Father's Day From One Year to the Next

Father's Day 2019

I had only been living in Florida for 2 weeks.  I couldn't wait to spend the day with my dad.  This is something that I hadn't done for more than 40 years.  My dad thought it was kind of silly but he put up with my picture taking and noting the importance of this day.  As I look at that picture now I see a still vital albeit aging man.  His eyes are shining back at me, his laugh is visible almost audible.  As father and daughter there appears to be so much ahead for us -  so many home projects, so many dinners and stories together, so many memories to share.  

Father's Day 2020

He is tired.  He is worn down from surgeries, attempts at pain management, and an impending hernia surgery.  He is on oxygen voluntarily with no one suggesting it.  He once again puts up with my enthusiasm at spending the day together but this one is very different.  In the air hovers the feeling that this will most likely be one of our last.  There is no photo this time.  This is a look I would rather not memorialize.  We enjoy dinner together and I do what I can to ease the burdens of their daily life, always trying to look forward but knowing that the road into the future is a short one.  

Take aways from Austin Channing Brown's conversation with Brene Brown

I am a "good" person but I can be a better one.

I'm here to get it right, not be right.

The work of antiracism is becoming a better human to other humans.

We all mess up.  We all get shit wrong.  But have you built the capacity to care more about others than you care about your own ego?

Proximity to a Black person (relational argument) puts the burden of teaching on Black people.  It makes the person of color responsible to change your heart and mind.  

Grown White people are adults who can think critically on their own... and look at the world and say something's not right here, let me...  change the way I vote, give to an organization that is trying to change this, let me go do.

Marching beside Black people is still for the self.  What are you giving?

Every White friend that I have, perceives racial justice, would still be doing the work if I was no longer there.  Being friends with me is not the work.    

White people like rules, not to do the work the right way, but so we can protect ourselves.  The rules are the fence around the ego.  

The American Dream

When the other side pushes back you know that you have hit a nerve.  The airways are currently full of rich black men blaming the individual and contending that there is no racism in America.  Yes, you the actors, and rappers, and a few lawyers and politicians made it.  But, did you take anyone else up with you?  This new voice now says, if you didn't have the opportunity, it's your fault for not going out to get it.  The blame is back on the family and the individual. Where are their parents, where is his drive to succeed?  The American slogan of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps just doesn't apply when you are raised in the projects surrounded by poverty which walks hand in hand with violence and drugs.  We emulate what we see and what we know.  If this is all we see and know, this becomes our reality.  The only way a poor child can reach for opportunity or dig down deep to succeed is if she knows there's something different out there.  

As a middle class white teen, I knew because I was told over and over again that I would go to college.  I had that voice in my head.  I had no idea why or what would be accomplished in doing so but I knew that it was going to happen.  Fast forward 20 years and I became that voice in my students' heads.  One thing that we now know as educators is that first generation college graduates only need one adult that becomes that voice, one adult that intervenes in a student's current reality and says, you can do this.  You can go to college, you can have a career, you can move out of poverty.  

Social media has succeeded in showing poor children and adults what the rest of society has but not how to get there themselves.  It is up to us to now create that.  Defunding/abolishing police and prisons will leave a giant gap.  In my view, we cannot jump from a militarized police department to nothing.  As we have said many times in the coronavirus pandemic, "Hope is not a plan."  So let's make a plan.  Let's plan for a social structure that will take the place of police.  Let's look at protection in terms of guardians instead of warriors.  Let's look at domestic disputes being handled by counselors.  Let's look at slashing the public safety budget and starting with its unions.  Let's look at gun control, seriously look at gun control.  

This is no longer a travesty.  It is an opportunity.  This is a once in a million chance of remaking American society into being the dream that we have all wished for.  Langston Hughes said it better than I can.  

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above

(America never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real and life is free

Equality is in the air we breathe.  

Let's Begin the Work

I am watching and participating in marches that claim Black Lives Matter and call for peace and for justice.  As lovely as it is to see, I'm sorry to say, America, this is not even the starting block.  You see, we have been here before on this very road.  We have marched arm in arm, we have sung the songs that called for peace and justice and thought that would do it.  That was a head change not one of the heart.  We thought everyone agreed with the simple truth that all are equal.  But the culture of hatred and the tight grasp of White power remained in place.  It took on a new look but if you were Black in America, you didn't notice a thing.  Until we can acknowledge that we have been complicit in systemic racism, nothing will change.  Until we can say mea culpa, I'm sorry, and mean it, nothing will change.  Until we can look in the mirror at our own power, advantages, and privileges and willingly give them away to those upon we have trodden, nothing will change.  March.  Sing.  Hold hands.  Continue to post videos of police harming instead of helping until everyone understands what we really mean when we say Black Lives Matter.  Then apologize.  Be political.  Open your heart and head to the idea of shared power and what that might look like in our hospital maternity wards, preschools, educational institutions, residential communities, and work places. 

Finding the Right Question to Ask

Living in the upheaval of today means finding the right question to ask that will bring us to a different outcome.  We, as a nation, have been in this time and place before.  As we look back, we reflect on when and where are the times and places that each of us has turned away and became complicit in the mistreatment and death of others?  Did we refuse to look or was it just more comfortable not seeing?  That can no longer be.  Now, we again come face to face with the rage and protest of racism followed by White America's admission that there is an advantage to being born white.  This time, let the next step be different.  Words feel inadequate.  What new is there to say?  We enter in with a sense of helplessness in uttering once again the words "Black Lives Matter."  Of course they matter; they are essential, and of deep value to us as a people.  And so we come with silence.  We set our minds on bold visioning and this time are determined to discover who we are going to be together.  How do we become the us that has not yet been and finally give birth to a united America?  In the words of Langston Hughes: "Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-"  It is time for the hard work to begin.  

Taking the Life of the Other

At the age of 65, I saw the "race riots" of the 60s and now am seeing them lived out again in the 2020 version.  This version is much more difficult to watch.  The look of anger on the faces is familiar like  old friends that I haven't seen in a while but they still look exactly the same.  The police continue to fight to retain white power at any cost and the blacks just want the world for an instant to acknowledge that systematic racism exists.  They are worlds apart - still.  In the 50 year interval I have seen the killing of black men and women with a variety of  methods.  I have always been stunned by the horrific violence of it.  Black men were snatched by the KKK in the dead of night, their faces illuminated by burning torches and strung from trees to be "Strange Fruit."  Then the police moved to clubs and on to guns.  The violent beating of Rodney King in 1991 is still a visceral scene in my mind's eye.  The men and women that I have seen killed with guns or choke holds on the eventing news by our public servants is too many to list.  And the result has always been the same.  Death by racism and the white officers walk away unscathed.  Few go to trial and those that do are never convicted.  And so it continues unabated.  But this killing of George Floyd is something new.  No violence.  No gun, or club, or rope.  No look of anger or distain.  Hands in pockets, completely relaxed, with only one knee as the weapon of choice.  But the question remains the same, how is it that you are able to snuff out a life so easily?  You took away this human's existence like I would step on a bug.  There was no thought of his being a man, a son, a brother, a father.  

White America turned blacks into the other many generations ago.  No law or politician or even a black president has been able to change the status quo.  Slaves were lazy.  Freed African descendants were illiterate and unable to be taught.  Arrests and criminal behavior was proof that we should be protected from them.  Government housing and poverty during a time of affirmative action was the "See, I told you so." nail in the coffin.  Any blacks that were able to lift themselves out of poverty were seen as the exceptions to the rule.  And I have witnessed all of these manifestations of prejudice in one solitary lifetime.  So we have remained in this place hovering between the academic belief that all are created equal but living the palpable fear of releasing, even for a moment, our hold on white power.  We have been here in this very spot that we were in 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 400 years ago.  Nothing has changed beyond the mode and extreme ease of murder.

Taking a Knee

It is time for us all to take a knee.  Some background:  I am a 49er fan and agreed wholeheartedly with Colin Kaepernick's 2016 silent protest of our racist criminal justice system.  It was simple, direct and repetitive to serve as a weekly reminder to us that a change was needed.  But maybe it was just too early.  America wasn't ready.  I also was a practicing Catholic for 40 years of my life.  I have no qualms with getting on my knees.  Now in 2020, we have seen how our police choose to get on their knees.  George Floyd died at the knee of Derek Chauvin and other videos have appeared with police officers restraining black men with a knee on their neck.  But we have also seen a myriad of people bowing down to racism, including some police officers.  While that is heartening, the road is long and we have a 400 year history to address.  I'm not sure where we go from here but we can start with Colin's kneel.  We take a knee to remind ourselves that, like Derek Chauvin, we have power over the vulnerable and helpless. Even when it is not intentional, we cause pain and suffering. We take a knee to remind ourselves that we live in a system where some of us are holding others down by the simple place of our birth into our privileged positions.  We continue racism through our ignorance and refusal to change what has always been.   We take a knee in an act of repentance. We apologize for the part we played in this systemic sin. Yes, it is time for us all to get down on our knees, to hold a mirror up to our lives and our society, and confess that we are participants in a structural racism that is as deadly as any virus we could ever encounter.