Category: Blackness

Blackness…

.Reading time 4 minutes.
“Measuring Race and Ethnicity Across The Decades: 1790—2010 – U.S. Census Bureau.” Accessed May 2, 2023. https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/race/MREAD_1790_2010.html.

I preached a sermon on February 16th titled “Blackness” that feels like a turning point for me professionally.  While I’ve preached on race before, I feel as if my studies being combined with the incredibly generous community I’ve been working with for the past few months has allowed me to tap into language and intention that I think may be useful for a wider audience than just Unitarian Universalists.  My goal is to be able to speak to people across the spectrum who want to engage seriously in understanding the race question that keeps rearing its head, complicating justice and messing with people, even when they don’t realize it.

After returning home, I was scrolling through my various feeds and came across this brilliant piece by Garrison Hayes.  He takes this conversation about race, and language to a whole new level and gets much more specific about the way the language around DEI is being weaponized as a modern substitute for the more traditional slurs.  I am INCREDIBLY grateful to his perspective this is a MUST watch.

Below is an original poem that I close the sermon with.  I’m including a link to audio of the full piece as well as the text below.  Once the video is live, I will link it as well.

My biggest gratitude is to the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley for encouraging me, loving me and letting me speak freely from this pulpit.  Not every black, gay preacher gets that freedom.  I’m a lucky guy.  Amen.

In the message, I share two slides.  The first slide is an overview of the US Census race categories since the Census began.  The second slide is just the categories for “blackness” compared with the categories for “whiteness” from that same list.  That slide is the cover image for this blog post:

How Does Your Whiteness Work?

How does your whiteness work?
Does it fill you with pride
Does it make you ashamed
Does whiteness call you to action
Or does it allow you to hide?
Does whiteness give you a pass
Is it just a pain in the ass
How does your whiteness work?

How does my blackness work?
My blackness is a portal
It gives me a place from which to see the world
My world
Your world
It gives me perspective
It would have to.
My blackness stands upon innumerable bodies sacrificed
To the nonconsensual concept of race
Applied, and reapplied
And applied again
Like layers of makeup on Baby Jane Hudson.

My blackness swims in the blood of too many ancestors
Never repaid for their gifts
And dives daily into the pool from an impossible height
Not the sparkling Esther Williams spectacle
As she plunges into the blue water dotted with identical white faces
But the thick, dark crimson of effort an unknowability
That comes from a history erased.
My blackness is knowledge
I hold it carefully
And share it sparingly
Because too much would bring the end of the world.
That’s how my blackness works.

How does your whiteness work?
Are you willing to find out?
Do you even want to know?
If not…why is that so.

–ALD

 

Full Text: “Blackness”

Full Recording:

Give Me A Break…

.Reading time 4 minutes.

“During Jim Crow…the black family was together.” – Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL)

There is no sentence in a rational world that begins with “In Jim Crow times…” and ends with any variation on “…things were better.”  If Byron Donalds’ black conservatism needs to use legal apartheid as part of the equation for black success, he might want to go back to school and learn a thing or two about his own history.  These are the metaphoric “boot straps” that did nothing but trip black people up.  Jim Crow set us back in the arc of moral justice by at least 100 years.

Black families being strong during Jim Crow was not because of the policy, but despite the policy.  Black families surviving through lynching was not because of the threat, it was in defiance of the threat.  Black families existing in the wake of the 400-year slave industry that created the institutional and generational wealth of white western modernity is not a product of that system, it is a miracle of survival.

I have nothing against black people who identify as conservative.  Although I will actively and publicly push back against any people who support policies that create second or third class citizens out of women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, people with disabilities or anyone who doesn’t aspire to be or can’t physically be a white, able bodied, Christian male.  If that identity is an aspirational fetish for Rep. Donalds, so be it.  But framing black conservatism in relation to Jim Crow as any kind of positive force in the lives and legacies of black Americans?  Give me a break!

Lurking behind Donalds’ argument is a deranged version of a black equivalent to white racial purity culture.  The idea that racial integrity should be a major social and policy priority and that it relies on segregation and isolation is, to say the least, difficult.  This is particularly hard to swallow in a country that grew its population based on the rape of black women by white men while simultaneously enforcing powerful miscegenation laws until 1967.  But most crucially in today’s environment, making a case for racial purity and “our country” and the myth of American homogeneity is the foundation of the anti-diversity/anti-equity playbook.  Donalds is serving up the “anti-woke” agenda in blackface.

The main issue is that black history is too important to play political games with…to be reduced to memes and slogans.  Donald Trump can play loose and fast with facts.  That is brand Trump.  It is the way he keeps his fans happy and tuning in.  It’s a game for him.  It is ratings and crowd size.  But Trump has never been black and has never cared about “the blacks” outside of his need for attention. Trump as a property developer, as a television personality and as a politician has proven time and again to be toxic to black people through his attitudes, his policies and his political alliances.  This is the dangerous similarity between Donald Trump and Jim Crow: neither has ever been any kind of blessing to black people.

Black history still matters Rep. Donalds.  We have not yet overcome.  People like the brilliant Abby Phillip are working way too hard to actually move the dial on racial (and gender) equality to let you rewrite some kind of Jim-Crow-as-Blacktopia myth.  So to quote someone who should run for president (RuPaul), “Don’t fuck it up!”

–ALD