A Word Beyond the Ballot Box: A Heart Between Resentment and Grace.
My words below reflect a small part of the sum of my experiences.
The president-elect has a clear, documented, and repeated history of racism and bias over many years toward Black folks, and other minoritized groups. I am saddened that this among many other things was overlooked on his path to being re-elected.
This does not make me wish that he will fail. I won’t deny that I am deeply concerned about his plans and policies, but when government entities fail the impact is felt most by those who are often barely holding up under the current crumbling infrastructures, inequitable policies, and broken systems.
I hope as I always have that we (me included) individually and collectively continue to confront our prejudices and what we are willing to brush aside in the name of supporting a red or blue ideology.
We are all guided by our lived experiences, fears, hopes, and biases, especially the ones that are hard to see and easy to deny. Race and the weaponization of race are a critical part of the American fabric. My words are but a sliver of this truth.
I am tired. So tired. So hurt looking back on a lifetime of compromise and efforts to walk across the bridge, while you stood still.
I’m devastated that I called you friend, stood beside you at weddings, celebrations, graduations, and births. That I’ve upheld your dignity, humanity, and personhood to every single voice who declared that a person who lives where you do, speaks the way you do, who hopes the way you do could never love me like I think you do.
I’m devastated that racism wasn’t enough for you to say no. I’m devastated because I’ve always known that I was your token. In your life, there is only one, and it’s me. I’m devastated because I thought I’d be enough to make you show up.
There is no grace, there is no eloquence, no perfect brown face that can fight the individualism, they’ve told us is the only way.
I’m devastated, but I should have known. When I told you about the racism that ruined my day, you questioned me, not the ones who othered me. The one who has never existed a day without an acute reality of the browns that shade her face.
I’m heartbroken, but I should have known. When I sat in that little rural church in 2008, the aging elder, with the help of her cane, stood up to ask if Obama was the anti-Christ. Not because he mocked her Lord, but because his skin could only erupt her hate. Something died in me that day. Legs crossed, hands folded in a sea of White.
I’m gutted, but I should have known, because we’ve been begging for so long. Pleading. When we asked for change, you gave us street names and declared we’re in a post-racial age, while our men lay in the streets and our children come home from school with stories, the same as their grandfathers.
I used to say I want to understand, but I don’t know if I can. Not in the way I hoped. I know the roots, I know the rot that lies in the fear and bias instilled in us with every generation.
I know that everyone is tired, I know that we’re all afraid, I know you think he won’t do what he says he will. But I remember the last time, on his first day, he told Muslims they no longer have a place.
I want to love you. My heart hurts because I don’t know how to. Not genuinely. Not without a Halloween face.
I’m not interested in shame. That will just make you run away, but I didn’t convince you to stay anyway.
If Jesus said my name, I’d ask him to make a way. Help me love the people you do, I can’t live with this disdain.
They say it’s the unborn, the children, the vulnerable, but they never talk about the limbs, tiny and innocent in the Gaza rubble, the Sudanese streets.
They say it’s the economy, but the hands they declare don’t belong here, uphold our money machine. In farm fields, in the parks with our children while we build careers.
Conspiracy has captured our brains. Empathy somewhere on a distant plain, waiting to be watered by generations shocked awake.
I need some time, especially because you seem so very fine, so unafraid. I don’t hate you. This time I simply don’t know what to do with the pain.
