What is Ours to Do? Breaking Silence after George Floyd
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It’s been only a week since we woke to the news of George Floyd’s death under the knee of a police officer. Since we were captivated by the Amy Cooper video. Since protests and unrest erupted around our country. Not to mention, since we hit the grim toll of 100,000 deaths in the US to coronavirus, with a disproportionate number of those being people of color.
We’ve been here before. Again and again. And we know that the news cycle, the social media responses, the protestors will move on. There will be new images and sound bites, new atrocities, ridiculousness, suffering. It is crazy the level of heartbreak, outrage, and alarm we’ve had to sustain. Whether by design or default, the pace of news in our country has grown crazy-making and utterly fatiguing. And when we stop and double over in grief or exhaustion (as we must if we are to keep running the race), who knows what we’re missing. The grief, the outrage, the feeling of being unseen, unheard, unvalued, unprotected, helpless piles up. Is it any wonder it then explodes and shatters windows and sets cars on fire?
If we’re honest with ourselves, we may want to move on too. Like a personal problem that arises for us, we may hope and fervently pray all of this will just go away. Without our having to hurt more, be uncomfortable, risk action, be undone and remade.
But I don’t want us to move on. I want us to hit pause, all stop moving, talking, tweeting, spinning, reacting and piling on more and more hurt.
I keep thinking about this stirring poem Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda, how we might be together in a “sudden strangeness,” how we might really take stock of how we are piling up hurt in ourselves and on others, how we might “interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.”
I know I’m not saying anything that hasn’t already been said far more eloquently. I know what I do say will feel meager and inadequate, may very well get judged and misinterpreted. And yet I feel compelled to say something. Because staying silent because of the insecurity or discomfort or fear of judgment is all about me, and does not serve anyone, including those most vulnerable in this present crisis. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter to a Birmingham Jail: We have to repent in this generation, not merely for the hateful speech and actions of the bad people, for the appalling silence of the good people.
I’ve heard many white people say in recent days they don’t feel qualified to teach or speak or write about this because they still have so much inner work to do themselves. Yes. Let me join their ranks. I do not pretend to come as a race expert, activist, teacher or anything of the sort, but just another human being wrestling in my own piece of white flesh.
Since trying to absorb everything that has been happening, I’ve been sitting with Nan Merrill’s beautiful translation of Psalm 41, contextualized for the week we’ve had:
Who among us hears the cries of the black community? (“I can’t breathe.”)
How many open their hearts
and heed the Call?
The plight of racism is a wound
to the very Heart of Love,
a scar on our own souls.
Blessed are those who lovingly respond!
The Friend, who knows all hearts,
will remember their kindness.
They will know joy, peace, and deep fulfillment
working in harmony
with all who serve toward healing
the racial divides of our troubled nation.
I’ve also been having hard, messy, searching conversations --with myself, friends, neighbors, my Sunday school class-- about what it means to heed the call, to respond to the ongoing oppression and killing of our black brothers and sisters. There are no easy answers. Everything one does or says feels woefully inadequate. And if we are a person with white skin, we always run the risk of trying to appear more “woke” or enlightened or innocent around race than we really are.
But again, staying silent, is not the answer. We must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We must not be lulled again into silence and inactivity for fear of getting it wrong, or being exposed.
And we must not let ourselves off the hook by getting overly focused on others. How could she erupt like that? How could he keep his knee down that long? Did you see what they posted? They’re not helping their cause with all this looting. It’s true, there is always someone more lost, more compromised, more hurtful than you. And all of us, especially our leaders and public servants, must be held accountable for their particular words and actions. But I think we know when our pointing or wagging of our own moral finger keeps us from looking in the mirror.
What is ours to do? I think that is the question. And really, I believe we each and all have to make our own journey with this, so the question becomes, what is mine to do? What is mine to do to help heal the racial divides and injustices in our country?
That’s what I’m wrestling with and I imagine you are too. And I know part of that wrestling is for me to write and put it out there. I can already tell I have more I want to write than time on any given day. So I will write in pieces as I’m able. If you’ve stayed with me this far, thank you. I love that most likely, we already have some sort of relationship with one another. (If not, I’d like us to!) I write to you as a friend and fellow struggler. And I really hope this opens into more conversation, whether between us, or with others.
Further thoughts. . .
What is ours to do? What is mine to do? To help heal the racial divides and address the injustices. To heal the racism that wounds every soul, and violates black and brown bodies.
I know many of us have been wrestling with this question more intensely over the last few years. For me, one of the hard gifts (It's always a gift to be dispelled of our illusions, even when it's painful) of the 2016 election was that it revealed how divided we really are, and also shocked many of us out of our complacency around a holy host of injustices plaguing our country, particularly communities of color. It was a long overdue wake up call. We knew we had to do something, even if we didn't always know what that was. But we made a start or a re-start. In my own friendships, communities, and work as a spiritual director, I have actually been heartened by and grateful for the change in discourse about race and racism, the searching inventory among white people of our privilege and complicity, the impassioned desire to work for more healing and justice, even if we don't always know how to get there, the increased engagement in protests, politics, and organizations working for real change. It's one of the things that has given me the most hope during the last several years, even while I remain deeply troubled and outraged.
For me, the specific incident that penetrated my own complicity around racism was the back-to-back killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in July 2016. You may remember the video of Castile's death, livestreamed by his girlfriend in the passenger seat beside him, after they were pulled over for a broken taillight. With clear presence of mind, Diamond Reynolds narrates what has just transpired, as we watch the blood flow from Castile's arm, the officer still holding a gun through the window and yelling orders with a panicky voice. Reynolds' four-year-old daughter is in the back seat witnessing everything. After she and Reynolds are placed in the patrol car, with the cell phone still recording we hear her try to comfort her mama, "It's OK Mommy, I'm right here with you." She also says, "Mama, please stop cussing and screaming cuz I don't want you to get shooted."
Lord, have mercy.
I was a newish Mom, watching the news at my parents' house, as my two-and-a-half year old slept peacefully in another room. I couldn't imagine the trauma for that other mama and her sweet girl. My heart broke. I watched. I listened. I let it in. I let it break my heart.
I say it that way, because the uncomfortable truth is that we don't have to let it in. It's not my reality. I have been pulled over a few times, and I get crazy nervous when I see those blue lights and the cop approaching in my rear view mirror. But not once have I ever thought that if I do not handle this exchange correctly, I may lose my life. My parents never had to have "the talk" with me, rehearsing over and over again what I must do if confronted by a police officer to stay alive. And never in my wildest terrors would I have planned for the possibility that I may need to pull out my phone and record on Facebook live my beloved dying in the seat beside me with my child looking on, because I may not be believed if I don't create such evidence myself.
I don't know why I watched the news that night. I was not in the habit at the time. Usually, after getting Theo down for the night, I would be so grateful for a little slice of time--to scroll through Facebook, read a book "for pleasure", or play Wood Puzzle on my phone-- preferably something light, even mind-numbing, before collapsing into bed exhausted. But instead, I spent hours watching and reading stories about Castile and Sterling, awash in sadness and shame. How could we live in a country this broken? And how could I live with myself, recognizing the utter disparity of our lives, based on the color of our skin? A disparity that if I'm honest, allows me to turn a deaf ear, a blind eye, to what is really going on.
Listen, you that are deaf;
and you that are blind, look up and see!
Who is blind but my servant,
or deaf like my messenger whom I send?
Who is blind like my dedicated one,
or blind like the servant of the Lord?
He sees many things, but does not observe them;
his ears are open, but he does not hear.
-Isaiah 42:18-20
It was not my first wake-up call around racism. But I had sadly been lulled back to sleep, made myself comfortable in the thought that while we hadn't gone far enough, we were moving in the right direction.
I was jolted awake again that evening. I began again, to continue my own painful inner work around what it means to be white in America.
As with so many other things, it seems that our conversion is not a one-time wholesale transformation, but a lifelong process that comes in fits and starts. We wake up, and fall back asleep over and over and over and over again. Like the disciples who cannot sit and stay with Jesus's pain in the Garden of Gethsemane, even as he pleads with them to stay awake with him. Our spirit may be willing, but our flesh is so weak.
Part of me wants to yell at myself and others, Wake up! To shame us for not being able to stay awake with our Lord, who pleads with us still through the blood and tears of black bodies. How long are we going to ignore and deny our history of racism, the rampant racism and white supremacy entrenched in our systems and in our own hearts? How many black bodies have to be strung up or pinned down, the holy breath of God choked out of them before our very eyes? My God, why have we forsaken them?
And part of me is desperate for that same Lord's forgiveness, who comes to Peter in his denial, to the disciples in their fear and betrayal, even to his executioners, saying, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."
I do believe there is mercy and forgiveness for us. But not without a whole lot of soul-searching, confession and repentance. And not without a cost.
If are struggling too, and would like to be in conversation, I invite you to join me and others for a pop up conversation on race. See more details here.
Until next time, grace and peace to you, and to our troubled nation,
Kimberly