Black Lives Matter
I went to Anoka High School where, I think, in a school of 3,000 9th - 12th graders, there were maybe 10 black students. I also remember there was a group called The All American Boys. I remember believing that this was a bad group, formed on the notion of white supremacy. Beyond this thought, I do not remember engaging in dialogue on the subject of race at this time in my life.
I have a cousin, not by blood, but by heart, who is black. Her name is Analuisa. She lived the school years with my aunt and uncle from the time I was in third grade until I was in college, save for the year Ana was not granted a visa to return from Ecuador, where she had returned to her family for the summer. Still, we did not talk about her blackness or my whiteness. Some time ago, I would have thought this was "a good sign." I would have thought this meant there was no real difference in our experiences based on race that would lead us to bring up such topics.
I can now call this notion, that we could live the same in this world with different skins, ignorance.
After high school, I went to Gustavus Adolphus College. Gustavus was smaller than my high school, and again, filled with white faces. I ran track at Gustavus, and I ran workouts alongside Jerry Washington and Ryan Hoag. These were the only two black peers in my social sphere.
I moved to Denver, Colorado, after I had finished my student teaching at 23 years old. I taught at Aurora Central High School. At this time, for the first time in my life, I was a minority. A minority who still had the majority of the privilege. That year, my students taught me 1000 times more than I taught them. They continue to teach me as I see the paths they pave for themselves through our connection on social media. I still reflect back to moments with my students at Central, those moments when I just couldn't understand why I wasn't being heard. Why I wasn't getting through to them. Why they wouldn't just listen to me.
To be heard. To be seen. To be known. It is what we all desire and seek as humans. But listening, seeing, and knowing is not always what we offer others.
Some years ago I was in a vehicle with someone who was criticizing the Black Lives Matters movement. Who hasn't heard someone else say "All lives matter" at this point? And yes, of course, all lives matter. The movement never arose out of any intent to say black lives matter over white lives or blue lives or any other lives. It arose because black lives are lost, be it the loss of the breath or the loss of freedom as black men are put behind bars at disproportionate rates to any other race in the US, at the hands of structural racism. every. damn. day.
Black lives matter.
When I was living in Ecuador, some 9 years after I taught in Colorado, many years after I was wondering why the heck I couldn't make the difference I wanted to with my students at Aurora Central, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.
I read and reread:
"But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
And still, I could not really understand why Coates kept talking about the black body like it was so different from any other body.
And then I brought up the book to one of my best friends, Charles. Charles is black. He did not owe me a conversation to help me understand Coates. It is not his job, or any other non-white person's job, to educate any of the white folks about what it is to live in their non-white bodies. But over cigars, Charles did engage with me. Over the course of that afternoon, I finally began to grasp what Coates said again and again to his son through the words of his book: you must protect your black body because society will not. The families of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Jordan Davis, Atatiana Jefferson, The Charleston Nine, Breona Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery have lost their son, daughter, sister, brother, and friend to the lack of protection that society offers the black body.
Black bodies matter.
When I was in high school, I learned about things like the Underground Railroad, and the Jim Crow Laws, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement. I learned about these people and events through text books written, largely, through a white lens. I did not learn about Malcom X, or the true power of the underground railroad, or The New Jim Crow, or much at all about black inventors and innovators.
Someday, when I have children, I will fill the family library with The Undefeated, Little Leaders, Henry's Freedom Box: A True Story From the Underground Railroad, Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, What Color is My World? The Lost History of African-American Inventors, and The Watson's Go to Birmingham -- 1963.
Black history matters.
In the last couple of years, one of my favorite authors has become Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I watch her TedTalk entitled The Danger of a Single Story each year with my students. She opens up the talk by recounting her life as a young writer:
I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. "
The audience chuckles, along with Adichie, at this anecdote. Adichie, though, is using the story to illustrate the significance of seeing yourself represented in the texts and world around you. Adichie has made me reflect and consider which books I have in my classroom, which books I choose to include in my curriculum, and which books I recommend to my students.
At the end of her TedTalk, she concludes:
"Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity."
I think this is an important time to consider the books on our nightstands, on our bookshelves, and in our hands. Are you reading books that represent a multiplicity of perspectives and backgrounds?
As a bookworm, in addition to the books from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ta-Nehisi Coates, I love, savor, delight in, and learn from the works of Roxane Gay, Jesmyn Ward, Nayyirah Waheed, and Trevor Noah.
On my next read list: Me and White Supremacy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and Stamped: Racism, Anti-racism, and You.
Because it is my own job to educate myself on what it is to walk through this world with what is defined as black skin, and what it is to "do the work" to understand my own privilege, I follow many important Instagram accounts: Austin Channing Brown, The Conscious Kid, Shifting the Culture, Rachel Ricketts, thelovelandfoundation, Layla F Saad, Jason Reynolds, and Color of Change, to begin.
Black voices matter.
For the past months, in the midst of this pandemic, around the world we have been wishing to re-establish "normal" life again, wondering when or if that day will ever arrive. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Roxane Gay writes,
"Eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism. We will live with the knowledge that a hashtag is not a vaccine for white supremacy. We live with the knowledge that, still, no one is coming to save us. The rest of the world yearns to get back to normal. For black people, normal is the very thing from which we yearn to be free."
In so many ways, we do not need to re-establish the old normal. We need a new normal. We need a new normal where there is justice for all, without hypocrisy. We need a new normal where white folks are examining their contributions to the current, racist status quo. We need a new normal where we engage in collective healing.
I think one of the most important questions to be asking ourselves right now is " Does the way that I vote, the things that I say, the actions that I take show that I believe that Black Lives Matter?"
