Let me begin this post by declaring that contrary to some beliefs, one person cannot speak for their entire race, group, or culture. As we all know there are innumerable diversities at work in every individual and my comments with regard to the subject of race, religion, culture, or any other category under which one might feel comfortable placing me are solely the reflection of my personal experience.
With that said, I would like to continue my honoring of what we call Black History Month with some more perspectives on race in America. I am doing this because I find it worthy to give my energies toward this effort. God has given me the experience of living all over this country and traveling to other countries as well as the opportunity to speak with all types of people across extremes from a hardcore white racist in Mississippi to hardcore militant Black separatists in NY. What I have learned from these experiences is that very often people are having very different conversations when it comes to push button topics. Most of the time, people are so concerned about being heard that they rarely listen. As a result, hurt feelings and misunderstandings are often perpetuated. Even when people sit down and try to “reconcile” as it were, very little gets accomplished, because, as I say, “hurt people hurt people.” In other words, when someone feels slighted, it is often very difficult to restrain from projecting that pain onto someone else. I will skip getting into the psychology behind that and get to the point of this post.
If you watched the video link from the movie, Amistad, featuring Djimon Honsou as Sengbe Pieh and assuming you have a heart and a human conscience, you should be able to access the feeling required of you to get the point I am about to make. When Sengbe screams out “Give us us free!”, that is “Give us our freedom!”, he is tapping into the natural human instinct toward self expression. “Give us us free!” We all know that feeling to some degree and some of us know it more than others.
So last week I got into a conversation with the nephew of Malcolm X. No seriously, I did. We didn’t talk long, but in the few moments we talked I could feel the power of his convictions and the depth and almost burden of his knowledge. He is so well aware of the psychological factors that effect many African Americans that I can only imagine that it must weigh on him from time to time that many of us today do not understand the emotional, mental, and psychological struggles that generations of our ancestors had to endure for us to have any semblance of expressed freedom in this country. Now I say expressed freedom specifically, because no human can give another human freedom. It is not theirs to give or take away. One can only, through manipulation, restrict another’s ability to express their God-given freedom. But in reality we all are free–even if we don’t know it or don’t want to be. And as I expressed in my last post, we are bound by what we bind. So if we hold someone down, we are ensuring that we have to stay down with them. HAHAHA. I love the way the Universe works.
Anyway, in our conversation he mentioned that what some people don’t get–black and white–is that when Africans were kidnapped and brought here and forced to labor, the debilitating psychological effects became engrained and if they are not confronted they will continue to plague us. That’s the Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome, I mentioned in my last post. He then went on to say that it is funny how when one person like Elizabeth Smart gets kidnapped, the nation gets it. They say, “Poor girl. It’s terrible that she had to be in captivity for 9 months and forced to work and be the wife of some man she did not know”. And it is true. It is terrible. NO ONE SHOULD EVERY HAVE TO GO THROUGH ANYTHING LIKE THAT! If Elizabeth Smart came to us saying she had a hard time adjusting to the world after her 9 month ordeal, we would understand. That’s because as humans, we sympathize with those who have been held captive. We would not tell her to “Get over it.” While it is true that the ideal hope is that someday she’ll make peace with her experience and perhaps even transcend it (My translation of “Get over it.”), we must understand that she cannot do that easily without the support of those around her.
Well, after my conversation I did a search on “kidnap recovery psychological” and found an article on the victims of kidnapping in the L.A. Times. If you dare read the article and see just how disturbing kidnapping is to a person and their families, you will get just a pinch of what the effects might have been on African people who were snatched up, sent across oceans, and then sold like property perpetually for 400 years. Elizabeth Smart was found 18 miles from her home. I am not taking anything away from her experience. If anything, I sympathize with her to some degree, but I cannot ignore the reality that people–to include me at one time–do not get that the wounds of slavery in America run deep. Again, this is not about guilt. I hate guilt. It is a useless waste of energy. Consciousness is what I am talking about. We have to start thinking and stop being zombies. We need to get headaches from thinking out of the box once in a while and stop looking for ways to distract ourselves from reality.
At some point I believe that we will all transcend this, but for now, we need to have the same conversations. We need to face the facts. There’s a poisonous mentality out there that says, “Their problem is not my problem.” It doesn’t matter who the “they” is, if someone has a problem, one day it is going to be your problem. Like Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
I’ll be honest, whenever I write stuff like this, I wonder if my white friends, who “don’t consider me black”, will feel uncomfortable. But in my mind, friends should be able to be honest with each other and be uncomfortable around each other. I tell them the truth, because I believe that they sincerely want to know me. I have to remind some people that this actually isn’t a compliment and that in many cases, “to not consider me black” is to mean that they consider black to be something and that I do not match what that something is in their mind. (I know some people mean it as our relationship transcends race.) At the same time I wonder if some black people who aren’t friends with me and don’t know me or my history see that my wife is white,–even though black people tell her they “don’t consider her white”–will feel like I have lost my right to comment on these subjects. (Yes some black people think like that because they too have an idea of what black is and don’t think I or anyone who thinks differently than them match it.) But then I remember that if people from differing perspectives don’t talk honestly about these issues then we will continue to live in a world where assumptions are arguing against assumptions. (ASSUME = Ass + U + Me)
I’ll be honest, for a long time I struggled with what I was called to offer with the life I have lived. Without God, my life looks like a mess of confusion. But because I have been exposed to tremendous diversity all of my life, I have cultivated a means of communicating honestly with everyone I meet. But what I have found is that most people do not want honest. They want what makes them feel better about themselves and the fact is that often those two are not the same thing.
I prayed a long time ago that God would turn my dysfunctions into my functions and it looks like it is finally starting to kick in. I feel like we are all called to this purpose at every level of society. So to me, that means that America is called to demonstrate a consciousness of communication, forgiveness, healing, reconciliation, and harmony of differences. Using the dysfunction to function model, the people of this country could actually do a lot of good in the world if we could just get honest with ourselves and stop pretending like we have everything under control. My continual theme for this month is going to be that we are bound by what we bind and are set free by what we liberate. My hope is that with these posts I can spark some honest conversations among people and we can start communicating at the same table. I know that we will not necessarily see things the same way, but at a minimum, we can work to get on the same page.

Recently, I heard that another childhood acquaintance, who we called “Professor”, died from a gunshot wound. When my mom told me, I felt this wave of feelings pass through me and for a brief moment I felt like I might be next. It was a familiar feeling that I had grown up with—the persistent consciousness that everyday could be my last. For a long time I prized that sense of impending death because I had found that living with the expectancy of death was a good way for me to overcome any threats people put toward me. “You can only kill me once”, I thought. “And since I am not afraid of death, anything else you try to say or do to threaten me is meaningless to me.” It was my super-power that served me well in my different neighborhoods and other areas of life where for years I attracted the aggression of others. Because of this, by the time I reached high school, I had come to believe that I would never live pass 18, so even though it was difficult to withstand some of the pain I experienced, the thought that I only had to survive high school without ever succumbing to the negative energies surrounding me, pulled me through. When I reached eighteen and was not dead, I felt like my assassin lurking in the shadows must have been sleeping on the job, so I took my chance and got out of Dodge. Still, every time I hear that someone I know was killed or died, I start feeling like I am in one of those Final Destination movies and I become hyper sensitive to the world around me.









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