No Time

3:25 am

I can't sleep.  Within days, two grand juries took a pass on putting those with badges on trial for the murders of black people.  And in between I reel from the death of a child who played with a toy and was gunned down by those with badges and without words of warning.

What sleep I did get was fitful.  Not nightmarish.  The nightmare I can dismiss.  Fitful.  Fistful. Sleep with fists balled, fighting toward a place of stillness where there is no world to weigh on any kind of essence of myself.

And I did not get there.

Pop passed on the maxim from Grandma Annabelle, "Every day's a good day.  If you don't think so, just try missing one."  Most days I awake to that idea as my first thought.  This is a good day.  My waking confirms this day is too good to miss.  Make use of it.  Don't do good, be good.

But I am not there this morning.

What kind of day is today?  How do I negotiate this explicit knowing beyond knowing that the state does not value black lives?  That the condemnation of blackness, as Khalil Muhammad describes it, is woven into the very fabric of this nation?

5:57 am

It's make or break time.  Nation Time.  It's make or break time for my relation to this nation.   (How) Can I move through this specter and let myself be an instrument for positive change?  It is not a good day.  But it is a day.

#RIP(s)

My previous post to the blog was a year ago.  A brief wary note on the comparison of Trayvon Martin to Emmett Till and what I see as a danger in flattening history. Now, I write to process, to fight against this numbness brought on by the recent killings of Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Mike Brown.  As I look for a link, I find that officers of the LAPD last night killed Ezell Ford, another unarmed black person.

I seethe. Racial equality is a pretense.

I want to hold to the idea that historical comparisons to the Civil Rights Era do little to reveal, address, and dismantle race-based oppression in the present.  I want to think in terms of how I want things to be, instead of defaulting to how things were. I want to believe that the Black Freedom Movement helped to improve the life chances and lived conditions of black Americans, and that addressing racist oppression in the present calls for rethinking how it works and formulating new strategies and tactics for how to address it.

But current events (or my exposure to them) leads me to acknowledge that there is a continuum.  This nation is founded on and continues to bank on systematic racist oppression.  The law of the land does not afford black people equal protection.

So, what to do?

Allow myself to be mournful. To deny the impact that these killings have on me is to deny my humanness and my blackness.

Be active. There is work to do. Read. Write. Learn. Teach. Use myself as an instrument to work for justice.

Get connected. Find people and groups working locally to address oppression and lend energy to the efforts.

Breathe.