For Such A Time As This

I’ve been struggling with myself going back and forward over whether or not I should comment or not…

In making the decision to publish this blog I keep thinking back to a verse from my favorite book in the bible-Esther4:14

For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?

I would rather say something today and be labeled ignorant or worse than to answer to my Savior one day when He asks “Why didn’t you say what I told you to say.Why did you allow fear to keep you from speaking up?”

I hope I don’t offend anyone but if I do…well I’m sorry you are offended but I am not sorry for what I am saying.

Personally I don’t feel like I have experienced enough to really comment on these latest murders. Do I really identify with my race and its struggle because sometimes I don’t feel like it. Sometimes I feel like because I went to an all white high school and a mostly white college I don’t really have a hand in the struggle that my people face. But then I think about the racism that I faced going to my all white school…it wasn’t often nor very seldom was it outright but it was always there. In the way some students and staff members at school interacted with me or the comments they sometimes made. In the way that certain customers refused to hand me money choosing instead to put it on the counter…it hurt but I never really let it bother me, at least not for long. Did that mean I didn’t care?  I care…but then, I don’t know. Sometimes…Maybe…

And I think about the fact that despite feeling this way I still have a dad, brothers, uncles and friends who bear strong resemblance to our ancestors-the slave.  OF COURSE I CARE! I cannot sit back and watch my face and the faces of my friends and family be erased from society from the inside as well as from the outside. The man who was shot by the officer here in Baton Rouge could have been my daddy. The recent college graduate who was killed in New Orleans could have been one of my brothers or my cousins. The baby consoling her mom could have been my niece or nephew…

All these faces I’m seeing on the news and on social media all begin to blur together forming one face…my own. These people look just like me. They are my brothers, uncles, cousins…they are me. I cannot sit idly by and allow my people to be hunted down and killed nor will I be OK with us killing ourselves. As African-Americans we need to love ourselves first before anyone else will. That means the killing has to stop. We are killing ourselves yet we seemingly only get upset when someone from the outside does it. How does that help? We fear for the lives of our sons and brothers and fathers at the hand of outside threats but what about the epidemic of us killing ourselves that has plagued us for just as long?

I think about when I decided to wear my natural hair. Most of the time I say I stopped getting perms because chemical burns were not fun and that is mostly true. But if I dig deeper I find that I choose to wear my natural hair because in learning to love me I had to love ALL of me, hair included. I made the decision to forgo the easy route and commit to my hair in its natural unkempt, sometimes unmanageable, stressful and time-consuming state. This is the same thing we need to do as a race. We need to love our blackness, the good and the bad, the joy and the pain. Society says we aren’t beautiful but God says that we are. And since He made us His word is is the deciding factor. No one and nothing has the right to diminsh or destroy us without our permission. We are magic, but if we don’t love that about ourselves no one will believe it or even care to see if thats true.

I want to leave you with this quote by Angela Davis

“The challenge of the 21st century is not to demand equal opportunity in the machinery of oppression, but rather to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded.”

I want to see us truly free as a race -as a people- and in order for us to be free we must stop giving others permission to treat us as if we are otherwise. If we don’t who will? And if not now when?