Confronting racism, seeking hope (Published in Living Lutheran)

Life in the present moment feels a little unsure, less stable and scarier than ever before. 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 seems like a better use of time. But here I sit writing, offering my thoughts and praying that my honesty may help others make sense of it all. It is what my faith is calling me to do.

Lately my Christianity has felt as heavy as my blackness, a weight I can’t take off and don’t actually want to carry. Everywhere I go, even on social media, my circle is a cross between politically conscious people of color who may or may not be religious and those who are Christian. The former share analysis and things about Christians (black ones in particular) subscribing to their own oppression, which hurts. The latter share Scripture regularly and often see the world through a passive lens, which also hurts. Those two extremes have been unsettling because they represent the tension in which I perpetually find myself.

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

I was raised in a small black congregation where my aunt and uncle were the pastors. It houses some of my first memories and first friends. It was there that I learned how powerful and important it was to believe in something bigger than you, to see the best in people and in your community.

And then Charleston happens. A young man walks into a church, sits and participates in a Bible study and is welcomed in a manner that I imagine was similar to how Jesus teaches us to welcome the stranger. Then the man attacks. He launches into hateful rhetoric that — while we pretend it 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.

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 through my participation in the ELCA. I live where believers allow their feelings and their theology to paralyze them and I live where organizers and activists launch into political analysis before they feel anything at all.

I don’t want to exist in two worlds. 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- and micro-level, in policies that discriminate and in the tainted ways in which we see each other. It is the side that requires us to confront what it means to stand for justice and not just use the language of faith to let us off the hook. 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 be 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 in knowing I am part of a people who has always been resilient and claimed its humanity even when society wouldn’t recognize it. I am part of a people whom God loves, who have always emerged from the ashes scarred but not broken.

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

We Belong to Each Other

By Maya Mineoi, Nicole Newman and Rozella White

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

As we write this, our hearts are breaking. The events of the last few months, the extreme responses from some and lack of responses from many have left us questioning. For such a time as this, we are uncertain about the role of the church and our own roles as women of color within the church. When some people are left thinking that our social patterns of hate and fear are the only way and others know of more life-giving ways but are paralyzed from realizing them, how do we speak hope to all? How do we speak out against injustice? How do we address the issue of racism? How do we use our prophetic witness of the gospel to not just speak out but live out our commitment to transformational justice in this world?

As the women who are leading the planning of the 2015 MYLE, the largest gathering of people of color within the ELCA, we must ask the question of how this church, our church, leads young people with a God-given thirst for justice to enact change. We represent a constituency that is plagued by racism and fear from our society and even from our own church. To not speak out is a disservice to the community we have been called to serve.

There are those who think today’s young generation is apathetic and disengaged from issues of injustice. To the contrary, we have experienced God’s passion for social justice in the hearts and voices of the youth and young adults of our church. We know that young people are leading change, and we also know that we need an intergenerational movement that owns both the hurtful and beautiful aspects of the legacy of our church. Many young people are hesitant to claim the gospel because they have at times experienced Christian communities to be hypocritical and irrelevant.

We know that large-scale social movements have never happened without a broad-based response and widespread involvement from the faith community. We write this letter with the hope that our voices will spark the church that we love to use its platform and its voice in a way that promotes justice, healing, reconciliation and wholeness. We not only have worldly influence as a church, but even greater, a promise of redemption and restoration from the God whom we collectively worship.

Too often, the church neglects the powerful narrative of Christianity for the rules of the world. We support reducing each other to titles and labels that we have adopted from society. It’s much easier for us to demonize or idealize each other than it is to live as humans together. It’s time that our decision making, our ways of being, our language and our actions reflect that we actually want to live in the equitable and beloved community that we profess to desire. As of now, it sounds like our Christian communities are content in the power of our privilege and the weight of our oppression. To the world it must seem that we are willing to wait until Jesus comes in Revelation to experience any sense of balance in the world.

Issues of mass incarceration, HIV and AIDS, immigration, access to health care, hunger, poverty, lack of affordable housing, and police profiling and brutality all stem from the same root – our nation’s original sin of racism. As a church we constantly advocate on these issues, but until we address the root, we will continue to be an unhealthy community serving an unhealthy world.

We have never done the hard and necessary work of reconciling ourselves to one another. We don’t see the common humanity within us all. Until we address the fact that we are living out stereotypes and deep-seated myths that have divided us, we will continue to demonize each other and kill each other.

At a time where it feels like there is no room to breathe, we can remember Mother Teresa’s wisdom, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” In order to deal with the realities of systems and structures that promote White supremacy, the church has to remind the world with its words and actions that we indeed belong to each other.

As people of Christian faith, we often use the image of the body to talk about how we are to be in relationship with one another. Parts of our body are dying, and when one part suffers, the entire body suffers.

Our body is aching. Our blood is hot with rage. Our bones are in despair. We acknowledge that all of these feelings of those who have been affected are valid. We must commit to a time of discernment, prayer and action as we seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

As a church, we should be praying for the families of those who have died, for the ones who are responsible for their deaths, and for each other as we continue to try to live out love. 

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

As the 2015 ELCA Youth Gathering prepares to enter Detroit, which has had a significant racialized history, we must be mindful that our faith calls us to uncomfortable places in ourselves and also to uncomfortable places in the world. Our Lutheran ancestor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, alludes that we are not simply to have sympathy or awareness from afar for those struggling daily in our society. We are to change our own lives and our own society so that we all may experience justice in relationship together. We must do the work of figuring out our own privilege and our own oppression so that we can be authentic and relevant leaders for change. This is God’s work in the world.

When fear-based responses to hate cause disorder, tension, rapid change or personal discomfort at the cost of human dignity, we often hear a destructive focus on the individual: My work, My hands.

We as a church get to profess and deeply live out an alternative:

“Gods work. Our hands.” 

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

On Being Enough (My Talk to a group of campus pastors)

I am a daughter, granddaughter, sister, friend, Jesus Freak, book worm, poet writer, community organizer, activist, builder of things, lover of people. There was a time when this list was in a very different order where I started with organizer and activist and moved slowly to the rest of those things. My priorities were always work focused. 

If you take anything away from this talk today, we are not what we do. We are not titles and accolades. We are not our collections of accomplishments. We are not justice seekers who move from cause to cause to fill the holes that exist in our own souls. We are not defined by our lack or abundance of faith. So today my talk will not call you out. It wont call you out into the world to act or out for your racism, sexism, homophobia or classism. This talk was designed to call you in. Into your own story. Into your own body. Into yourself so that you may come more fully alive to the world. Maybe the only way we can truly go out into the world is to do it from a place of wholeness in ourselves first. If we want to serve well we must not only ask the question of who is my neighbor? But who am I?

We are who we be. Our first name is beloved. And no amount of service acts, or hustling/doing changes the fact that we are special and unique and loved. And what communities need more than acts of charity is people who understand the role they play in society and commit to being just and not doing justice.

Justice and service are important but not substitutes for our own sense of self love and worth. And if we are to do act of justice. It must be out of a place of mutuality and reciprocity. So my question is how do we connect with others? How to we serve others from a place of seeing their own worth when we don’t see it in ourselves?

Now I am not saying there are not systems of power and privilege that we must work to dismantle but I am saying that how we do the dismantling must be from a place of connectedness and integration. We must embody and practiced that which we want to create. And if we can not dream it, taste it touch it, yearn for it and have glimpses of it, how can we manifest it?

I have had the pleasure over the last few years, to have jobs that allowed me the space to find out who I am and be that person and am here today to share a little of what I gave learned with you.

(even though I am terrified)

When I was a little girl my mother tells the story of me coming home really upset. A young white girl in my class has invited everyone to her birthday sleepover but had told me I could not come because her father did not like black people. My mother said she was terrified and wanted to make sure she handled this situation well. She said I knew my response and this experience would form you for the rest of your life. She said she did the only thing she knew how to do with me. Her 7-year-old child who loved reading books on the bus and dancing in front of company. The child with a million questions and her favorite question being WHY? She was honest. She explained racism and prejudice. She told me I was exceptional and that it didn’t matter, or change who I was or that I was loved and surrounded by a community that loved me and supported me. She did the best she could with what she had to give me.

And then she says I did something that has been forever etched in her memory. something I don’t remember. I looked up and said to her. Its okay. Her dad is probably mean to her too.

I tell this story not because I want to talk to you about race or racism, even though I think and live a life that is shaped by it existence but because I want to talk about how our journey in life, is a journey back to our child selves. That somehow all the tenderness, vulnerability and authenticity that children display as second nature gets beat out of us by this life that tells us those things are liabilities. Authenticity has taken me further than anything else. And sometimes it looks messy and unpolished and honest and afraid and yet it always shows up.

We can not understand others, seek meaningful connections with people of difference if we are not fully alive to who we are. If we can not be at peace with all our imperfections our attempts to build bridges will produce little more than guilt and shame based actions that are not rooted in the needs of others.

And yes I have done some cool things. As an organizer and activist; developed curriculum, trained people, started my own business and tried to hold politicians and powerful people accountable but the what I have done is not the most important. The how and the why matter most.

"Bridging boundaries, borders and walls".

This theme resonated with me. Because boundaries, borders and walls are all structures.

Things that are created. They don’t just emerge. We have to consciously construct them. So if we consciously construct them we have the power, the resources and capacity to deconstruct them

But the only way to do that is

1.   Authenticity which I talked a little about before.

2.   Courage

3.   Creativity

Courage for me is about being seen. Walking in all of who you are and owning the parts of you that have developed over time. I used to imagine myself as some new soul India aired natural hair wearing, farmers market shopping person and although I’m some of that. There was always a picture in my head of who I was suppose to me. The longer I ran from that. The more I did the cupid shuffle for people’s approval and time and energy the unhappier I was, the less content I was and the more my work left be unfulfilled and drained.

A few years ago when I was talking to someone about my work and in the middle of the convo they exclaimed! You’re in an estuary place. *Thank you Pastor Leila Ortiz and Kristen Kane

I was describing how my formation of being born black and female in the US and all of what that carries with me, had prepared me for this work. But how terrified of failing I was. How a wrong turn in a community meeting, or planning an agenda or being stood up for a meeting with a leader all made me doubt myself. How in the face of corrupt politicians I would muster courage but felt utterly convinced I was an imposter!

My life had made the work absolutely necessary and gave me purpose. But the deeper I got in the work, the more formal analysis and organizing language I learned the harder to relate to the base of people I was building with. The pain and struggle had done more to prepare me for this time in my life yet I felt I couldn't talk about it. My experiences were not valid in organizing spaces only the books I read, the categories I fell neatly into. And because I was removed from the experience of the people I was working with all I had was memories. I was no longer living that life and often felt guilty about it.

So when the person said estuaries! I was like what's that?

Estuaries form a transition zones between river environments and sea environments. They have both to sea influences—such as tides, waves, and the influx of saline water—and to river influences—such as flows of fresh water and sediment. The inflows of both sea water and fresh water provide high levels of nutrients both in the water column and in sediment, making estuaries rich in nutrients and unique places

There are some things that can only live in the mixture of fresh and salt water. Some organisms that survive the in between places. My work and I live in those places.

Learning that I was not the first thing to be shaped by a myriad of different environments let my work take different shape! I could be who I was AND who I was becoming. I could pay homage to my past and work to create a different future. My organizing work became more about what could be possible in the places between the world I lived in and the world I wanted to see.

I became possible. I no longer had to regulate myself to some outside position I could show up the full sum of my parts. Admit the good and no be bound by the bad. I could relate to folks in the neighborhood not out of a place of trying to prove myself but out of a place of authentic connection that allowed my story to be valid.

See the thing about stuff that grows out of estuaries its needs the balance the mix to thrive. To much of one thing causes imbalance I am like that in organizing- to much idealism and I start to want to make concrete ask and do something about the things happening now in communities in our countries. To much concrete traditional campaign work and I long for the creative the visionary. That which is unseen. The mysterious.

I wonder often if those of us who are organisms who need these environments like estuaries are fundamental parts of the things that will create change. We know how to get nutrients from many places. We are not attached to one environment over another. We exist in places where transition is happening and can hold the contradictions of multiple things.

Maybe these are the only places where the work can be done. In places where we aren't attached to what we know or absolutes. Where we are curious instead of right. Maybe it's only the mixtures of a lot of things that give the possibility for new life.

And that is why courage is critical. Because this is never an easy process. It difficult and requires sacrifice and negotiation. It requires us to die to all that which has propped us up.

Lastly creativity.

I have never claimed my identity fully as a poet. Namely because I was always comparing myself to other more accomplished poets.

And one day in the middle of a serious political education training when we talked about the black liberation movement hero’s and shero’s and I was asked to name mine. The names I spoke were Lucille Clifton, Nicki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan and Audre Lorde who had been with me and spoke to me and politicized me and for whom art was critical to movement work and a form of resistance.

And I asked a friend of mine how she sustained herself as a writer and she said is it in your space? Put it there first.

So I hung post it its all around my house that said. Writing is how I sustain myself and others.

And I begin think about how writing and creating poems was a labor of love

One that allowed me to be more fully who I am

Maybe you’re not a poet but find what part of you that is creative. If you aren’t creating, how are you living? How are you contributing. Live in that space. Because it will impact all other parts of your life. Creation is not limited to music or art or poetry. Some people create spaces, some people create technical things. Some people create meaning. There has to be room for the dynamic and spontaneous in our lives.

So I leave you with this poem.

Do you truly know how powerful you are?

How beautiful

How creative

Before the world beats no into your brow

Before heartbreak can be spotted in your eyes

Before you lips learn protection as you first language

Your creation was majestic

Your being enough

Do you know how enough you all are?