I Cannot Sleep

                                                                                               July 7, 2016

Dear Friends,

I could not fall asleep last night. Again. Another murder. Another senseless act of violence and terror against an unarmed man. Against a people. A continuation of centuries of oppression and affirmations that the life of Americans, African-Americans, are still not worth that of their counterparts of a different heritage (save Native Americans) in society.

If you don't know where to start making change, choose courage over comfort. Ask questions. Say sorry. Read. Be still. Write. Unite. Read some more. Ask questions. Grieve. Let others grieve if you are not grieving. Shut up, if you have something dismissive to say. Listen.

Tonight, I still cannot sleep. So, I chose to write.

When I moved to the USA, I had been living in The Netherlands. In four short years that I was fortunate to live in Holland, the Dutch made it very clear to me what the Nazis had done to them as a people and a country during their reign of terror half a century before was not to be forgotten or repeated. This was not put to me as something that only affected the “Jewish community.” Instead it was a national and united-front approach to explaining the horrific history of the past and making clear the rules of the game moving forward. The Dutch were (and I hope they still are) proactive critical-thinking people. They solve problems and the Holocaust and WWII were 19-story high problems.

A few key rules became clear to me soon after I settled into life in Holland. A) Discrimination against people is wrong. Don’t do it. B) We stand up to people who discriminate against others (because it’s the right civil thing to do) C) If you have a problem with someone else, you still do not get to kill them, persecute them, or oppress them. (Now this is not to say that the Dutch don’t or have not oppressed. I could go into their history as colonizers or their way with telling immigrants where they must live, etc. But, that is for a different letter.) Even in the messy reality of a country that colonizes, enslaves, and uses the term “Buitenlanders” (“outside-land people”), these truths were evident and ingrained in me as a resident of this land. (My comments here should not excuse Holland for still deeply colonial in their being and art, in their homogeneity, and oppressive ways/policies of today. I am not attempting to sanitize them or not hold them accountable to their oppressive ways.)

I left Holland at 15 years of age in 1993. I got on a plane to Dallas, TX understanding quite a bit about the middle passage, mass-enslavement of African-Americans and indigenous populations, the Jim Crow south, and the Civil Rights movement. It was most certain in my 15-year-old-mind that upon arriving in Dallas, I would see a very bold  anti-racist and anti-oppression agenda being put forth overtly and covertly to reverse the centuries of oppression and terror that African Americans had endured in this country. I imagined billboards, commercials, news articles, and textbooks extensively centering Blackness and African Americans as a critical part of “our heritage and history.”

I still feel profound sadness for this country when I think of that moment when I discovered that my assumptions were all false. They were mere projections of my adolescent mind. Instead, I was met with segregated communities, schools, and the N word being used in the vernacular.

Looking back, I should have known that it would not be the case just by looking at how Native Americans in this country were and have been treated and erased (I am part of the oppression of Native Americans in this land. I could list all the ways, but that too would be a different letter). However, I still truly had an expectation that at the least people would openly talk about the horrific acts of oppression and terror that only 30 years earlier people were suffering.

I was abysmally wrong. So painfully wrong, it still hurts.

My peers at school did not ask their parents where they were just 30 years earlier while freedom fighters and freedom riders were marching. Where were they when young Ruby showed us the meaning of courage, when Mohammed Ali was speaking truth to the craziness of sending Black soldiers to fight for a country who separated them because they were not equal. What were my peers’ grandparents doing? Did they march? Nothing.

My teachers at a 98% white and affluent private school in North Dallas did not pose such questions to us to disrupt our family dinners and evenings. They didn’t challenge us to think critically about reparations or the implications of segregation on how we live, go to school, commune, congregate, network, and get ahead socially, economically, and emotionally. I loved many of these teachers. The more courageous of them extended the chapter on Civil Rights of our textbook to include a tad bit more on what his experience was during that time. As a teacher myself, I know their intentions were good and their hands felt tied at times. However, they too had a part in erasing the past and not paving the rules of the game moving forward.

And here we are, 2016, and this country is still not willing to have systemic changes to counter the centuries of mass-oppression and terrorizing that has happened. How can we? We are segregated. We are too scared to have courageous conversations with our families, let alone neighbors, or people who live across town. Where are the critical pedagogy curricula (teaching that attempt to help students question and challenge posited "domination," and to undermine the beliefs and practices that are alleged to dominate) centering Blackness, Browness, and Indigenousness? Where are the messages to young and old alike that Black lives matter so much that we will teach you about the horrors of the past, we will not glorify men, women, symbols, and flags who oppressed and terrorized. We will not let you forget so as to not allow this in-grown occult terrorism and othering to continue.

Instead, we will teach you about resistance to enslavement and denounce the notion that the confederate flag is about heritage alone. Where are the math, history, civic, and economics classes in middle and high schools who teach that this country is still very much segregated and therefore so are our schools, hospitals, healthcare, access to mental health, justice system, and pretty much everything else? These questions lead us to scrutinize how we plan for and allocate scarce resources to each of these services.

Where are the questions we should be asking as we examine our privilege? Where are the connections that you don’t have to be a racist to exist and value what your racist society indoctrinates you to value. Where is the facilitating of uncomfortable conversations so we learn how to have them at a young age? I know these are in pockets of California, Massachusetts, and New England as a whole. Maybe even in a few places down in Austin, TX. Perhaps. But, that is not enough.

A peer in Dallas once told me that she was a racist because her parents were that way. This was plenty evidence that the education system had failed her but the repercussions would be deadly only to her oppressed counterparts. I have since heard many college-educated well-paid people (some friends) say that they are _______ (insert code language for racist) because their parents were. Racism is to many a value passed down like religion and holiday traditions. But to many, they passively move about their days not knowing that what they were not taught (race and oppression consciousness) actually makes them part of the greater systemically racist society we inhabit.

A friend once complained to me about the Black boys riding bikes outside of Walmart late at night. He implied that this was because the Black community didn’t care and didn’t have proper child-rearing values. I countered with the fact that if he thought of ALL of the Black community in his city and that only three of ALL the Black children in that community were out riding bikes and that most Black children were indeed home and with their care-givers then it was truly a biased observation of his part (sadly a common one) and the pristine othering of Black boys who carry the least or almost the least amount of value in this country.

The culture that has produced civil servants who shoot a man or woman point-blank several times in the chest while responding to a routine surveillance call is the same culture who produces teachers who don’t examine their privilege and the power that community-building in the classroom (instead of “classroom management”) has to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. It’s the same culture who is horrified by mass shootings but very blatantly gives pass to Dylan Roof as being mentally diseased and not a product of the white supremacy that is alive and well in this country thanks not just to the KKK and their cronies but also to people who claim to “not see race.” It’s the same culture who fights for their second amendment right to carry a gun but are quick to say that Black men who were brutally killed by police should not have been carrying a gun. It’s the same culture that still requires that there be an “Alumni of Color Conference” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in order for voices and issues such as school-to-prison-pipeline to be raised. The same culture that allows for the before and aftermath of Katrina to unfold as it did and then leave it as that.

I am enraged. Not on my watch. Not anymore.

I once heard a courageous angry man say that he was tired of “allies.” He was no longer interested in having allies. This was at first very unsettling to me as I often thought of myself as an ally. Then he went on to explain that he is interested in co-conspirators who are willing to risk something with highstakes to bring about justice and dismantle the historically systemically racist practices of our times which span every aspect of our society. He proposed that until you are willing to show up at a funeral, put your life and/or job at risk for this cause, and denounce police brutality, you rest in the comfort of a privilege that African Americans are still not afforded in this country.

I am done being an ally. I am ready to risk more, do more, say more, write more, and denounce more than ever before.

Still, I will never feel the pain, fear, worry, and grief that my fellow African American mothers, sisters, friends, daughters, feel today and with each senseless killing.

Last night, my son came back from his friend’s third birthday party happy as could be. He fell into deep sleep in the car before we got home. My boy and his friend had a blast bouncing around with their bodies busy with being three year olds. They were parallel in so many ways – both three, both potty-training, both into Paw Patrol, airplanes, and things that pop and bounce, both living on the same floor of the same upper-middle class apartment building. Yet, I know that my son will never have to fear the things his friend will grow-up fearing or watching his back for. His parents have something I will never carry in my heart or truly understand in my soul because they are raising two black boys and I am raising a brazilian-american blonde boy.

My heart breaks, aches, and enrages tonight.

Its not time for a change. It was time for a change a few centuries ago. Now, its time for a conspiracy to disrupt this narrative and the systemic oppression of Americans whose bodies and lives hold a different worth because of their “color”. Quit the counter argument that “all lives matter” because if they did, they would, but they don’t. So take a look and see how you can start being a part of the solution. Question what you believe, have been told, and what you consume. Read, center Blackness, center the oppressed in what ways you can. I will stand by you as you do this messy work and fumble through figuring out how to shed the layers of ingrained preconceptions of the past. Begin somewhere, risk something, and do the work, YOU do the work to decolonize your racist (implicit or explicit) ways. I'll be over here doing my work. 

Co-conspirators unite.

Warmth and light, 

#wheretobegin #wheretocontinue #whatelsecanido #Disrupt #Dismantle #notonmywatch