black ruminations

Some things are known before they are said

You can tell the formality

The rehearsed cadence in his voice

As a white man stands and delivers his brand of justice

The way he has been indoctrinated to believe that truth

And right lie in the hands and minds of those

With more power

Better arguments

More facts

And a better articulation

And more guns

My hair raised ever so gently on my arms

My mother crying in the phone

Telling me she worries

About bobby at night

In dark

Past a curfew of respectability

When good boys are home

My same mother once told me she

Wasn’t political

But I guess the personal 

The profound

The profane can pull it out of you

I asked though my tears

Where is my brother?

He gets on the phone slow scared unsure of what I will say

Robert

Not bob bob

Not his stage name of epic mind of lo

Robert

Do you see what your life is worth I ask

Yes he says

Then that is all that matters I say

I keep going back and forth between pain and anger

Tears and outrage

I just keep thinking God do you love us?

Then why isn’t our liberation top on the priority list

Before rising the sun

And pulling the moon out

Before snow fall

And dusk setting

And seasons changing

Why isn’t our liberation top on the to do list

Do you keep moving it around your calendar

Like I do the things I don’t really want to do

I keep thinking will this make us stop buying bobby shmurda

Will this remember black is beautiful

Call us back to black power like the 76 ebony magazine I found

Will we decide we are more than whitewashed faces

And salaries and degrees

More like kings and queens

More than soul food

And basketballs and running on fields

That we don’t own

I want our freedom

But I know it might cost

But tonight I would be willing to pay it

With my own body

Offer me on the cross like Jesus

Since god is a black woman anyway

Crucify me

Let me blood run in streets like black boys

Killed to soon

Anything to release all the tears I feel

Dear Mike.

We failed

We tried

The system beat us again

We are sorry

We thought this time

In your name we prayed

And danced

And worked

And organized

We believed

We cry about your death

What will we do for the boys who live

We cried about injustice

What will be give up for freedom

Harriet said she could have freed more if you

Convinced them they were slaves

Mike maybe you can break the chains

We cry miscarriage

But we abort the mission

Mike Im praying your death give us vision

Let it be the thing that helps us see

I don’t believe in justice

I believe in black

And being free

If I teach you to bow then your back is bent

if I teach you how to fight you will be killed

if I teach you to love yourself than maybe 

you may survive 

Open Hands

Open Hands

There are things in our lives that make sense. Those are the things we talk about. There are other things in our lives that don’t make sense. Those are the things we hide.

Today was our staff retreat and to understand its importance, you need to understand the back-story of our organization and how I got there.

Three years ago I worked for a group, where on the first day I was charged to build a coalition of faith, nonprofit, civic and business leaders to end poverty in Washington DC. I showed up to a small office with a staff of two and spent a lot of time meeting people and figuring out how to make things happen with few resources. We made progress on recruiting small business leaders. We won budget increases for adult literacy providers and supported and worked on behalf of issues of affordable housing. We were just getting started laying a framework when we closed.

That’s right we closed. Our funder decided no more money. Our board let it happen. And I decided after lots of tears and anguish that never again did I want to let a bunch of white advocates control my future. I never wanted to be a puppet. I wanted to go work in my own community, building and dreaming of a city with my own people.

I wanted to reclaim and reconcile my blackness.

It never made sense to me that as the daughter of two drug addicted parents who were products of DCPS, that my life had ended up so much differently from my friends and love ones. Simultaneously, I had a college degree and no longer felt connected to folks I had grown up with in Edgewood Terrance where my mother lived or on 3^rd and P where my grandmother lived for most of my life. I had explored places where “black professionals” frequented and I didn’t belong there either. Those people seemed more concerned with (organizing publicity-friendly) days of service and charity happy hours than community transformation. I was always the radical idealist in those settings.

Regardless, I wanted to figure out how to relate to middle class young black professionals. The opportunity arose to organize in a small neighborhood with a significant number of people around issues of employment, housing and educational was there. The words that got thrown around to describe the organization were “start up” and “innovation”.

Perfect place to test co-op models and develop leaders. To think about job creation and entrepreneurship, to get a recreation center built and preserve one of the few pockets of the DC of my youth.

But in the words my G, ”Baby some things are just too good to be true”. I came into a place of chaos, hierarchy and sheer confusion about what we were doing and whom it was for.

So I did what my two emotional responses are as the daughter of addicts - I fought, resisted, argued and I made it known this place was bullshit. Probably not great for first impressions. When that response resulted in further isolation and marginalization, I shrunk. Because educated black people have always been the thorn in my side and it was easier to feign disinterest than admit my feelings were hurt and that I wasn’t part of the “inner circle” I functioned for a while. I got some stuff done. I built a playground, launched a community action team, did a safety walk, worked with young people on a civic engagement project, and recruited for programming. But those weren’t the things I was interested in or wanted to do.

I wanted a big win. My own development depended on it. Meanwhile, people were leaving, our systems ems were failing and we had many different leaders. Since I didn’t ever think leadership started from the top, I was fine. But I realized I stopped talking in meetings, I was reserved, calculated and unwilling to take risks. All things nobody who really knows me would believe.

So with new leadership the retreat was the manna for me. The place I would look to as a symbol of what was to come and what I needed. So today was a big deal.

I arrived at the retreat space grumpy because I had stayed up all night reading and watching what was going on in Ferguson with the young man who was slain in the streets unarmed. And I was grumpy because we as an organization hadn’t talked about it and it was weighing on me. And because black respectability politics is rampant and I’m tired of hearing that pulling up our pants, not listening to little boosie and cutting our dreads will cure all that ails us.

And I started to think about a friend of mine who told me “Nicole. When you’re in a place of hardness open your hands, whether its emotional hard places or conversations that are difficult just open them.”

And I did. I took a walk, I meditated and I said, “Open your hands Nicole. Don’t try to control the outcome, don’t worry about perfection or who’s unhappy open your hands. “

And I started to wonder if open hands and surrender went together. Did Mike Brown? Did Renisha McBride? Did Trayvon Martin? Did Garrett, my ex who was stabbed in he streets of DC at the hands of someone who looked like him? Did Ezell Ford? Did they open their hands?

If so, what were they surrendering to?

What will I?

Will I be the person I know I am or continue to wear a mask to fit in? Do I owe these deceased young people’s legacies to be my most honest self?

Some people die slow deaths as they cling to ideas and beliefs that hurt them. Other people die at the hands of those sworn to protect them. Either way death is always a place of surrender. 

Will  you open your hands?

Black On Black Violence: What's killing me about how we kill each other

There is something that is killing us. And although I know it is perceived to be physical violence, I believe that there is something much more insidious that is penetrating our hearts and minds and causing us to literally assassinate each other. While this is not meant to excuse the physical violence that is plaguing our communities, I believe that, that violence is a symptom of forgetting we belong to each other and our communities lacking the resources, infrastructure and power for us to determine our OWN course turn our frustrations and fears out on one another.

This plaque that I speak of is a phenomenon called gatekeeping or some people refer to it as policing. Either way you cut it, we become the enforcers of black respectability and instead of admitting we all know a “Daquan” (which is a problematic viewpoint of black masculinity) we in our public and personal spaces become the black people police. We judge the choices of our entire group by our personal viewpoints and choices. We promote a bootstrap mentality that is so far from our cultural tradition. We even tote individual choices as the cure to all that ails us.

I know its simple. Too simple. Over simple. And you haven’t bought in yet but stick with me.

I would argue that black people find themselves in a precarious situation. We are in a fight for our collective story to be recognized, suffering from the trauma of generational systemic oppression, all while living side by side with the “colonizer “and having no “homeland” or physical land which to speak of.

I can explain it as best: as having an awareness of the collective suffering of your people while those who have caused that suffering proceed with life as usual. You are watching a movie in which you’re told to aspire to a certain quality of life and then blamed for not being able to reach it. Imagine for every generation, I have passed down an history of your family that is told by schools books not written by you and that leave out many details. I make this history about single heroic actors instead of unified agenda that involved compromise and creativity. I give you half the information and then without so much as a thought on how that impacts your psyche, I say okay now don’t see color, work really hard, try to be white like and everything that has occurred in your family is your fault but you should be over it by now.

But all of this aside, black Americans (I know that others including those African and Caribbean descent have a complex story) but Black America, is my framework for understanding the world and my lived experience so I write from that vantage) continue to work and love and live against the odds.

Black Americans are being killed by other black Americans in ways I didn't think was possible. This violence looks and feels different and I was made aware of it acutely one night at a bar with an friend of a friend gave her viewpoints on homelessness and a missing young girl by the name of Relisha. 

An acquaintance was there and she started talking about “breeders” women who she said didn’t deserve to be mothers and how being homelessness means keep your legs closed and don’t bring a baby in this world her tax dollars support. I tried not to argue back because I realized in those situations I tend to get very upset, but I couldn’t be quiet. I left and I started thinking about how violent we are with each other. How are words are often designed to cut each other down, point out what we didn't do and have no grace or space for the complications of a life that is not understood from a lens or viewpoint not of my own. How we are taught to be so hard on one another.  How compassion is secondary to criticism. How violent words get passed down from generation to generation. How self hate and IRO become litmus test for how acceptable and mainstream you are. There is a reason we are taught very finite ways of understanding success. 

If you have ever said any of these things lets talks!

Black People are like crabs in a barrel

You can’t give Niggga’s shyt

If you can’t take care of your kids why have them

My tax dollars should not support your weave habit

If they would just pull up their pants

White people don’t make us kill each other

The list goes on… and on and on…

What is inherent in each of these statements in two things that trouble me? A) Distance from and lack of responsibility for those in need in our community.  It’s why most people who work in non-profits and do “mission” work in the traditional sense are young white women. (I understand the paradigm that exist in communities where we cook each other meals and serve each other informally that aren't often recognized) But I would argue this is largely been co-opted by the non-profit industrial complex as not valid forms of caring.

We are all responsible for a world where Relisha can go missing and a world where middle class African Americans distance themselves from people of a different class. We are all responsible for a world where the message we send to low income children is get out and don’t look back.

B) We don’t love each other and therefore our critiques are often disguised as advice or information but are problematic because what would we be willing to give up to make sure everyone who looks like us is cared for?

Anyone who believes collective progress can happen without collective outrage, collective action and collective sacrifice is naive.

Additionally I am not a fan of having these talks in front of non-friendly audiences. (Bill Cosby), we don’t do it on national TV, we do it community and individual level and absent of a relationship these things sound like critiques that are void of the care and concern these conversations merit.

How to we build up instead of tear down?

How to we talk openly but move the convo away from one about interpersonal interactions to institutional and systemic realities?

How do we translate personal narratives into political and economic power?

I believe we make individual choices. I make them every day. To get up and try to love people. To understand their choices even when I don’t agree. To work for justice even as I may sacrifice personal comfort sometimes. To operate out of a place of love rooted in black self-determination and liberation. Anything else to me is just shallow.

Black on Black violence whether in the streets of urban areas or in the classrooms of academia is dangerous. We can’t not build collective economic and political power if all of our time is spent deciding who is at fault.

Classism without commitment is just critical.

And its time we stop our deadly assault on each other.

when black girls go missing: for Relisha Rudd

On missing girls

When little girls go missing

We search in parks

In places where little girls

Don’t belong

Lest we believe the little red riding hood

Stories about safety

About land

And woods

And trees

When little girls go missing

In your backyard

Becomes a crime scene

Its hard not to sit at your

Computer crying

Or begin to pray over each of the

Babies in your program

When little girls go missing

 We search

We search for our own mother’s gardens

Trying to make sense of

Girl hood

Of woman hood in wooded areas

Where life doesn’t grow

When little girls go missing

We try to debate the facts

We try to make sense

I know so many little girls

Beautiful ones

With big eyes

Who have seen too much

Who know too much about the cold world

Who I worry about

How poverty, and desperation, how accountability and schools

And police and parents and “god fathers” and shelters

Deal with complexity

Deal with not knowing

Deal with ambiguity

Deal with right and wrong

Deal with life

Deal with you when you’re missing from school

Or when you’re just missing

When little girls go missing

It’s hard not to notice

Not to try to write about

Not to cry about

The girls who are seen and unseen

The ones in my own backyard

On being a unicorn…

We sat in a restaurant at a table full of beautiful and talented black women. The group had gotten off track.  We had a side conversation. And then she called me a unicorn. Told me that my relationship with my mother was complex and that for my own wholeness, I needed to keep working on it.

She read my life. Isn’t that funny? How the things we leave unsaid become the things we most need to talk about? I got home that night and begin to reflect. I thought about unicorns and my childhood.

A childhood I don’t remember much of. I wonder if that is a function of wishing to forget. The more you forget the less the you remember. But I recall that I had a book.. One of my favorite books. And it was called, Alexandra and the Vanishing Unicorns. (My middle name is Alexandra)

And in the book she was the last unicorn. All the others were disappearing and she was the only one left.

I can remember reading the book over and over and always thinking I am her.

I had never shared this with this friend or anyone else for that matter but she read my life. Read what I didn't say about my mother and about myself and in doing so made me recall things that at first glance are unimportant. Sometimes its the unimportant, the unloaded, the unassuming parts of life that carry the most weight. Those small details that comprise a life that one day come back around to reclaim you. 

And I spent all day the next day looking for this book and trying to reclaim parts of my childhood. I decided I needed to write this. I needed to talk about being a unicorn born to a mother who doesn’t like magic, who hasn’t ever had space for discovering the unicorn in her.

And this is a poem for her: 

I wonder if you knew you were magic

Myth and folklore

The stuff of angels and dust

Would you walk different?

Lift your head higher

Would you stop looking for life?

In dry places

And make water run from your own well

Would you love the magic in me?

I know DC was not nice to you

And so you never left

Never dreamt for

Aimless hills

 And mountaintops

You settled for cracking the open sky

To rain down on me

Mother you are shame and perfections

Beauty and hurt

All things at all times

And even though you call that making it

I call it magic

I have tried to run as far from your image as possible

But your shadows show up in my

Darkness

Reminding me that I am light

And for that I am eternally grateful

I know you wanted a daughter that was normal

That wanted a picket fence

A stable job

A college degree

A car

All the markings of middle class we never had

And what you got was me

Maybe your magic

Can only produce unicorns

Maybe masterpieces can only produce

One of kind masterpieces

And maybe that kind of genius

Makes you drink or create

Drug or reach for the moon

And so you created space for me

To be Alexandra the only one left

Mother and daughter relationships are complex and often the place where generational trauma is passed on. I have heard it said mothers love their sons and raise their daughters. I think as a community we have to begin to heal and talk in earnest about legacy and how it gets passed down.

So thank you to my friend who sparked in me a desire to see my mother as human and to begin to heal from the 20 plus years of baggage I have carried around.

When "art" imitates societal constructs of black femininity

"De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”  

                    Zora Neale Hurston through Janie Crawford 

I wasn’t going to write about this photo. It seemed to much like what would be expected of me.

It seemed like by dignifying the picture with a second thought, much less a written response I would do what white people (namely white women) expect of me. I would be reacting to the disrespect once again of black bodies instead of engaging in a productive dialogue about how to build a world where I too am allowed to "BE". 

But alas here we are, I am sitting at the counter of one of my friends kitchen and writing. Because micro and macro racism is different. Because Intent and Impact are different. Because we need to move beyond the conversations to racial equity work. Because I am learning to love myself and my sisters when no one else will. Because validation is beyond the point. Because if all I am is a backdrop and a prop then the world is missing out and white supremacy wins in our hearts and minds. 

When I saw this picture all I initially thought was Sarah Bartman. I was focused on the wrong thing though.  My gaze was upon the white woman and not the sister in the photo. So looked again and this time when I saw her, I thought about her hopes, her dreams, her aspirations and my own. I had to adjust my vision to see. 

The Russian editor says the picture was taken out of context. I agree with her. It was taken out of context and that context is the social, political, economic context that black women find themselves in present day 2014. 

The lady apologized for her intention but what about the impact? The impact of being reduced to a chair, a scantily clad and exploited body and always seeing your image reflected as lesser than to the gentile, sweet and always protected white woman? The impact of that will never be fully known. More importantly, every time racism is confronted the response is always one that focuses on intent instead of impact. We can no longer be quiet about race, our issues, our discourse has to use race explicit language. To not use it does us a disservice. 

I understand that inter personally not all white woman view black woman as chairs but I also know institutionally and structurally we are often used as furniture, inconvenient backdrops to the story line about their lives. 

We are chairs when white feminist refuse to acknowledge us

We are chairs when black men continue to objective and devalue us

We are chairs when white men call us angry and ghetto

We are chairs when society continues to ignore us and reduce us to the sums of our experience. But even in the midst of that we, we are beautiful and complex and we hold the weight of our lived experiences with grace and rise from the ashes stronger and more resilient. 

As always, black women have picked themselves us out of the shadows and continued to determine who we are for ourselves. But this photo and the woman in it can't just picked up and dusted off, forgotten until the next wave of assaults to our humanity. 

We must organize and demand our place. We must continue the conversation and begin to support magazines and books and images that help us in our journey to self-determination and liberation. 

SO the sister who is in this picture becomes me and I become her. Our stories become linked. Together we become a masterpiece. A picture of art that reflects our true essence. A picture of hope and courage. A picture of compassion and connection. A picture from the front lines of life and beautiful magic that no matter what won't go away quietly. 

And we all know: 

“I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.” Audre Lorde

What Beyonce Teaches Us and Female Friendship

“The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”

― Toni Morrison, Sula

The critics have spoken. They have debated and pontificated. They have analyzed and weighed in. Beyonce- feminist or not? Beyonce – Self-actualized woman living the dream or pawn in the capitalist, patriarchal society we find our ourselves in?

My question is: what if she is both?

What if she lives in the tension of the world as it should be: where we as woman can be who we choose to be while operating in the world as it is where we are scrutinized for every decision, every choice, every mistake and misstep.

And what if this discourse is a distraction from the reality? Beyonce leads a life many of us only can dream of, and the reason we, her loyal fans flock to her faithfully is because we too want to believe that we can have whatever we want. If it’s a husband or not. A successful career or not. Beyonce for many of us represents the ability to choose. To chart our own life’s path free from the gaze of a society that tells us we can do it how we want to, but then ostracizes our choices.

But more than that for me is something bigger I want to process with you all. I watched Toni Morrison and Junot Diaz at the NYPL. Toni Morrison and Beyonce what do they have in common? Well Junot Diaz posed a question to her about her legendary book Sula and the lens or commentary it provided the world about Female Friendships.

I have read Sula several times and in one poignant moment that remains my favorite part is when they describe the connectedness of the girls. I believe they talk about two heads, one body. This is intimacy here people, one we don’t often see depicted in popular culture. Sula sleeping with Jude does not shatter that connectedness, it survives despite it. Reconciliation is not the aim; it is the realization that friendship and sisterhood transcends all of the mess of life and the muck of romantic relationships. In the end, as TLC put it “what about your friends”?

Female friendship in the novel is about an emotional intimacy that even male dominated culture and infidelity cannot destroy. It defines the construct of women as competition and catty vying for the attention of a man.  And although it doesn’t ever repair itself we know Nel and Sula grieve the lost of each other.

The conversation about Beyonce being a feminist is a distracting one. It gets us off course with the real discussion we should be having. How have we as woman been indoctrinated to critique and compete with one another? (I realize this may be a generalization) How does this lack of reverence for female friendship hinder us from addressing patriarchy and white supremacy head on?

I think the real feminist act would be to stop squabbling over who’s in and whose out and begin the process of unlearning that which has continued to keep many of us in shackles. We define ourselves in proximity to men, in proximity to power and if don’t do this than we have arrived and we sit back, rest on our morals and become the judge about how pro-woman progressive everyone else is.

What is the revolutionary act is to allow each woman to choose for herself her own course and then to love her anyway?

More than whether or not she is a feminist she is self-proclaimed woman and today that is good enough for me.

Beyonce teaches us that female friendship is the crux of the movement. We liberate ourselves, we get free on our own and whether or not someone measures up or looks at the world just like us, we choose to love.  I am not naïve to the structural and systemic ways, which women are locked out, but I think we need to ask, is how to we use love and freedom and choice to widen the table and begin the work?

So in the words of Toni Morrison “She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be - for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself, which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.”

― Toni Morrison, Sula

Let others become intimate with their own selves. Labels don’t last. Loving the reflection of yourself you see in others, Deciding to be a friend is the most radical act we can take. And the first step. No movement work had ever been done absent of love for people and a desire to translate that love into the work of justice.