Black Girls

Sandra Bland's funeral was on Saturday.

They closed it to the press.

Voyerism of black girl bodies, even in a white coffin, likely clad in white, would not be fodder for marketers sells pitches on morning news shows making a buck off black pain.

I wanted to bear witness to her life, to stand with her family and her beloved SGRho Sorority sisters. I saw the images of her family members in white, her sorority sisters in white and their signature yellow and blue. The image of her coffin in white with the white roses on top. My place as a black mother of a 28-year-old son wanted to celebrate the life, activism, and bravery of this black 28 year-old-daughter.

Her mother said it meant war.

It has always been war on black girls.

Every since the discovery of Saarjite Baartman and even a couple centuries before through the Law of Maternal Descent, the space and place of black women has always been a place of war for power and control.

"Ain't I A Woman?" has been a refrain and cry and question from the sunkissed sisters for years.

Many joined clubs to teach their daughters that they are just as worthy of frilly dresses and coitillians as the white girls, that their coming out parties were as celebrated and honored. The sororities of the Divine9 all emphasize the agency of black women over their bodies, their intellect, their gifts, and their humanity.

Yet, in one bully moment, one time when a white man felt challenged that a black woman, two years his junior, did not obey his explicit orders to "put out your cigarette" made him feel every bit of the coward he truly was in high school and every bit the racist he is in the Texas police force.

I could not watch the video without thinking of my own daughters and their encounters with the white authority and power and control systems.

My mind raced back to two springs ago when my older daughter was called a racial epithet by a car full of white boys. The freedom they felt to shatter the protected innocence and presence of this little black girl simply walking down the street from school to coffee shop in her quaint little suburb.

School is about to start in three weeks and in thinking of Sandra, I looked over at my youngest daughter who is about to start middle school and I wonder about her encounters in the hallway. Will a white male teacher challenge her intellect and demand obedience of her? What about the other black girls who may have a "mouth" on them that would not comply with silence as they wield their instrument of submission Will they use something similiar and like the officer, threaten to "light her up" if she does not acquiese?

Black girls are suspended at a rate of 10:1 against white girls. This is even greater in some spaces like zero tolerance for-profit private-charter schools and black majority public schools.

White girls have been held as the norm, "nice" and "quiet." They are neither. They have been and can be mean, catty, bullies, and loud in that nasel screech voice of middle school girls blocking the entrance of the school and feeling like they can tell the black librarian they will not leave when asked. It is this centuries of protected bodies that makes them the mean girls that books are written about, the mean bosses that have ruined careers, the so-called feminists that try to tell black women all they have done for them or the elected officials who stand on a stage in front of black people and declare that "all lives matter."

Yet, none of these girls are suspended for their behavior.

None are called out for their sexualized actions in the back of school buses and behind the buildings of middle schools.

They are held as the idealized virginal standard that can do no wrong. Or they are putting on blackness like the latest trend and thinking they should not be called on it, like Rachel Dolezal or the designer who declared the hairstyle of his model a new trend. 

And we all know that is a lie

Perhaps that is what is the problem in the first place.

We know the lie, and so do they. But they keep repeating the lie, making more and more exclusive communities that they know are filled with peanut-butter eating white families sitting on card tables just so they can pretend they are better, just so they can think they will never have to see a young black girl at a pool party.

The lie is crumbling.

Perhaps that is what that officer was feeling. Sandra Bland was only a few weeks after Bree Newsome took down the flag and only that long since black women were the primary victims of the Mother Emanuel massacre  or the face that the Dark End of the Street has always been a dangerous place for black women encontering white men .Black trans women coming up dead in jails or raped repeatedly in male prisons, arrested on vacation in Iowa or turning up dead on streets while people walk on by because they don't matter.

Maybe that is the problem.

They know all along the assured confidence of a black woman to assert her rights of existence is what they really fear.

Black women as the last outcry for rights and life. Black women have born the brunt of the extra policing of their communities, the murder of their children's souls, and the elimination of their men. Black women were the ones who stood up and said Black Lives Matter, all of them - straight, lesbian, queer, educated,  uneducated, employed, unemployed, wealthy, middle class, poor, urban, suburban, street, pearls, light, dark, natural, straight, D9, GDI, trans, loud, quiet, religious, secular, parents, single mothers, boomer, jones, genx, millennial, nextgen, babies - all of them.

Black girls matter.

We will continue to declare it.

Even to our own.

We will keep fighting for black girls.

The memory of so many demand it.

A Son Has A Son

I am sitting in the lobby of the maternity center letting it all absorb that my son has had a son.

It has been a very long day with the labor process attended by two grandmothers, one great-grandmother, and of course, his parents. The boy of mixed heritage that is united in culture and sealed in love, entered the world at 7:10pm.

What do I feel about a boy coming into a world that may not love him as much as we do? Will they see that he looks like his German/Chocktaw/Cherokee mother? Will they see him with his French/Irish/African/Creole father? Will we get it right and have a world that will not try to put him in a cell when his parents are putting him at a desk? What do I feel in this moment of life entering?

Hope.

Promise.

Joy.

Wonder.

Love.

My son has a son.

I am GranméTayé.

And the world says that we will go on.

Babies Like Justice Always Come When The Time Is Right

I've been on baby-watch for the past two weeks.

My son and his wife are expecting the first grandson, on both sides of the family.

This highly anticipated baby will come into a world that may not recognize him as a mixed heritage little boy. They may overlook his mother's Choctwa/Cherokee and German heritage. His future teachers may miss the uniqueness of his father's mixed heritage that is being black in America. They may not catch the subtle hues of the Creole in me that is in him or the ruddy redness of his ScotsIrish heritage from my father's side and my ex-husband's father's side. The world will see a little black boy.

So I watch and wait.

And hope for change.

Like the little twelve year olds of mixed heritages that were naming off their identities like one checks off the school supply list. None of them were just "one thing." All of them would be identified as "black" except for two. All of them were a range of milky white to dark chocolate. All of them promising.

Which brings me to the matter of justice and babies.

Like my daughter-in-law, we are prepared for the baby. The baby shower is over and done, the gifts put away, the crib ordered and put up, the house arranged, the dog baby trained. She has taken care of and nurtured this growing child in her body for exactly forty weeks, as of today.

And the baby is not budging.

Just like justice, we may be prepared and have been preparing for the day when it comes to make things right and whole. Like the day when a black girl is not murdered in her jail cell and it deemed a suicide over a missed turn signal while changing lanes. Or the day that a 3-year-old boy is shot or the night when young black women do not meet an untimely death. Perhaps, like babies, it will come in the night when the body triggers the right hormone to set things in motion.

Or, like my grandson, it will be helped along.

That is the case with justice.

The arch is indeed long in bending.

We have bent and some have broken in changing minds, hearts, wills, and laws to say that Black Lives Matter should not make the rest of the world upset that the always-focused-attention turns to the one in most need.

Just like my daughter-in-law.

We were there for a week when we received the call on a rainy Wednesday night that she had been having contrations for four hours. She had been at the doctor the day before and they said she was at a 1.  I've had babies and have gone from zero to launch within hours.

I rushed the family to get the car loaded, my husband dutifully gased it up and put cash in our hands, we set out after midnight for the 3 1/2 hour drive to meet my grandson.

Great anticipation swept over me as I navigated the rainy night. Thoughts of the next generation, mentally sending her encouragement to do what centuries of women have done.

Only to get the call that they were sending her home.

Disappointment swept over me as I stood still not knowing if I should go forward or go back. What do we do when what we have most hoped would happen has stopped us in our tracks?

Like justice, we move forward,  hit a block, have to decide to keep pushing forward, or concede and go back?

We kept going, knowing that eventually, that baby was coming out.

Thankful for the work-write-at-home life that lended flexibility to my schedule, we pushed forward. We took up residence with family that recently relocated to the city and waited it out.

The family took the daughter-in-law walking and walking and walking. No baby. We kept motion going.

We rested, got another call to go to the hospital. She was creeping forward to now 1.5cm and 50% effaced. Showing signs that something was happening, even if watching the ticking made the seconds seem like hours and progress seem invisible.

She was sent home again.

A river of tears of exhaustion and disappointment pours out of her, streaming down her face, turning her red through sobbed whispers of "I'm so tired, and I'm so sorry you had to come all this way."

I hugged her and told her it would happen when it was supposed to. The blessing was that I was able to be there, that flexibility allowed it to happen.

We went to dinner and decided that we would stay a few more days. Surely the baby would come by Tuesday.

Sunday turned to Monday turned to Tueday and still no baby.

No progress, nothing. A decision had to be made.

Again, like justice, we can wait it out or we can do some things to help it along.

The family packed up and drove back the 3 1/2 hours home to attend to some matters on the homefront. The couple-to-be continued to wait it out. She slept and gave her growing-beyond-options body a chance to rest for the ardous work of delivery that was surely ahead of her.

Wednesday turned to day after day to the last doctor's appointment, today, Tuesday, the baby's actual due date. She is a 2cm. And the baby is taking his sweet time to prepare to enter a world that may not be welcoming to him, a place that is challenging his white identified family to love and nurture this baby who will be black identified in a world that will love him until his cuteness wears off and fear sets in.

Unless justice happens and peace follows.

We have a date now, a time set, she will be helped along on Thursday, a baby should be here on Friday.

Like babies, justice has to have some direction and action to make it come when it is supposed to come, when we are ready to do the hard labor, to work to make it happen, to nurture the life on the other side.

It's Down

I am sipping coffee in my cousin's kitchen four hours from my home. They have cable so I am watching the coverage on MSNBC of the Confederate Flag coming down.

My teenage daughter said, "Just take it down already."

My tween daughter said, "They lost, take it down."

It is 400+ years of oppression and 53 years in the wrong since they put that "Confederate Battle Flag" back up in protest of the Civil Rights Movement. It has flown on that state capital since 1962.

The flag is a symbol of hatred, racism, and degradation of African peoples in this country.  It is more than just a piece of cloth on a public building.

Why did it take the horrendous murder of nine black people, five of them ministers, by a deranged Millennial white man, to make this finally be a discussion among the populace.

Bree Newsome scaled that pole just a couple weeks ago and declared, "I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today." They arrested her and now, I know they better drop the charges. It was a flag of treason that was against the United States of America,

The crowds have filled the capital grounds and are singing, "sha-sha-nah-nah, hey-hey-hey goodbye." AT the same time, I know there ware some white people who are crying.

The military regiment that took it down was lead by two black men. I can't even imagine the thoughts raging through these black sons of South Carolina as they carried it and handed it off to the curator of the Confederate Relic Museum. I wonder what he was thinking.

There are so many thoughts that rage through the hearts and minds. It was a a powerful moment yesterdaywhen Nikki Haley, Governor of South Carolina, signed the bill to bring it down. The visual of the crowds outside that statehouse are a great image of people who want to move the country forward.

My cousin said to strike up the church organs and think of the great cloud of witnesses who are shouting in heaven.

It is time for the rest of the southern slave states to step into brotherhood of the country and remove any remaining vestigages of hate. The very granddaughter of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, called for the flag to come down as an elected official in South Carolina. She remarked that there is no one more connected than she and she commented it was past time.

Representative Clybourne has called for it to come down from the Citadel and all othe rremaining public spaces. Anyone who wants it in their home, fly it, that will let the rest of the world know who they are.

It must be a moment for the families of the Charleston Nine that were in Bible Study that night. Imagine their blood that stains the country and the importance of this flag coming down to all the people of Mother Emanuel.

Perhaps the arch is bending.

Black Lives Matter.

The United States of America just took a step to be more united.

What To The Black Woman Is The Fourth of July?

What to the Black woman in 2015 is the Fourth of July?

I kept pondering today, Independence Day, in light of the last eleven months, in light of the last seven-ten days, in light of my fifty-one years of life. Is there a place in America, in the world, even, where a black woman can truly be free?

It is no suprise that this question comes up after Ferguson, after Baltimore, after the afters of so many lives cut short by state sanctioned violence amid the cries of many activists telling the world to wake up. It is no surprise after white allies, including the famous and not so famous, have been writing and teaching about white privilege and the dangers it produces in the black bodies of the country. It is no suprise as voices have been elevated for decades about the private prisons and the criminalization of the country's black children. For years, the clarion calls have been sounding and it seemed like it was on deaf ears.

After Trayvon Martin was murdered, several fierce women started the Black Lives Matter movement, yet, it didn't have national traction There were twitter followers and some in the POC-LGBTQ community who were introducing terms like intersectionality and allyship on multiple fronts.

Then August 9th happened and the world turned upside down.

Angela Davis was recently in town and told a sold-out crowd to not forget that " you changed the world." Ferguson needed that boost of confidence as they saw celebrity status awarded to some and neglect placed upon others, when all of them were on the other side of the tear gas and hatred of the early days of the movement. Her sister, Fanta, reminded the crowd to take care of the heart and take care of the heart, that stepping away for reflection and refueling is not a failure but a survival tactic to keep fighting another day.

For surely another day would come.

The very Saturday that the room was filled, that very morning, a prayed up, praised up, and prepared up young woman, Bree Newsome, declared, "this flag comes down today!" She prepared for an entire week after watching folks debate whether the Confederate Flag should come down or not, even as the mourning kept going for the Charlston Nine. She prepped, trained, and on the morning of Rev. Pinkney's funeral, knowing that his casket was to pass under that very state capital, climbed a poll with her watcher, a young white man, standing at the bottom to make sure she was a safe enough distance up so the authorities could not pull her down. She declared, "I come against  you in the name of God, this flag comes down today!"

She was the reminder of the fierce urgency now and the agency of the black woman to just do it, after all the hand wringing and demands that the grieving families forgive the young white male shooter, she saw the righteousness in the act of declaring that treason, hatred, murder, and evil had no place on public property.

The world watched and cartoon renderings was made, she was awarded an "Ohhhh, that's so cool" from this writer's teenager daughter whose image of what young black women can do has been elevated even more than seeing the fierce young women on the bullhorn speaking truth to power. she showed the resilience that black women are noted for and the tenacity to get it done. We were tired, Bree, at only thirty, was divinely appointed for that moment.

In the days following the murder of the Charlston Nine, church after black church burned amid suspicious circumstances.

Black folks knew.

It was the KKK or some other affiliated hate group that was burning down these historic AME, AME Zion, and National Baptists icons of the black community.

It was a shot into the soul.

Hatred has a way of doing that, of upsetting the delicate balance of a people already weary from the constant onslaught of systemic racism.

One could hardly catch a breath from the murders to then the Dominican Republic deporting those of Haitian descent, literally dispelling their brothers and sisters. The only thing that separates the two is which European colonized which side of Hispaniola.  The heart hurt deeply. Having ties to both sides of this island, the blood of both running through these veins, I grabbed for my Haitian flag and declared that #Haitianlivesmatter! I was met with that on twitter with young Dominican after Dominican sending a notice to their government that they were not ok with this human rights violation, to essentially leave generations of people countryless. The DR went back to the 1940s, many Haitians only spoke Spanish, had never even been to Haiti, they were left at the border like discarded trash.

That is what the emotional toll has been on a people, for over 400 years, for the 239 years of the nation celebrating its independence, black people, black women, have been the trash left on the side of the road. The trash that was thrown out the windows, crumbled and crushed in hands of hate, tossed into the murky dumpsters, stepped on, spat on, discarded.

The approaching July fourth then left many questioning the nature of freedom, independence, and personhood in a nation that is literally celebrating stealing the land of the First Nation tribes and then stealing African Nation peoples and forcing them to work it. It was not that the First Nation or African warriors were afraid or weak, it is that they were outgunned, outdiseased, and then outlawed.

The meek and mild never existed, the African always sought for freedom. The Haitian Revolution paved a way for other enslaved Africans in the Caribbean to seek their freedom from Spanish Rule.

The British outlawed the transcontinental slave trade with the Spanish, French, and Americans agreeing to stop stealing people from the homeland. This did not stop the brutality of enslavement in the country that places itself as a beach for the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." The differnce is that those yearning suddenly became white when they hit these shores. The black was outlawed, the Native was made invisible on reservations, the white gobbled up more and more.

To the black woman, what is the fourth of July in a nation that still pays 67-cents for every 77-cents of the white woman and $1 for every white man. The same woman whose body is coveted by every white girl discovering and appropriating black hair styles, the black color, and physical differences.

It is the voice of the black woman that has been most vocal throughout the past eleven months of this movement because she in all her forms - straight, married, divorced, single, lesbian, bi, queer, trans, old, young, rich, poor, educated, surburban, urban - realized that this was her time to be free and she had to do it by all means necessary.

Black women have taken pen to paper, have marched, have organized, have taught, have facilitated, have used every venue to elevate voice and expose the evil that treatens not only the black life, but all lives.

Black lives have to matter. Period.

When that happens, then perhaps the country can truly be free.

Until then, the black woman still has to resurrect the words of Frederick Douglass and wonder, "what to the negro is the fourth of july?"