Joy and Rage: Being Black in America

I wrote the piece below to make sense for myself of the jumble of emotions I felt this morning. To reconcile the oil and water experience of joy and rage existing alongside each other in my brain and heart. To quote Charlie Mackesy, “sometimes just getting up and carrying on is brave and magnificent.” To all those who pulled it together and carried on today, I see you and I am you. Onward.

After the Buffalo shooting don’t choose a comfortable silence | Opinion piece for nj.com

The past week offers a window into the disquieting reality of being Black in America. It is the violent, perniciousness of rendering daily life—whether at church, in the supermarket, or asleep in your bedroom—unsafe while at the same time decrying the teaching of critical race theory as harm.

It is the treatment of Michael Brown Jr. in the media as a man while the Buffalo killer is a teenager—they are the same age. It is to insist on the sanctity of Black life, to ask the country to see you and agree, and be derided as divisive. It is emotional whiplash to find and hold your center when the world, if you are Black and paying attention, pulls you to the poles of hopelessness and outrage.

Yet, millions of Black Americans woke up on Monday morning and went to work and to school. You smiled and perhaps they smiled back. For me, and I venture it is true for many of us, the capacity to hold collective grief and find space for joy is well-practiced. This weekend was graduation. Celebrations of Black joy and brilliance abounded, the news of Black death did not overcome it. The celebration was not just a distraction, holding space for joy was itself resistance.

But I hope we never get to the place where we, by our inaction, normalize the mass murder of Black people. I recall the 2015 Charleston massacre, the loss of nine Black lives and the desecration of a historic church, but most of all, I remember the suffocating devastation of that moment. America from that point on forever chose to live in willful ignorance of the radicalization of White youth online, the reality that code words and dog-whistle politics set up the future of America as a battle of “us vs. them” incites violence.

We all witnessed the 2017 Charlottesville riots, the chants “you will not replace us.” The storming of the Capitol on January 6 bears an awful resemblance to that moment, the sentiment that a country was being taken and the fight was on to take it back.

We watched the fervor of the last several months where the feigned fight against teaching critical race theory in schools was used to galvanize voters, terrorize school board members, and ban books. Now we sit in the wake of the terror visited on the Buffalo community and I am reminded of James Baldwin’s words that “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.”

It is not enough for Black people to be enraged; we need all people of conscience to speak up. This is not a choose your own adventure moment in America, we fall or rise together. I am often comforted by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s admonition that “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice,” but only if WE bend it.

I hope you do not choose comfortable silence. I hope you do not give in to despair. I hope you find a way to hold space for joy and channel your rage and I hope the world is better for it.