the blueshift journal

The Other World Where Everyone Lives

 

There was a time when I resisted any label—writer, American, woman—without qualifying it first as black: black writer, black woman. It was around the time I first read Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in which he describes the young writer who wanted “to be a poet—not a Negro poet…meaning subconsciously, ‘I would like to be a white poet’; meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white.’” I was a student at an all-black college, from some very white places, surrounded suddenly by black friends, teachers, and texts. I had become politicized, enflamed, so very young. So very sure.

 

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Then, a confluence of changes. I started grad school. After five years of living in all-black neighborhoods, I was surrounded by white people again. I started dating someone who put compassion, in deed and ethos, at the center of his life. I started meditating, and through it, developed a Buddhist practice. Compassion for everyone.

 

The absolute way I thought of my blackness shifted. The way I thought of myself shifted. Slowly, I began to consider everyone’s humanity. I thought about the ways that individual white humans suffer. I thought about everyone’s experience being valuable and valid. Slowly, I gained a more nuanced view of my identity. I realized that no matter how enlightened I might be, that in no universe, alternate or otherwise, could I be right about everything.

 

I thought about the white people I’d met in grad school. How if they seemed to know a lot about black culture, they were appropriating. But if they knew nothing, they were ignorant and helpless. As a friend of mine sat on my couch, struggling to even say the word: “Well, I mean, you know, this guy, he was black,” I realized that in my puzzle, she had no way in. And for me, lonely, in need of companionship, how could I automatically deny the friendship of so many people? How could I never give any white person a chance?

 

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“Now, I’m not talking about a sentimental, shallow kind of love. I’m not talking about eros, which is a sort of aesthetic, romantic love. I’m not even talking about philia, which is a sort of intimate affection between personal friends. But I’m talking about agape. I’m talking about the love of God in the hearts of men. I’m talking about a type of love which will cause you to love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. We’ve got to love.”

 

—Martin Luther King, Jr., from his speech “Give Us the Ballot”

 

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Imagine a world in which nobody’s child is killed, no one is presumed guilty, where all little boys and girls and in-between are encouraged, supported, nurtured, loved. Imagine a world in which we all survive. Imagine a world where black suffering is the same as all other shades of pain: the loss of a parent, a broken heart, all of life’s disappointments. Imagine it’s not race that keeps you from succeeding, surviving, but plain luck. Imagine your husband and child are not executed by the police, but like all of us, they still die.

 

*

 

when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish

when we are alone we are afraid

love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed
but when we are silent

we are still afraid

 

So it is better to speak

remembering
we were never meant to survive

 

—from “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde

 

*

 

How to say that I feel unfazed? How to say that I feel the same? How to say that I feel sadness, love, and compassion for young Michael Brown and his family—how to say that I feel hope, like I always do, that now, things are changing? I look at the black men I love and know it could be them and feel frightened. I think of you, Brian Francis, becoming an image, an example, a name shouted in the streets. I think of a nationally televised funeral and the example that would be made of you, and the t-shirts and the tweets. I think of someone I love becoming a stupid hashtag.

 

I think of screaming Listen to me! in a crowd of people chanting for justice, people who need change, and will get it, but none who knew you. A beam of light bends towards justice, but my heart is still empty, as are the rooms you lived in, the clothes. The interminable echo.

 

Michael, I stare at your graduation photo, knowing someone thought you were just data, not a person with a particular laugh, and ideas you hadn’t yet spoken, and plans, all these plans with no dim inkling you would end, you would be upended like this.

 

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I am not angry and not bitter and not right and not black, though I know that I am. I am not angry because I am black I do not care because I am black I cannot relate to you because I am black but I know that it is. I don’t feel victim or aimed at or loathed or pitied or passed over or invisible except for when I do, and start to wonder what colors they get in the other world where everyone lives.

 

*

 

Let’s go back to 2012. I had been dating the compassionate humanitarian for a while. I was embroiled in a terrible living situation, searching for a way to love my neighbor. President Obama was campaigning for re-election. And what I remember about that time, in which I was actively trying to understand others’ points of view, was how everyone around me seemed to be in accordance: We liberals are smart and good and right. Those conservatives are dumb and bad and wrong. It’s significant that it was an election year, because there were conservatives intentionally trying to obstruct the civil rights of minorities. But there were other people voting red who were not maniacal, or uneducated, or racist—or who were—but who still loved their children, or missed their mothers, who wanted better jobs, to find love, to be happy; who suffered and wanted not to.

 

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Once, I thought that oppression was the clearest glass. That my suffering inoculated me from all criticism, that it cast an impenetrable veil over all my experience. I thought no white, or male, or privileged pain could compare to my black woman rung on the ladder.

 

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Who knows what other people feel? Maybe nothing. Maybe what you feel. Too much to bear, or speak. But you still try. You try to say it still.