Break the silence!

I enjoy writing, but this week, it has been hard to write or imagine the right things to pen since I first viewed the George Floyd video over a week ago. I keep going back to the footage and reliving his final moments, feeling his life drain out of his body, under the full weight of a police officer, on his neck. What state of mind, I have wrestled, possesses one human to suffocate another in a public street, in broad daylight, using pressure from his knee, for eight minutes?

I received my first lesson in racial inequity at age 19, within 24 hours of leaving Sierra Leone for the first time and arriving in the United States. "Why", I observed to my brother who was showing me around Providence, Rhode Island "are all the passengers in the public buses black?"

This coming to America discovery was followed by countless others and within a few weeks in my new home, I came to understand that the rules were different from the ones I had grown up with. I learned quickly, as survival instincts naturally dictated, to keep my hands visible at all times, to clear my throat loudly to announce I was approaching, and smile when I felt no mirth. I learned that keeping complete strangers comfortable was how to best keep myself comfortable, and safe.

Off campus at Morehouse College, I learned to slip into survival mode, until I returned to the dorms. And so it has been, as I shifted from job to job and state to state and year to year. The ignominies continue but I compartmentalize them and place them in a spectrum: from the humiliations that I can survive with a thicker skin, on one end, to terminal experiences on the other, those that could cost me my life or freedom, that I should avoid or deescalate at all cost. There is also everything else in between, a million incidents of overt or indirect microaggressions each year - small chisel chips, even if not body blows, eroding even as I am building.

I found a way to do well in life, safeguard my liberty and claim my happiness. America is not all bad, but does come with a range of potent contraindications. But, in sad contrast, hell did and still does exist for millions of others whose everyday experiences are bookended by batons and hot lead. I am among the lucky ones, but I also know any day my luck could run out. It's a constant effort to find the power within to defend, against the power without that is wont to offend.

Time does not bring healing. You keep adjusting but there is always something new - and it takes work not to lose your calm or your judgement. The aggressions ebb and flow and you find the right places to go, people to hang out with, things to say, ways to act, styles of dress, in order to keep parrying. It is exhausting and its feels like playing in an endless match with no time out; but you can't afford to become tired or miss your step, in case it becomes your last. There's nowhere to hide, as you need to get out and build a life, a family, a living and play extra innings in this long game. Work is not a refuge, and if anything, just another viral petri dish, that you wake up and power through each day.

The reality is that the forces of racism in the United States never abated. The same forces that brought Africans to America's shores never stopped or took a break. The energy of racism has persisted in an unbreakable chain of seamless manifestations from the middle passage to plantation life to the civil war. Militia constables on patrol coerced or press-ganged former slaves into prison chain gangs and the same system morphed into Jim Crow and segregation and eventually into modern day law and order politics - which almost every presidential administration from Nixon's to the current one has entrenched, embraced, expanded or elevated. Today, those constables are cops and the chain gangs, mass incarceration, both which seem to have an insatiable appetite for black and brown lives. The same voices that held bibles aloft on commercial plantations, preaching "Slaves, obey your masters" today scream "Lock them up" in industrial prison complexes.

Ephesians 6: 5 Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. 6 Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. 7 Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people, 8 because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are slave or free.

George Floyd's murder was not a one-off tragedy or an isolated injustice. It has kin and similarity to countless others that have not garnered as much attention. Remarkably, eight minutes of video footage gone global speaks loudly today for four centuries of pain. The same pain that black mothers voice in maternal instinct to defend their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons - only to earn the "angry" caricature designed to ridicule them into silence. "Go home and fix your the black family," is the cruel rejoinder, as if familial destruction is an outcome our queens designed and brought on themselves. Every black church and mosque knows the chronicles of pain - they are where millions of people find peace and re-energize for a few hours each week, where the fabric of their faith is used to mop the stream of blood and tears, so that they can put on a new smile and a dry face and go back out again on Monday.

These days, as we are inundated with statements of heartbreak, one wonders if this is a turning point. Will the sea of empathy and fresh outrage that is awash in every post and blog or glossy statement result in a drop of heartfelt action? Corporations and politicians and pundits and everyday normal folk have been effusively shocked, even as many in years past have been silent, insufficiently concerned, tolerant co-conspirators if not outright purveyors and agents of unjust and racist acts. It's hard to tell if America is finally ready to break the chains. I am no fan of vandalism but it does not augur well when random looting of TV sets and athletic shoes over nine nights, becomes conflated with the systematic looting of human lives for thirteen generations.

My children are growing up fast. In the last few weeks they have not been spared the relentlessness of the news cycle and some of their innocence has chipped away. They struggle with the illogic of violence and the notion of someone dying "for no reason". They are confused that cops can be bad, and will likely now never truly trust one. I read the confusion in their questions and see it in their furrowed brows. "If this could happen for no reason, could this happen to you, Daddy?" Suddenly they know color and our inter-racial family makes the implications unfathomable. They read much from my eyes and I watch them getting tired and exhausted - already. They are 8 and 6 years old.

There has to be a turning point, and it has to be now. Nelson Mandela said "One of the most difficult things is not to change society — but to change yourself." One hopes that the horror leveled at the police results in changes in law enforcement tactics, but this is not the only answer. To assert or believe so is already shirking the responsibility that must be owned resolutely if more lasting and broader change must happen. Racism in America is systemic and American people themselves are the true keepers of the system. Why would a murder like George Floyd's happen in broad daylight, had license to kill not been granted. Every modern institution, code and law today has its sinister antecedent in history. That is why people still march...

In these times, leadership matters, especially of self!

I know why I could not write. There is way too much to recall and much to express. This is not how many have heard me speak. But this is not the time to stay comfortable and way past time for us all to have courageous and uncomfortable conversations. No matter your ethnic identity, this is not the time to stay silent. Together, we can own the critical need to process hope and find the turning point - a turning point that finally breaks the chains that we cannot allow to hold back our children and yet another generation, no matter their race.