Writing Until We All Get on the Same Page

“I’m writing until we all get on the same page.” I said this during my introduction to a writing session for Good Faith Media’s Writers’ and Readers’ Retreat at St. Francis Springs Prayer Center in Rockingham, North Carolina. An unplanned mission statement, I immediately knew I had successfully articulated my reason for writing.

Not surprisingly, the sentence came to me just as all the other words do. I don’t search for or find the right words; instead, it is quite the opposite. 

They find me and I do their bidding. Writing, this word-work of radical responsibility as an ambassador for a “kin-dom” to come, is my calling. An introvert, I am willfully tongue-tied otherwise, focused deeply on my inward journey.

Self-contained, still, the words of the raceless gospel call me to this cosmic sense of kin-keeping. I feel deeply obligated to remind us that we are all family, all related to and through the earth with God as the “Ground of Being.” It is the rationale behind my righteous rage against the machine that is white supremacy. 

“There is nothing new under the sun but there are new suns,” Afrofuturist and American science fiction writer Octavia Butler taught me. Thus, I join the list of other imaginaries. 

Yet, I have no desire to go to the moon but for my next of kin to be able to go to a neighbor’s house without being shot dead like Ajike “A.J.” Owens or suffering near-deadly consequences while doing yardwork like Davis Moturi, even when the perpetrator’s history of violence is known, documented and reported. 

The work of protecting bodies racialized as black in America is constant, deliberately exhausting and intentionally distracting. To be sure, this is the aim as outlined and explained by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison:

“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. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

Racism is mindless busy work and thus the need for the affirmation of somebodiness, that is the inherent dignity and worth of all human beings. Only capitalism coupled with colonialism creates nobodies. 

No one need explain their reason for existing, though mammon and race require it. Instead, praise your divinity.

Likewise, the Very Reverend Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, a womanist theologian and award-winning author, is clear: “Whiteness is an oppositional reality. It does not exist apart from this.” 

Master versus slave, us versus them, white versus black, these relational dynamics are sustained through the linguistic determinism of subjugation, which shapes the way that an oppressed group experiences life and the way they see the world. Oppression is first a language. 

People are first “talked down to.” None of this is new. The Teacher is right: “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

Imagining freedom from the oppressive conditions of a racialized reality and resisting white supremacy is an ancestral response. This is, perhaps, why poet Nikki Giovanni resolved, “If the enslaved could believe, I know I can.”

Head back and eyes closed, I imagine a time and place when we all go within to discover who we are and come out more committed to freedom-making, to resisting oppressive realities and to building a freer future. “Free’em all” because civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer is right: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

Consequently, pen to paper, I write to push back against the totalizing narratives of race and its progeny. Fingers to keyboard, I write to refuse the marginalizing roles and the automated living of stereotypes. 

I will write until we are all clear on how we got here: divided and unreconcilable. I will write until we all have ears to hear, “We are all God’s children.” There is no maximum word count.