Excerpt from The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, by Charles M. Blow

"In a perfect world the composition of community would be meaningless when aiming to ensure equity and equality. But we don't inhabit that world. In this world, America has had four hundred years to get right by Black people, and it has failed. There have been undeniable advances, but when barbarism is the base, the only way to move is up.

And, I must confess that at a certain point, I simply believe that it is spiritually healthier to be in spaces, to create spaces, where you are wanted, honored, and loved, rather than ones where you are simply tolerated at best, or, worse yet, despised. Integration has its virtues, but it can also inflict spiritual and psychological violence. Nine experiences may be lovely, or at least tolerable, but the tenth is terrible. The mind settles on that tenth, using an extraordinary amount of energy to anticipate it, confront it, and overcome it. The unfortunate fraction becomes a consuming detriment.

I see Black students at elite, mostly white colleges in the North and West protesting poor treatment and demanding "safe spaces," and it is foreign to me. And it pains me. Some part of me always wants to say to them: You are spectacular. Being in your presence should be seen as an honor, not a burden.

...I went to an HBCU in the South not because I had to but because I wanted to. Before that I went to an all-Black high school. 

During my school, all my spaces were safe. Almost every classroom I ever walked into, A Black person was the smartest person in the room, so as an adult I continued to believe that into every room I walked I could be the smartest person there. The security and comfort of being inculcated and enveloped by Black culture, not just becoming "woke" to it as an intellectual pursuit, a form of activism, or need for demonstrative rebellion, produced in me an overwhelming confidence and also an ease of spirit.

Over the years, I have found that many Black people with far more distinguished academic pedigrees than me also carry far more racial insecurity. It stymies creativity and growth. I liken this phenomenon to being covered with scars--scars from hand-to-hand combat with white racism because you are always outnumbered, always on the defensive. Black creatives keep issuing plaintive missives--movies and books, television offerings and an endless stream of podcasts--that feel to me to be a truly northern and western depiction of Black experience. Many southern Blacks like myself have given up trying to persuade and explain. 

As the great Toni Morrison put it:

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."

The Second Assassination of Martin Luther King, by Ibram X. Kendi
(The Atlantic)

"King’s nightmare of racism is being presented as his dream...King’s first assassins professed to hate him half a century ago. His second assassins profess to revere him. Death threats to King’s legacy are now sold as love songs to his legacy. King is adored in death, literally. King is still hated in life...

...His modern-day assassins endlessly recite King’s “dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”—as if that was all King said during his 1963 March on Washington speech. They disregard the lines before and after it, when King lamented that his dream was being thwarted by “vicious racists” in places “sweltering with the heat of oppression.” They disregard King’s paraphrase of his iconic “dream” line in 1965: that “one day all of God’s Black children will be respected like his white children.” They disregard King’s recognition that the civil-rights movement did not end racism, leading him to tell an NBC News correspondent on May 8, 1967, that the “dream that I had [in 1963] has at many points turned into a nightmare.”

...King’s modern-day assassins disregard everything he said about education. “Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance,” King wrote in 1967. “It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”

They disregard King’s worry about the effects of not teaching Black history, including white people internalizing notions of superiority and Black people internalizing notions of inferiority. “The history books, which have almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, have only served to intensify the Negroes’ sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy,” King wrote in 1967.

...It is wrong to present King, who continuously spoke out against racism, as someone who stood against people speaking out against racism. It is wrong to claim that teachers educating their students about past and present racism “are stomping on the grave of Martin Luther King,” ...These self-professed admirers of King are digging a new grave, and burying King’s body of work within it."

(a) Our love is our very life itself. The nature of our love determines the nature of our life and in fact our entire nature as a human being. Our dominant or leading love, however, is the love that constitutes us. 

Our dominant or leading love has many other loves; they are derived from it in a hierarchy beneath it. No matter how these other loves may look or seem, each one of them is part of our leading love. With it they make one government, so to speak. Our dominant love is like the monarch and leader of the rest: it guides our other loves and uses them as intermediate purposes through which it focuses on and aims for its goal. Both directly and indirectly, this goal is the primary and ultimate objective for them all. 

[2] (b) The focus of our dominant love is what we love above all else. What we love above all else is constantly present in our thinking, because it is in our will and ultimately constitutes our life.

A Prayer for Reconciliation

Where there is separation,
there is pain.
And where there is pain,
there is story.

And where there is story,
there is understanding
and misunderstanding,
listening
and not listening.

May we - separated peoples, estranged strangers,
unfriended families, divided communities - 
turn toward each other,
and turn toward our stories,
with understanding
and listening,
with argument and acceptance,
with challenge, change 
and consolation.

Because if God is to be found,
God will be found in the space between.

Amen

(Padraig O Tuama, Daily Prayer, The Corrymeela Community)

Photo by Harrison Haines from Pexels