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Terra Date: June 15, 2020  |  By being_human

It was my first real job and Louise was assigned the task of training me. She was a no-nonsense woman in her mid fifties and she found me amusing – in a good tempered way. As I access the memories I can clearly see her face. The sideways smile, high cheek bones, and soft laugh in her deep brown eyes. She decided, in addition to teaching me my responsibilities, that she would also teach me about what it means to be Black in America.

We would talk here and there about it and Louise would bring me articles to read about Black History. Sure, I already had the knowledge of this history from text books, novels, and television and it was all neatly stored in my mind. On occasion, my dad talked about the Civil Rights Movement and his participation in the MLK Freedom Marches. He tried to teach us not to judge people by skin color as he himself was half Mexican. When he recalled the painful memories of the 1960’s, where so many good people were murdered for standing up for Love and Truth, his countenance would drop. It was clear that he felt defeated and the truth had been extinguished along with those extraordinary lives.

Broken

One day, Louise brought me an article about a young man, a teenager, a boy really… he had been lynched in the 1930’s for simply speaking to a white woman in what was perceived as the wrong way. There were graphic pictures and as I read it the tears streamed down my face and my heart fell heavy with grief. When I looked up at Louise, her eyes were moist with tears and she had a sad sort of smile. She needed me, a naive twenty-something kid, to understand… her. My heart broke and in that moment everything else fell away – no black, no white – just shared misery and confusion over the sick and evil places that humanity can take itself.

“War” on Poverty?

“The disastrous effects of the government’s management of anti-poverty initiatives are recognizable across racial lines, but the destruction is particularly evident in the black community. It effectively subsidized the dissolution of the black family by rendering the black man’s role as a husband and a father irrelevant, invisible and — more specifically — disposable. The result has been several generations of blacks born into broken homes and broken communities experiencing social, moral and economic chaos. It fosters an inescapable dependency that primarily, and oftentimes solely, relies on government to sustain livelihoods.” – Derryck Green, Project 21

I learned a lot more from Louise. She had three sons that she was very proud of. They were all by different fathers as she didn’t have much respect (read: trust) for men. She openly admitted it and made no apologies. I know it sounds odd to say but they were just a means to an end – to have children. She chose these men on a single criteria and that criteria was that they have very dark skin. She herself had an ancestry of African, Native American, and Caucasian and felt it was important that her children come into the world with the darkest shade possible. I understand now that this was her way of exercising defiance against a culture she felt made her feel inferior.

Differences

Her middle son, to her utter shock, was born with reddish hair and very pale skin. When he was about four years old she decided to “brown him up” a bit at the beach. It did not turn out very well as you can imagine. He received terrible burns and needed medical treatment. Suffice it to say, she never did that again and felt very much the fool for doing it.

Her eldest son was a very attractive and successful business man. To her credit (and a great example of the power of her resolve) she was able to provide her sons with the means to pursue their goals of higher education. On the other side of her son’s success was a busy social life; one in which “playing the field” was just another experience to be explored.

She would often ask him, “Why don’t you settle down and why do you date so many women from different racial backgrounds?”. Her hope, of course, was that he would choose a woman from his own race. He told her he wasn’t ready to settle and that he had come to realize that he preferred white women. They brought a certain kind of guilt that allowed him to get away with just about anything in the relationship. Louise didn’t like this at all because she knew it was feeding the worst parts of his character.

Justice

Louise was a lovely intelligent woman. Both flawed and formed by circumstance and experience – creating perceptions constructed by the past and the present. A setup primarily influenced by government interference and policy that in the words of Frederick Douglass caused “positive injury” by allowing so-called “sympathy and pity” where there should have only been “Justice”! In order for true equality to manifest it must be based on dignity and self determination. Where one stands or falls solely based on their individual efforts. To single out a group in society based on skin color bias and declare they need “special help” is incredibly insulting and reinforces the idea that one is inferior.

We need to pull up the heavy anchor of the past and stop swimming in its muddy suffocating waters. It has served as a club to keep us blind and nailed down to a specific point in time. Why? To control us in disunity in order to keep us all powerless and in our place. For we all have a place reserved for us – as if standing on a stage we willingly go to our mark and repeat the discordant lines that have been written for us. Thanks to the halls of higher learning, politics and media we have learned to become lost in emotions, rhetoric, and labels.

Ship of Fools

We must recognize what we are – useful tools to a system that requires us to hobble ourselves to institutionalized guilt and fear. These components only give birth to anger and hatred. We give away our power and render ourselves inert. Having foolishly granted parental powers to a governing body that sits above us we can expect nothing less than to be stripped of our rights and our humanity. If we continue down the road of creating divisive academic labels and new victim ideologies we will fail – all of us will fail each other and remain as human cargo on a ship to nowhere. Thanks for reading and I hope my personal story has provided some positive food for thought…

Note: This post was inspired by my niece, Julia. An amazingly deep, intelligent and wise soul who is just starting her journey in the wonderment of understanding our complex world. I love you.

I would love to see your thoughts in the comment section. All are welcome! Just keep it respectul :).

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