I have looked away, averted my gaze, and stuffed lined paper in my mouth. I have picked up my mechanical pencil and put it down. I am unsure of the words that want to come out or even if I have the will to say them.
Frankly, I’m all talked out. What needs to be said that hasn’t been said by abolitionists, civil rights leaders, activists, and artists? And it’s all been said and done before— to African Americans.
Hispanic Immigrants are stereotyped as “lazy,” yet Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are raiding their places of employment. Further, the “lazy Mexican” stereotype has historical roots dating back to the 19th century, with depictions in media and even political rhetoric contributing to its perpetuation.
They are told to “do it legally” and are arrested at or near their court hearings. Immigrants are collectively described as “violent criminals” and “gang members.” Yet, according to a recent Pew Research Center report, 78% of European Americans voted for Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States— a convicted felon.
Likewise, African Americans were stereotyped as “lazy” after 246 years of chattel slavery wherein they were forced to labor “from can’t see to can’t see” (that is, sunup to sundown) and the expansion of chattel slavery in the United States was the primary driver of the nation’s economic development and its rise to global power. “Moreover, the 3.2 million people enslaved in the United States had a market value of $1.3 billion in 1850—one-fifth of the nation’s wealth and almost equal to the entire gross national product,” Edward E. Baptist wrote in “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.” “They were more liquid than other forms of American property, even if an acre of land couldn’t run away or kill an overseer with an axe.”
They tell us to “go back to Africa” as if our ancestors weren’t forced to relocate to the U.S. and as if their descendants don’t belong here. They speak as if Marcus Garvey, a pioneer of Pan-Africanism who advocated for economic self-empowerment, didn’t found the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) only to be later prosecuted for one count of mail fraud in connection with the Black Star Line, a shipping company he founded that aimed to connect people of African descent across the diaspora. Some historians argue it was politically motivated, as Garvey was deported back to Jamaica after serving his sentence, never to return to the United States.
So, sometimes, I don’t want to say it, point it out, or pen it down. Because Pulitzer Prize- winning author Toni Morrison was right when she said, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
I am dead tired of bearing witness to the Trump administration’s cruelty. Same old blues, I don’t want it to influence my rhythm. I march to my own beat, interpreting the drumming codes of my ancestors so I can move about the world more freely.
“Up above my head, I hear music in the air,” the African American spiritual declared. “There must be a God somewhere.”
Finding a balance between head in the clouds and feet on the ground, I am levitating and I don’t want to come down. I treat those ancestral sounds as riffs on my poetic imagination.
I don’t want to lose my sight or these visions, compromised by the American empire and its leaders who leave little to the imagination as to their intentions for the marginalized and oppressed. I don’t want to lose myself or my voice while responding to the delusions of white-body supremacy. Instead, I am plotting futures for an undivided “kin-dom.”
To be sure, scholar Imani Perry was right when she said, “Imagination doesn’t erase nightmares, but it can repurpose them with an elaborate sense-making or trouble-making.” So, I play make-believe in an attempt to thwart the concerted plans and organized process of political machinery meant to quell my capacity to think, know and imagine.
Exhausted by soundbites and reactive responses, I need more inventive thinking out loud. Because this is not a war of words. No, it is as writer adrienne maree brown said it is: “We are in an imagination battle.”
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
