Everyday Black Matters
On 9/11, I have a vivid image of my husband bounding into our bedroom, swinging open the door and yelling, “Gracee, wake up! We are at war!” My 1st thought, of course was nuclear war. I thought we had days, hours, perhaps even minutes to live. (I know I’m such a drama queen, but seriously who says ‘we’re at war’?)
My experience that day was unlike most. In short, my reaction was extremely complex. At length, I was confused, angry, bitter, racist & immature. I hope I can explain that here.
In the midst of the 9/11, 9th year anniversary, my thoughts today are meant to look at how events like 9/11 contribute to the complexity of race and racial issues. I hold just one perspective of a black American who felt completely divided about the attacks.
Even more, as a biracial woman I felt split down the middle of my very identity; taking sides with myself and such. It’s been a long journey for me that is rife with struggle and tears yet ultimately led me to face the anger and racism towards white people I had held onto since the first time a white person called me a nigger at 6 years old.
Read without taking it personally, please. Two years following 9/11 I experienced significant healing, but remember healing is messy…
By 6pm on 9/11 I was experiencing a myriad of emotions that I can only properly explain in bullet points:
- Along with everyone else, I felt shocked. How could big, bad America allow this to happen? Better yet, why did this happen? And now, what is going to happen?
(And that, unfortunately is where I stopped identifying with what most of Americans were feeling)
- I had a hard time negotiating what I felt about how America has treated other Nations and people groups in the past and perhaps wondering if we were getting what we deserve. (The old chicken came home to roost perspective)? At that point in my life, I was still angry about what America did to Native Americans, slavery, Japanese internment camps and on and on and on and on. We don’t have a glowing past, we can leave it at that. I wondered if perhaps our interactions with other nations had finally come back to haunt us, and so the attacks -for me at least- did not seem to be unprovoked. So, while I wanted to feel badly for everyone and all of the terror of that day, my mind went big & wide and focused on the history of our country instead.
- As an African-American, I was livid at how the news media handled it. I distinctly remember a CNN newswoman saying it was “the greatest tragedy to happen on US soil since Pearl Harbor”. Frankly, I disagree. Excuse my language, but I felt like, “what the HELL?” How could we -as a Nation- so quickly forget the practical genocide of the Native-Americans, the slaughter and abuse of Africans, the slavery of Africans, the lynchings of African-Americans, the concentration camps of early Japanese migrants? How can we overlook those tragedy’s? All which happened on U.S. soil. Additionally, we legally kill more people each week –albeit in the womb– than the number of souls lost that day. I was outside myself with rage.
- In addition to that, I found myself incomprehensibly angry at white people. I kept seeing image after image of white people crying all over the place and my heart just froze up and hardened, sealed right shut. I didn’t know how to feel bad or identify with white people at all in that moment. I wanted to identify with the suffering of white people that day, yet I didn’t want to identify with or associate myself with what they were going through. It felt like that would have been a giant abandonment of the minority perspective. Or the equivalent of taking my arm and sawing it right off.
- I hated that the news media lamented like it was the worst thing that had ever happened in all of human history. I felt the pain of the rest of the world. It was almost as if my mind filtered everything I saw on CNN/MSNBC/ABC through the eyes of a 3rd world country. I saw Rwanda wondering if the mass murder of 800,000+ Tutsis meant nothing?
- What I personally heard and saw the media communicate that day was the value of American lives at the expense of everyone else on the planet. What I saw is something along the lines of: “the world should stop moving because American lives have been lost.” How could we value American lives more than the rest of the world? I felt like our being the most powerful and wealthy country in the world made 9/11 feel like even more of a tragedy to everyone, but it’s not. It’s only equally tragic as the 6,000 African kids who died that day of ringworm. It’s only equally tragic as the many people who have lost their lives in Pakistan in the past few days, yet has made very little news.
- I’m sorry to say that by that nightfall, I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t want to cry for a country who devalued the lives of other human beings. I regret to say, when my husband asked me if I was going to head to the campus for a prayer vigil, I responded badly: “why? I don’t give a f*ck. What you want me to go to campus and hold hands with white students and sing Kumbaya? No thanks.” Anger, anger, anger seeped into my veins as if I had just drank pure acid. My husband looked at me like I had lost my damn mind. (Clearly, I had). He replied, “Okay, you need to go to God right now and start praying. What on earth is wrong with you”?
- I had a hard time with how Arab-Americans were being treated. I grew up in Detroit, which borders Dearborn, MI. Dearborn, MI holds the largest concentrated population of Arabs outside of the Middle East. I grew up with Arabs. They were and are my friends. My best friend is Lebanese. By the time the 2nd tower went down we were on the phone crying together as she contemplated what life would now be like for her Arabic family in a post 9/11 world. I simply couldn’t stand for it. How could I identify with hurting America when I knew doggone well the media was making this out to be an “Arab problem?” I watched as ridiculously hick-like white people made atrocious comments about how the “Arabs were gonna pay for this,” etc. I think my blood started to boil. The anti-Arab sentiment threw me into a giant wall of “us” & “them.” From that moment on it went like this: whites against minorities. Me against America. And from there my mind formed assumptions about who died that day: a bunch of suits. White men going to work in the twin towers. I could have cared less. I was not about to cry for the suits. If I saw them merely as suits, I was able to feed my ravenous hunger for anger and revenge.
- I remember my supervisor being over our apartment that day. He was scheduled to meet with Dave & I at 11am, so he was there for the first few hours of my anger and confusion. I remember him saying, “but it wasn’t all white people! Everyone on the planes and the diversity of the working class in the towers!” I didn’t hear it though. It wasn’t until months later that I did some research about who died that day.
All of these things, swept over me like giant waves in a raging ocean. Here I was trying to deal with years of pent up anger at white people, a misunderstood over-identification with the suffering, a misplaced anger about slavery and the treatment of African-Americans and a confusion about how to be appropriately angry about injustice yet still mourn the individual lives of my enemies experiencing injustice.
Thankfully, 9/11 was the catalyst that plunged me into that raging ocean, nearly drowned me and left me gasping for breath. The events of the day and my subsequent emotional outbursts of anger at white people, left me longing to understand what happened to me.
Why had I woken up bitter, bruised and ready for a brawl?
I had to figure out why I went to campus that night and stood OUTSIDE the circle of singing, praying Christian students crying out to God while I watched on looking disgusted with my arms crossed and an attitude problem. I could no easier have taken part in it than I could have had the courage to jump into a burning car and rescue someone.
The day made me a coward.
I couldn’t face how I felt, but I also couldn’t face how others felt. Why are they crying? Cry for the rest of humanity!
When all you have is anger, racism, bitterness, confusion and hate you hang on to it. You guard it with your life. If it’s all you know that’s real, it’s all you can trust.
Fast forward two weeks. Two weeks post 9/11, PBS aired a Tavis Smiley hosted forum. It was a panel of important black people -Cornell West, etc.- speaking about the black perspective of 9/11. I sat on the floor and balled my eyes out because they articulated everything I was feeling like they had been reading my journals!
Dave (my white husband, fyi) said he finally understood my perspective. The forum helped facilitate a wonderful conversation between us in which I was able to expound on my own raging emotions with clarity that brought me peace as well. Some of the things the forum address are things I mentioned above. For example, the fact that blacks haven’t ever really felt safe in this country, so it was hard to see whites complain about not feeling safe in our great country. I knew that I was feeling something along those lines, but they articulated the plethora of emotions I was far too immature to articulate on my own.
Fast forward two years. Through much soul-searching, counseling, book reading, talks, tears and prayer sessions, I finally “graduated” through the various stages of anger, to hope and healing to ultimately forgive America, forgive white people and even love and cherish my own white heritage. It was crazy, ya’ll. I can now firmly say, I love white people!!! 🙂
It’s been AMAZING to feel FREE from RACISM. Racism is a heavy burden to bear, ya’ll. It’s debilitating is what it is. Especially since I wasn’t just pissed about my people, I was pissed about the entire planet. God did not intend for me to carry all that mess.
My healing in bullet points…
- Now, I FIGHT for injustice. I don’t need to be angry, emotional or out of control to make a DIFFERENCE.
- Now, I USE & HARNESS my love for the suffering and the overlooked to take ACTION for them and to EMPOWER others who have the RESOURCES and capabilities for CHANGE.
- Now, I take my UNDERSTANDING of blacks, Arabs, whites, etc. & TEACH myself & others to see the GOOD in one another. And for the love of all that’s good in the world, I HOPE I can be a CATALYST for UNDERSTANDING, for PEACE and for HEALING.
I regret that 9/11 happened at all, but I am thankful that through it God used it to change me from an angry, black racist to a free woman! Hallelujah!
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