I’ve been writing this post for an entire week. One, because it’s just difficult, and two, with each day there’s some new element or twist to all of it that evokes another dimension of emotion and thought. I’d originally planned to write the patio reveal post I’d mentioned in my last post, but decided to forego that for a commentary because this moment demands attention to the current uprising of the 400-year old cancer we’ve all been affected in some way by called racism. I wanted to share a little bit of what I’ve been feeling over the last couple of weeks. To even begin to address it I’d have to go back to the very beginning, which was slavery. I’ll spare you the history lessons that we all should’ve been afforded in elementary and high school, but were somehow erased from our textbooks. I could do a whole blog post on that alone. But there is a ton of information on the internet that may help give you a headstart if you’re interested, by simply typing in the word “slavery”. From there you can learn of the many atrocities that were inflicted upon stolen Africans. Every, single, thing Black people face, every, single, day, has it’s root in what began in 1619 and culminated in 1865’s Civil War.
As a near-60 year old Black person, who like most if not all Black people my age, my experiences with racism runs the gamut from subtle and systemic, to in-your-face and blatant. So I’ve had to deal with these feelings many times. I wasn’t going to write about it this time because frankly, if I dialed in on the blog for every video-taped murder of an unarmed Black person, this space would become something entirely different from what it was intended. I say that to say, there are too many to mention. And so we hashtag their name on a social media post, add an RIP to it, make the phone calls to our local, state and federal leaders, send emails, ask our family and friends to do the same, and we keep it moving. Because with each one, something inside of you says, ‘well there you have it, the video is super clear this time. I know they’re going to be prosecuted for this. How could they not be, it’s right there, clear as day, right?’ And then there’s no charges brought. And if there are charges, there’s no convictions. So murderers whose acts of violence are memorialized on video, get to walk around free to live their lives, and go home to their families every night. And even though we may know the perpetrators’ names and addresses, if you protested outside their home, you’d be the one cited for violation of their rights. I’m tired of hearing ‘well they must’ve done something bad‘, when these same officers seem to arrest unlawful white citizens calmly and without incident. And then there are those who say ‘why do you have to always make it about race?’ If you take race out of it the most recent news story would say: “A police officer was video taped holding his knee on the neck of a handcuffed suspect while two other officers kneeled on him for 8 minutes and 46 seconds until he was unconscious, while another officer looked on.” Is that ok? No. I just feel tired.
Just a Few …
Here are just a few of the more high-profile names in recent years, of unarmed Black men and women who died either at the hands of police officers, or while in police custody, or by known, vigilant racists, with no accountability pursued by way of arrests, charges, indictments or convictions.
So We Protest… AGAIN
Once again in history, across the nation and even internationally, people are taking their voices to the streets to demand justice and change. There’s a few things that are so infuriating about these demonstrations. There are three kinds of people out in the streets in the name of “protests.” One, is the actual “protester” who really is trying to eradicate injustice and enable change for the betterment of all our lives.
The second are groups of people who infiltrate the protest to disrupt and sew violence, and they are the “rioters”. Speculative reporting has identified them as provocateurs, agitators and sometimes anarchists. They are not part of the protest at all. They are well-coordinated and very strategic; masking themselves in all black from head-to-toe, so identifying them is near impossible. They burn cars, spray paint buildings, hurl bricks through storefront windows and set them on fire, and throw bottles at police officers. You’d be hard-pressed to find photos of them in action. But here’s a good article that captured a lot of what the actual Black Lives Matter protesters witnessed and documented, ‘They gonna blame that on us”.
Now they’re not the only bad apples using “the cause” to act out. There are other idiots of color out there as well. And they make up a portion of the third type, the “looters”, who take advantage of a suddenly open and vulnerable store to steal as much as they can carry, with no respect or regard for property and ownership. Not to make excuses, but I would suggest their values have been tainted by the unfortunate and unprivileged circumstances they were born into or that befell them. They’re really making the rest of us look bad, and the imagery feeds right into the hands of the media. When the nightly news headlines say “Violent Protesters” or “Violence and Looting”, I want to scream loud enough for everyone in America to hear me and say “THAT’S NOT US MOST OF THE TIME!!!”. It was the same way in the 60’s. The lack of diversity in these looting scenes that run constantly on every news program, give way to justification for being afraid of us, for shooting us, for denying us our rights and calling us thugs and savages. Unfortunately, you’re more likely to see this in your local newspaper or on the 9:00 news…
Not this:
Or this…
The video is quite clear, however, these “thugs and savages” remain unapprehended. And I won’t even start on police officers who are using unnecessary force, knowing that this “system” and the powers that be, will always protect them, cover and justify their actions.
It’s almost as if the goal is for everyone to view Black people as indecent, ghetto, thugs, undeserving of morality and humanity as this kind of narrative is incessantly promulgated. So on a regular Tuesday at Neiman Marcus, I get followed around the Women’s department by in-store security. But on another day, I can’t get anyone to acknowledge my presence at the Nordstrom’s jewelry counter. For some reason, they don’t “see me” there. It’s not blatant, but it is racism. This is also tiring.
And then there’s this…
For the record, after growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, I never thought I’d be “here” again, until Barack Obama won the presidency. As we were all celebrating the election of a Black man to the highest office in the land back in 2008, I had an “Oh sh*t” footnote moment, (please excuse my language), almost bracing myself for what possibly would follow in the months and years to come behind that. Knowing the things he had to deal with that were reported, I can’t imagine the bias and resistance he faced behind closed doors that weren’t reported. What other president has had to combat birtherism? Or was accused of not doing anything towards the end of his second term, only to find out the Senate Majority Leader refused to send 240 bills to his desk to review for further action? Or was refused confirmation hearings for his Supreme Court nominee a full year before the end of his second term by the Senate Majority Leader? President Obama’s election and re-election didn’t reveal how far we’d come in race relations, it ripped off the mask many had worn for decades, and showed how deep-seeded racism really is. Now people are just emboldened to do and spew whatever bias and hatred is in their hearts. They now have a cheerleader in the white house, but I’ll leave that alone for now.
But Wait There’s More…
There is soooo much more to racism than excessive and deadly force by police officers against unarmed men and women of color. It’s deep and it’s intricate. To know that the most powerful and economically advanced country in the world, stole land to build on, used the free labor of stolen human beings, treated and sourced as livestock, to become this great nation, and then bent over backwards to withhold every and all civil liberties, human rights and economic equality from them, once said people became “free”, makes me question, “who are the real, original looters in America?”
You can’t discover and claim a place as your own, that was already there with people inhabiting it.
Racism began as blatant acts, but over decades, as there have been victories from ending slavery, Jim Crow laws, separate-but-equal schools and poll taxes on voting and owning land, systemic and institutionalized racism in the form of housing, employment, criminal justice, and wealth equality exist and are much harder to prove. With the murder of George Floyd being hailed as a modern-day lynching, it prompted the revival of discussions around the passing of the Anti-Lynching Bill into law. I guess that one fell through the cracks over the 200 times legislation was presented throughout the last 120 years. Over 200 times a few disagreed and fought over whether they should make it a federal crime to target and murder a Black person for being Black. Let that sink in. There are some Senators, well one Senator, that is presently holding up the passing of this age-old bill. You can read about the latest battle HERE. This too could be a whole blog post to itself, but I digress.
As the years roll by, though I hate to admit it, I’m inclined to believe, equality was never intended for all Black people. A few of us can “make it” to a certain point, in sports and entertainment, and even to Congress. But how dare we aspire to being President of the United States, or CEO of a billion-dollar company, or have a million-dollar home outside of “the hood”. How many times have I heard: ‘You should be happy with what you got’, or ‘That was 200 years ago, why can’t you just let it go?’ And my answer is: I/We didn’t start this. And I should be allowed to do and be all I can like any other American citizen. Study the history of “us”, imagine the tables turned, and then tell me if you could just “let it go?”
Many of us who have grown up to be what our parents taught us to be: fair, good-hearted, kind, empathetic, law-abiding people of integrity and dignity, who work hard to become all that we are, and have what we have, are just plain old tired of being reminded of our Blackness all day, every day in the most insulting and sometimes vicious ways. It’s completely exhausting. We’re tired of fighting. We’re tired of proving. We’re tired of walking on egg shells so we can keep our good-paying jobs, or so we don’t get killed when we’re pulled over by the police, or be mistaken for a thief, or be shot in our sleep because of a police investigation error. I’m so tired of it all. I just want to truly be free to live my life and pursue my dreams, and be happy, like anyone else; to not feel fearful when I see a police car behind me.
My Country Tis of Thee. Was this American patriotic song written with us in mind? Are these words true for me, for us too? God help us.
My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From ev’ry mountainside
Let freedom ring!
My native country, thee,
Land of the noble free, thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills;
My heart with rapture thrills, like that above.
Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees sweet freedom’s song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break, the sound prolong.
Our fathers’ God to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright,
With freedom’s holy light,
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God our King.
Great piece my sista!!!
When you are articulated our journey of the 400 hundred years of slavery and oppression I could not help but think the term “Cyclical History”. Which is the continuous re-occurrence of past events that have come back around to our present reality. My mind immediately went
to biblical history when God told Abraham that the Hebrews would be oppressed and enslaved for 400 years and He would bring judgment on the nation that they served. What makes George Floyd’s death so unique from the other African Americans you respectfully mentioned that also were unjustly murdered is that it has brought the world to there knees in disgust. White-Americans are now asking themselves the long over due question” Is this really us?”
I have been asking myself the question “What happens next? Not to get too spiritual but everything that happens in the physical is always preceded by something that’s happening in the spiritual. With the global COVID-19 pandemic and the Racism pandemic. What Is God Up To?
More Power To You Ingrid!!!…You have a marvelous gift!
I certainly agree with your “cyclical history” assessment of these current times. I’ve said many times over the last few years, when these “unprecedented” events have come back up, that I don’t know how anyone deals and lives with any of this without a faith base in their life. Thank you so much for stopping by the blog, for your thoughtful comments and for your kind words. Much appreciated!
My Friend… This by far is one of the most powerful & informative writings I have read in all of my years of living!! Wow!!! Thank you for the this hurtful but uplifting piece on our plight here in America… I salute you Queen… Keep it coning…
Wow, thank you so much Brad for your kind words! I tremendously appreciate your support. Thanks so much for reading and sharing your thoughts my friend :)xo
“Fifty two years ago this past June 5th, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy was assassinated. Two months to the day before he was killed, on Friday, April 5, 1968, Senator Kennedy delivered this speech in my ancestral home of Cleveland Ohio; the city where my maternal grandmother, my parents, and my three older siblings, were born.
“At approximately the same moment this speech (whose complete text I have at the end of my comment) was being delivered, my father, Composer Hale Smith (1925-2009) piled me into the car with a longtime family friend and raced to Freeport High School in Freeport NY after getting a call that a race riot had broken out in response to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the previous night and that one of my brothers and my sister, were right there in the middle of it. Dad had told them to go to the school cafeteria to sit out the riot in the event one came to pass in the wake of Dr. King’s shooting. (that is where he later found them).
“I myself was just two months shy of turning three years old & so what I relate now was told to me by those who were there in the coming years because quite frankly the violence I witnessed that day caused a mental blackout which made me think that the violence I was about to witness was part of another event and had occurred a few years later.
“So I have no memory of the actual drive to the high school and the tension my father must have felt as he drove there. I know that the reason I was taken at all was because my paternal grandmother who usually kept watch over me, was out of town and my oldest brother was completing his freshman year at Brown University.
“So I went and it was upon my arrival that I witnessed things which forever altered my life’s trajectory and for all intents & purposes, brought my childhood, or at least the innocence associated with childhood, to a premature end.
“When we arrived at the high school, I saw the rioting in full bloom. Mobs of white & black students were waging all out war trying to kill each other. My nearly two year old eyes struggled to process the raw savagery I was seeing and my toddler ears were overcome by the roars of rage that filled the air.
“I was, quite simply, terrified and my terror only increased when I saw my father get out of the car and disappear into the mob. I pressed my face against the window & began to cry, convinced that I would never see my Dad again.
“Then I looked through the windshield and as I saw the mob grow, I became convinced that it would soon overwhelm the car and kill me for make no mistake, even when one is this young, they can sense the closeness of death and death seemed very close to me at that moment.
“Then I mentally blacked out and my ability to remember anything was neutralized for the better part of a year for the next memories I have are of the Apollo 11 moon landing of July 20, 1969.
“Today, the children of our time who bear witness to the violent upheavals of our era; are being similarly traumatized and as such they are tragically condemned to carry the mental scars of the savagery they are currently witnessing, for the remainder of their lives.
“Fifty years from now, in 2070 and beyond, today’s toddlers will look back at our times and rail at the injustice of childhoods ended too soon. There is nothing any of us can now do to undo these horrible effects on the youngest among us. The only thing we can do is to be motivated by the early destruction of our children’s childhoods to create a world in the wake of this current chaos where the childhoods of future children are not similarly cut short.
“This is our challenge and for our children’s sake, it is a challenge we dare not fail to meet for they, our children, are our future, and as such if we fail them now, then things being what they are, the odds are high, very, very high, that neither they nor we will have any future at all.”
The Mindless Menace of Violence.. A speech delivered by Robert F. Kennedy on April 5th 1968 (City Club of Cleveland in Cleveland, Ohio.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, “REMARKS AT THE CLEVELAND CITY CLUB” (5 APRIL 1968)
“Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I speak to you under different circumstances than I had intended to just twenty-four hours ago. For this is a time of shame and a time of sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity–my only event of today–to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.
” It’s not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one–no matter where he lives or what he does–can be certain whom next will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.
“Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled or uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.
“Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily–whether it is done in the name of the law or in defiance of the law, by one man or by a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence–whenever we tear at the fabric of our lives which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children–whenever we do this, then the whole nation is degraded. “Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost.”
“Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and we call it entertainment. We make it easier for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition that they desire.
“Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force. Too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of other human beings. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of rioting, and inciting riots, have by their own conduct invited them. Some look for scapegoats; others look for conspiracies. But this much is clear: violence breeds violence; repression breeds retaliation; and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our souls.
” For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions–indifference, inaction, and decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books, and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man amongst other men.
” And this too afflicts us all. For when you teach a man to hate and to fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies that he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your home or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies–to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and to be mastered.
” We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as alien, alien men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in a common effort. We learn to share only a common fear–only a common desire to retreat from each other–only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force.
“For all this there are no final answers for those of us who are American citizens. Yet we know what we must do, and that is to achieve true justice among all of our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.
“We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions, the false distinctions among men, and learn to find our own advancement in search for the advancement of all. We must admit to ourselves that our children’s future cannot be built on the misfortune of another’s. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or by revenge.
“Our lives on this planet are too short, the work to be done is too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in this land of ours. Of course we cannot banish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
” But we can perhaps remember–if only for a time–that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life, that they seek–as do we–nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment that they can.
” Surely this bond of common fate, surely this bond of common goals can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at the least, to look around at those of us, of our fellow man, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
“Tennyson wrote in Ulysses: that which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will; to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
” Thank you very much.”
Thank you so much Eric for sharing your story and this piece of history!
All I can do is applaud the editorial queen. Firstly, you are a phenomenal writer. I enjoyed your commentary. You also provided some education as well. There is nothing else to say but” well done”
love Live this👏🏼
Crystal, thank you so much for those kind words. I really tried to speak / write from the heart. So glad you loved it!
On point in every way.
Thank you Patricia Bohannon :)xo
So, if you look at this from a “relationship” stand point (we’re in a relationship with America), what advice would your Dad give? Stay in it. Fix it with love and endurance, for better or worse. Or would he say, “you need to let that @#$$a go!” I’m kinda at that crossroads these days.
Great analogy! And regarding to stay or leave, I hear you. I think a lot of us are pondering that right now. Thanks Broski for stopping by the blog and sharing your thoughts :)xo