Fiercely Kind
Fiercely Kind: 15 July 2020
I’ve read fewer books this year than I have since I started counting, maybe 15 years ago. This singular pleasure, my go-to escape, is another casualty of pandemic life, coupled with big family needs. The former means that there’s not much alone-time in my life, and the latter means that when there is, I don’t have the concentration needed to sustain compelling fiction or intriguing non-fiction.
In addition to ruining my reading, those factors have worsened my already-bad sleeping. When I’m not worrying about how I’m failing my family or what I haven’t done for work, or what I forgot to do for a friend, I’m suffering under the weight of the systemic injustices that permeate our culture.
Vividly, in the middle of the night, my mind replays episodes of When They See Us. Our church is hosting a weekly Zoom discussion of the Netflix miniseries. Almost all participants are white, with a few brave and generous black folk journeying with us on this difficult path that is all-too familiar for them. The series is a heartbreaking dramatization of how five innocent children were wrongly convicted of a brutal rape in Central Park in 1989. They were exonerated in 2002. Watching the system crush these boys and their families is horrible. But the true horror is witnessing the layers and layers of systemic injustices working then, as they work now, to crush so many of my brothers and sisters.
It’s such a hard time to be dealing with all of this. My father is facing consecutive high-risk surgical procedures at 85 years old. My husband is still recovering from a colon re-sectioning. The non-profit organization I work for is trying to pivot to predominantly on-line services for folks who really need in person help; and I’m trying to raise money for it when the economy—as well as our participants—are taking a beating. My children are pandemic-weary, tired of screens, by turns grouchy and buoyant, and grieving the inability to see and play with friends. Both teachers and both students in our home desperately want to go to school in August, but not at the expense of our community’s health.
What each person in each situation wants more than anything is for someone to plant a stake in the ground so that we can adjust our attitudes and expectations accordingly. Maddeningly, the answer to most when? what? and how? questions seems to be: depends. And I’m just throwing it out there—the heat wave is not helping matters.
So police brutality? Black Lives Matter? Defund the police? Wow. Can’t I figure out medical issues, school, and work first?
And that, my friends, is the essence of privilege.
Specifically, white privilege. Because all my friends at work? They don’t have the luxury of dealing with racial injustice when the other parts of life are running smoothly. Fact is, until we white folks step up and begin to dismantle racism, the lives of people of color can’t run smoothly.
It doesn’t matter how nice you are to your black friends, if you have any. What matters is how you’re talking about all of this with your white friends. And whether you commit to becoming part of the solution.
We can’t become part of the solution until we teach ourselves how to see the problem. For white people, the first step is dialing back our defensiveness. Racism is not your fault. Willfully denying it, and your role in it, is. It won’t go away by us being nice individuals. It will only cease its strangle hold on our country when we confront it systematically with laws, social norms and accountability throughout all institutions.
I was the facilitator for last night’s When They See Us discussion, and I began with a prayer I first saw a month or so ago by Laura Jean Truman, a writer whose essays I much admire. What follows is part of the description of her Patreon site, and it seems so true to what we, as church, must aspire.
“This is what we do here - feel it all, say it all, repent of our complicity, dismantle old systems, try to discover new ways of being, learn from the marginalized, listen to the Spirit, learn how to be very still when we want to move and learn how to get up and shake the dust when we want to curl up and not respond”
So yeah, I’m teetering close to overwhelmed with all the plates I’m spinning right now. And that doesn’t give me a pass. I may not be spinning any of my plates well, but it is not okay to let this one drop. That is how I begin to embody the toll that racism has placed on my beloved homeland. Liberty and justice for all? None of us is free until all of us are free. Pretty sure Jesus said some things along those lines, too.
The one book that I am enjoying a page or two of just before bed is Sibley’s Birding Basics by David Allen Sibley. (Yes, I’m sure we’re related somehow. No, I don’t know how.) Years ago I was a dedicated bird watcher. Binoculars and field guide, early morning and early evening strolls, free time planned around migrations. From this perspective it seems a pleasant dream of someone else’s life. I still notice birds, even if I don’t actively seek them out these days.
Birding Basics is a plucky little guide whose purpose is not to help you identify birds, but to help you learn how to see them. “It is easy for a beginner to be overwhelmed…not having a clear idea of what to focus on can result in an observation that yields no useful information.” Thus his guidance for getting started includes 1) Learn to See Details, 2) Watch for Patterns, 3) Gain Experience, 4) Learn from Your Mistakes.
And isn’t that how we learn anything?
It is perfect guidance for getting started in the long, arduous task of dismantling racism. We have to learn how to see it. Once you begin, you’ll see it everywhere, and it’ll be tempting to give in to despair. It’s so big, this can’t be true, how have I not seen it, I feel guilty and blind-sided and complicit and overcome and too small and inadequate to the task. Feel all that. Deeply. Don’t deny it.
And keep looking.
As it says in Birding Basics, “This expertise can only be acquired by experience and by consciously testing the limits of perception. Talking yourself into something or denying your mistakes will only slow the learning process and cause problems in the long run.”
Friends, we must be committed to dismantling racism for the long run. We are called to nothing less.
Ms Truman’s beautiful prayer is helping me keep my focus. Perhaps it will help you, too. Remember: the rest of us are counting on you.
“God,
Keep my anger from becoming meanness.
Keep my sorrow from collapsing into self-pity.
Keep my heart soft enough to keep breaking.
Keep my anger turned towards justice, not cruelty.
Remind me that all of this, every bit of it, is for love.
Keep me fiercely kind.
Amen.”
