black musing 2

The brilliance of black children 

Can not be seen by those accustomed

To solving algorithms and problems 

Who crunch data 

and believe that information is wisdom

the brilliance of black children 

has no room here 

so we plow through lessons because 

Saving us must not be disrupted 

Or off script 

Or out side the line

Education designed not to 

make us curious about the world 

Or love learning

or love ourselves

Teaching us is always about compliance and obedience 

making us believe who we are is never enough to 

stand alone 

The brilliance of black children is that 

we know what you think 

What you believe about

our innate capacity our humanness 

Our character

and we still find joy

The brilliance of black children is 

that we can not be reduced 

to test and text books

to put your cell phone away 

or take out your pencil 

raise your hand to go to the bathroom 

sit up 

walk straight 

stare ahead 

metal detectors 

have no magic about you 

Like black boys with no headphones listening to fetty wap on the train 

And trashing talking

Like the after school let out 

We know we are our own best kept secret

And the only place we are fully free is with each other 

With our own bodies 

So we sit quiet 

Even though now a days that too 

Has a cost 

If ever I am ripped from my chair 

Tossed like a rag doll 

Told by hands of a white man

a stranger 

forcibly taking my body 

to satisfy his own rage at my defiance 

Let the rage of my sisters be penance you pay 

Let the love and protection of my dignity 

be a force for you to reckon with

Because only a woman was brave enough to save and stand for another 

We are the ones we been waiting for 

And to the rest of the room 

To everyone else 

we are collateral damage on the way to

our peoples full destruction 

An Open Letter

This poem has been saved in my notes on my phone since 4/6/13 because this is the last time I could look at this or touch it or try to finish it. I finished it tonight only after deciding to write again. I realized recently writing has been the only thing in my life that has kept me. It helped me find myself and find my way back to what was important through some of my most difficult times. I thought my voice was unimportant and small. It is not. It is clear and cutting and crisp and mine. The most important is that it is mine. 

I was scared to share this. I don't want to hurt my family. But I have been unable to speak my truth because I don't want to hurt them. So I was silent because the wholeness of my story might open other people's wounds and make them look bad. But who I want to be in the world is dependent on the truth that comes only when you find your own voice and decide to share it. 

An open letter to Crack

For every birthday

For every Christmas

And every time I tucked my own

Little body between

Ice cold bed sheets

For every unexplainable tear

And every emotional outburst

For every promise

Of new pants

Or shoes

Or a movie or a toy

For every time

I knocked on the door

And got no response

For every unread bedtime story

For every living room blue glow tv light

At 3 AM

For every time my hunger was met with a wait a minute

And for the time I walked into the bathroom

When blood was everywhere

For bare feet and quick steps

For dark

And for the backgammon set I played with alone

And for alone

Solitude

Solitaire

This is an open letter

For every heartache I couldn’t explain

For every lie I told and

Still tell

For truth that gets twisted

For every time I wished to be an orphan

And pretended that my parents

Weren’t really mine

I have told countless stories

To explain being born to them

Constructed a life that

Looked a little more normal

In which you were not there

Your presence not missed

My fairytale included

Happy endings absent

Of you

But they were just stories

And you were real

You were constant

The only thing I could count on

To occur

To happen

Sometimes I will admit

When you showed up I would be happy

Then I wasn’t crazy

I could justify my stories

Plus I liked seeing my dad talk

And mom dance

I liked that I could get ice cream

For breakfast

And not have to do my homework

I like that I had no curfew

And my boyfriend could spend the night

You were bittersweet

I hated you but

Love that in your presence I could become

As invisible as I had come to believe I was

I could blend

No one cared when you were around

So this is my open letter

How mundane and ordinary

Your presence had become

How dreadful weekends and

Weekdays

Were

How fleeting money was

And how I tried to hold it all together

In the small fist of a seven

Then ten

Then fifteen

Then twenty

Year old

How I'm still trying to hold it all together

And brillo pad dreams

Are fleeting

Like crack pipe highs

I know all to well

How hard it is to pry you loved ones

Out of your grips and this is an open letter

To you

Twitching faces

Glassy eyes

Wire coat hangers and sheets

On the windows

This is the calm before the storm

Of coming down

And withdrawals

How I leaned to tense and brace

How I know how to knuckle down and

Fight

My shoulders hunched in permanent position

Like ink marks that never fade

And stolen dreams I still crinch

At the words geeker

Crackhead

Because the image it congers

Is the shape of mother

Of father

And this is an open letter for secrets

You try to flush

Because even in your young mind you

Know drugs are bad

So rid of drugs rid of bad

But still you cant flush

Enough

There are no porcelain toilets

Big or deep enough to flush

away

A life that in punctuated

By you presence

I am so used to men calling my

House looking for my parents

That sometimes

I answer the phone with

An attitude

Just so they know

We are never here

I am never not angry

I am so used to having the baby

In my bed

That now I don’t even remember

That I am not his mother

Or how my ex boyfriend

Told me my eyes

Told him I was a crack baby

And when I asked

My mother she said

I never used when I pregnant

There is an elephant in the room

And it is you

The neighborhood boys

Laugh at me and want to fuck me

That same ex sold you to

To buy me food

And so

This an an open letter

About

Shame and guilt

And what I wish for you

I wish you a 100 birthdays

Punctured

By your own hell

I wish you eternal damnation

Every time

You think about my family

I want you to spontaneously combust 

For every family you have destroyed 

I want to burn

and feel the pain of choice and dependence 

and to understand 

there are to many Me's who you have tried to kill

because you hooked the people 

who were to love us

At 28 I am still crawling out of the shadows

knowing I am worthy 

knowing I am loved 

that I am more than you

and that my parents are more than you 

and my family although bent is not broken 

and that the carnage left over is not just a sad story 

but the story of finding your way home 

and through forgiveness

and choosing laughter and happiness and joy over and 

over again 

because the 28 year old me knows that feed on the sorrow 

and my own story is one of resilience and rising 

rinsing strong and rising often 

but always rising and always loving 

A Faith That Gives Rise to Hope… Choosing Sides

A Faith That Gives Rise to Hope

Choosing Sides

“Suffering naturally gives rise to doubt. How can one believe in God in the face of such horrendous suffering as slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree? Under these circumstances, doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope.”

― James H. Cone, The Cross-and the Lynching Tree

Life in the present moment feels a little unsure, less certain and scarier than ever before. Maybe recent events were not a surprise to some and more in line with historical events than we'll ever talk about, but there is much damage done. The wound that Charleston has left feels too open, too gaping and too big to try to fill with words. With all that has been going on in our country and the world, all the attacks on black bodies and black people, words seem like a luxury. Action or numbness seems like a better use of time. But here I sit writing, offering my musings and thoughts into the public discourse on what it means to be a contradiction and praying that my honesty may help others make sense of it all. It is what my faith is calling me to do.

I am a contradiction: I am black, I am woman, I am a community organizer, I am a lover of black people, I am poet, and I am also a Christian, a Lutheran to be more exact.

Lately my Christianity has felt as heavy as my blackness, a weight I can’t take off and yet don’t actually want to carry or know what to do with. Everywhere I go and even on my social media, I see the cross between two groups of people. The politically conscious people of color who may or may not connect to organized religion have lots of analysis and lots of fire about the way the world is operating. They post things about Christians (black ones in particular) being backwards and subscribing to their own oppression, and that hurts. My social media is also filled with church friends who love Jesus and post scripture regularly. They try to live out their values through love and often see the world through a more passive lens. Both of these points of view are incomplete and leave no space for someone like me to exist.

Being a young community organizer who loves my community and bends toward justice with my radical political views, I rarely tell people I am a church geek. I love black liberation theology and I listen to Luke Powery lectures at night like lullabies. I enjoy spirited conversations about God and People and life and love and what it all means. I am both.

Most would say that being both and having both within makes me Lutheran. It was the language of being both “saint and sinner” that attracted me to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). This language and the community of Luther Place Memorial Church, where I am a member in Washington DC have supported me as I have grieved the loss of black lives and given me the space to develop my own leadership and theology. But today I want to pick a side. I don’t want to exist in the both/and tension.

Charleston has made me feel like this perpetual tension, this desire to see things from every side - while great theoretically - is almost impossible; especially in a world where violence is pervasive and racism undergirds the fabric of the way we operate as a nation.

A young man walks into a church, sits and fellowships, participates and is welcomed in a way that I imagine Jesus teaches us to welcome the stranger. Then, he attacks. He launches into hateful rhetoric, that while we pretend is offensive, we have all heard. It is the same hateful speech that causes us to laugh at the expense of another culture; to be so concerned with protecting our own way of life and church tradition that we won't even recognize the humanness of other people.

The shooter claims the same church I belong too and that hurts because it’s not about him. It’s about the victims and families and it's about the way our country believes and operates as if black lives mean less and that refuses to see that racism and gun violence are linked. It is about a narrative of race that promotes white geniality and purity, white intention over impact, white purity and guiltlessness as the most important values. And again, I was reminded that I live in two worlds, the black one of my work and upbringing and the white one I choose to engage by my participation in the ELCA. The one of organizers and activist and secular folks who go to political analysis before they feel anything and those of believers who allow their feeling and theology to paralyze them.

Today I have decided to leave the tension of the both/and. Today, my side is picked. It is the side that calls us to confront the ways in which racism has distorted our world both at a macro level and individually, in the ways in which we see each other, It is the side that requires us to confront what it truly means to stand for justice and not just use the language of faith to let us off the hook. It is the side that demands us to see the humanity of all and to intentionally choose to prioritize those most marginalized. It is the side that leads us to boldly declare #blacklivesmatter because until we understand that we will just be clanging symbols. It is the side that pleads us to stop shoving our anger into appropriate boxes and is bold enough to be hurt and vulnerable. It is the side that says love is great but love is not enough to heal the choices we have made as a nation.

And yet there is still hope. There is comfort in knowing that our lives are more than the collection of accolades and events. That our lives can spark awareness and action and movement. There is hope knowing I am part of a people who have always been resilient and claimed their humanity, even when society wouldn’t recognize it. I am part of a people who God loves, a people who have always emerged from the ashes scarred but not broken. It is that legacy that allows me to believe that doubt and (anger and pain and rage and hurt) keep our faith from being sure of it like James Cone says.

2 Corinthians 12:9 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

The weariness that people feel may be the fuel for new paradigms and new worlds to be created.