Monday, October 19, 2020

Wondering What Daddy Would Say

 I desperately miss my father.

His wisdom, political analysis, spiritual guidance.

How I wish I could talk to him now

When I was a girl, I heard all the political, social justice talk he and his friends engaged in. Our family room at 311 Gordon Street, once had these tall, giants of ministry, government, education, all Black except for one White man, who came to gather and imagine a different possibility.

It was 1974. I was ten years old.

Of course, my world then was playing with dolls that didn't look like me, imagining what my late mother would tell me, riding my bike, and simply trying to breathe as a skinny asthmatic.

A few years later, when President Carter became President, there were these same men and a few more. There was this energy buzzing about the place. A hope and possibility for a new, modern era. 

Daddy had been offered a job in the Carter Administration. He even went to D.C. for a tour and house hunt. He declined it. His imagination for us was different than 1976 D.C. Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like had he made that career enhancing move. 

I listened to my father for years. He talked about Selma, reminded me of my family member and namesake who marched, told me what Dr. King told him and why he pursued the law and ministry, taught me about Shirley Chisholm and the hope for women, told me I could do anything, and admonished me that we must study history or be doomed to repeat it.

By 1980, there was a darkness that set over the conversations my father had. I was sixteen by then and starting to think about what life would be like. I had no idea that the doom my father felt would be realized in my young adult life.

Reagan came to office in 1980 and with him, came the polarizing of American religion with the "moral majority" and Phyllis Shaflay bunch crying for women to remain in the kitchen and bedroom. It was after Jim Jones massacre and my father making us watch Roots, The Holocaust, Jim Jones, and Helter Skelter, to name a few. He wanted us to know what was happened in places outside our middle of America town in the middle of our state. 

My father lived to January 1999, well before his time to go. 

He never saw the 2000 or the fiasco of democracy that followed from the Supreme Court decided election to 9/11 to the economic downturn to the first Black President to the first clown President to this modern explosion we have lived in since our breath stopped in 2011. 

I want to talk to him.

He was wise and thoughtful. 

Maybe he can help me ease the tension in my neck, when I look across the street at my neighbors' desperate attempt to make a stake for whiteness. Daddy would warn me about how dangerous these times are and admonish me to vote (I already did). I think he would hold court with his grandsons and granddaughters and tell them to remember these dark and evil days.

Then, Daddy, in his booming voice and deep smile, would also tell me to have hope.

He would tell me that we can and should still do good. That good will outlast and outwit evil.

So, 15 days to the election, I will hold onto that which can not be taken from me.



Wednesday, October 14, 2020

When Amy, Amys

 Like many of the people I know, we were disgusted by the GOP power play during an election.

It was not months and months, but barely weeks and weeks.

The services for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg hadn't even happened yet when the white-men-who-crave-power were salivating at the change to shove yet another conservative justice down the throats of Americans.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a poor replacement.

I was part of a press conference, joined with there women leaders, in the middle of Yom Kippur, to denounce this pick, again, merely weeks before the November election. In fact, people were already casting a ballot and deserved to have their voices heard.

This hearing is a sham.

This nomination is a sham, and in the couple weeks since she was announced, we notice it was also a super spreader event, resulting in even the president contracting Covid19.

It feels like these folks have been beyond gaslighting the American people.

So, regardless of how we got here, here we are and this judge who is barely a judge, is sitting before the Senate for the past three days, to have a confirmation hearing. The result of that hearing would be just days before the November election.

And Amy, Amys.

She equivocates.

She demures.

She evades.

She just sits there looking like the sick dream of every patriarchal domineering power-hungry evangelical conservative white Male in America.

And they love it.

Love her for her worn-out-uterus and her bonus Haitian adopted children. Her quiver is beyond full , this handmaid delivered on her purpose, according to the religious sect that she and her husband pledged allegiance to.

Now, to be fair, my quiver is full, I have a large family. I am a woman of faith, a M.Div, in fact, a minister, so my disgust with her is not that she is married, not that she has a large and diverse family, not even that she submits to her husband.

It is everything else.

If she were any kind of woman, in my opinion, she wouldn't let herself be a pawn in their sick game this close to the end of the election. It makes me wonder what kind of training white mothers give to white daughters that they are wet mops for their husband's whims and wishes.

Will this woman ask her husband's permission to rule on a case?

Is she that power hungry that she would do this so close to an election knowing that the American people are so strongly opposed to this pandemic confirmation?

How about the super spreader event, does she have Covid? And what about her kids that she has paraded around, often without masks, have them been exposed? Does that even matter in the quest for more white dominance in white womanhood?

What kind of woman is this woman?

She clearly opposes a woman's right to reproductive health, even when that woman's very life is at stake, and that is beyond even being Catholic, in my opinion. She is dangerous to my daughters.

She clearly did not have a problem with an employer using the N-word even as she raises two Black children. How safe are they in her home?

She clearly doesn't care if anyone else has health care, knowing she is being rushed through to do what the GOP was unable to do since the ACA was implemented to help save millions of lives.

Clearly a pandemic and 219,000+ dead Americans are not the lives she is concerned about, not very pro-life.

She said she respected the work of Justice Ginsberg and invoked her during her opening day of the confirmation hearing.

But does she, really?

This woman is every Black, Brown, and POC woman's nightmare of how insidious the Amys are.

Something just kept unsettling me.

My home office is upstairs, just off my en suite. I kept the TV on in there so I could hear while I sat at my computer and worked. 

The sound of her voice was making my skin crawl.

Her evasiveness was making me angry.

2020 and this is what we have come to.

A woman who will willingly overturn Roe v. Wade and send women back into the dark ages.

A woman who refuses to refute blatant racism.

A woman who willingly accepts corruption from an impeached president.

A woman who believes her belief system gives her the right to regulate the rest of our lives.

A woman I cannot trust.

Black women have been on the other side of the wholesome looking Amys who look like they will bake you an apple pie wearing pearls and a skirt. 

They have cried rape on our men.

They have shouted at our children integrating "their" schools.

They have yelled at our children in classrooms.

They clench their purses in elevators

They protest Black or Brown families moving into "their" neighborhoods.

They want to feel "safe."

They are the 53% who put in this nightmare because their fathershusbandsunclesbrothers convinced them a woman was not able to lead and that she would make their lives scary.

Nevermind the scary four years that have ensued.

So, no, I am not feeling very confident in this process.

I'm sure she will be confirmed.

That is how this thing is set up.

This originalist who believes I and my people are only 3/5th of a human and only then because it was a concession.

This religionist who believes my daughters' minds are not worth anything but their wombs are meant to be used, well maybe not them, given they are Black.

She is like the Amy who calls police on Black people just living.

When this Amy, all the Amys act as an Amy, it makes live extraordinarily dangerous for me.

And that is frightening more than anything that will happen on Halloween.


Friday, October 9, 2020

Every Black Woman

 When I was in seminary, one of my dear classmates used to always tell me to"fix my face." 

Now, she, like me, was one of a handful of Black people at our Midwest seminary.

I honestly didn't even know I was doing it.

My kids - all teens and young adults now - said that my "face" meant they were in trouble, needed to stop whatever they were doing, reconsider, or really, just back away.

I remember once when my youngest son was away in college and I was shopping with my only daughters and last two children. We were in Target, probably back-to-school. Anyway, I guess "the face" was invoked and they took a picture of me to send to my son.  

"Oooooh, what did you do????" was his response to his little sisters.

"Fix. your face." It is something we either think about or just let happen.

Senator Kamala Harris was every Black woman the other night as she was sitting at a desk, protected by plexiglass, while a mediocre White man gaslit, mansplained, interrupted, and otherwise exuded the smelly excrement of his cis-het, evangelical male privilege.

Even the fly knew it was an odorous thing coming out of him.

But Senator Harris had to do a thousand cartwheels in her mind while being denied her time with no help from the woman moderator who was every KarenSusanAmyBeckySally we have ever encountered.

Her face, though, her expressions, though, told the story.

It is unconscious.

We can not say all we are thinking, especially when we are in spaces where our everything is scrutinized from our hair to our shoes. We can not be smarter than them or expressive.

I studied Womanist Thought, wrote a class with that title, while I was in seminary because I was tired of all the maleness that was in Western culture. Hypermasculinity. The very sacred texts I was reading were through a series of compromises from a bunch of men who still wanted to hold onto their version of power and control.

The Black Woman's essence, mind, body, soul, and spirit, has been up for grabs for everyone but us for years.

Kamala Harris was all of us. The Asian Aunties who have been stereotyped to be docile and compliant. The African American sisters who have to code switch for mixed audiences. She was everyone of us except the white women who want to claim her phrase, "I'm speaking" for themselves.

The SallyKarenAmySues of the world were the moderator, the same woman who kept thanking the man who interrupted, went over time, and essentially did not follow the rules.

It made me think of my sixteen year old daughter who was watching the debate with me and was giving commentary about "that man." 

I began to wonder about what we have gained over the generations. This is the 100th year since women, note, white women, were granted the right to vote. For the rest of us, suffrage is still a dream, so many obstacles to the ballot. But I paused to wonder about the place of women.

RBG famously said that a woman's place is anywhere decisions are being made.

Black women have been making decisions for centuries. In this country, since 1619, the emotional, physical, and spiritual maneuverings we have had to make have been to save our families and ourselves. Womanists before Alice Walker coined the term. We had to.

And we always had to "fix our face" and "moderate our tone" and "smile for the people" because to do otherwise would have meant sure and certain destruction.

Senator Kamala Harris, likely, measured all that she was when she sat at the table.

As a writer, I wonder what she was doodling on her pad, how many unspoken words and gestures made it to that tablet. What we could not say outloud.

To be sure and certain, these are difficult and differing time, unlike any I've experienced in my lifetime. But we all say that in the middle of a cultural shift when we are alive in that moment. Yet, even history tells us that this time is different.

And every Black woman knows it.

So, since we know it, we may as well act on what we know.

We know we are drivers of our family's essence, the nucellus of the neighborhood. We see even what they do not want us to see. 

This election is crucial. I may not be alive in fifty years to know the long-term effects of these decisions, the impact of over 210,000 souls gone to Covid19 and the 840,000 newly unemployed on top of all the others who lost their jobs since March 2020. The homes people have lost, the health and education of our children forever altered. We know how crucial is.

So, what I told my college freshman daughter, her voice and her pen hold power. Use it. She is not like me, they say, her face does not give off the tell-tale signs of aggravation. So I told her to use it, to change what she can, to vote.

Every Black woman. We know what is at stake and for that, so many of my sister circles have been teaching and leading and educating each other on everything from the Census to Covid19 to this election. Because it is crucial. 

We are less than 28 days to making a decision, not only for the highest office in the land, but for the Senate, the House, the Judges, the State and local races.

Every Black woman has a voice. And a platform.

And like Senator Kamala Harris, it is time for us to declare, "I'm Speaking." and let our voices be heard for the future we need and want.