Category: people of color

Black Deaths

.Reading time 3 minutes.

It may go without saying
Upon seeing my brown face
That I will always
And emphatically insist that
Black Lives Matter.
I have heard the arguments
And listened patiently to the counterpoint
Knowing I am neither heard
Nor understood, in the wind of the flatulent rebuttal,
“all lives….”
But really, this isn’t about black lives
It is actually about black deaths
and how they have never really mattered
in the white man’s world.
The strident calls for action
Coming from full lips and carved bodies
Dipped in golden, umber and ebony skin,
Their cry is not even a whisper in the shriveled rose pink ears
Of this ongoing colonial experiment.
In a history of proximity to whiteness,
Black deaths are unremarkable, unmarked, unnamed
Unknown and entirely unheard.

Black deaths…
like so much spoiled grain
shoveled off the deck of a boat and disposed of mid ocean
Black deaths…
from being flogged as beasts of burden
neither mourned nor memorialized
Black deaths…
that satisfy white fetishes for sexual heroism or conquest
Black deaths…
in burning crosses and exploding churches
Black deaths…
in segregated wars defending global white imperial oppression
Black deaths…
in the name of white science, the benefit from which black bodies are excluded
Black deaths…
in systems of servitude and serving time
Black deaths…
from weapons kept legal so white entitlement can lethalize fear
Black deaths…
in weekly hashtags that normalize the terror
and make suffering a brand
Black deaths…
nations, cities, hospitals, mothers, babies…

In these ways and many more
Even as you read this
Black deaths have not mattered
Black pain has not mattered
Black feeling has not mattered
Black lives have not mattered,
Because black humanity does not matter
…cannot matter
…is not matter
Beyond being one of the “master’s” most versatile tools
Used to inscribe the outline of a white world
Giving contrast and context to the caricature of empty racial lies.
How could black lives matter
When black does not have death,
but is merely erased.

–ALD

I offered this poem as part of a workshop at the recent Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina.  The workshop (God is the Fact That…: Living to Die) explores the ways in which personal theologies about death may provide bridges across spiritual and cultural barriers.

#FeedtheFeverofLove

.Reading time 4 minutes.

This morning, I could write about the sickness of gun culture. I could write about the incompetent presidential administration. I could write about another nation working to sew discord in ours. I could write about yet another white mass murderer captured alive. I could write about politicians who value job security over lives. I could write about many things for many people…

But today, I’m writing specifically to the people of color in my chosen faith tradition of Unitarian Universalism asking us all to invest in better direct communication with one another. I believe that we are uniquely positioned to lead the change that the world needs to embrace. We have the creativity, the diverse and divergent views that don’t abandon each other in crisis and frankly we have the trans-generational resilience to stick it out, however long the struggle takes. If we want to see a healthier world, it must begin somewhere and I believe it can begin with us.

I am a casual student of the history of war. I am fascinated by the human desire to destroy the one thing that we all share…life. In that study, I have learned that the primary difference between warfare before WWI and afterward was the proximity of combat. WWI was the first widespread use of weaponry that allowed for anonymous killing. Machine guns, more powerful rifles, advanced bombing techniques and air power allowed mass killing to be faceless. Although there were plenty of horrifically deadly conflicts prior to “The Great War” none had previously been so impersonal.

As I see it, the latest iteration of that anonymous battlefield has become social media.

My personal prayer is that Unitarian Universalist people of color learn to lead the way in detoxifying our own discourses, de-emphasizing the veil of social media and remembering that if it can be said on a smartphone through Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, it can also be said by dialing someone’s number and talking directly to them. And even if it is not about talking in real time, or face to face, we can at least work to recapture the art of deep listening in social media spaces. I am not “calling out” any specific situation or person/people.  I have been wrestling with this for a few years now.  What is more, I also acknowledge that everyone has different ways of communicating for any number of reasons both physical and technological. But none of us can afford to forget that people of color have already had their faces and their identities too frequently erased by the dominant culture.  It does none of us any good to be doing it to ourselves whether it be by shutting each other down, shutting each other out, or shutting each other up. We have an opportunity to model the multi-cultural, interfaith world that everyone else just talks about as a pipe dream. But we must actually be in conversation with each other in order to do so.

Starve the sickness of self-righteousness; feed the fever of love.

#feedthefeveroflove

– ALD