Terror at home: Naturalized victimization in those bones are not my child

In 2002, the purported "year of child abductions," the U.S. face of victimization was a blonde and blue-eyed girl named Elizabeth Smart.2 From Salt Lake City, she was affluent, Mormon, and played a harp. Less seen was the face of seven-year-old Alexis Patterson.3 Disappearing in Milwaukee a month before Smart was abducted, she was, unlike the white teenager, from a poorer neighborhood, African American, and never recovered. What made Smart a universal sign of the endangered child and Patterson's victimization invisible? A few news producers argued that the sensationalism of Smart's abduction at gunpoint from an expensive home simply overshadowed the everyday nature of a young black girl disappearing on her way to an inner-city school. For them, Patterson's disappearance was a distressing but predictable outcome of identity and location. While Smart's wealth and religion would seemingly make her a less typical victim, she was constructed as the face of victimization. As I watch the news stories about missing white girls and note the scarcity of highly visible stories about African Americans who number among the abused, the murdered, and the disappeared, I have often thought of the words of a Toni Cade Bambara character contemplating the abduction of black children two decades before Patterson's disappearance in Toni Cade Bambara's Those Bones Are Not My Child: "Tragedies, after all, happened in castles, not in low income homes."4 Both phenotypically and economically, Patterson's story cannot access a princess-in-a-tower narrative. In a discussion of events years before the Patterson case, Bambara's novel critiques the invisibility and devaluation of black victimization. Those Bones Are Not My Child recounts the black community's real-life struggle to deal with the devaluation of their children between 1979 and 1981 during the Atlanta Child Murders. Twenty-nine murders of children and young adults were placed on the official "List" of victims, and the authorities eventually and controversially attributed the murders to twenty-three-yearold Wayne Williams. However, many people argued that there were victims who were not included on the list and thatWilliams could not have committed all of these crimes. Bambara's novel treats both the crimes and the state response as domestic terrorism against the black community. Those Bones illustrates the rhetorical obstacles that black Atlantans faced as they struggled to draw the attention of the authorities, media, and other U.S. citizens. A melancholy story about the community's grief and activism, the novel recounts their inability to sustain a debate that resists local answers about a lone killer and doomed street thugs. Bambara narrates how the families and communities of the disappeared and dead refused to accept the media normalization of black suffering, defended against the demonization of their parenting and children, and persisted in representing the violence as systemic and not isolated. Resisting normalization of black suffering was key to their activism then, and the novel remains a vivid illustration of what rhetoric undergirds other national narratives about black bodies at risk and who can function as citizens worthy of protection in the nation state. Bambara's mapping of the rhetorical struggles of victims' parents and other activists during the Atlanta Child Murders is just as resonant a narrative in the early twenty-first century, as stories of inequitable coverage of black bodies and the massive state devaluation of African Americans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina circulate in media outlets. Those Bones examines how the terrorism many citizens experience at home is constructed as hysterical and self produced, at war with mass-produced rhetoric discrediting the continued resonance of history and social forces as sources for violence enacted on black bodies.