your accomplishments and your suffering and trauma. Those men are patronizing and dishonest and in the last third of their life bitterly angry as they scream and blather at you about how you are taking away their choices just by existing.
When I was in high school I did an Independent Study on Black History. My sponsor was a white history teacher who felt forced to acquiesce to my counselor and so he divided the course into four sections with 20 typed pages of paper to write per section as a requirement. When he returned the first graded paper I noticed he had corrected the grammatical errors but refused to comment on the content. My mother was livid because she watched me typing those pages and staying up late at night; she saw the heart I put into it.
My mother who years later would become a priest addressed my teacher in the same graceful manner Judge Jackson addressed her Republican tormenters. She said “You said nothing about this part. The slave trade. Or this part. Slave auctions. Or this part. Slave rape. Or this part, slave economics. You call yourself a history teacher. Then teach.”
Years later as I thought about that encounter when I was 16, I believe Mr. Hanton was, before it was so-named, taking a stand against Critical Race Theory, angry that I was passionate about the historical tragedies and excellence of my own people. That I was black and I said I was black. That he was white and I said he was white. I came to realize that white men want to silence black women’s history and black women's thoughts, black women’s experiences and black women’s motherhood, black women’s children, and black women’s assault. And black women’s pride in one another.
When Lindsay Graham was spitting rage, when he “questioned” Judge Jackson’s credentials, when he gaslighted her with hate pressed all over his eyes and lips, when he tried to discredit her life’s work and appeared to have something broken inside of him, he was spewing rage at my mother, an Episocal priest, and he was tormenting my grandmother’s accomplishments at the University of Chicago, and he was minimizing my godmother’s podiatry practice, and every black woman who pulled me aside and said “Valerie, you are special” and “Valerie I love your hair” and “Valerie you are smart”- those black girl magic women who have loved me he pissed on.
I can’t speak for Lindsay Graham’s intention. All I know was what it felt like watching his hissy fit. It felt personal. Like he hated black women. Like he hated me. The euphoria I held for Judge Jackson’s nomination suddenly felt idiosyncratic until I remembered this is what white men do to black women they can’t best, who are too strong for them, too accomplished, too unbreakable, they rage in a death-by-paper-cut soliloquy hoping they have reduced their target into a mass of gunk who will just slink away and give in to their temper tantrums. As if we aren’t Harriet Tubman’s daugthers.
Sorry, GOP. And. Not sorry. We are not here for you to discredit our excellence. We are not here for you to malign our beauty. We are not here for you to criminalize our sons and sexualize our daughters. We take the hits your small minds can’t help but dish out, because, like Maya wrote “You may shoot me with your words/You may cut me with your eyes/You may kill me with your hatefulness/but still, like air, I’ll rise.”
