No Days Off
I posted about reading @ibramxk’s How To Be An Antiracist months ago. It felt good to be ahead of the curve, to have been put on to his work and writings (Stamped From The Beginning is on deck) before the nation watched the latest slew of lynchings from the discomfort of its quarantined isolation, and white people have been moved en masse to collectively work against the minority of racists who proudly and vocally support and encourage the status quo.
But it is taking me an inordinately long time to read and absorb his relatively short work. I’m finding myself nodding and aha-ing on every page, feeling my gears and perspectives shift with each sentence. As much as I have been an advocate of diversity equity and justice in my classroom, I am becoming more and more aware of the complicity I have been lulled into, the golden handcuffs I have locked around my wrists in seeking change comfortably, in “working within the system to change it”, rather than calling people out for their support, for our support, and perpetuation of policies and systems which are racist in both their design and their execution.
And friends of mine are worried, have told me that I need to take a break, but to be honest I don’t know what that means. From its inception, the United States has ground Black bodies for fodder, raped Indigenous families for land, plowed white women for reinforcements, broken Chinese men with railroad spikes and Chinese women with patriarchy, defiled monuments to enshrine white supremacy, and claimed to be “the land of the free”. But we are not free, none of us, unless all of us are free.
And as much as I want to 🎶raise a glass to freedom🎶 I cannot watch “Hamilton” anymore with its amazingly diverse cast without the shadow of Ona Judge lurking behind George Washington and giving Daveed Diggs’ Thomas Jefferson the side-eye when he quips, “Sally, be a darling…”
Perhaps this is MY come to Jesus moment.
The blanket of blithe comfort under which I have been snuggled is smothering me. If I, Too am America, then I have so much to answer for, beginning with What to the Negro Is the Fourth of July? Because racism and white supremacy don’t take days off. And fireworks are the new bread and circuses.
