Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There’s far too many of you dying
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today
Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On”
A few days before #blackouttuesday I stepped back from social media. Not a prolific poster on any platform to begin with, even in more normal times I often find it all pretty overwhelming and generally cacophonous, sure not conducive to thoughtfulness, reflection, real conversation. So I took a grace note, a pause just off the beat, quieting my own voice to better listen, watch, witness the moment we are in.
Listening to Wesley Morris last week on NPR being interviewed about a piece he’d written in The New York Times, I was inspired to try to find some words. And draw on the power, strength, insight of others.
This country manufactures only one product powerful enough to interrupt the greatest health and economic crisis it’s probably ever faced. We make racism, the American virus and the underlying condition of black woe. ”
Wesley Morris, “The Videos That Rocked America. The Song That Knows Our Rage.”
It was this idea that made me really focus: The land of the free and the brave has produced the one thing that can trump a pandemic. The one thing, the opposite of a vaccine. Racism.
Morris’s piece finds him doubled over his kitchen sink, with all range of emotion from despair and disgust to weary fortitude and hope. To be human these past few weeks is to find yourself doubled over all manner of furniture or whatever, at odd times in odd places, at home or in the street, despairing of the knowledge of what is going down in this country. That one more black man would be murdered so grotesquely, so mundanely, by police officers, in Minneapolis over a (supposed counterfeit) $20 bill. A $20 bill. That same day, which happened to be Memorial Day, a white woman with an unruly unleashed dog in Central Park called 911 because a birder, who happened to be a black man, asked her to leash the dog. She ends up in hysterics, screaming into the phone an “African-American man is threatening my life” and that he was her emergency.
The juxtaposition of these two events, one so tragic, one absurd but full of its own tragic potential, reflects in all hideous shades of gray the horror of race in this country. Much of what the world knows of George Floyd’s murder is what 17-year old Darnella Frazier filmed, on her phone. George Floyd’s last minutes under the knee of a hideously calm, oblivious white man in uniform were recorded by a high school student. Christian Cooper, the black man in Central Park, was filming too. He knew, like all black Americans, how badly such an exchange could end, and best have proof.
It seems the gross and brazen inhumanity of George Lloyd’s murder has pierced the fog around us white folk, so many of whom just never got it. Well-meaning liberal-leaning we might be, self-congratulatory for our open-mindedness and fair treatment of all, and yet. While each incident– from George Lloyd back to Rodney King and on through history– presented its own terrible injustice that we were ready to decry, still, white supremacy and systemic racism were really just not ours to claim. Well, wake up, they are all ours. Wake. Up. It’s way past time, like a few hundred years, to look in the mirror. And to truly see, and hear, the faces and the voices of the black, brown and all colors of humanity besides us. Get uncomfortable, and get to know them. Because as the film director Kasi Lemmons wrote in The Washington Post last week, black Americans know whites “very well. We’ve had to. We had no choice. … We had to know you to survive you.”
Now imagine that even now, after everything we’ve survived and accomplished, after we’ve built this country with our sweat and blood, our backs and brains, after we’ve sacrificed our lives in every war that has ever been fought for America, this country is still not safe for us. It’s still not safe to go jogging while black; to listen to loud music while black; to drive while black; to birdwatch while black; to shop at Barneys while black; to be a 13-year-old boy while black.
It’s not safe to lie on the ground, not resisting arrest, while black.
Maybe that explains this lack of white imagination: The price of truly understanding black life in America is just too high. That understanding demands too much. If you felt this rage yourself, you would have to acknowledge what caused it, and what it makes you want to do.
Kasi Lemmons, “White Americans, your lack of imagination is killing us”
When the protests first began to take shape the end of May it felt like shades of the 60’s. I was six in 1968, one of the hottest years of that on fire decade. But I remember the turmoil. My father was in the Pentagon working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, my brother was down in front of the White House protesting the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April, Bobby Kennedy in June.
The protests of 2020 are different. The colors, genders, ages are so fantastically uncategorizable. Multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-age, multi. Obama remarked in his Town Hall address with My Brother’s Keeper last week, that it gives him hope the young generation is picking up the torch for a cause whose time, after many centuries, has finally come. Amen.
A few years after the 9/11 attacks, Tom Friedman wrote something that for me gestured to the un-understandable of that day and its ramifications more than anything else I’ve read or heard before or since. While so many wanted to blame the intelligence community, that they had missed crucial signs that could have prevented the attacks, Friedman wrote that to his mind it was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. Who among us could imagine planes being flown into buildings, on purpose? Like, in real life, not a special effects thriller?
Lemmons nailed it. Who among us white folks could imagine dying the way George Floyd died? Who could imagine the daily fear tied only to the skin you were born in, the need to constantly self-monitor? Well now we don’t need to trouble ourselves to imagine, we have the video, and if it doesn’t shut you down and double you over, you best check for a heartbeat. And there are many more videos, so many, each so specifically horrifying. Morris writes that the events black people are recording on their phones comprise a “ghastly visual mosaic of mistreatment,” they are “the stone truth.” Part of a vast library all too well stocked that has helped them survive us, know how to teach black and brown sons and daughters, but especially sons, about how to keep safe.
The pandemic already was exponentially worsening the economic and social inequalities in this country, mercilessly highlighting all the fault lines. In this recorded murder– also rightly being called an execution and a lynching, and the first recorded for the world to view at its leisure– centuries of injustice came to rest on George Floyd’s neck, at a moment when the world may already be shattering for its sins. It’s time.
It’s time, and we are weary: It has been a refrain these past weeks. Black and brown women and men who daily must navigate a world where one false move can end horrifically are bone weary. Morris writes, “You fight because you’re tired. Yet you’re tired because you’ve been fighting. For so long. In waves, in loops, in vacuums, in vain.”
Journalist Jonathan Capehart describes being brought to tears at the end of his podcast with author Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility) when she turns to apologize to him: “I’m going to look at you, Jonathan, in the eyes and say, on behalf of my people, I apologize.” Capehart then eloquently, heart wrenchingly gives a brief summary of life in his skin.
I’ve seen white women clutch their purses and watched white men tap their back pockets to see if their wallets are still there. I’ve sat alone on a packed rush-hour commuter train back to the suburbs. I’ve had people assume I work at the store/restaurant/hotel I was in. I’ve had my space invaded because I’m not really seen by white people. I’ve been followed in stores because I’m seen as a thief or a threat. I’ve been mistaken for someone else black who looks nothing like me. I’ve had my experiences discounted or dismissed. I’ve watched others rise to positions I know I could do better. I fear leaving home for any duration of time without my driver’s license, health insurance card and a Washington Post business card with my husband’s phone number on it just in case I have a run-in with law enforcement or a stranger who calls the police. And I feel unsafe in my own country because the president of the United States delights in pouring gasoline on America’s four-century-old fire.
Jonathan Capehart, “Dear white people, please read ‘White Fragility’,” The Washington Post
In his last breaths George Floyd called for his mother, who had died nearly two years before. I have wondered if at this terrible moment, with his breath being cut off, on the verge of death did he see her, his mother, for surely she was there with him. As any mother of any color would, I believe, I know she was. In a sea of misery, believing that offers a filament of comfort, a sense of something better in the face of evil.
Back to Wesley Morris doubled over his sink. On top of the roiling emotions of the past weeks, he was triggered by a song, and not just any song. In a sweet disclaimer for his own mother, whom he excuses for not being on the Patti LaBelle bandwagon, he gives it up for the singer and her supersonic hair and a live version of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now.” Listen and be moved.
The stone truth. Grace is only available through suffering. Suffering, theologian Paul Tillich wrote, reminds you you’re not who you thought you were, it drags you deeper into yourself, it carves into the basement of your soul to reveal a new cavity, then it finds the floor in that one and carves deeper still. A state of grace is not achieved through meditation or prayer, no, that particular moment of terrible, amazing awakening comes only in suffering, suffering what you’d avoid at any cost if you could, and suffering it while traversing the darkest of nights.
Right now, individually, communally, nationally, it seems like many of us may be waking up, and in the labor of opening our eyes we just may have access to a transcendent moment of grace. However some leaders are or are not responding to it, the proof is there, we can see it with our eyes, hear it with our ears; we can feel it in our hearts, down into our souls. Amazing grace. I once was blind, but now I see, was lost, but now am found.