Category: essays

Thanks for trying but it’s not enough to recycle.

In the quest to find the source of racism and inequality, conscientious Americans today are like fish on a quest for water. I think I discovered the source of racism by the time I was four years old. The majority of white Americans realized something was ‘out there’ around May 25th, 2020, as they watched George Floyd die.

Definition of dissonance

1a : lack of agreement the dissonance between the truth and what people want to believe especially : inconsistency between the beliefs one holds or between one’s actions and one’s beliefs — compare cognitive dissonance

Strength and security isn’t a constant for me. I don’t even know how much of those things I have. They may be fleeting. I have moments of fear, faith doubt anger.

I don’t know if I have good advice for anyone about getting through this time. I am struggling. If pressed to say anything, I’d tell other black people, talk to other black people, as much as possible. You suffer less if you live in a shared reality. Be with wise folks, if at all possible.

An African American Dharma teacher said in a recent online retreat for people of color, people will be having nervous breakdowns. I believe him. I wish it could be easier. He said this in answer to a question from woman who expressed physical symptoms of stress. I have those symptoms. Insomnia, sadness, stomach upset. I get a few hours’ sleep and I think I have this conundrum licked. Then I spend a night without sleep and I wonder if I will survive these times, then I get some sleep and feel a little better, and the cycle starts again.

By the way, white people; don’t go to your black friends or acquaintances or co-workers for any solutions to your angst, guilt, or sadness. We are treading water. We are in a land filled with people who forgo their higher thought processes when they see us walking down the street or sitting across from them in job interviews. You will do it anyway, ask us to make you feel better. I’ve seen it. At the last community where I lived, one of the founders, a white man, asked, after the current president was elected, “Black people have had to deal with a lot of adversity and stress. How do you do it?” He asked me this. I answered “How do we do it? On the whole have high blood pressure, heart attacks and we die.”

We don’t always do that. Some of us persevere because of a simple truth. Some know that we are more than this. I am more than my body. Simple. But it is not an easy truth to live in the day-to-day. Anyone who has tried knows this. I have been meditating and looking at my mind, paying very good attention to it for years for the purpose of healing childhood and inter-generational trauma. I have been saying to my mind, “I am more than this.” And I still struggle with getting through the nervous breakdown and beyond it so that I can get on with the business of healing myself, humanity, and the planet.

If I never thought of meditating, I might be blissfully unaware of any feelings out of the ordinary. But I do meditate and I’m glad that years ago, I had a jump on how to get through this day by meditating. Now is a good time to start a practice if you don’t have one. It is not a great time, but it is the only time you have. I don’t feel at my best right now, but I know I am lucky because I have a practice.

I was listening to a talk where I live here on full presence mindfulness, and I believed that Rinpoche was talking about us having an effect on reality with our thoughts, or that is what I took from the talk on the reading. I’ve heard it before, manifesting reality. And, I’d call what we’ve done with the planet and the culture of humanity ‘feedback on our collective thought processes.’ This culture could benefit from nearly every one of its people trying something else in the way of thought processes, something other than or in addition to what we have been thinking.

This is what I believe and say about these times when I am in a zoom circle, and when I start talking to the black people among us. I say with certitude that we are all prepared for these times, or we would not be here listening and hearing each other’s words in these conversations.

The legend of Harriet Tubman is now a movie, but before she was a movie title, I learned about her in Sunday school growing up. She is not a suggestion that there is someone out there that we must wait for to rescue us. Her legend is about us all having the potential to be despised, enslaved, beaten and hit on the head with a lead weight, and turned into a superhero with eyes in the back of our heads. I understand the problem with the superhero narrative. It simplifies the goings on in the world down to good versus evil, as it declares war on something. Okay. Let’s call her an alchemist of situations and circumstances by way of her thoughts and beliefs. Let us suppose that this time is very critical, and it’s challenging to our nervous systems because we are solving the dilemma of how to save ourselves from extinction by shedding the unsustainable ideas in our minds.

The Founding

There is no way, from my point of view, to ascribe benevolence to owning another human as chattel, unless whoever uses that descriptive suffers from psychosis.

Thomas Jefferson’s mansion stands atop his mountain like the Platonic ideal of a house: a perfect creation existing in an ethereal realm, literally above the clouds. To reach Monticello, you must ascend what a visitor called “this steep, savage hill,” through a thick forest and swirls of mist that recede at the summit, as if by command of the master of the mountain. “If it had not been called Monticello,” said one visitor, “I would call it Olympus, and Jove its occupant.” The house that presents itself at the summit seems to contain some kind of secret wisdom encoded in its form. Seeing Monticello is like reading an old American Revolutionary manifesto—the emotions still rise. This is the architecture of the New World, brought forth by its guiding spirit.

In designing the mansion, Jefferson followed a precept laid down two centuries earlier by Palladio: “We must contrive a building in such a manner that the finest and most noble parts of it be the most exposed to public view, and the less agreeable disposed in by places, and removed from sight as much as possible.”

The mansion sits atop a long tunnel through which slaves, unseen, hurried back and forth carrying platters of food, fresh tableware, ice, beer, wine and linens, while above them 20, 30 or 40 guests sat listening to Jefferson’s dinner-table conversation. At one end of the tunnel lay the icehouse, at the other the kitchen, a hive of ceaseless activity where the enslaved cooks and their helpers produced one course after another.

During dinner Jefferson would open a panel in the side of the fireplace, insert an empty wine bottle and seconds later pull out a full bottle. We can imagine that he would delay explaining how this magic took place until an astonished guest put the question to him. The panel concealed a narrow dumbwaiter that descended to the basement. When Jefferson put an empty bottle in the compartment, a slave waiting in the basement pulled the dumbwaiter down, removed the empty, inserted a fresh bottle and sent it up to the master in a matter of seconds. Similarly, platters of hot food magically appeared on a revolving door fitted with shelves, and the used plates disappeared from sight on the same contrivance. Guests could not see or hear any of the activity, nor the links between the visible world and the invisible that magically produced Jefferson’s abundance. Read the entire article

Smithsonian Magazine

Tulsa

The Tulsa race massacre (also called the Tulsa race riot, the Greenwood Massacre, or the Black Wall Street Massacre) of 1921 took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.^[1] It has been called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.”^[15] The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest black community in the United States, known as “Black Wall Street”.

Rosewood

Before the massacre, the town of Rosewood had been a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Trouble began when white men from several nearby towns lynched a black Rosewood resident because of accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been assaulted by a black drifter. A mob of several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors from the town hid for several days in nearby swamps until they were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. No arrests were made for what happened in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by its former black and white residents; none ever moved back, they were never compensated for their land and the town ceased to exist.

Whether we know it of not, we are witnessing a shift in momentum for this country and the entire world. An increasing momentum to evolve. This momentum may have started with an unknown man or woman who jumped off of a slave ship rather than be enslaved in this land. It may have been furthered by Denmark Vesey, Harriett Tubman, and Geronimo, furthered by their desire to not rest until they were free.

I live a hundred million light years away from white people on this planet. I remember when I was about five, a white boy who lived next door to me took a hammer and smashed my fingers as I walked along the side of a fence between our houses. His mother stood on the back porch unflinching with her arms folded in front of her. There were no cell phones with video cameras. So, yes, in answer to any queries, I’m sure it happened. What did I do to provoke him. you ask. What, under the sun, could I have done to deserve that?

This is my America, A hundred million light years away from whiteness.

The founding fathers, all but one, owned slaves in order to amass fortunes. They considered my people chattel. In the same breath, these founding fathers mouthed and penned the Constitution. Most Americans from the dominant culture can’t see the founding fathers as anything other than heroes, and me an ungrateful asshole because I consider them assholes.

I don’t have the capacity to have conversations with people whose eyes are sealed so tight. I wouldn’t have any energy left to live.