"Give me light, give me hope, keep me free from birth"

I have been finding quiet moments for prayer and reflection over the last 36 or so hours since the terrorist church shootings happened in South Carolina on Wednesday night, and was listening last night and this morning to many of the songs of the late George Harrison, including, "Give Me Love", one of the most compelling entreaties of self to reach out with full heart and soul to be guided by God's love.  And, I suppose if you don't believe in God, then it is easiest to explain that Harrison is seeking to understand pure Love and to have it guide his thoughts and actions.

Love, God, is the place I go when I cannot make sense of human action, when I need to assess my own motives, when I need to be outside the constraints of myself and my petty existence.  That is a place I have to go to any time I am confronted with just how visceral race relations are in my cherished country.  Visceral - emanating from deep inward feeling - not engagement of intellect.  We feel how we feel sometimes.  Therapists tell us feelings are never wrong - but they need to be explored.  Acting on feelings we have not subjected to examination, assessment, well that can be very wrong and very harmful indeed.  And it is very apparent to me that there is much action taking place in this country that is visceral, devoid of valid intellectual engagement, of self-examination, of the sort of therapeutic dialogue that better enables us to understand the source of our feelings and to work them through in a healthy way.  And hopefully we get to the place where we don't feel hate or feel compelled to act on it. 

Like anyone else of kind heart and empathetic bent, I would love to bind my actions to the sort of soul searching oneness with Love that George Harrison spoke of striving toward, and like anyone else of imperfect nature I fall short time and again.  But I keep trying, keep self-examining, keep reaching out, and keep saying things out loud  to find out what they mean and how to make sense of them, so that I embrace love and repel hate.

I have a terrible, painful memory of what for many years I felt was unforgiveable bigotry on my part.  I was a small child, four years old, sitting in the way back of our station wagon in the parking lot of a private school in San Diego.  Our car was crowded with my mother, me and five of my sisters while my father was interviewing for a job he would never take because at the end of the day my mother did not want to move away from her hometown.  Boys were coming and going from class at the school, all in crisp khakis, white oxford shirts and maroon sweater vests or blazers.  It was not a particularly diverse school, mostly clean cut white boys not yet challenging the constraints of conformity in the mid turning to late 1960s, the view was mostly homogenous.  But there were a few Asians, some Latinos and a very few African Americans.  I watched about seventy or eighty boys file by the car moving from one class to the other, and only three were black.  Two sported the same crew cut as most of the other boys at the school, but one had a mini-Afro developing and it was bleached out at the tips either by the sun or chemicals.  It was the late summer of 1966 and these were the last few days of their summer session at school.  These three boys walked together from one set of classrooms across the quad and toward the classrooms on the other side of where we had parked.  They were probably thirteen or fourteen years old. 

I turned around to face my mother and commented that the young man with the orange-tipped mini-Afro looked wild, like a monkey.  My mother was horrified, and I could see immediately in her face that she could not believe what was coming out of my mouth.  Without even knowing why yet, I understood I had said something terrible.  Fortunately, my mother didn't just scold me and advise that 'we don't ever say something like that', she explained why it was so offensive.  She told me some things people sometimes said about Sicilians like her, but how those were generally cultural and not physical 'denigrations', and why it was never acceptable to compare any human being to an animal.  She went on to tell me that I was too young and lacked sufficient human experience to understand just how badly we, as a human family, had treated Africans, and later black Americans, "but someday you will begin to grasp the magnitude, the scope of time without relief from oppression and violence, the venal disregard for human dignity", she advised, "and then however bad you feel right now about the implications of what you just said will seem insignificant to how bad you should feel."  She always spoke to me as an adult, often with words I could not fully understand - but this was very clear to me.  I remember sobbing, feeling so bad about being so offensive, and she did not comfort me and say it was okay.  It was the most profound lesson she taught me in my early life.  After that my eyes were upon her actions and those of my father, as my ears attuned to their words in the ensuing years to determine that they were consistent and to look for guidance. 

What I remember now is that my mother did not take issue with the way I would stare at and moon over the cover of one of my father's Harry Belafonte albums - because I thought (and probably still do to this day) that he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen.  Ditto with Sidney Poitier when I asked if it was okay for me to go see "A Warm December" when I was about ten (or my crushes on Bruce Lee, William Holden and Carlos Santana all in this same timeframe and for no particular reason).  Harry Belafonte wasn't a 'black' singer or Poitier a 'black' actor to me nor were they pointed out as such by my parents, although my parents were very much aware of the deep civil rights commitments of both of these men and they respected and admired them for it.  Somehow, as I was growing up, it was conveyed through how we lived our lives (my grandparents included, as they brought a number of their friends back from South Vietnam and helped them get residency as the war there escalated, and one of the stories my grandmother told me to comfort me during a prolonged stay with them when I was sick as a child was of the children who welcomed her and her older sister when they had to move to the black part of their Tennessee town after he mother was widowed) - that people are people.  We certainly recognized cultural and physical differences, and I remember my mother struggling over interracial dating with my two oldest sisters, but she conveyed to me that her fears were about harm coming to my sister or to the boy she was out with, because of what others held in their hearts. 

I didn't share her fears, although I suppose they were understandable.  Those were volatile times.  In the wake of the church bombings and lynchings and assassinations of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement had emerged amidst some fairly general anarchy.   I guess what got lost was that white power movements didn't disappear, they just receded from the mainstream.  We let ourselves believe they were not just dormant, but dying.

By the 1980s, when I was in college, a white girl going to a Mecha or a BSU dance was not an act of defiance or solidarity, it was about going to the dances with more and better music.  But, even in the midst of mindless college fraternization and frivolity, I read, witnessed, remembered.  We looked out to other trouble spots in the world, South Africa, the always tense Middle East, where issues of racial and religious injustice seemed most harsh.  We allowed ourselves to think those were the problem areas and we had continued to move forward in a society of equality.  Late in that decade I got married and after introducing my Nigerian born husband to one of my old college friends, the friend, a young man who had shared a suite with buddies of all racial origins and who had certainly presented as somewhat counter-cultural in the buttoned down yuppie times into which we emerged from the womb of collegiate protection - commented to me "Wow, you guys have really got it made professionally what with affirmative action and all".  A comment off the top of his head, I supposed, but it stung as it seemed to demean both my husband and me as somehow likelier to succeed than him (he was an Anglo-Saxon male) based solely on gender and race privileges we would accrue in the business world.  Since  our experiences had been just the opposite of that - if any doors were ever opened to us, they led to multi-storied opportunities devoid of staircases (and that ever present glass ceiling) - and continued to be so, I wanted to disabuse him of his theory.  But, it was a wedding and not the time or place.

I think that is what most racial injustice this far into human experience is about.  It is not about any real perception that an ethnicity or race or gender is lesser, but that someone of that race or ethnicity or gender is going to get something in life that we do not get, that we are denied.  We are a global economy and we are increasingly a multi-racial species rather than a species of significant, distinct races.   The planet has become smaller, sources of education and communication far advanced, and so we can no longer live in real ignorance of our similarities across cultures.  It is a time in history when we should be able to celebrate the diversity of cultures even as we preserve the history of each.  And why in this country in which I was born after so much history of sanctioned mistreatment and separation and so much having been sacrificed to the effort to overcome and equalize - do we still have citizens walking around believing they have the right to harm or kill black people?  Yes, this type of hatred extends to other groups, genders, etc. - but we have not yet fully resolved the centuries' long problem that began with slavery.  Jim Crow, the great evil that emerged in the south and endured for more than a hundred years through the Civil Rights movement, was more harmful even than the atrocities, corruption and disarray of generations of post-colonial unrest in many countries in Africa.  And then things seemed better, I guess, at least in California where I grew up.  Yes, we still saw and felt some unease, some displeasure, but the violence, the terrorism, the entrenchment wasn't apparent.  Until we elected a black President.  I can't really tie the renewed violence and absence of a public dialogue to anything else.  I remember my father telling me how there would never be another bombing killing little girls in their church.   There would be no more disappeared/murdered civil rights workers.  We saw the evil for what it was and we called it out by its name, and we could now move forward.  I feel I have to call this one as I see it, for electing Barack Obama crossed a line that apparently some in this country did not want to cross.  It wasn't about one person, about any political party, it was about what that meant.  Anyone, any black American, could now grow up to be President.  Why did I see that as hopeful and about damn time (and I'm waiting for the day when a woman can lead this country too), and clearly so many others saw it as a threat?  What did it mean to them?  Why did it frighten or anger them?  What is it we have not said out loud to each other what we need to say out loud and start analyzing?


Why are there immediate apologists for a terrorist, citing mental issues after Wednesday night's mass shooting in a church?  Does anyone think Timothy McVeigh was really well-balanced emotionally and mentally?  But when he blew up the Murrah building and we saw those bodies coming out of the buildings, including little tiny ones in firefighters' arms, we called the act out for the terrorism it was.  It was motivated out of hate.  What happened in South Carolina evolved from the same sort of hate.  And we have to stop saying "if the victims were white we wouldn't be having this conversation'.    No excuses, we have to have a dialogue on race, on equality, on acceptance of where we've been and what we've done as a people and the harm it has caused and will continue to cause until we stop making excuses.        

The dialogue we need to have makes many people uncomfortable.  That is unfortunate, because for many more there is no real peace, no true safety, no semblance of equality, nothing that approximates actual freedom- without that dialogue and the progress it must bring about.  As a white mother in a black family I have experienced much that makes me hopeful about race relations in this country, and much that causes me alarm.  I have a cloak of invisibility at times that forces me to see things while remaining unseen for who and what I really am.  As my former husband advised me before we married, I would be giving up my culture, my race in some aspects as we married and especially as we had children, and he was right.  He understood this as someone who had to discard some of his own culture in coming to America, in assimilating, in leaving behind the legacy of having been born Yoruba in Nigeria where his ethnic group were the political leaders in a country of diverse cultures, religions and ethnicities to venture into the middle of America where his heavy accent and his deep chocolate complexion made him even more of a minority than just being a black American would.

And here we stand fifteen years into the 21st century in America, and things should be better, safer for ALL of us.  Regardless of political affiliation we should be proud that we live in a country where someone from a multicultural background, with a broad worldview, grew up to become president - that this was possible here.  Any white child, any black child, any brown child, any child regardless of gender, can grow up to be president here.  Except the ones who are killed because they are black, or because they are Muslim, or Jewish, or because we think their parents came here illegally, or because girls shouldn't be able to do everything boys can do.   Nine people in a church in South Carolina are not alive today because of hate.  A group of Amish girls are not alive today because of hate.  Countless Jewish Americans are not alive today because of hate.  Matthew Shepherd is not alive today because of hate.  The list goes sadly on and on.  What do we think they are getting that was supposed to be for us?  What are they receiving that they didn't deserve?  What threat are they posing to our worldview or our religious views that simply cannot be tolerated or allowed to exist for one more minute?  And why do we think that we are the arbiters to determine the level of human dignity any other person should receive, let alone to determine who gets to breathe free and who has to stop breathing?

My mother was right all those years ago not to comfort me and tell me it was okay, that I hadn't understood the implications of what I'd said.  I spoke out of ignorance, and she schooled me, but the reality was I had said something harmful and unacceptable, and I needed to feel discomfort to think about how I would feel on the receiving end of such words.  And I've known the pain of having to bury a child, though gratefully not due to an act of violence.   We need a better dialogue in this country, more personal accountability for actions.  And, we need it now.  I pray we get it and that God hears me prayers and keeps my heart open.  Please God, don't let me know the pain of burying a child due to racial violence.  Instead "Give me love, give me love, give me peace on earth.  Give me light, give me hope, keep me free from birth.  Give me hope, help me cope - with this heavy load.  Trying to touch and reach you, with heart and soul."