It's weird, the bits and pieces from high school we take with us.
I remember—vaguely—a reflection assignment I was given during our unit on the Salem Witch Trials. I don’t know why it sticks out in my memory—it was the same content in a circulating curriculum of American History classes. Ladies were accused of witchcraft, the trials were a sham, it was all very sad, the townspeople probably looked like the extras from Monty Python, etc etc. I don’t even remember what this specific chapter was covering, I only knew that I was supposed to reflect and get my participation points. So I reflected.
After all, they must have been so primitive. Women* were witches just because a neighbor said so? Conveniently located next to available land that could be cheaply absorbed by the next highest bidder? Have you seen the doctrines and complexity of 17th Century Puritanism? The bystanders, the onlookers, and the accusers were likely suffering from some form of mass hysteria. But as I put pen to paper...my attitude changed.
I thought I knew who I was in this story. Surely there were some voices of reason in this that saw beyond the theatrics. Someone standing in the crowd, looking around them with wrinkled brows. That would have been me, right? I would have done something, right? The more I considered—the surrounding circumstances, the fear of disease, the clouded faith in the supernatural, and the daily habits of economic necessity—the more disillusionment dawned on my own young self. Would I be the voice of reason, or the person in the crowd shouting that she was guilty? By the time I reached the end of the page...I didn’t know anymore.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was knee deep in my off-center adolescence, close to college with a brick being thrown into the middle of my faith. I was finding out in the midst of a particularly painful chaos that the good guys are not always the good guys, and the bad guys are not always the bad guys, and sometimes they are both and neither all at the same time. Pair that with a history teacher who was good at getting her students to think for themselves and there I found myself—wading in my own context and rolling down the first slope of deconstruction.
Sometimes, we look back at history and think we know exactly who we are.
Sometimes, we look back at history and accept that it was complicated.
Both are useless if we stop there. They adjust the lenses we are looking through. They make it so easy to close our eyes when the people around us are trying to get us to wake up.
Thats the only reason I’m bringing this vague, irrelevant memory to the surface.
I watched the video of George Floyd’s murder. I wept. I wasn’t benevolently misinformed on the matter. I wasn’t naively unaware of his “past.” I wasn’t inconsiderate of all the invisible things outside the camera frame. I watched helplessly, alongside thousands, while a grown man used the last of the oxygen in his lungs to cry out for his mother. I cursed the eyes in my head that did not see sooner.
This is the prayer I’m shouting at the western skies: give us eyes to see.
The point of this isn’t to lead you through a white girl’s epiphany and demonstrate short gratitude that I learned something. The point is to understand, with certainty, that this fight has been raging for a long time, and some of us are catastrophically late. It didn’t stop after the civil war. It didn’t stop after the 60’s. My own city has been divided for decades**. I still have relatives who try to explain that some Jim Crow policing was warranted and that the KKK really isn’t so bad***.I couldn’t see it before, because my lense was obstructed by a picture painted for me during February school days—a sober and docile Martin Luther King Jr., a grandmotherly Harriet Tubman, dignified and obedient black heroes who “won” a battle with a neat beginning, middle, and end that extinguished in the 70s. When people were acting outside of that paradigm, I was allowed to shut my eyes.
Give us eyes to see.
I debated saying anything, for a lot of reasons. Because a lot of what I’ve had to say has fallen short. Because I want to embrace a posture of learning. Because I know I can be vain. Because people of color don’t need my guilty conscience right now. Because corporations are starting to capitalize on this. Because I don’t want to be louder than the black voices who need to be amplified in this moment. Because I don’t want to put the burden of education on someone else. Because I don’t want to confuse humility with self-deprecation (the latter of which is not fruitful and puts the job of making me feel better about bad things on someone else).
But mostly, because I know how deeply it can hurt when people who didn’t believe you a year ago are suddenly jumping on the bandwagon, pretending they’ve been there the whole time.
If you were wondering? It hurts. It hurts a lot.
...I also know that sometimes silence speaks. So this is me—briefly, without fanfare—saying something, and then sitting down to listen. I’m not the authority on any given subject but if history has taught me anything, it’s empathy. In the thick of it, I learn the need for justice circulates and evolves. To study it means to keep listening, to keep searching for what has been erased, and to keep coming back with new eyes. If you can’t see that, then your eyes are still closed.
Give us eyes to see.
Footnotes:
*And sometimes men.
**If you’ve ever driven on Gregory or 63rd street to the Kansas state line you will know exactly what I’m talking about.
*** A Klansman opened fire on a Jewish Community Center down the street from where I work in 2014, killing a 14 year old boy and his grandfather. Let me be clear: you can and never will convince me the KKK “isn’t so bad” and I’m sad that’s a sentence I have to say in the year 2020 AD.
