Selling Out

By Ella Attell

Gates Mills, Ohio, is not the kind of place where political feathers are ru ed. Multi-generational homes sprawl across green acreage with the righteousness of money that is no longer earned but inherited. It’s idyllic in aesthetic: maintained but not cookie-cutter, sophisticated yet rural. It’s not uncommon to see equestrians take their horses out for morning trots alongside BMWs and vintage convertibles. Ninety-three percent of the village is white, one percent of residents are Black, and nearly no one falls below the poverty line.

When George Floyd gasped for air, he wasn’t breathing the air that residents of Gates Mills breathe. And even when Cleveland residents took up signs and chants, the tear gas stained air I encountered felt like it had never touched the shuttered stables and rose gardens only thirty minutes away.

I have to think that when some protesters started throwing bricks at court house windows, they imagined raging against the iron gates that have kept so many people out of places like Gates Mills. And yet, while glass shattered downtown, not a blade of grass was askew in one of the many communities in my state that effectively voted Donald Trump into office. I thought for a moment that our efforts as protesters would be better spent marching through the tree-lined streets of a community that treats tax law like a suggestion and voter suppression as folklore.

When I passed through Gates Mills days a er the protest, I couldn’t help but become unhinged at the sight of a lawn jockey in blackface. My rst impulse was to return to the village at night and smash or steal the statue to spite the homeowners. And yet, I found myself persuaded by better angels to take a di erent approach. So, I penned a placating letter:

In front of your lovely home, there is a lawn jockey dressed in red. As you will see in the second document, the lawn jockey has a complicated history. Often depicted as a caricature of the African-American male (large lips and dark skin), lawn jockeys are ornaments of servitude. In short, they present the African-American man as in service of his white homeowners for whom he lights the path and decorates the lawn he serves.

It is important to note that the lawn jockey may have been used as a tool during the Underground Railroad to signal freedom to enslaved peoples. If you display your lawn jockey to celebrate this particular history, I understand your doing so and would perhaps suggest tying a green ribbon around the statue’s wrist as a more explicit celebration of the positive history of the lawn jockey. If you display your statue for its kitsch, however, I urge you to contemplate how such a decoration perpetuates the narrative of Black folks being less than their white counterparts. It is this particular idea of racial hierarchy that contributes to disproportionate rates of police brutality and the mass incarceration of Black Americans.

Please consider the history of the lawn jockey as well as your personal ability to counter the stories our country should no longer tell.

Signed, Your neighbor

I left the letter, along with some reading about the history of the lawn jockey, without expectation of removal. To my surprise, just days later the statue’s face was repainted in white. Was this victory? I’m not so sure.

I chose a moderate approach and, in turn, got a moderate result. The homeowners didn’t remove the statue nor did they, to my knowledge, make donations to bail funds or boycott corporations that use incarcerated labor. I doubt they cracked open Audre Lorde or W.E.B. DuBois, and they likely still belong to the local country club in which the guests are white and the employees Black. Should I be content that they made a conscious alteration even if a can of white paint means virtually nothing to anybody but the involved parties? I think the answer lies somewhere between yes and no.

I have to think that their display of Black servitude had fostered some kind of internalized legitimacy of racial superiority. The objects we surround ourselves with are the subtle forces that move us, and the spaces those objects inhabit determine how we move. One should reckon with that statue in a museum or on the cover of Paul Beatty’s Sellout, not pass it mindlessly on the way to work.

Then there’s the lie of the letter, perhaps the very reason they acted. I’m not their neighbor. I don’t belong to the Homeowners Association or sit on local boards. The owners of this statue and I, unbeknownst to them, are completely anonymous to one another. And yet, I suspect that these particular homeowners will hold themselves differently at the next neighborhood cocktail party, believing that someone in this crowd thinks them tactlessly racist. Is it wrong that I had to make myself one with the oppressor to elicit change? Maybe so, especially when it seems like people of great privilege are always the ones being met halfway.

Taking or destroying the statue would have given the homeowners a closer sense of what it is to not be rich and white. For a second, they might have known what it’s like to feel as if your property doesn’t belong to you, but likely their anger would just have a rmed anything they’ve ever wrongfully believed about anti-racist e orts. I wish that weren’t so.

I suppose, in some sense, I am their neighbor. If we let collective humanity be the only zip code that matters, then Tamir Rice, who was murdered just a few exits from Gates Mills in 2014, was their neighbor too. I wonder what the world would be like if people of privilege started referring to the too many Black deaths in our country as “my neighbor was murdered.” With perspective, our world, no matter how siloed we have designed it to feel, isn’t big. We are all neighbors, stewards of the same earth. We just happen to forget it more frequently than we remember. ■

ELLA ATTELL is an undergraduate student from Cleveland, Ohio, USA, currently studying at Yale University (’23).