Where to start in a moment like this? In a time like this?
With the country whirring around us, chaos on the left and on the right, and pain and suffering there in our faces, where to start? We are seeing lynchings right in our living rooms. We don't have to depend upon the history books and the black and white still photos of days gone by.
We will start at home. We will rinse leftovers of racism out of our language, minds, hearts, and lives. I will write more about this later, but for now, we're starting right here where we live. There is room to grow beyond, "I'm not a racist." Or, "I have Black friends."
We will repent and own up to our privilege and how it has benefited us and how it has spurned and maligned others. We will not walk into a protective cocoon that insists that we weren't there. We didn't own slaves. We never marginalized people of color. We will own up to the fact that our system benefits people who look like us. Education, housing, employment, health care, and even walking down the street are benefits we received from our economic and political systems. We will continually address our complicity.
We will serve as faithful allies to our friends of color. We will show up, and we will listen. We will realize that our friends of color are capable, competent, and resilient, and they do not need for us to rescue them. We will take our places where we can be helpful.
We will call out racism in the world in which we live when people attempt to hyper-explain why someone deserved something bad to happen to them, or if our friends try to explain and blame the protests and the riots and diminish the pain and suffering of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many, many more. Our culture immediately wants to vilify the victim. We will play no part in that. We will avoid the bootstraps conversation because we recognize that some do not have boots.
We will continue to write, protest, speak out, research, and support efforts to bring about justice in the world.
We will use our platform and years of experience in the Black farmer movement to speak into current circumstances. The Black farmer movement and those harmed by racism within the USDA are a particular, a specific area and woundedness, within the larger context of living while Black in America versus living while White in America.
We will seek to understand, rather that seeking to be understood. So many people of color are speaking these days to the fear, hurt, and anger of living while Black in America. Even our thought leaders on the television are telling stories of their children and the bitter lessons they are learning, or the sports commentator who speaks of being wary and weary.
James Baldwin's famous quote has been burned into my consciousness: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ”
In 2005 while on faculty renewal leave from ACU, I traveled through Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Georgia interviewing farmers, gathering qualitative and quantitative data about the lived experiences of farming while Black and dealing with the discriminatory actions of the USDA. Several impressions were made upon me. These farmers and families loved the land and were severely wounded by an institution of the federal government that they loved. They lived in constant consternation that the country they had served even in the military would mistreat them. Their faith allowed them to survive. Even then, their anger, disappointment, and anxieties were internalized such that they bore in their bodies the wounds of the long, drawn out war to save their land. Hypertension, blindness, strokes, just to name a few.
On one occasion I was on the receiving end of internalized rage turned external. I was sitting in the kitchen of an elderly couple, interviewing them, when their oldest son arrived. He came barreling into the kitchen, interrupting the interview, demanding to know who I was, why I was there, and what was going on, ostensibly to know if I was going to further hurt his parents. His rage was palpable. I have reviewed the transcript just this morning. I have the voice recording. Both speak to the volatility of the moment.
The younger farmer, who was no longer farming because it was taken away from him, was angry because the USDA's actions had caused him to lose his farm and his house, and it had wounded his children. He was so angry that at one point he began to weep. Yes, he was so angry that he began to weep. There were deeper emotions that he could not articulate except through tears.
At one point in the interview, as we'd shifted the focus from his parents to him, he asked, "Did you here me tell you it was dangerous for other folks the way they have done us?" "Yes, I heard you," was my reply. He then nuances his anger and his faith, "You want inner peace? He gives us inner peace. They don't give it to us. 'Cause I got anger in there for them, but that inner peace that I get from Him keeps me from doing something dangerous to them. 'Cause like I said, I just came out of a meeting today. That inner peace keep me from goin' off in there. So it's in there. If it wasn't for the faith, it'd be worse than an atomic bomb."
I was face to face and coached up by a man protecting himself, his family, his identity, his life, and in the face of losses was rage and a whole bunch of other things.
I left that interview shaken.
We will listen to the pain of the unheard before we launch into destruction, marches turned peaceful to riots out of control. If someone wants to begin with the protests, marches, and riots, we'll press them to start over with the pain of the unheard, the pain that has accumulated since the shores of Africa through the middle passage.
We have witnessed story-telling that tells of only being a few generations removed from enslavement. One farmer spoke with delight as to his ancestor who successfully ran away from the plantation.
For America to watch a ten minute video of a police officer pressing his knee against the neck of the pleading, cuffed Black man who is lying on the asphalt, for 8:30 or so, opens a deep wound of the value of Black lives in America. Black lives mattered when they were the work force, during enslavement, or via the created chain gangs thereafter when trumped up charges led them to being released on work duty to pay off their fines.
When Black Lives Matter, and begin to matter, we will move into another era in our country. Until then, we will sit on the proverbial powerkeg, and at times we'll find it added to explosively by the current occupant of the White House and the white supremacists and racists who follow him.
Van Jones says it well, "If you speak up and you're not heard, you might yell. If you yell and you're not heard you might scream. If you scream and you're not heard you might throw something. What you've got now is an escalation of frustration....."
Here is his entire interview: https://twitter.com/i/status/1266508333197996033
Weep, America, weep for your children lest we all burn up.
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