it feels like i’m on fire--
it has been a really, really, really long time since i have written anything (on this blog. i still write in others and in my personal journal almost daily).
before i go any further, i want to make a *disclaimer: this is a purely emotional outpouring. i am completely aware that the Black Lives Matter movement is not about me--i don’t intend to center myself in the narrative, i don’t write this post as a way of trying to overpower everything that Black voices are trying to say. i’m writing in an attempt at self-therapy, completely subjective and an emotional torrent of my thoughts and feelings, because sometimes i think i will explode if i keep it all in. i need an outlet. and this is my outlet. so know that this one is personal, and that my voice should not take up space in the BLM movement--but also know that i can’t help writing anyway.*
i’m writing this morning because i’m angry. i woke up angry. i went to bed angry. i’ve been angry all this week, all this month, for so many years, it feels like. it feels like i’ve been angry for so many years, and this morning, it welled up again, bursting and rushing and burning, and it felt like if i didn’t get it out, i would explode.
it comes and goes. there are days and weeks where i almost forget about it--because i’m privileged enough to forget about it. because my life is so full of blessings and goodness and benefits from the racist system that i grew up in that it doesn’t affect me. there are even months where it feels separate from me, and sometimes, i admit, it’s easier to ignore it and look away since it’s so separate. sometimes it’s easy to go about my life and enjoy all of its advantages and not face the ugly, horrible things that had to happen in order to get me here.
i think i’ve been angry since 2013. i think i’ve been angry since i started teaching. i think i’ve been angry on behalf of my students.
i think i’ve been angry since i first set foot into Alfred Benesch Elementary and saw the complete, absolute, outrageous bullshit that this country wants to call an education that that school had to offer them.
and i think, in varying stages, that i have come to carry that anger inside me, burning at all times, but in different levels of intensity.
and how fucked up is it that i didn’t know about this insane level of injustice--how messed up is it that i had no idea how Black people were being mistreated and systemically, socially discriminated against--until i taught in an all Black school in an area of Cleveland that others called the “ghetto” and the “hood” and cautioned me against walking around in? it’s so fucked up. it’s so fucked up that it was so far removed from me. it’s so fucked up that it was so separated, so screened, like i was raised and selected and partitioned intentionally in a section of society with blinders on, like i had these partitions meticulously attached to either side of my eyes by my church, by my Christian leaders, by my family, by my school and its textbooks and lessons and history, by my teachers and my fellow students and my fucking ivy league universities, by every single fucking thing around me, so that i was conditioned and grew up completely fucking blind.
it’s so fucked up that i didn’t see until i got dropped into room 208 of Alfred A. Benesch Elementary School, where i taught all Black kids and saw all Black life in an all Black neighborhood and suddenly got those fucking blinders that society so meticulously installed ripped the fuck off of my eyes. it’s so fucked up that that was the only way that i could see. it’s so fucked up that maybe 75% of the people in my life that i still interact with still have those blinders on. it’s so fucked up that America took such careful pains to screw those fucking shutters on that i don’t know how to take them off.
even for people i love. even for my best friends, my Christian community that has become a family that i grew up with, my actual family: my older brother, my father and mother and aunt.
and it’s so fucked up that this is how Black people live. that their whole lives they have been this angry. that their whole lives they have faced this fucking infuriating injustice. that they have not had the blinders installed, ever. that they’ve been trying to take them off of other peoples’ faces for centuries and instead faced backlash, denial, discrimination, dismissal--been called names, been mistrusted, been questioned and examined and analyzed for their fucking lived experiences.
it’s so fucked up that this is the world that my students grew up in. that my kids have known nothing but this.
that for me, it was a three year experience teaching.
that for them, it is a lifetime of watching their cousins and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers getting shot.
and this week, Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times by police officers. today, Breonna Taylor has still been murdered while the so-called law enforcement officers who killed her walk free (fuck Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison. i said what i said. fuck them.). today, it’s been over a year since Elijah McClain was killed for no fucking reason.
Tamir Rice could’ve been T***z. N******h. K***i. any one of my kids.
and my country--my church leaders, my church community, some of my best friends from church, some of my family members, some of my friends--refuses to see it.
this morning, i woke up angry.
