A Rise of Color

Lord of Thunder, unleash your fury, deep and black!

Fierce and flashing--lightning upon our tongues!  

We chant lions with ripped and roaring hearts, 

Beating back batons as tear gas glistens on the glowing road. 

Shadows give birth to white noise. We lynch our own color 

Foolishly thinking a story has two sides or one voice.

Evidence means nothing. I witnessed the beating of a heart.
And another heart stopped beating.

Dead daughters shiver and gasp, a cold choir with no voice.

Sons scream in soundproof booths--coffins for the living black.

"Can you hear me now?" David had to throw stones, too. 

Walk in the woods at night to see what you've become.

Velvet hollows haunt and holler, "Feel the fertile depth of black."

Now gather the blackness like berries, and be dyed by a rise of color.

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This is fucking hard to write. Fitting that it should be such a struggle. I wrote a poem. It is tidy, pretty, punctuated. The poem lies. I woke up crying. My tears tell the truth. This is not a well-composed article with tidy distance. This is a storm with loose ends and no conclusion. 

Social justice teacher Verma Meyers says looking at pictures of strong black leaders alters our cognitive bias against African Americans. Let's look long and hard.

Clara Mae Luper was one of the early leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in Oklahoma in the 50s. She was arrested 26 times for her civil rights activities. She led sit-ins to end segregation all over OK. She was a candidate for the US Senate in 1972, and developed Black Voices Magazine in the the late 70s

I had a dream.

March 25, 2014:

I am trying desperately to hold an old African American woman's hand. We fight until I am in a cold sweat. We must fight together if we are to hold hands. She's dying. I have to struggle, not give up, knowing that my intentions are good, but my view is incomplete. She has the last word no matter what. I must listen. I will not give up. I am yelling, she is yelling. To hold hands with a black woman honestly requires an engaged struggle. Only she knows what it is to be a person of color. Finally, after wrestling from sun up to sun down, we can hold hands. Something is complete. She lies down to die. 

But nothing is complete. People keep dying. I am bewildered. I don't know where to start. So many voices. So much emotion. Such nuance and complexity. I get lost in the chaos. I retract my own statements fearing their inadequacy. Inadequacy is OK. We must all speak up, all of us who can. I return to my center. I breathe. I regain my voice, knowing it's just a note in the symphony, a fluid measure of music. Music is nothing without intentional pause, and less without listening. I want to lend beauty to our song. I try to write love songs but they always come out sad.

This is Mary McLeod Bethune 1875 - 1955. 
She was an educator and Civil Rights leader who founded the National Council of Negro Women, and served as an adviser to FDR on his "black cabinet." She promoted the education of African-American youth.

To know deeply who we are helps us stand with each other. To look at another human being and see ourselves is the litmus of truth. When we cannot see ourselves in the mirror of others, we endanger society, and kill people of color. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of ourselves because knowing who we are is at least as painful as it is powerful. We are Othering our African-descended family to protect our smallest selves, so that we of a lesser scale can continue to live and rule in fear. But true power roots down. If we don't build a tower, we can't fall from it. 

I don't identify as white. I stand in my tribes. You may think this doesn't matter because the system still caters to my color. But I can tell you that knowing where I stand makes a difference. My roots are deep and broad. They intertwine with yours. This is no theory. We are a family. Ask any elder who holds pieces of the ancient stories of humankind. (Did you know that African Chief Maui sailed from Libya to Polynesia, settling in Maui? Or that a man from the Siberian steppe carried a golden arrow all the way to Greece to initiate Pythagoras?) 

Great chief of Balé, King Fonyonga II of Bali-Nyonga, 1901–40. Cameroon, 1935

We hold pieces of each other, for each other. When we come together with open hearts, minds, and memories, we can know ourselves more fully. When we identify with each other, we act with a broader sense of self-preservation. We preserve our roots. We preserve our future. We preserve each other. Justice arises when we stop fearing who we are. 

At the same time, we can never know the experiences of another. Amid the protests in Oakland last week, a black man who lives on the street yelled at a group of us. "Nothing you do matters," he told us. "What does any of this mean?" ("We have no idea; please tell us.") "People have taken everything from me. I have nothing. They don't even want me back in Africa." Then, "I saw a dead black man rotting on the sidewalk for two full days before the police even bothered to come get him." 

Was there a funeral?

Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute, is the first African American to be awarded an honorary degree by Harvard University. Born into slavery in Virginia, Washington moved to Alabama in 1881 to open Tuskegee Normal School. He soon gained fame as an educational leader among black Americans, a fact which Harvard recognized with a Master of Arts degree.

Apathy makes us an accessory to murder. Inaction makes racism our legacy. If we are tired of hearing about injustices against black lives, we almost surely benefit from institutionalized racism. We who have the luxury of ignoring this struggle are those who are now called to engage, to speak up, to avoid being complicit in systematic murder through silence. 

We who quibble over court cases and question who the victims are almost certainly have not walked in the skin of a darker hue. I can tell you with the certainty of a poet that we are standing on the wrong side of history, and missing the forest for the trees. 

In 50 years, if we are still alive, we will not want to say, "I didn't see what was happening right in front of me. I was blinded by my privilege [or my peers or my region], blind to the oppression of others because I had never experienced it myself." We will not want to tell our grandchildren that during this critical time for human rights, we did nothing. We have to make a decision. We can participate in a system that condones murder and oppression, or we can dismantle it. 

Cornel West, American philosopher, academic, activist, and author. The son of a Baptist minister, West received his undergraduate education at Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1973, and received a Ph.D at Princeton University in 1980, becoming the first African American to graduate from Princeton with a Ph.D in philosophy.

Every successful struggle has singular focus. The focus here is Black Lives Matter. If we are white-presenting, let's amplify the voices of the oppressed. If someone of color has something to say about justice, let us not criticize the tone or the content. Let us not speak out of turn. Let's. Just. Listen. 

Communities of color and their allies are coming together in creative and peaceful ways for restorative justice. People of privilege often criticize the media-emphasized violence. Let's stop pretending we know how we would behave in the context of a hundred years of oppression. Martin Luther King, Jr. said riots are the voices of he oppressed. Starwhawk says, "If we refuse to hold accountable those who speak with bullets, how dare we stand in judgment of those who respond with stones?" 

Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. giving his I Have a Dream speech on August 28, 1963.

What can we do?

The truth is, everything little thing we do matters. We can speak up in an uncomfortable situation that promotes or condones racism. We can eradicate euphemisms for blackness, like "thug" and "inner-city." We can ask African American activists how to best serve the community. If we are used to defending privilege, we can momentarily suspend our disbelief, as an experiment in empathy. We can raise conscious kids. We can make art. We can cry. These are no small things. Every move shakes the system, and we are a system that needs shaking. Sometimes the softest touch causes the biggest earthquake. 

Life will conspire to engage us in loving justice. Let's remember who we are, starting with our own family history. Let's expand our social circles to include people of different classes, races, genders, abilities. Let's acknowledge each other on the street. Let's lean in to people of color. Let's register our biases, our inner racists. This is fiercely uncomfortable. Let's practice tolerating the discomfort. Racism is a strong thread in the fabric of our society. To change the fabric, we have to stop denying our involvement. As Verna Meyers says, "Stop trying to be good people. We need real people." 

So let's be real. To hold hands honestly with a person of color requires an engaged struggle.   Let's struggle till we're in a cold sweat. 

I'm all in.

"I have a great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift." Septima Clark (1898 - 1987), a teacher in South Carolina, established Citizenship Schools throughout the South to teach reading and increase voter eligibility.

Additional Outstanding Resources:

Cognitively Shifting Internal Biases by Verna Myers

Truth and Reconciliation by Fania Davis

Keep the Focus on Black Lives by Mia McKenzie

Admitting Our Collective Blind Spot by Tim Wise

Heart-Centered Activism by bell hooks and Thich Nat Han

The Stages of What Happens When There's Injustice Against Black People by Luvvie

Creating an Anti-Racist Agenda by Challenging White Supremacy Workshop

On White People, Solidarity, and (Not) Marching for Mike Brown by Mwende Katwiwa

Shredding the Case Against Michael Brown by Shelby Lawson

Chomsky

How to Parent on a Night Like This by Carver Wallace

Nelson Mandela, South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, politician and philanthropist who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was South Africa's first black chief executive, and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election. His government focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid through tackling institutionalised racism, poverty and inequality, and fostering racial reconciliation.

In Sickness and in Health

In Sickness and in Health is adapted from a commencement speech for Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College, Berkeley.

"Everything shines by perishing."—preacher, Albany, GA

Portrait of Ria Monk by Gustav Klimt

We are all going to die. Death is my most intimate companion. This is the only way in which my love life has been truly successful. What began as an arranged marriage has blossomed into a beautiful and thrilling relationship that I have only grown more certain will see me through to my very last breath. 

by Tom French

In some ways birth is the only true cause of death, and death is the only cure for being born. But there’s this middle ground, which is everything that happens in between. It looks like the people I see in my clinic. It looks like myself and my loved ones. It looks like you. I have noticed in my short time as a clinician and in my much longer time as a patient, that we inhabit a rather limited view of this middle ground, and of ourselves.

Sometimes we equate health with a prize for the merits of our own behavior, or sickness with personal failure. Sometimes we are so invested in making meaning from pain that we can’t just let a cough be a cough. Sometimes we insult people by making their disease into a metaphor for some hypothetical, unresolved issue.

I want to talk about these things because I see them happen over and over in my clinic, and in myself, and in the people around me. I’ve seen people break down and cry when I tell them being sick isn’t their fault. I myself have broken down and cried looking for reasons why I have had so many health issues. By the way, I am living proof that thinness is not a proxy for health.

We’re not just inedible meat compartments. We would all die quite suddenly if the room was filled with CO₂ instead of mostly nitrogen. Or if the temperature went up or down by just a hundred degrees. Or if the atmospheric pressure changed by just a little. But, if we’re in an ideal environment—and maybe for you it’s the beach, and maybe for me it’s the forest—we flourish. We experience health. And this is how Chinese medicine sees the world, too—as holistic. Where do we end and our environments begin? (Incidentally, this is what makes feng shui a logical treatment principle.)  

It is unscientific to deny the intimacy of our surroundings, whether oxygen, or temperature, or the way a piano sings our own musicality back to us. Why do we create this imaginary point at which we cease to exist, and become something Other? Our body is unimaginably vast. We co-evolved with all of this, even the stars—which by the way, are also going to die.  

by Joshua Petker

We have this platitude that we create our own reality. But who are we? And again, we’re this giant state of flux, a big old writhing mass of meat and miracle, and there are tropical storms and institutionalized racism and mass murderers involved, and we’re creating that, too. We’re creating our reality, but it’s more than just our singular input. If we’re really in touch with what we’re creating, it is as awful as it is exhilarating. Saying “we create our own reality” is like saying we control the vast and unpredictable sea by steering the rudder of our tiny boat. Of course, we can’t deny the rudder, but we can’t disavow the ocean, either. 

Sometimes we just get sick, and we don’t know why. It is ok to stop looking for a reason. We can dig for meaning, and at a certain point it is the digging for meaning that becomes the pathology. “I don’t know” is hard, and it is honest. Understanding causality can be like unraveling the wind, invisible and indivisible.

So I am here to tell you that illness is not your fault. It is no one’s fault. If you are healthy, you have not won. If you are sick, you have not failed. To take credit for our health or to take blame for it is, at a certain point, absurd. Like giving a prize to “a single cell” when the body performs well, or blaming the same cell when we get cancer. 

We also do this thing where we make illness into metaphors. For example, if you had a kidney stone, someone might ask, “What are you holding onto so tightly? What beliefs are obstructing you? What isn’t going with the flow?” By the way, I dare you to ask this to someone who’s passing a kidney stone.

At best, these questions acknowledge a fuller range of factors that lead to or away from health. At worst, they are accusations: "You got a kidney stone because you’re not going with the flow.” Dear reader, let us discontinue this commonplace offense, of which I am certainly guilty. (Full disclosure: I chose the word "offense" over "douchery" at the last minute to appear more professional. The thesaurus also offers: blooper, faux pas, misstep, gaffe, impropriety, blunder, error, boner, and indiscretion.)

Dorothy Howe

Or take the question, “How’s your diet?” which is a great question, obviously, but I want to look at why we’re asking it. Just think about when we see people on the news who make it to 106 years old, and the news anchor asks, “What’s your secret?”, and the answer is inevitably something like, “Bacon and cigars.” A thousand people can have a terrible diet, and maybe just one or two of them get cancer. On the other hand, a person with a terrific diet who hears this question might start looking at her lifestyle in terms of infractions. She might blame herself for having cancer because she ate a wheat cracker last Wednesday. 

no offense, Louise Hay (bless your heart)

We assume that if we understand the mental, emotional, and dietary “causes” for disease, and just stop doing those things, we’ll be well. We’ll be absolved. And sometimes this is the case. But very often, it is not. 

Health is not a binary to begin with. Healthy or not healthy. Health can look proud as a personal trainer, or it can look like a woman who’s about to die from cancer, like my friend, teacher, and colleague Suzanne Friedman. In the days leading up to her death, we can say with certainty that though cancer had consumed her body, she was completely healed. She was so lucid and so alive in her last hours that she told her community she was giving us her death as a gift. She told us to study it and to learn from it. Thank you, Suzanne.

by Kindra Nikole

Suzanne checked all the metaphors. She knew all the right herbs, all the cutting edge western drugs and therapies. She ate whole foods, exercised every day, didn’t drink or smoke. She had a positive outlook on life, a wonderfully supportive spouse and community, and all the best doctors. She did all this in a relaxed, undogmatic manner, her signature hilarity always intact. 

At a certain point, people may encounter this unspoken implication that if we fail to defeat an illness, it must be from a weak will, or a wish to be sick, or even a desire die. Because in this storyline, which sees illness as a failure of our own efforts or maybe even of our own creation, we might conclude that sick people are asking for it in some way.

by Citania Citizen

But I’m saying that people with all manner of health concerns — and that includes all of us — are expressions of normalcy, given the condition of our larger body. We are responding naturally to what we are creating. We can’t blame GMOs or corporations or pollution, because we are these things, too. Acknowledging this frees us from taking pain and sickness personally, and it also safeguards our relationships by making us more mindful of them. 

It’s ridiculous to think it’s just about us, the inedible meat compartment. That eons of forgetfulness, war, famine, poverty, pollution, oppression, colonization are all happening right now in the continuous process of our body, and we think there’s something wrong with us when we get sick, or if we feel sad. When we do not feel sad is perhaps when we are the sickest. And I’ll say it again, we can’t blame a person on Wallstreet any more than we can blame a person in a hospital bed. 

by temporary-peace

But when we are aware of the ocean, and when we are aware of our mortality, we are living a life that is already healed no matter how we find ourselves. In happiness or despair, in sickness or in health. This invokes enormous inspiration. It also involves a lot of “I don’t know,” a lot of tolerating discomfort and embracing ambiguity, a lot of relinquishing dogma and forsaking the need for self-improvement. We have already arrived. 

Right now a thousand stars are being born. The scent of flowers rides the wind. A million new mothers are nursing their babies. A man is speaking on behalf of those with less power. Someone, somewhere is writing a symphony. Young people are falling in love for the first time. A woman has just received a clean bill of health after her last chemo treatment. On every continent, we smile. We do not need to take happiness and health so personally, either, but simply share in it when it arises.

Gerard McNamee

My wish for all of us is that we live a life that is already healed. That we recognize our terminal diagnosis without literally receiving one. That we see ourselves in the ocean so that our deeply-natural self-centeredness assumes value. There is nothing to lose, except the things that took up too much space anyway. Until death gives us his fond wave of equanimity and the only true cure, we share this body. This astounding feat of biology, this writhing mass of meat and miracle. This is who we are, absolutely replete and undeniably whole, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.

Ria Monk on Her Deathbed by Gustav Klimt

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Artists unknown for all unattributed images.