Colin Kaepernick takes his place in a long line of oppressed American patriots

Okay, class! I think it’s time for a history lesson. With our country having emerged upon a very important and timely intersection of blackness, Americanness, and football, I think that it’s high time for us to uncover some of the truths and unfortunate historical contexts that have brought us to this very poignant moment. I’m taking my cue from the 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, who has been silently kneeling on the sidelines during the national anthem at his games in protest for the unjust treatment and oppression of black people at the hands of police officers. He has recently inspired many athletes across our country, professional and amateur, all the way to elementary students during the morning pledge of allegiance, to kneel in silent protest. A noble cause.

What we cannot ignore but rather must confront is our country’s history of racism, misogyny, and oppression. It has infected every area of our nation, from the first boots of colonialism that stepped onto marshy banks to knees that are bent on football fields. To ignore and to insist that this history has either been left behind or that this history is over exaggerated is to see history from a blind and ignorant lens of privilege. But the reality is that you don’t have to look far to find it.

Let’s go to 1781 when Thomas Jefferson, one of our country’s most honored founding fathers, wrote Notes on the State of Virginia only five years after he wrote the declaration of independence. In this text, Jefferson gives breath taking overtures on the separation of church and state, individual liberty, the richness of America’s natural resources, and the inferiority of “the blacks.” After describing black people as having no mind to write or learn, having a foul smell, being designed as an animal for hard labor and little sleep, being incapable of loving their women and only desiring their bodies, he concludes “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” It should be no surprise then that when we look at the the creation of the constitution in 1787, our other founding fathers decided that black slaves were considered to be only 3/5ths of a whole person. Property to be haggled over for taxes and representation, more seats in congress.

Though we are two centuries away from these inaugural decisions at the birth of our nation and many if not most of the institutionalized systems of racism have been dismantled, the remnants of these systems ring in our ears and in the lives of black people if you choose listen and look around. From the war on drugs, to the repeal of the voting rights act, the mass incarceration of black youth, the labeling of “super predators,” the new Jim Crow, antagonism against the Black Lives Matter movement, police brutality, and on and on, this system of racism was bred and incubated in our country’s revered historical documents and founding fathers. This festering racism that is found in most of our founding documents has interwoven into the American consciousness. And how couldn’t it? The same documents and historical figures who we revere as the ancestors of our freedoms and patriotism are the very inscribers of racism and misogyny into our systems of governance, legislation and culture.

Recently, Boami Jones wrote an article in the Undefeated titled “Kaepernick is asking for justice not peace,” where he poignantly suggests that “While the major party candidates for president spent the week pointing at each other with charges of who is or isn’t the real racist, Kaepernick pointed at the flag and, by extension, every person who takes pride in the American flag.” This suggestion naturally ruffled quite a few feathers. But if we consider for a moment that you lived in a country where your founding fathers considered you to be 3/5ths of a person, a smelly, unintelligent, lustful person, property, that perhaps you would have a difficult time revering it as much as your white countrymen.  Especially when you witness firsthand the racist imagination that your fellow countrymen have inherited from our founders. It may often be much subtler and undetectable to some, but it is also very obvious when videos of murdered black citizens scroll across our screens every day.

To deny the very obvious historical racism that Kaepernick is protesting is not just ignorant, it is wrong. The work that he is doing is only un-patriotic to those who hold our country up to an infallible esteem and who ignore the very problematic and hurtful history of racism that many of our brothers and sisters in America experience daily. There is nothing noble about forgetting and ignoring that history and present reality.

That is why critiquing our country is important. It’s what moves our country forward and away from its dark beginnings of slavery and genocide, and towards a hope of more equality, freedom, and liberty. This is a freedom that has not solely been fought for by soldiers. It has been fought for by generations of oppressed people. People whose backs were striped with whips and held by chains. Necks that have hung from trees. Women who sat on bus seats. Children who first integrated into schools. Indigenous people who stand at Standing Rock. Football players kneeling on the side lines. Those are the patriots who demand that their country respect them and move us towards a greater freedom. A greater equality. A greater happiness. Kaepernick is actively participating in the National Anthem not by standing, but by kneeling in remembrance, reverence and in protest against the legacy of racism that has and continues to affect him and his ancestors. God bless America and the patriots who demand better.

The Ways of Changing the World

Heavy lids heaving down and back up again over giant round eyes as glassy orbs
with every blink, lying and praying that maybe this time they’ll stay shut and
bring me sleep. Gears grinding and winding images of words across my mind’s eye
I continue to think about the gloom that knows my soulful cries and long to not need
my eyes to see. Maybe tomorrow after I wake and brush my teeth the new day will
bring me closer to learning the ways of changing the world.

Perceptions of Beauty: How Speaking About Anti-Racism Is Not Divisive

When I was a child my grandmother and I would watch QVC in the evenings while she got ready for bed. Sitting at her vanity, she’d slather on her cold cream with her hair up in pin curls while I laid across the bed next to her with my feet kicked up and picked at the loose threads on the knit blanket. Her favorite segments on QVC were the Fenton glass basket sales and the porcelain dolls. She kept the TV turned down low during the makeup demonstrations declaring that the women looked like a bunch of hussey clowns in all of that lipstick, but when the porcelain dolls came on she turned up the volume and watched with her full attention.

Straight and tall, the creamy white dolls stood on their stands with bright, glossy eyes and ringlets of yellow, red, and chestnut hair falling down their shoulders from under boater hats. Decorated in Victorian lace and bows, these angels of the house were so beautiful. After a long day of housework my grandmother gave them all of her attention. She dumped her burdens and absorbed them. The camera panned across the line of dolls and stopped at the end to zoom in on the one with smooth dark porcelain skin. Her deep black eyes stared out unmoving but knowing and they pushed my grandma back into her chair as she looked away and finished wiping the cold cream off of her face.

“Oh, grandma look at that one. She’s beautiful,” I said wispily.

Jerking around with pinched brows, my grandma looked at me and said, “Now, you know that doll is ugly as sin. Don’t go saying stuff like that.” She turned off the TV and finished her night time beauty routine. Twisting hair. Smearing cream.

*****

It’s quite amazing how years later old memories can apparate into our realities. I thought of that story of my grandma and the black porcelain doll this week after I packed up all three of my kids and went to the grocery store to pick up a few things for lunch. Waiting in the check out line, Ruby was sitting in the front of the shopping cart by me while the boys flipped through magazines. When we finally moved up a spot, we stood next to a young black lady in the line next to us with a little girl around the same age as Ruby in her cart. As I was in the middle of telling the boys, yet again, that they could not buy any candy, an older white man that was in line behind the black lady and her child walked over to Ruby, rubbed her hand and said, “Why hello blue eyes! Aren’t you a beauty!” I turned around to see him fawning over Ruby and I immediately felt my skin begin to glow as I noticed the young black man behind me give a knowing look to the other child’s mom. She looked at Ruby, then at the old man, pinched her mouth shut and turned around towards her baby. The old man continued on saying that Ruby would be a heart breaker one day and that she was just so sweet and pretty.

He didn’t notice a thing. Because what really just happened? Did anything happen? Did I read into the faces of the people around me? Impose my intuition on them? I don’t believe I did. Something very subtle and culturally big happened. And I thought of my grandma’s dolls. I remembered back to my grandmother telling me that the black doll was as ugly as sin and I felt ashamed. And angry. What happened in the grocery store with Ruby was so subtle that it was almost unnoticeable. Well, unnoticeable to the white man. The little black baby sat in his direct line of vision for minutes. There was no fawning. No talking. Almost as if the baby wasn’t there. And then we strolled ahead of him. He craned his neck and walked across the aisle towards Ruby to show his admiration for her beauty. I noticed. And so did the black adults around me. I was immediately uncomfortable for what he had done and I felt complicit. I was complicit. And, sadly, so was Ruby. My little girl has been born into a racial system that places her at the top of what is considered beautiful: blonde hair, blue eyes, creamy white skin. And there’s my grandmother again: “that doll is ugly as sin.”

There’s this myth out there among white people that if you bring up or talk about racism or oppression against people of color that you are in some way creating racial division. That uttering into words the everyday experiences of racism is what actually creates division and unrest, not racism itself. We think that if we keep silent about it, ignore it, only talk about chipper white-ass things, it will somehow magically not be there, if it was really there to begin with. I’m always perplexed by this cultural myth. It isn’t until something crosses or saddens us (white people), our own friends, our own family, or our own values that we feel compelled to share our grievances and concerns. In those moments we don’t consider bringing up how we’ve been wronged to be divisive. We consider it to be a part of the process of restoring justice. And it is. But this moment at the grocery store happened. That other mother’s beautiful little girl was ignored and vanished under the system of beauty that my child has privilege in. The people around me felt it and witnessed it. The division was there. It’s still there. Is my mentioning it and telling the story creating more division? Or, is it me warning us, white people, to open our eyes. To look around. To look at and see the faces of the people of color around us, these faces that have for centuries have been told are “ugly as sin.” It’s a lie. Look at them and remember that it’s always been a lie.

I think my daughter is so beautiful. Parents tend to always think that about their own children. And the other mother thinks the exact same about her daughter. If only our culture didn’t choose sides. As I was standing there watching the black adults around me groan at the display of centuries worth of racism, racism that they see every day, I didn’t know what to do. What could I have said or done to decenter this old white man’s perceptions of beauty? What could I have done to have made it right? I didn’t do anything. I just stood embarrassed and in disbelief. The old man went back to his place in line and silently waited for his turn to check out. I herded my kids back to our van and drove us all home. I played the scene over and over in my head for hours and couldn’t get the looks of the black man and woman out of my mind.They knew exactly what happened.  And I wish I could tell them that I’m sorry. You’re so, so beautiful.

I decided then that this story had to be told. There are those that believe that these stories are divisive, that they create racial tension. Well, I’m here to tell you that there is already a divide. It’s been there for centuries. It’s told to our children when the beauty of black baby’s is ignored because our grandparents told us that they’re ugly as sin and dangerous as hell. Well, no more. No more.

Accepting the Risk of a Trump Presidency

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society. – Angela Davis

I’ve been spending my time these few weeks immersed in reading; poetry, essays, books, articles, mostly written by black women. This is the process of liberating my mind. Expanding my borders. Everywhere we look our world is on fire and I don’t want my mind to go up in a blaze with it. So I read. And I read what isn’t instant. Online writing has become largely a space of immediate gratification and self aggrandizement, not often a space for contemplation or intellectual exercise. And I do realize that my writing on this blog places itself in that discourse. Though, I hope in some small way that it contributes to deeper thought and contemplations. To read words that have been carefully crafted, thought over, and critically created in the context of other similarly thoughtful writing is the work of actively liberating your mind. The distress that I see over the Presidential election has naturally captured my attention and I can’t help but wonder if we are enslaving ourselves with continual, non-stop streams of immediate information. In the furor of news articles, cable news programs, live streams, blog entries, memes, and tweets filling our consciousnesses, the discipline of being still and contemplating our own thoughts, reactions, and understandings become chained to what flashes in front of us. We then begin filtering buzz words through value systems that aren’t actually our own, but rather through what is new and current. Voices get lost. And they are usually the ones that have sat and read and thought critically, having not yet moved on to the most current news cycle. I’m also considering how I contribute to and participate in this cycle of enslavement on social media and on this blog. How do I latch onto what is inflammatory and immediate? Or how do I reinforce binaries of liberal/conservative, democrat/republican, racist/anti-racist, christian/non-christian,  American/non-American? That’s what I find that online writing and information sharing typically works to do and how it enslaves: it works to reinforce binaries. Having spent some time reading Angela Davis, I am considering her philosophy of not endorsing politicians, but rather engaging in independent politics that places pressure on candidates by engaging them in difficult conversations, pressing them on their weaknesses, flaws, voting records, and platforms, and is not interested in electing specific parties. I want to be much more intentional and conscious of how I help to dismantle a political system of binaries instead of reinforcing it. And I am aware of how this sentiment is scoffed at. The current political system that we have constructed and reinforce is a binary that I am constantly uncomfortable with. As Davis suggests, there is no party that is rooted in labor or has the vocabulary or the desire to effectively address sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or racism. The current system works by pandering to those issues in return for votes; eventually progressive work does slowly get done, but only as a result of political pandering, not active resistance. What I find most disturbing in this election cycle is the broad dismissal of cries for a third party candidate (who are not the ineffective Green Party or Libertarian party), specifically the dismissal of women and people of color who are not satisfied with the current parties or candidates. We must remember that this current binary political system works to organize people into systems of oppression. Nowhere in this system is there an adequate place for issues that concern the labor class, people of color, women, queer, trans, or the disabled and dismissing those who are dissatisfied with the current system and how it oppresses is not only harmful but an oppressive act itself. I find that the same people who get uncomfortable when black feminists begin to organize and suggest that white feminism has worked to oppress them for decades, are the same people who get uncomfortable when liberals and democrats are also criticized for oppressing women and people of color.  When a black woman expresses her concern for both a Trump and a Clinton presidency, we cannot dismiss that concern. Her mind and body has been oppressed by both political parties and it is not a simple matter of choosing the worse of two candidates. Arguing that she choose between two candidates in a system that has actively worked against her for generations is itself an oppressive act. We must realize that the experiences and voices of those who have suffered most need to be considered and we must work to create a political system, from the local to the national, that rejects binaries and encourages independent politics. Because what I have seen a lot of on the internet, that immediate and quick information stream, are white, middle class people who are scared of a Trump presidency deriding women and people of color for not accepting Hillary Clinton. These people who are not willing to support Clinton are then assigned the responsibility of avoiding a Trump presidency. That is not anti-oppression. That is not liberation. That is not anti-sexism or anti-racism. That is oppressive and enslaved politics. We must recognize how our democracy and two party system is oppressive in that way and reject it. Even at the risk of a Trump presidency. What is most striking is that for the first time in a long time, we see white people scared of an oppressive power from above. We are scared of how a Trump presidency will not only hurt minorities, but us as well. We then turn to those who have been systematically oppressed by our government for generations and tell them to choose someone else who they are equally afraid of and tell them that it’s the lesser oppressor. That’s privilege and arrogance if I ever saw it. And it’s what I’m concerned that I’ve engaged in and am reinforcing. That’s what I’m trying to liberate myself from and research how to support and implement governing systems that reject systems of oppression. However, that’s a slow process and it is a process that may risk a Trump presidency and that scares the crap out of liberal white people. Including me.

The Silent Mile: The Privilege Of Choosing To Be Silent

Am I too cynical? Disillusioned? Unbelieving? Hopeless?  That when I march with a crowd of hundreds for the shared belief and desire for peace I can’t but not roll my eyes? What is wrong with me?

I’m wondering if this is a safe space for me to process an event that I participated in yesterday in my city. How can I explore my own beliefs and experiences in a way that is both honest, healing, and works to dismantle the minds and beliefs of those like me who also marched?  Because the work that I am MOST interested in doing is confronting and dismantling systematic oppression, misogyny, and white privilege. And I’ll tell ya, that pisses a lot of people off. It means that those of us in positions of power and privilege have to take a good, long, difficult look at ourselves and our work and confront how we support and benefit from these systems. Even when we march. No, especially when we march. Solidarity, unity, allyship is more than a held sign, a shared Facebook post, an identity. It is a process of rejecting our privilege and giving it away without receiving approval, praise or acknowledgement for our work. It is the work of humility and confession, putting others before ourselves. We become lower so that others can become higher. Isn’t unity and equality supposed to put us all on the same level? I’ll go ahead and answer that question for you: No. No it’s not. We should be putting those who have been made less than in our system on top at the expense to ourselves. So, yeah. It pisses people off.

What I am going to do here is explore and examine my own experience at The Silent Mile NFK march that I participated in yesterday afternoon. These are my thoughts, my observations, my experiences, my confessions and they do not represent anyone else who attended. I don’t want to take away from the good work that was done yesterday and I do not want to disparage anyone that attended. But instead, what I do want to do is point out that the racially and class privileged people at the event were not confronted with their complicity in systematic racism and oppression; a message that is vital to dismantling it.

---

I stood on the Hague walking bridge yesterday with hundreds of people waiting to walk single file down Brambleton Avenue, one of the busiest streets in Norfolk, during rush hour and block it for about 20 minutes while we crossed. Most of the people who stood around me appeared to be from Ghent and ODU; they’re not very difficult to recognize. I didn’t feel in the least out of place. I felt like I belonged, though slightly less tattooed than most. I felt safe, comfortable, almost good about myself for being there. Before we marched, each of us were given the name of a black person who has been fatally shot by police in the last year and we were instructed to Google them before the walk began. This is when I first started to feel uncomfortable. Let me digitally introduce you to Kevin Hicks, the man that was put on my shirt and who I was walking in silence for. I don’t know any more about him than what that link produces. What I do know is that he was shot and killed by a police officer after he assaulted his wife in their car while their kid was in the back seat. While he was assaulting her, she called 911 and approached police at a gas station for help. Video surveillance shows him assaulting the officer who initially attempted to use a taser to subdue him, but it escalated to the use of deadly force after the officer’s hand was broken and bitten by Kevin Hicks. I was marching in a funeral procession for him. I will have to be honest with you and say that it took everything inside of me to keep his name on my shirt. I wanted to throw it off. He was a misogynist. A wife beater. He physically assaulted and harmed the officer who was trying to protect his wife and child. I felt ill just looking at his name, let alone wear it. My experience at the event never recovered from that moment.

In that moment I was immediately confronted with the complex layers and intersections of this very important issue and I was uncomfortable with continuing. As I was internally grappling with Kevin Hicks we began filing in and silently marching. I held up a sign that was provided to me by organizers that said “Break The Silence. #BlackLivesMatter,” as I walked past dozens and dozens of police officers that stood by and blocked off streets for us, directed traffic, and boiled in the sun. I couldn’t help but to feel deeply ashamed of myself, ashamed of Kevin Hicks, ashamed of this broken system, and ashamed for feeling ashamed. But still I marched. Each step troubled me and I longed to reach the end where organizers were waiting for us with a planned demonstration. I hoped for some consolation at the end, something, anything, to assuage my grief. But it never came. We packed and filed into rows on the empty lawn while organizers called out the 144 names of black people who have been fatally shot by police officers this year. There were some people who placed the piece of tape with their person’s name on it over their mouths. Silence. Reverence. A life lost. My piece of tape seared through my shirt, into my skin and boiled me into shame.

There I was. Standing with a large group of people, most of whom were very similar to myself in both class, race, and privilege, and I was alone. When I look at racialized and classist police brutality from the outside I can’t understand it. I’ve never experienced it. I don’t fear it. I struggle to believe that it exists. If there weren’t videos of it and if my black friends didn’t keep reminding me of it’s pervasive existence and affect on their own psyches I would go about my days unaware and unchanged. Hell, I see and hear it in the news and online and I’m still barely changed. I’m still grappling with what it means to support someone who has made criminal decision, like Kevin Hicks, and then ended up dead at the hands of the police. These aren’t isolated incidents in people’s lives. These aren’t isolated “racist” cops gunning down minorities.This is a system of oppression. One in which we’re are all interwoven and complicit in. And this wasn’t addressed at the demonstration. The group of people who marched and demonstrated were not confronted with our place in this system of oppression, racism, misogyny, and police brutality. The organizers of the silent mile said that one of the things they want is accountability of police officers. Do you know what I want? I want accountability from our community and the people that marched yesterday. We all identify as allies. The good guys. The anti-racist people against other bigoted, racist people. And that is a false dichotomy. We all make choices in this system that benefit ourselves and harm others. We choose where to hang out, live, get coffee, send our children to school, who we vote for, if/when/where to volunteer, to be silent or to speak, and to protest or not, in a system that works for some and against others. And if we don’t locate ourselves on the spectrum of that system, if we don’t confront the choices that we make and the privileges that we have, then we are not allies. Because the truth is that we had a choice to be silent. If we don’t recognize that there are others who do not have that choice, that there are others who are silenced, then we are going nowhere. The Black Lives Matter activists are often silenced. The Silent Mile activists chose to be silent. There is a difference. A very important difference that needed to be recognized and confronted.

Only 4,000 feet away from where the march ended yesterday is a public housing community, Young Terrace, where crime, violence, poverty, and fear exists in an incubator. Those of us on that were on that lawn barely know that it exists and are complicit in the system that put the people in that community and works to keep them there. It’s the work of our local laws, regulations, policies, policing systems, social systems, education systems, voting systems, business systems, on and on and on, that work to benefit a few and oppress others. The ones reaping from and collecting those benefits stood in solidarity on the lawn, a stones throw from the people to whom we stood in solidarity with.

I will end with reinforcing that this was a very good and needed protest. It drew attention to a very important and deadly issue. I’m thankful to those who organized it and showed up. But there is so much more to do. We need to collectively confront our privilege and the systems to which we benefit from and work to shift the power. That means marching with and lifting up Black Lives Matter activists. It means demanding that our local officials and representatives focus their time, money, and resources on our most desperate neighbors and neighborhoods and not just the light rail lines, shopping malls, trendy grocery stores, art districts, coffee shops, and schools for our most privileged students. It means putting our time, energy, and money where our mouth is. You want to end systematic oppression and racism? Then we need to own our place in the system of racism and privilege and displace it. Spend time in these neighborhoods. Spend your money at black owned businesses. Demand that grocery stores are put in our food deserts. Grow a community garden in a dangerous community and then DON’T COMPLAIN when the people in that neighborhood reject you and trample on your plants. Keep working. Keep loving. Keep dismantling. Form relationships. And keep marching.

Longing For Home

If you drive the long stretch of route 58 west from the low marshes of Virginia, the ground begins to plump and swell towards the the old and bushy Appalachian mountains and the water slowly shifts and drains down into the Mississippi River basin as a spout into the gulf. When the briars become more tangled and lichen spatters across bark and rocks as wrinkled age spots, you have come to the imagined Virginia/Tennessee line. There are no valleys here, only hollows and slanted front porches that overlook gardens grown in brown clay and cows that meander through crooked wooded trails.

We arrived there in our mini-van and always stick out as the city folk among Jason’s extended family. Every year we visit and ever year we become more and more removed from life that is there’s. It’s a natural generational shift when a family moves away from their land and marries outsiders. We come back as observers. Visitors. We wander around the fields. Sit on the porches. Hug and chat and are amazed out how much the children have grown and the elders have weakened. But we aren’t there when the fields need to be plowed and medicine needs to be administered. We aren’t there during the daily moments of meals and bills, seeds and watering. So we soak in as much of each other as we can in sweltering air and cool breezes and we try to make up for lost time by talking for long hours, throw water balloons, build fires, make new memories, help to clean dishes and trim bushes. The compressed time does fill the empty spaces of a separated family, at least for a moment.

We make this journey every year to visit Jason’s aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, but this trip, for me, was long and difficult. The hotel room was dark and lonely. And you can only eat so many continental breakfasts before you begin to stare at your bagel wondering when the Lord is going to return. My spirit longed to be home. The people who I’m with daily, who see my children slowly creep up through their jeans, they were all home hurting. Being away from home and from my people isolated me to the point of extreme grief. All I wanted to do was talk about it, to pray and grieve with human bodies and hearts. Suppressing my trouble and grief over the deaths of the innocent made me feel less human. Our screens have created a sort of dual reality; what we read and type into digital space is not what we communicate in our physical space. But it’s always right under the surface. We’re all thinking about what the person next to us said or shared on Facebook but we don’t mention it to them while we’re sitting in the grass watching our children fly paper airplanes. We’re too busy filling our empty spaces with each other to talk about grief and pain and murder. That eats at my mind. It makes my spirit weary. And I wanted to go home.

What was it about Alton Sterling’s, Philando Castile’s, and the five police officer’s deaths last week that shattered our collective hearts? What is different this time? Have you noticed the air shift? The ground tilt? When we drove back home into our driveway yesterday evening we rushed inside and ate a quick dinner, changed our clothes, combed our hair, piled back into our van, and drove to church for a special service of lament, confession, and worship. When I sat in the pew, immediately the broken chasm between the digital, the physical and the spiritual broke wide open and I wept with my people. We prayed, we sang, and we cried out to the Lord in our grief and our fear. We individually stood up and confessed our racism, our indifference, our pride, our arrogance, and our retreat from humility and grace. Our pastor, through his own tears and anguish, offered the filled sanctuary words of our Lord’s grace. And our hearts lifted in joy and hope through our grief and sorrow. It’s what my heart needed. I needed to be home with my people, my church, my community, and I needed to grieve with them. I needed to go to the Lord with them. I needed my heart to be healed with them.

While I love my husband’s extended family, their homes, and their land, I’m just so glad to be home. I belong here. The people know me. I know them. We grieve, look towards hope, and march together towards justice. All to the glory of our Lord.

Numbers Kill Our Stories

Sometimes I believe that there is no such thing as data. Numbers don’t exist. They’re nothing but concepts created to order, place, control, manipulate, skew, draw upon, organize, separate, divide, multiply, add, subtract, genocide, rape, mutilate. My blood is quantifiably, identifiably, numerically, divisibly, historically worth more than black blood. At least 2/5 more at one time according to our constitution. And saying that makes me a denier of numbers, someone who doesn’t understand variables and controls, who skews statistics.

And I would say that statistics wring out the blood of our history. The stories are washed out. How do legal definitions that contribute to chart and statistical adjustments of police involved shootings tell the story of systematic real estate racial steering, job discrimination, historical segregation, the trauma of historically being considered 3/5 of a person? It doesn’t. It can’t. Numbers cut out and incise the stories of injustice that can’t be seen on charts and graphs. They are told to our children through stories. Stories that came out in songs of lament from hunching over cotton and tobacco. Stories and songs that are clapped and danced in the church. Numbers and data can’t touch the songs of ancestors.

This is the story that numbers can’t tell:

But they try:

(Images and data from Cop In The Hood.)

What are the controls? The adjustments? Where is the skewing? What are the variables?

And the story is lost. The history is gone. Where is the blood? Where is the story?

And so. It’s unpopular. Ignorant. Unintelligent. It’s anti-colonial and anti-western but I don’t believe in or trust numbers.

I believe in stories. The stories of our people. I listen to and believe them before all else. In order to understand the tears, the anger, the fear, the mothers who have to tell their sons to be wary of the police we have to stop and listen to the stories. If they aren’t your stories then please, please stop talking. Drop the numbers. Stop trying to impose your white, western logic on people where the logic denies them their humanity. The logic that has worked to take their humanity away. At one time, science and data and numbers said that blackness likened people to animals and beasts. Your logic has historically worked to oppress and suppress and strip away dignity. So stop and listen to the stories. You’ll learn more than you ever could with incomplete data.

 

The Blood of Our People

Deaf and blind, we cannot see or hear the breeze

from the dead who run past and collapse as

a spattered breath on the ground.

When I close my eyes I see blood and bullets.

But it’s not my blood. And they are my bullets.

Black skin and kinky hair lay on pavement

and over leather car seats with nothing left to give

but raised hands, clenched teeth, and the sways

and hums of chained ancestors from hidden burial mounds.

Our ears are ringing from the pounding bullets leaving

chambers and ripping through skin and bones that we

can’t hear the moaning and the crying from the grave,

families left to release their relatives’ spirits to be with the

generations of ancestors entombed in the ground of our

forefathers who separated and divided the liberties of men.

So, we listen with our blood. Lift our spirits to the sky.

Gather at the city’s farthest edge. Remember history

that began before the beginning of every moment

and reclaim what is ours, the blood of our people.

---

This morning I wanted to write about The Camp. But how can I? All I can think about are the children that I played with and hugged and cared for and that 1 out of 3 of them will end up in prison. How many more of them will be shot or will shoot? All I can see are the videos of men shot and killed by police.

We must rethink how we see ourselves, our people, our history. We must see our people as precious, beloved, full of dignity. We must see our history as working to deprive our people from what is theirs, their divine images. Their beautiful bodies. Their eternal spirits.

A Day At Home In Norfolk

In the morning I will sit here
in my dinning room
next to my lukewarm cup of coffee
reading news of more shootings
and violence in my city gone mad with
gun lust and apartheid.
I am at home.
In the labor of my garden that will last
longer than the lives of our youth,
I will go on a harvest plucking
fruit from the vine to ripen in
the poisoned air. We will feast
while the rest starve.
Needing entertainment, I will pack up
my children and drive them through
the city’s labyrinth of our self-esteem
passing coffee and biscuit shops, sold out
for a higher economy of redevelopment,
while avoiding those streets where poverty
is laid to rest. God rest their souls.
In the evening, the Lafayette will be calm and wide
with bridges stretching their arms as friends
in a close embrace, hiding crabbers on her banks.
They will laugh and tell stories with fish guts under
their nails next to no fishing, crabbing, or loitering signs
as I pass over them on my way home to
tuck in my children and kiss them good night
before more gunshots ring out putting us
to sleep safe in our beds, bodies in the street.
I am at home.

http://wavy.com/2016/06/25/norfolk-police-investigating-deadly-shooting/

An Uncontrollable Life

Walking to the bus stop yesterday morning with all three of my children we talked about bugs and the blooming hibiscus that Myles described as looking like purple plums with tongues. He has a burgeoning love for poetry and I just love looking at and describing the world in creative and beautiful ways with him. It’s the last week of school and we’re all anxious for it to be over, so we walked slow to the bus stop through the thick humid air. None of the children have their book bags with them anymore. They’re just going to school to watch Disney movies for a few hours, run around on the playground equipment while their teachers fan themselves in the shade, and spend their last days joking around with their friends.

We arrived to the bus stop at the same moment as Xavier and his mom. Xavier is a little kindergartener, the same as my Owen, who lives 2 blocks away from us and he ran in circles and smiled with the other kids, oblivious to his mom’s crying. I asked her if she was okay and she said “No. I’m really down this morning. My little nephew was killed last night in a shooting.” My first response was oh my god. i’m so sorry. This isn’t news that I hear in my circle of neighbors and friends very often. The last time I received this kind of news was two years ago when a woman in my church shot and killed her 7 year old daughter and then herself at their home while her husband was at work and her older daughter was at summer camp. It rattled our community to the core.

But the gun violence that found its way into my neighbor’s life is something very, very different. When I asked her how old he was his life flooded out from inside of her:

He was 17 but he lived an uncontrollable life. He wouldn’t listen to us and there was nothing we could do. He was just out of control and we’re all just so sad. We saw this happening but I just still can’t believe it.

When the bus pulled up all of the little kids lined up and piled up the steps. Xavier was full of smiles and waved back to his mom and she just stood there staring at him. Her eyebrows furrowed and new tears filled her eyes and she watched him. On the bus, the kids poked their heads out of the windows and waved their goodbyes and there she stood. Eyes staring. Tears streaming. Watching her 5 year old drive away from her.

Her watchful, crying eyes haunt me this morning. I keep picturing her happy, smiling son waving at her. And she stands there. Tall. Strong. Staring. Crying. There was so much worry, fear and sadness locked on her face. There is a knowing in the creases of her eyes that I don’t have. Her understanding of our city, our people, and our communities are etched much more sharply and deeply into her body than mine, and so she looks at her son in a way that I will never be able to or have to look at my own. When she sees her son, does she see the statistics? Does she see the images of her nephew holding guns? Does she see handcuffs, crime tape, and police cars?  Does she see the bullet holes in cars and hats laying in the street? What does she see? Because I see a smiling, waving child. When I look at my sons I see them making silly, innocent poems and chasing fireflies. And then I feel almost foolish. The lens and view that I have of my city is so small and so naive. I read the posts on NextDoor by my neighbors about black boys on bikes that might be casing the neighborhood, car break-ins, burglaries, muggings, and people feeding raccoons and they are just like me. They see our city from a vantage point that doesn’t see their sons and daughters as a statistic. Our special little children write poems and go to swim lessons and we never worry that one day they might have a gun in their pocket and end up as a hat in the street. We worry that those are the kids that will harm us and ours.

And I cry. Because I’m so naive. Because my city is not how I know it and see it. Because there are mothers who can’t wave back at their children. Because how do we control uncontrollable lives? I’m sitting here in my whiteness, the skin that I was born in, the skin that protects me and my children from statistics and crime tape, and I want to help, I want to say and do anything to help Xavier’s mom wave at him. To keep him innocent and smiling. To keep the guns out of his pocket. To keep him writing poetry about the blooming hibiscus. And still I cry because I can’t. I can only hug his mom. I can only cry with her and walk next to her. Invite them over for dinner. Be their neighbor. What else can I do?  This city is not mine. It is ours. And our city needs us to not be afraid of our black children and their parents and their schools. It needs to us sit with them and eat with them and learn with them and not be afraid of the guns. It needs us to love each other and talk to each other. And so, I’ll write. I’m writing to you. How will you love our city and the people in it?

These are images of my kids, Don Demetrius Jr., the 17 year old shot and killed on Sunday night, children at the PB Young school garden, and our city where we all live. So many images of hopes, dreams, and violence that shape our communities in so many different ways. How do we confront them in meaningful and purposeful ways? How do we live together in love and not in fear? They’re all our children.