Tip of the iceberg: An average life

This is how I feel right now.  I am in 9th grade reading Huckleberry Finn with my class and each time they call Jim a nigger, I cringe.  And it's said over and over.  Many look at me sympathetically, shrug their shoulders, some even touch me on the arm if they are close enough because we all know, no matter how we all long for the adventure, that poor, ol' Jim and I have more in common than Huck and me.  I don't deny that most feel uncomfortable with the language that is explained away with a "that's how people spoke of black folks at that time" but when we move on to "A Farewell to Arms" everyone else can drop their shame, their melancholy, longing for the expectation that I have forgiven this past and that "we've come a long way, baby" and get back to modern living.

But I see Jim and I know him because, though you may be looking at me and seeing an upper middle class, well-educated, articulate, funny, put together (at times) African-American (I prefer Black) woman with a handsome, French husband and two beautiful mixed kids, I come from a long line where Jim and folks like him are roots on my tree.  I am, as the expression goes, the tip of the iceberg, but under the surface is a lineage of survivors and thrivers, former slaves and slavers.  We are mixed by choice and very often not.  I spent my early years and my summers on the front porch of my grandparents' home at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  Though I lived in a white neighborhood in New Jersey and believed myself assimilated, I sat at the feet of my grands and great-grands and heard about racism firsthand.  Not just being called "nigger" or "blackie" or "brown sugar" by white kids testing their power and position in the wide streets of the suburbs, but pervasive, oppressive, strangulating cruelty that only served to threaten and stunt the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social growth of black people.  These were not stories or headlines.  These tales were the lives of my family and my ancestors.  No matter where I am in the world, this is the ground beneath me.

I did not grow up the way many envision black people growing up.  Not because it is so rare but because you don't know us.  And if you do, really do, then I am not talking to you, but I would venture to guess that you don't really.  I dream of a life that is banal, no more exciting or charged than that of anyone else, maybe even the default.  The life you think of when you think of every day life.  And then I wake up and remember that I am black.  That I am a black, sensitive, creative woman who, by nature of being black in America, cannot live an average life.  That my life is meant to define, describe, explain, assuage, and calm the feelings of other citizens allowed to live their mundane lives while mine is fraught with symbolism and metaphor and hyperbole.

My grandmother told me often that she wanted better for me, for all of us, was grateful for what she'd seen us achieve in such a short amount of time, hoped that "white people were fair and good" to us. There was palpable fear and doubt, but also hope.  I wanted to tell her, to show her that all her suffering and her efforts had not been in vain, that we were advancing.  That the rapes, assaults, laws, white supremacy, and pervasive and accepted racism were seen as the horrors they were, were being put firmly in the past, and that WE were being seen for the "content of our character."  And the advancement of our family specifically was tied to our advancement as black people in America collectively.  Many black families will tell you the same. For us to be able to just be average, regular, unspectacular, under the radar, just living our lives gave her hope.  It was the tip of the iceberg.  She was sure we'd overcome.  I carried that hope for her.

There were small things that reminded me we hadn't come as far as I'd hoped.  My father getting followed home by the police on a morning run.  People assuming he was a ball player because he drove a nice car.  Having a very hard time finding an apartment even with full time employment, good credit, and a clean record.  Having to consider that I had a clean record.  Listening to people tell me, when hearing my experience as a black woman in America that racism wasn't the problem but poverty and elitism.  Um, AND those too.  Having to qualify that though, yes, micro-aggressions were not the same as being beaten or killed in the street, dealing with them was still incredibly damaging to the psyche. Having someone, a "friend" write something about "hey, blacks, I've suffered too and look at me" on my Facebook wall in response to more proof of the systemic racism that prevails in our country.  Imagine trying to be part of a group or society or country but when the conch shell gets passed to you, everyone talks over you.  Tells you it's not your turn.  

If we meet you with rage, if we meet you with anger, you call us animals and beat us or pepper spray us or shoot us.  If we ask for a fair shake, an opportunity, a chance, you say we are angling for special privilege.  If we write stories or articles or blogs about our experiences on the outside, you say we, WE are the ones being divisive.  If we tell you we are hurting, we are tired, we are traumatized by the rhetoric, by the hatred, by the violence, the unrelenting insensitivity and ignorance, you say buck up. When innocent black men, women, and children are murdered, people who look like us, in epic abuses of power, and no justice comes on their behalf.  When we cry for them, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, friends, we are asked to consider why they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing.  We are told that if they'd just listened, behaved, respected the law and the policies that were not designed with them in mind, they might have lived another day to face it all again.   

This racist system is real and it's killing all of us.  Not just Black people, but our country.  It's not that we are a nation divided by black and white because that isn't true.  It wasn't then and it isn't now.  But racism, complacency, white privilege and its hideous cousin, white supremacy do threaten to tear us apart.  And everything that anyone finds great about this nation will crumble into the seas like the icebergs of white and blue and purple crumbling under the heat of global warming.  We are dying ever so slowly from a disease that feels impossible to stop.  We are sure it is going to overtake us, consume us.  It just might.  Like people suffering from illness, we can resign or we can fight it with all we have.  There is prayer, meditation, and there is love.  And love...

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  1 Corinthians 13

I don't deny it, I am sinking, melting into the sea, afraid I will never be solid again.  Each week, as I try to do what everyone else is doing, raising their children, trying to give them values and truths to uphold them, I am crying into the back of my hand, afraid to let them see what lies beneath the surface of their gleaming pyramid called life.  I held the hope for my grandmother and now I hold it for my daughters.  This conversation is just the start.  It's the tip of the iceberg but if we don't tend to it, we are bound to hit the parts below the surface and dash all our dreams of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for an average life made special by our content, by our character, by our cooperation, and by our love.

RIP to the victims of the cowardly act of terrorism in at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.


(c)  Copyright 2015.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.