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.

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.