Illuminating our History

We are halfway through our summer with the July 4th holiday in our rearview mirror. And like so many things in this moment, I am thinking about it in a new way.  

The past month has been particularly emotional, agonizing, and hopeful. As the May killings occurred one stacked on top of the other compounding insurmountable evidence of the toll taken on black people by the pandemic, it all felt too much. A month and a half ago, I felt I had finally adjusted to our new normal. The isolation, the loneliness, the tanking economy, anxiety, and the fear – I was managing. When I forced myself to slow down, I could still find beauty out of doors in everything turning green and the weather sometimes rainy, sometimes breezy and sunny, not yet hot. But then death upon death, all terrible in their familiar ugly weight. By day, I became an automaton, and by night, I was awake, always awake. I had climbed up inside my mind and was ricocheting off of its sides. I could not process everything that I was seeing, hearing, thinking, and feeling fast enough and I began to think perhaps this is what a mental breakdown looks like. This is not normal, became my mantra. This is not normal. And while I appreciated the check-ins, concern, and empathy of my white colleagues and friends, I did not want to hear about or be a witness to their tears and awakening. I had no bandwidth and did not want to be conscripted in this way. I found, surprisingly and disappointingly, that for many I seemed to be the only black friend in their lives.  

I felt that I must say something. But in the chaos of the preceding weeks, my creativity, my one true super-power had fled me. Throughout June, I felt raw, so many things all at once, all inarticulate, all a jumble. The eloquent and elegant words put forth by others were so poignant, I wondered at my being quiet, my inability to sit still to muster or conjure anything. I wondered most about my role. Who am I in this time? Do I like her? What am I doing with my time? Is it having an impact?  

So, I took a break. And the summer happened. The days grew hotter. The sunsets streak the humid sky with bright oranges and pinks – sometimes nature is the only thing that feels real and reliable right now.  

In taking that break, turning off all things electronic to be able to hear my own thoughts, feel my own feelings, it has struck me that for real change in our society to occur, first we need to know our history. All of it – personal and collective. For all of my expensive education, I feel uneducated. For someone who believes herself an astute observer and lover of history – the stories I know are few and flat. They need to be rounded out, bulked up; they need heft. Fortunately, there are a lot of amazing scholars, artists, and writers who have been diligently working.  While the rest of us slumbered, they have been digging up the skeletons, researching and providing the light that we all need, holding all of our weight, all of us up in their persistent pursuit. In my quest, I have ordered books, read countless articles, and listened to many great podcasts. I am trying to cram hundreds of years of scholarly work, thought, and art between my ears so that I can figure out how I might most efficiently and effectively act.

Amidst my activity, one thing is extremely obvious. And that is this.  The original sin of this country – the enslavement of Africans and the extermination of Native peoples – is a debt that is begging to be paid. The more we squirm and distract from this truth, the worse we treat each other, the more the fabric holding us together deteriorates, the more precarious our democracy. In unraveling the central hypocrisy of our country’s founding, we become the ideal, the whole point of it, but we have never taken those steps. At every turn when there was a glimmer of promise, we have made compromise cutting corners and stitching together something flimsy that cannot hide the underlying, lumpy grotesque truth – We have never been equal. So the sin stays and stains, it seeps even further into our pores, it corrupts absolutely everything.  

For this reason, we find ourselves, yet again, discussing the same issues and problems, having the same arguments debated since our country’s founding. And from these compromises has sprung all sorts of twisty-pretzel thinking that employs systems to restrain and constrain whole peoples whose talents and potential have never been fully realized. The cost of which is the society within which we currently find ourselves – the rich, still primarily white and male – getting richer while the poor – just about everyone else – getting poorer. The mechanism and lies that kept that one white slave owner safe amidst the hundreds of poor whites, black and brown peoples living in close proximity – that lie of the skin – it lives still and is a mightily powerful sleight of hand so that we fight with others similarly situated over scraps and we are kept angry at all the wrong things. What has sprung up in the absence of honesty, it is madness. It is not normal for people to take to the streets amidst a life-threatening pandemic. This is what a societal breakdown looks like.

Being adopted into a white family as an infant, in the closed adoptions of the early 1970s, I do not know all of my history. And this lack of knowledge has absolutely held parts of me back. How can it be no different on a vastly more macro-level? What we experience as the individual ripples out to the whole. So I am starting with the drumbeat of stories. Mine, yours, and this country. The more we know about each other, the more connected we become, the more we understand that we have always been connected. I live in the South and the South is a complicated place. My black ancestor’s do not come from the American South, but I am a black American so I inherit these stories, all of them. We all do.  

There are so many more stories that we do not know – so many hiding in people’s attics or even lying in plain sight begging a new perspective. Let’s do the DNA tests, let’s look upon each other as the kin we all are and let’s hold a Truth and Reconciliation airing of all of it. And first up, let’s call to testify those historians, sociologists, archaeologists, writers, and artists who have been waiting for us, candle in hand, to show us all the things we were so that we can finally understand all the things we are.