2020 god damn
2020, god damn.
I wish Nina Simone were here to sing rage into beauty.
For at least seven years my email signature has read, from the Talmud, “Do not despair at the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but nor are you free to abandon it.”
Tonight I despair. I fucking despair.
What is there to say that has not been said? This week is not a lesson to learn from, not the blatant horror or new empathy that we need to see the error of our ways and find ourselves changed. That would have been Emmett Till. Or Medgar Evers. Or Philando Castile. Or Atatiana Jefferson. Or Charlottesville. We don’t need any more examples to know better. We just need to be better.
This is no time for magical thinking. Police cams did not eradicate violence. Bias training did not eradicate violence. iPhones and Twitter compelled reactive, minimalist, optics-conscious responses that — while better than no response at all — have not stopped white America from killing black and brown America. In the street, in their homes, in schools, in wars, in hospitals, in prisons.
Whiteness has been executing black and brown genocide for hundreds of years. In this country, our genocide is not an epidemic or a pandemic, it is endemic to our very American-ness.
Dr. King says that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I want to believe this. But in spite of efforts of heroes, American genocide proves a sneaky, resilient countervailing force.
I cannot tolerate another cycle of memes and retweets, followed by quiet, followed by death. I don’t want to live in this world. I don’t know how to go to work in this world, no longer feel certain that our schools hold the most promise for love and liberation and social upheaval.
I know that power cedes nothing without demand. And I know that, while knowledge is power and learning can be liberation, there is no amount of education or training or impactful social media that will persuade white America out of its — out of OUR — rage and power and violence. Those roots go too deep. We’re gonna have to pull up the tree.
Here we are, in a pandemic that is showing (as if we needed to be shown) the gaping chasms between white and black and brown America. While the virus kills indiscriminately, our politicians have made damn sure it kills black and brown bodies more often. And, as this happens, black and brown America are losing jobs and wages and housing and healthcare at vastly disproportionate rates, looking out at a long road of “recovery” that, if anything like 2008 or any number of national crises before that, will help rich white men get richer off their backs. And, as they stare down this gauntlet, they are harassed and killed. Anywhere, everywhere, by dog walking white Karens or a police officer’s knee.
2020 god damn.
An aspen tree is not single entity. One aspen is part of a cluster of others that are bound together by a shared root system. The trees that share roots are part of a single organism. Today, we continue to unabashedly suck the life out of black and brown humans. Brothers, sisters. Is it because a few among us believe that color of their skin makes them less than human? Or, perhaps, because the color of their skin reminds us all that we — we who enslaved, we who stole, we who kill — are less than human? What I know is this: if we continue to lessen the value of black and brown bodies across the globe and in our back yards, we are all going to die. We are the aspens, we share roots.
Fannie Lou Hamer told us that “nobody is free until everybody is free.” James Baldwin told us that the the future of black America is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of America. We share roots.
Our violence and rage is self destruction. Some people will get very rich from it, for now, but it is self destruction. We share roots. Some people won’t notice or won’t care until it comes to their doorstep, which it will. We share roots.
We could come through this pandemic with hope and very real pragmatic reason to put the healing and thriving of black and brown lives first. We could put their economic recovery first, build infrastructure in communities of color and employ people of color to build it, redistribute wealth from the top 10%, get rid of local education funding formulas. We could come through this violence and simply change our police policies, stop putting people in prison as easily as politicians in the 80s decided to start putting them in prison. We really, actually could. If we did this, it would save lives. It would humanize us. It would also increase our GDP and lower our taxes, if you need those motivations. It would make us all better. god. damn. people.
But, this is not a time for magical thinking. It is, however, a time to get up and be better. I don’t know, yet, the exact right way to lend my voice or place my hands in the demand for the end to genocide, for freedom. But certainty is not always an antecedent to action. I feel this despair in my bones. It is despair for my black and brown friends, for the communities I serve, for my own family and for us all.
I will
Write publicly, even if I am not sure what exactly to say, because silence is complicit.
Show up to protest.
Act in solidarity without centering myself or waiting to be told what to do.
Help people of color, women of color, get elected to office.
Lobby my city’s police department to enact policies that are shown to reduce police involved killing.
Continue to direct my professional career toward community development and education upheaval.
Integrate anti-racist action and abolitionist teaching into all of the projects I support.
Write privately, because we all need imagination to see our way out.
—
these streets should be on fire tonight
and we should run through them and sing
the song of our denial
yours is not the annal that we will sign
our name to, yours is not the stage
on which we’ll play our parts.
may our birth not be our casting
may we never read the lines
that history has wrote for us.
may we follow humbly in the tread of those
who dared, to pen of purple lechery
and alabaster greed
who showed that pilgrim feet were shod
by those whom we have gall to damn
those who prayed to spacious skies
for thicker skin to bear the beating
liberty bestowed
may this be the song we sing
may each note ring righteous out
from our angry loving throats
never silenced by the sound
another fallen body makes
senseless and predicted
we shall set our song on fire
watch our notes, they lick like flames
and wrestle hate to ash
we too shall tend the tender growth
that will root in loamy soil
the memory of fire.
—
Black and brown lives matter. I despair.