Home Sweet Home
Imagine you come home from work after a long day. You pull into the driveway of your dream house. But instead of feeling relieved or happy, you cringe. You know it’s coming. And sure enough, you’re barraged with blinking lights, loud music, and racist harassment from your neighbor.
This is the reality facing Jannique Martinez and her family. Five years ago, Jannique and her husband (both military veterans BTW), purchased a house on a quiet little cul-de-sac in Virginia Beach, VA. Over the years, their neighbor, a white man named John Michael Eskildsen, has gradually increased his harassment of the family. What started with blinking lights has escalated into the racist nonsense you saw above. With young children at home, it has been a very difficult time for them. They have contacted the police several times about the harassment but the police say that nothing illegal is happening.
It’s quite a complicated setup the man has. His house is covered in security cameras, several of which are pointed at the Martinez’s home and driveway. He has motion sensors that activate the sounds and lights whenever someone comes or goes to the house. And when her husband would park his truck on the street, monkey noises would play.
It seems insane to me that in 2021 a person can do this to their neighbors. Not just in a moral sense but in a legal one as well. If this isn’t harassment, I don’t know what is. Virginia does have a number of laws that the neighbor would seem to be violating. According to Cook Attorney, “harassment, as it is generally understood, is repeated and aggressive action that annoys or intimidates a person or group of people, thereby causing anxiety or fear.”
Seems like this fits the bill. The police could absolutely do something about this. Funny how when it comes to other aspects of controlling the public, particularly people of color, the police don’t hesitate to throw their weight around. But in this case, they’re basically like “sorry, can’t help ya, darn Constitution.” I wonder what race the police chief in this town is…
Looks white to me!
I can’t help but think that if this situation were a little different, the police would be willing to do something about it. Let’s say a Muslim family began playing music and recorded messages from Osama Bin Laden at a white, Christian family. Do you think the police would just be like “sorry, can’t do nothing”? Or do you think that family would be on the FBI’s radar faster than it takes to cook an egg?
All that aside, this is terrorism. To focus upon a person’s race and use that to demean, frighten, and make life unlivable is pretty much the definition of terrorism. I mean, would you feel safe if this was your neighbor? If they used cameras to keep tabs on you, blared music, and haunted you with racial epithets every time you went to grab the paper? Would you feel comfortable allowing your children to play outside? I doubt you would.
It is convenient for white folks to say that this is “protected speech” under the First Amendment. Bullcrap. There are many forms of speech that are illegal. You can’t say sexually explicit stuff to children. You can’t yell fire in a theater. You can’t say “Imma kill you”. How is this any different? White people might not think that saying the n-word is an act of violence. But it is. When a word has such a terrible history, all that context comes with it when it’s directed at Black people. The images of lynchings, of boys being dragged behind trucks, and so many other crimes — those all come with it. White people do not have to live with that. And it makes sense we’d try to distance ourselves from it since it was white people who were doing all the hateful acts.
It is easy to say racist incidents like this one and many others like it are isolated incidents. But in reality, it is all part of a larger systemic problem. Privilege and supremacy has granted an unfair status to one particular group of people. Spoiler alert: it’s white people. And it is from that perspective that many of my fellow whites are blinded to reality. We’ve even reached the point where white people talk in earnest about being oppressed.
Allowing Black people to be humiliated and dehumanized is as American as apple pie. Only 100 years ago, blackface performances were the most popular kind of entertainment. It was a tradition that went back to the 1830s and still continues to generate controversy today. White people are able to say “what’s the big deal, it’s just a Halloween costume” because their ancestors are not the ones being mocked and lampooned. It was not their grandparents and great-grandparents who had to sit at different lunch counters and drink from different fountains. Instead, it was their ancestors who were holding the bullwhips and tying nooses.
The whole point of systemic racism is to continue to elevate white lives and white culture at the expense of lowering and devaluing Black lives. It is to portray them as “less than” and animalistic. This way, when they are treated with callous, hateful behavior, white people can feel OK about it. Or at the least, shrug and say that nothing can be done.
Nonsense. A LOT can be done about this. But it has to come from all corners of our society. White people, in particular, need to step up their anti-racism game. What does this mean? It means confronting your friends when they say racist shit. It means telling your husband to shut up when he tells that one Black joke he knows. It demands that you do more at your job to elevate Black folks and other people of color.
If you’re a white person reading this and thinking “well, I didn’t have anything to do with this. I didn’t enslave anyone. I didn’t call anyone the n-word. I’m not racist,” then you are missing the point entirely. This isn’t about what you, a single person, have done. It is about centuries of oppression and maltreatment of which you are the sole beneficiary. If the racist treatment of the Martinez family bothers you, if it makes you feel like the neighbor is betraying American values, if you want to live in a world where this does not happen, then you must begin to transform your world in anti-racist ways.
I want to end with a little positivity. I saw this ad the other day and it got me tearing up. It’s a beautiful message about how we can defeat racism, even in the face of violence. But it also serves as a stern reminder that we are still battling with our past and that we still have a long way to go.