The fourth floor rotunda is abuzz with activity before Gov. Ron DeSantis' State of the State speech, Tuesday, Mar. 7, 2023 at the Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla. (AP Photo/Phil Sears)
Published on April 19, 2023 at 9:42 pm
“If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
-Zora Neale Hurston
I’m often disconcerted by the laws coming out of Tallahassee, but beyond the draconian nature of the legislation, what I’m really needled by is the swift construction of a surveillance state. This is beyond cameras in phones, red lights, and on doorbells, but the de facto deputizing of citizens to surveil their neighbors and turn them into the actual police for suspected crimes. Even an Orwellian comparison is too on the nose. Where 1984 intentionally drifted into the dystopian for didactic effect, what’s happening in Florida, across the American South, and, truly, nationwide is more insidious and sinister.
These legislative measures target the very existence of marginalized groups. Identifiable differences are punished as if they can be expunged from the body and excised from the substance of our souls. But with one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, preventing the procedure after six weeks of gestation, I guess that is exactly the point, save for the unborn. Their lives matter.
And while – on paper – there are circumstances in which abortion would be permissible, they are a bit dubious. Exceptions for rape, incest, and human trafficking (now allowed up to 15 weeks) require proof like a police report. Rape is the most underreported crime, with an estimated 63% of sexual assaults not being reported to the police. So this ban is re-victimizing someone who has already suffered trauma and been made a victim when they’re trying to survive. Furthermore, I don’t have a lot of faith in the law’s exception for saving the life of the mother because of the already high rate of maternal mortality nationwide, especially among Black women. Let the stories of Anya Cook and Shanae Smith-Cunninghan be cautionary tales.
The lack of access to necessary medical care and the denial of reproductive justice to women is just but another example of lawmakers’ litany of legislative priorities that erode, restrict, or outright block not only equality but equity. This realization, for me, is personified by the recent travel advisories issued for the state of Florida by the NAACP, Equality Florida, and the Florida Immigrant Coalition. They make it clear that there is real danger for Black folks, queer folks, and immigrants to visit, live in, or relocate to the state. I’d like to add another advisory to the bunch: one for the women folk.
These crimes, like having an abortion or teaching slavery in history class as a key component of the founding of our country, endanger us. There is an abundance of guns and a paucity of empathy, compassion and humanity. Men, women, and even children shoot first and roll the dice with whether or not the police or a jury will have mercy on them — or at its most egregious — find them not guilty of taking a life. We may be human, but aside from being bipedal we exhibit none of the social graces defining humane.
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America has always been hostile and inhospitable, Florida particularly so. And now the scrutiny we live under, in this state, has transformed us into spectacle. Offal for consumption. Our pain exploited for ratings, clicks, and views. The Black folk, queer folk, women folk, and immigrants dehumanized every time our rights recede at the behest of those so privileged they’re offended that we deign to point out their benefit from birth.
And while state lawmakers don’t yet have the authority to contain, detain, and dispose of those they dislike and disagree with in a final solution of their own kind…I know it is a possibility because it has happened before, which means it can happen again.
The erasure of knowledge, of history, of truth makes ripe the opportunity to repeat the gravest travesties of the last centuries.
Which makes living under constant surveillance all the more frightening. The infractions are in the doing of life. The crime scenes our actual bodies, wombs. The crime itself our skin color, or who we love, or where and to whom we were born, as if this land doesn’t weep blood of the masses of First Nation peoples massacred here.
There is a precision to genocide. An accuracy to which elimination and extinction must be executed. Surveillance is only one of the first steps, restricted movement the next, and I fear what we’re witnessing, what we’re living through, is the sharpening of the knives that will be used to slit our throats.
