What I Really Want to Say

This political season has caused almost unbearable stress for the country and for some individuals – like me.

I am glad the former administration was voted out, but I am angry about the debacle that happened between the election and the inauguration of President Biden. The day Biden’s victory was confirmed, people took to the streets to celebrate, COVID-19 notwithstanding. It reminded me of the munchkins who danced in “The Wizard of Oz” after the Wicked Witch of the West was melted – or something – after Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her.

How the munchkins celebrated! And so did Americans when the final result of the election was reported.

But then the foolishness – the evil foolishness- started. The Big Lie. The court cases. The performances by so-called attorneys. The call to martial law. Our dancing of celebration stopped and once again, we – or at least I – found myself wound up, worried, and restless.

Social media is a good place to vent but I cannot really vent the way I want to. I cussed out loud the day of the insurrection. I cuss when I see and hear how the “justice system” is letting many of those accused and arrested for their part in the insurrection get bailed out. Whenever Mitch McConnell speaks, my stomach turns. If I have cable news on (which is rare and will continue to be so) and the anchors are talking about “the former guy” (thank you, President Biden, for this perfect moniker!) I mute the television.

On my Twitter feed, there are things that I see which make me want to write out my basest thoughts, like “I hate …” and I fill in the name of the person of whom I am thinking. As I watch Marco Rubio jump from place to place, issue to issue, trying to land, I groan. His recent claim that he is pro-union made my disrespect for him deepen even more. I not only laughed out loud, I cussed a little louder than usual. (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/marco-rubio-amazon-union-alabama-oped-woke-capital.html) I cringe as I hear Republicans (and now, Gov. Cuomo) use the term “woke,” like they know what it is. They do not. And when I hear Republicans – political and civilian – use the phrase “cancel culture,” I want to sit them down and talk about what it really is to be canceled in this country.

I watched Nikki Haley jump from lily pad to lily pad, one day supporting the former guy and the next day wanting to be back in his good graces, asking permission to visit him at Mara Lago – to which he said no and I could not swallow my disgust. Where is her dignity? Where is the dignity of any of these sycophants who have made the former guy a god on earth?

(https://www.politico.com/interactives/2021/magazine-nikki-haleys-choice/)

Then there is Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose antics and arrogance are beyond ludicrous.

I want to say things like, “the Republicans have no souls” as they continue to spread the Big Lie and other little lies and do absolutely no viable work in Congress, wasting taxpayer dollars by making “Dr. Seuss” books their points of conversation and outrage. I want to say “I hate Mitch McConnell” as he tries to assert the power he did for years, blocking bills that would have helped millions of Americans have easier lives and I cuss in my house as I read reports of how Republicans, none of whom voted for the American Rescue Act of 2021 are now trying to save their political butts by touting the good it will do for their constituents. I want to say that the Republican Party is the party of racists, that it is a party that has no vision except that of stoking, nurturing and incubating the racial fears that so many white people have. I want to say, as I listen to how the former guy really was in cahoots with Russia when it came to trying to manipulate the 2020 election, and I want to say, “I hope you get found out. I hope you get arrested. And I hope you go to jail.” When I hear that the former guy is intent on exacting revenge against Republicans who had the courage to cross him, I want to write what we all know: that if you dig a hole for someone else, you very well may fall into it, and I want to say that exacting revenge is just stupid.

As I watch the clips of all that happened on January 6, I want to say that those who touted “Blue Lives Matter” were and are hypocrites because their actions clearly showed they don’t care about police officers at all. When I see pictures of the insurrectionists climbing up the exterior of the Capitol Building, when I see the pictures of them breaking windows of the Capitol, I still shake with fury, but when I see them carrying American, Confederate, and Trump flags, claiming to be patriots, I cuss and when I hear that they attacked police officers with American flags, I say things that I will not write here. When I heard Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc) say that he wasn’t afraid of the insurrectionists because he could see that they were patriots who loved their country, but that if the group had been members of Black Lives Matter or Antifa, he would have been worried, I called him a racist and when he denied he was a racist, (of course he did that), I put an adjective in front of “racist.”

As I watch the Republicans cow-tow to the former guy, I want to say that the Republicans are cowards, with no morals and no ethics – and I want to add that their spinelessness is disgusting. As I watch and have watched people defy wearing masks as a means of helping to stem the spread of COVID-19, I want to say, “I hope you get the virus, but I hope you don’t go to the hospitals where health care workers have been working their buns off for over a year, trying to keep people alive.” When some of the former guy’s administration got COVID-19, I wasn’t sorry, and I cannot even describe the fury I felt when I learned that the former guy and his wife got the vaccine in private to protect them from the virus he called a hoax, a barrage of words came out of my mouth. I renewed and reviewed my opinion of him as being weak, dishonest, and hypocritical, and also reviewed my opinion that over 500,000 people have died from COVID 19 because of his lack of leadership. The fact that he sneaked and got his virus before he left office just affirmed my opinion.

Then there are the actions of the Republicans to suppress the right to vote of Black people, and as I think about that, my cussing increases exponentially. The audacity and the arrogance of these people is astounding. I want to say, “Y’all cannot win unless you cheat.” I want to say, “Y’all have no compassion or capacity to care about anything other than your own fear of Black and brown people having their voices heard and their needs met.”

Oh, there’s more, but I don’t want to dump it all on anyone who might read this. But like Fannie Lou Hamer said, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. I am tired of white supremacy. I am tired of white folks who whine and cry and cheat in order to win elections. I am tired of racists saying they are not racist. I think folks should own their racism so we can stop fooling around with this “American exceptionalism” myth. The only thing America is exceptional at is holding onto and incubating its belief in white supremacy.

One more thing: everyone knows that if the Democrats are going to help make the crooked places straight, – i.e., get their policies passed – then they have to use the power that they have now. This wrangling by some over not bothering the filibuster is insane. Their indecision makes me cuss out loud. I think they should remember Mitch McConnell, and know that if the tables were turned, he would do whatever he wanted in order to get his agenda passed. It’s what he did while he was majority leader. The Democrats should, as Joe Scarborough once said, “fight like the Republicans.”

That’s all for today. I feel better. I got some of it out.

Thank you for reading these candid exclamations.

Black Faith: A “Pythian Madness”

James Cone, in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree, quotes AME Bishop Bishop Daniel Payne who wrote in 1839,

“Sometimes, it seems as though some wild beast had plunged his fangs into my heart, and was squeezing out its life blood. Then I began to question the existence of God and to say, “If he does exist, is he just? If so, why does he suffer one race to oppress the enslave another, to rob them by unrighteous enactments of rights, which they hold most dear and sacred?…Is there no God?”

Cone writes that W.E.B. DuBois “called black faith a “pythian madness” and “a demonic possession.” In a country where Black people are marginalized and cast aside, many white evangelicals call on their God, which seems quite different from the God on whom Black people have had to call and lean on in order to survive the poisonous fangs of white supremacy.

This struggle with understanding God’s role and place in helping marginalized people is not new; indeed, Moses questioned God in the same way, challenging God in Exodus 5:22-23:

Then Moses turned again to the Lord and said, “O Lord, why have you mistreated this people? Why did you ever send me? Since I first came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has mistreated this people, and you have done nothing at all to deliver your people.”

In spite of that complaint and the pain he was as he wrestled with the “whereness of God,” Moses continued his assignment of leading the Israelites out of captivity, but it was a journey fraught with questions that could not be answered. His faith was, as WEB DuBois would say generations later, a “pythian madness and a demonic possession.”

Many of us try to pretend that everything is all right when so often, it is not. We cannot see. We cannot hear or even feel “the way” from chaos to peace, from confusion to clarity, from pain to peace. Some of us wail and call out the name of God, but others of us temper our crying to God so that it is a faint whisper. We know the testimonies of others; we have heard them say that when they have looked back, they have seen that God was with them, and so they sip on the memory that brings brief moments of numbing from the pain of not feeling God in their here and now.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who broke from the ranks of the Republican Party to vote for the conviction of the former president, got a letter from his family that said that because he had spoken and acted like he did, he had disappointed his family …and God. The sentence stopped me cold. The God of his family was a God who apparently was all right with the uprising at the Capitol, yes, but was also all right with the white supremacist mind-set and beliefs that were the foundation of that uprising. The God of Kinzinger’s family is, apparently, a God is is not only all right with white supremacy but perhaps created it.

It is because of the practice of a religion by some that having faith in this country has a peculiar quality. How can we believe in one who has done “nothing,” as Moses said, “to deliver” the marginalized people in this country? What has been done has been done under pressure and duress, and many who follow the God of Kinzinger’s family would probably say that it would be OK to take away what gains marginalized people have made.

Cone says that “black people’s struggle with God in white America …left a deep and lasting wound.” Black people have had to “trust and cultivate their own theological imagination,” he says, because the God of the majority of culture did not seem to have the desire to reach out to the marginalized, although God had created them as well.

Tomorrow begins the season of Lent, a time where we have an opportunity to examine ourselves, including our souls, to see what we must work to get rid of – not just for 40 days but for the rest of our lives – in order to get closer to God. For some of us, that with which we will have to struggle is a troubled faith that is tinged with anger and anxiety because of the toxicity of white supremacy which is ever before us, and which is ever saturating everything that happens in this country.

We would do well to be honest with God during these 40 days, laying before Her our faith in a way that exposes its tears and shredded seams. We will have to hold onto our faith, in spite of our questions and complaints against it, as did our ancestors, because our faith is the only thing that has kept and will keep us together as we will in a country that refuses to love us, as Doc Rivers said, God notwithstanding.

Amen and amen.

Breathing Easier but Not Easily

When the announcement was made that Joe Biden had won the presidency in the November General Election, I literally took what felt like a cleansing breath. For four years, I had internalized a type of stress that was ongoing. Every day there was some new attack, some crazy Twitter message. The goal of the former president seemed to be to undo the government as we knew it. Bit by bit, he and his administration chipped away at institutions that had been mainstays of this government.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/07/black-lives-matters-police-departments-have-long-history-racism/3128167001/

From the first day of his presidency, there was chaos, from making his press secretary lie about the size of his inauguration crowd (https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-38707723) to making his first official visit to the CIA. (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/trump-visits-cia-day-after-inauguration/580003/) I remember thinking that the visit was weird, but as his presidency moved forward, and he showed continued obeisance and deference to Vladimir Putin, I wondered if there was a nefarious reason that the CIA had been in his crosshairs from the beginning. Was he there because he knew he was going to be compromising America’s security? I wondered about it more as he demanded loyalty from the people around him. While no fan of form Attorney General Jeff Sessions, I found it oddly uncomfortable that he would dismiss an attorney for recusing himself from a situation in which he knew he was compromised and that could have cost him his license to practice law.

The daily attacks on people who opposed him, the daily attacks on “the Democrats,” the daily name-calling, the doing business by Tweet, …all of that made my spirit uneasy. His tenure as president was like a soap opera; there seemed to be very little progress on work to make the lives of Americans easier, even and especially the people who comprised part of his base, but there was sure to be high drama every single day, and people tuned in to see, to hear, and to react.

Then came the coronavirus, and his totally inept handling of the crisis. I still cringe when I remember how this president said the virus would “just disappear,” and how he suggested any number of remedies to get rid of it. I cringe when I realize that his administration gagged public health officials, how he discounted, discouraged, and politicized the use of masks, and how he seemed totally unconcerned with the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were dying from COVID-19 on a daily basis. In the deepest recesses of my soul, I found myself believing that he was using the disease to weed out certain segments of the population. Hearing that Black and brown people were more affected by the disease than whites seemed to be OK with him, a reason, perhaps, to ignore the runaway rate of infection.

So, when the announcement was made that Biden won the election, I breathed easier. I reacted to and rejoiced with people who took to the streets to celebrate his victory. I believed that the 45th president and his administration would just do what others who have lost the presidency have done: accept the results and allow people like me, who were tired of his ineptness, name-calling, and lying, alone.

But I was wrong. His attack on the results of the election – which he said during this campaign that the election could only be lost by him if the election was rigged – was breathtaking in its persistence and scope. He had a pattern of attacking elections that did not go his way. In 2016, he made the claim, (https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-election-rigged-2016-10) and he did it in 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9i80SrDc74) He said during the 2016 election that he had only lost the Iowa primary because Ted Cruz had stolen the election and said in 2009 that Obama had only won the election because the voting had been rigged. (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-longstanding-history-calling-elections-rigged-doesnt-results/story?id=74126926)

That he said it was one thing; that he got millions to agree with him and believe him was quite another. The result was his last-ditch effort to steal (ironic as the mantra of his supporters was “stop the steal) the election from Joe Biden, going so far as to encourage his followers to go to the Capitol and stop the counting of the ballots submitted to the Electoral College. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55640437) (https://www.vox.com/21506029/trump-violence-tweets-racist-hate-speech).

The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, a continuation of violence carried out by his supporters at some state capitals, and the disparity of treatment of these insurrectionists and protesters in the Black Lives Matter movement is why, though I am breathing easier, I am not breathing easily. Trump supporters – which include the rich as well as the poor, the highly educated as well as the uneducated, women as well as men…are angry and are calling their attempts to overthrow governments acts of patriotism. They are not finished and they are not gone. And the fact that many of these supporters are members of law enforcement, and many are ex-military, who operate in a country where they know for the most part that there are two justice systems – one for white people and one for Black- makes my breathing tentative. Where will they go next? Who will they attack? And when?

Too much of law enforcement seems to be on the side of those who want to overthrow the government.(https://www.npr.org/2021/01/15/956896923/police-officers-across-nation-face-federal-charges-for-involvement-in-capitol-ri) That is not new; law enforcement has historically participated in – or has ignored – violence against black people, and of course, the Civil War was fought because white Southerners desired to shut the Union down over the issue of slavery.

The fact that it is not new, however, is not comforting. These people have been emboldened by the rhetoric of the former president and know that they can claim they are using their First Amendment rights in what they are doing and that they will possibly get away with it, (https://www.courthousenews.com/citing-first-amendment-rights-judge-lifts-iowa-ban-on-protesters/) even as some state legislatures are working to put in place laws that would stem the protests of groups including Black Lives Matter. (https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/anti-protest-bills-around-country) (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/11/20/criminalize-protests-civil-rights)

It is worth noting that these actions do not take into account that the BLM protests and what happened at the Capitol are not the same, though MAGA supporters are making that claim. The BLM movement is an attempt to get convince governments to create policies that will stop the legal extermination of Black people by police; the MAGA protests are about wanting to overthrow governments – local and federal – because they are upset with and want to eliminate a world where all people are treated with dignity and respect.

So, I breathe easier, but not easily. The angry white people with guns are prowling the country; we do not know who they are, but they are prowling, waiting to attack, and still wanting to destroy the government. They are working to make laws that will make it even more difficult for Black people to vote. They are openly expressing their desire to kill lawmakers who have not been loyal to the former president. We are not in a good place in this country and will not be until we deal with the moral corruption of this nation, a morality which has brought us to the brink of Fascism.

Until we do that, I will not breathe easily.

A candid observation …

The Prayers of the Fervent White Supremacists

I have always been bothered that people who believe in and live by the principles of white supremacy call themselves “Christian.” It has been anathema to me that one could lift up the name of the Christ, who taught by example that all people matter, even while practicing discrimination against Black people, certainly, but against other groups of people as well.

The God of white male Protestants has been alarmingly approving of racial, sexual, and Xenophobic, homophobic behavior and beliefs, as well as anti-Semitism. It has been troubling, causing many to fall away from Christianity and from the church, and some completely rejecting the person and ministry of Jesus the Christ.

That God – the God of white supremacists – was called upon by white supremacist, MAGA Trump supporters during their attack on the Capitol Building on January 6. In a scene which sickened me to my core, one of the insurrectionists called upon the rioters to stop and pray to the Lord Jesus, asking Jesus to bless their efforts to overturn the American government. (https://faithfullymagazine.com/capitol-hill-attack-video-pray/) They bowed their heads. They lifted up their hands, and they prayed.

“Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” they cried out loud.

It should not have surprised me. White Protestant Christianity has represented the very opposite of what I was taught Jesus was about, but throughout American history, white Protestants have invoked the name of Jesus to support their racism. Racism might be wrong, some would say, but it was not a sin; slavery, they would add, was created and sanctioned by God.

It is notable that some of this nation’s most rabid racists called themselves Christian and were quite religious. Sam Bowers, who when alive was the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, believed that God had called him to “embark on a holy war for white supremacy.” Bowers was a devout Christian; he taught Sunday School, and before he sent members of the Klan out to carry out racial violence, would lead them in a prayer, and often had them fast as well. He ordered the murder of Vernon Dahmer, a Black man who dared register to vote and get other Black people to register as well, and to his dying day (he died in prison in 1982 after finally having been convicted of Dahmer’s murder) never uttered a word of regret.

In his mind, as well as in the minds of so many white supremacists, what he did had been ordered by God.

The late Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., was also a devout Christian but was rabidly racist. He, too, felt that his racism was something God was comfortable with, because “the Bible” sanctioned it – racism, as well as slavery. He was once questioned about his Christianity and his lack of willingness to “love his neighbor as himself.” Wasn’t that racism, he was asked, an abrogation of Christian principles? Byrd said no, it wasn’t. He knew the scriptures, he told an interviewer, and he acknowledged the command to love one’s neighbors, but, he said, “I get to pick my neighbor.”

I thought about his words, and about Bowers’ devotion to his Christian faith. I have no way of knowing, but it is highly probable that, in spite of the racist violence he fomented and in which he participated, he died believing that God was smiling on him, saying, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

Many of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 are probably members of a Protestant church somewhere; many are regular church goers. Some may have had a prayer meeting before they traveled to Washington. This is what they knew: that Jesus was their savior and Trump was their president. What they believed is that their savior was going to usher in their president, with the anointing of God.

The image of them praying in the Senate chambers is sobering, but their belief in God-sanctioned violence to protect and preserve white supremacy is more than sobering. It is offensive.

Their God is not my God. It never was and it will never be. Their fervent effectual prayers are not the same ones I would pray. The God I learned about in Sunday School is not the same one that they learned about. There is but one Bible, but apparently, there are at least two Gods.

A candid observation…

Refusing to Be Erased

(Note: Every Tuesday I write a piece for what I call “Tuesday Meditations” and send them out to those who want to receive them. In light of the brilliant performance of poet Amanda Gorman today at the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, I thought I would share this meditation on my blog because it was an interview of Gorman I heard a couple of days ago that inspired this meditation. I hope you enjoy it.)

Poet Amanda Gorman, national youth poet laureate who will read one of her poems at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, remembers that Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that black people could not be poets. Miffed that Phillis Wheatley, a Black woman, was earning high praise for her poems, Jefferson expanded his beliefs about the capabilities of Black people, writing,”Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Wheatley [sic]; but it could not produce a poet” (p. 44).

Gorman’s description of how Jefferson tried to erase Wheatley as both a poet and a woman, hit a nerve. Is that what Black people and other oppressed people have been fighting? Their being erased as human beings, first, and secondly as human beings with worth, talent, and gifts?

If one feels erased long enough, one begins to buy into the narrative. Little Black children, who are as excited as is any white child to start school, learn quickly, in far too many schools, that their school buildings are in bad shape, with broken windows which go unfixed, no heat in the winter, and no air conditioning in the summer. They see torn and tattered books and too often have teachers who do not believe in them and who are in fact their teachers only because someone assigned them to this building and to these children as a sort of punishment.

Do the children feel…erased?

I was working in Texas when I decided to go to divinity school. When I got accepted, I told the publisher, as well as the editor of the paper and the city/metropolitan editor, because my acceptance meant I would be leaving the newspaper in a month.

A little later that day, the publisher came out of his office and asked me, as I sat at my desk in the newsroom, to what school would I be going. When I told him Yale Divinity School, he laughed out loud and said out loud, “Oh come on! You’re not smart enough to go to Yale! What was your GPA?

While I was taken with his reaction, I was not surprised. I was troubled. I was angry at his arrogance. And I think I was embarrassed. It seemed like all of the reporters stopped writing for a moment, in spite of us all having to meet the deadline for our articles. They stopped. Some turned around to look at me. Others acted like they didn’t know what was going on or what had been said. But they knew.

I felt a number of different emotions that I can remember. I realized that my worth as a writer was obviously not much to this man (though my work won high praise from my readers). Likewise, I realized that my worth as a woman, as a Black woman, and as a Black woman with talent and intelligence was very low. I was a body that wrote articles that helped get information to people. Period. I was an object.

But as I look back, maybe I felt erased as well. I had been a fearless reporter for that paper, walking the streets at night in the city’s red district to talk to prostitutes and find out why they ended up on the streets and walking those same streets during the day with Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, to find out why he did what he did. I interviewed Mikhail Baryshnikov and was allowed to cover sports because I loved sports so much. I managed to get interviews with Doug Williams and did the first interview (I was told) of Patrick Ewing.

I thought I had worth – until this man erased me like I was a word spelled wrong on a chalkboard. I could not put a name on that emotion until I heard Amanda Gorman’s words and read her poem.

In spite of getting erased through discrimination on the job, at school, or in life in general, Black people seem to have an ever-ready piece of chalk, something, that is taken out to redraw and reclaim ourselves. We refuse to be silenced, and we fight being erased, but as long as white supremacy exists, that fight will continue.

The psalmist wrote in Psalm 73 “Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped.” We fight our feet slipping from under us as we are erased on so many levels, in so many ways. We are, however, aligned with and connected to a God who is able to keep us from falling, or, when we do fall, is able to stand us back up and demand that we redraw the lines of our beings, once again claiming who it is God made us to be.

When we know who we are and Whose we are, we refuse to be erased,or to remain erased, no matter how many times it is done.

And we will continue to keep the chalk of mercy, grace, and truth in our pockets. We cannot and will not let anyone have that kind of power over us.

A candid observation …