How Can I Keep from Singing?

"Through all the tumult and the strife, / I hear that music ringing. 
It finds an echo in my soul. / How can I keep from singing?" 

~ Robert Lowry

Several weeks ago, I wrote the following paragraph to introduce an article I planned to write for the church newsletter.

We partnered with another church to host community viewings of the PBS documentary The Talk: Race in America. The documentary is about "the necessary conversation taking place in homes and communities across the country between parents of color and their children, especially sons, about how to behave if they are ever stopped by the police." Each viewing was followed by conversations facilitated by a pastor from another church.

Later I wrote this paragraph.

In these conversations, attendees were placed in small groups for a set time followed by "share with the group" time. However, as I often do ever since moving to Minnesota, I felt stifled and voiceless in the conversation I attended. As a person of color, it is difficult for me to have honest conversations with well-intentioned Minnesotans of whatever color when my truth is full of ire and memory.

In the ensuring weeks, I wrote several other paragraphs, tried to revise them, deleted them, and so on. I wanted to write something meaningful for people who matter to me. This is the only paragraph from those attempts that I kept.

Racism is a volatile topic already, and The Talk is about how racism murders innocence -- both literally and figuratively. Since moving to Minnesota, I’m often stopped when I speak directly to my truth because my comments are deemed rude, hurtful to others. I’m asked to wait or "reminded" to not be confrontational, remember the "guidelines" for conversation. Sometimes someone else steps in to "interpret" my meaning. I’ve always attributed my frustration with such conversations to the disconnect between this Chicagoan and those Minnesotans. But maybe it’s something else.

 

Maybe.

Now I’ve passed the newsletter deadline because I'm not sure what to say without offending, confronting, insulting, hurting. And although I have so much to say, I can’t change myself to say it in a way “they” want it said. And my ire rises. I need a place to put this anger.

I know that other writers of color have faced this same block.

 

Consider what Maisha Z. Johnson wrote in her blog “I’ve had white people try to explain racism to me, a woman of color. ... It’s incredibly frustrating to share my experiences with racism, only to have a white person try to speak over me about it – and often by belittling how racism hurts me.”

I feel that “belittling” Johnson mentions when white people want to show me how they understand my feelings because of their own experience of discrimination or “reverse racism” they have experienced. I counter with the oxymoronic nature of this phase and attempt to clarify that prejudice can be reversed but not racism because racism requires the power to act on that prejudice or benefit from it. But I suppose my explication does not aim to please. Remember: I’m confrontational, I'm rude, and I hurt people’s feelings. Or so I'm told.

And although I find other people’s stories of discrimination edifying and emotionally touching, I don’t want to hear those stories as examples of how they understand my feelings. Their experiences are not the same as mine and neither are their feelings. Instead, by telling their discrimination stories, white people demonstrate their profound lack of understanding. 

Although I share her frustration, my opinion is not as harsh as the anonymous blogger who wrote, “Another thing that often sickens me whenever talk about race and racism is involved is when white people attempt to have any sort of dialogue on it. Why? Because most of the time they cannot see past their own prejudice, white privilege and white guilt to truly see the matter- these things distort their perception of events, and they often try to take race out of things because the topics of race and white privilege in general makes them uncomfortable.”

That lack of comfortable, I believe, is why I'm perceived as the cause of conflict in my conversations with people in Minnesota. And most of the people in Minnesota are white.

However, unlike this blogger, I am not sickened. I don't mind hearing white opinions as long as they are not patronizing or self-righteous. But I don’t want to be in the position of educating them. I don’t need them to find common ground with our experiences and I definitely don’t need them to “feel” my pain. I just need them to hear, not just listen, to what I have to say. 

Award-winning British journalist and author Reni Eddo-Lodge comes closer to my view because she addresses “not all white people” in her article.

“I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the existence of structural racism and its symptoms. I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience. You can see their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals. It’s like they can no longer hear us.

“This emotional disconnect is the conclusion of living a life oblivious to the fact that their skin colour is the norm and all others deviate from it.”

Looking back at the conversation about The Talk, I believe it is that oblivion  Eddo-Lodge references more than white opinions that raise my ire. How dare you not know how much privilege you have? Relish it, love it, deny it, hate it, live into it. I don’t care. Just face the reality that you have it.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m glad we had the film and the conversation. However, it showed me – once again -- that we need to have some truth-filled conversation about how we talk to each other. And why we don’t need to have people change their “style” of talking to be accommodating and make Minnesota nice.

In “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981), Audre Lorde expresses my feelings best of all when she says, “My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.”

Like Lorde, I don’t want to continue holding in my anger. If we are truly a church family as we claim, can you accept that family members often hold differing opinions on topics that matter -- politics, religion, race? Can you accept that I need to voice my anger? Can you accept that we might not change others’ minds, even when their different opinions hurt? Or will I remain the one hurting with my silenced voice?

Through the anger and hurt, despite the words of that old hymn, we don’t really need to be totally of “kindred minds.” We do need to remember who – not what but who -- binds us together in faith.

"Bind Us Together" song written by  Bob Gillman