Just 10 minutes earlier….
I’ve never been a proponent of cleaning up graffiti. I’ve always seen graffiti as the voice of the people and cleaning it up as trying to silence folks.
Artistic graffiti is what I love most, colorful street-art, skilled, elaborate, alive. But the plain black graffiti too, has its place in life. I have nothing against it. To me, anyone who takes a spray paint can and writes in all CAPS on a public wall is not screaming for the first time. This is someone who has screamed before and not been heard, someone who spoke and was silenced.
So when I was in downtown Philly this morning, a city I’ve lived in for 20 years now, and a city I love, I saw a massive cleanup operation. Mostly white folk but not only white folk with Brillo pads and Ajax. Some professional folks in uniforms, mounting glass, cleaning glass, boarding up windows.
Brooms of all sizes, small brooms, big brooms, synthetic brooms, straw brooms. I wasn’t there to clean. I was there to witness.
All I could think of is what would happen if we didn’t clean up. What would happen if we had to sit with the impact of ugly racism day in and day out. What would happen if white people had to sit in devastated neighborhoods until we cleaned up our own personal, institutional, and systemic racism. Would we pay attention then?
Overwhelmed by the intensity, I leaned on a pole close to City Hall. Across the street, a white city worker in a fluorescent yellow t-shirt used green paint to cover up white graffiti from a newstand that ten minutes read: “NO JUSTICE NO PEACE. ” I watched him in a daze, as he covered up with green paint. I wanted the sign to stay. I wanted us to remember.
Massive cover-up, this is all we white folk have done. How much time, money, energy have we spent in the past 500 years covering up the signs of our own ill-actions? How much time have we wasted trying to clean a window or cover up the writing on the wall? This is not justice. Cleaning up is not justice. What things look like on the outside is not the issue. We have to dig deeper. We have to dig deeper, our survival as a nation depends on it. And there are centuries and centuries of hurt.
“What happens to A Raisin in the Sun? Does it dry up, or does it explode?” — Langston Hughes
Exploding after centuries of injustices is a human response. All the people who are fingerpointing right now, need to get over their damn selves. White people have had 70 years. 70 years of a little-teeny-weeny-less of a privilege. And white folks are whining like hell and up in arms feeling mistreated.
How dare we, how dare we expect a movement to be non violent when it stands on injustices of 400 years? 400 years of attempting to dehumanize Black humanity.
And every single system in our country supports this. Every single system disproportionately mistreats people of color.
Health: People of color have higher child mortality rates.
Education: youth of color are suspended more frequently for longer periods of time, and more frequently referred to police.
Criminal Justice: more Black folk are locked up today than Africans under under enslavement.
Law enforcement: Black men of color are 3.5 times more likely to be shot by the police than a white man.
Mental health: Folks of color have less access to mental health services.
Immigration: Families of color are more likely to be separated from their children or locked up or killed at the border.
Housing: folks of color are more likely to be living in houses run by slumlords.
Welfare: though there are a lot more white people on welfare than there are folks of color, folks of color are more likely to be kicked off welfare more frequently.
Child Welfare: children of color are more likely to be removed from their parents and placed in foster care and for longer periods of time. Children of color are also placed in inferior quality homes, which means institutions where we know children are physically, sexually, and emotionally assaulted regularly.
Every freakin system you can think of disproportionately mistreats people of color. And I’m not saying this to be nice to Black folk, though there are many I love who, every single day, live in anguish, fear and terror.
I’m saying this for white folk. Every time we’re complacent, we are the inhuman ones. If we cannot be compassionate, about our own brothers and sisters born on our same block, or three blocks away, or in our same city, in our same country, if we cannot feel a sense of connection for folks we shop in the same grocery store with, we are the ones who are inhuman. We are dead.
No window cleanup is gonna fix that. We have to clean up our hearts. We have to be willing to feel the pain that we have caused for centuries. We have to feel the pain in our own bodies. We have to give up being numb. We have to be willing to say: “I’m sorry,” whether we think we’re right or not. We have to be willing to listen, even when it hurts. And we have to be willing to shed tears and witness the tears of others. We have to be willing to listen.
We have to be willing to question our own judgment, we have to be willing to check every single piece of prejudice that comes up every moment of the day. Whether our eye twitching at watching a Black man in a mask who walks by, or our clenching a purse or locking a car door.
We have to be willing to look at ourselves, we have to be willing to clean up our own self. And I’ve been doing this for 25 years and it doesn’t end, it’s not a job that is over. We have to be willing to devote our lives to cleaning up how we see the world. It doesn’t end because we read one book, it doesn’t end because we have now realized how f*cked up we were years ago. It does not end. It is a lifetime commitment of standing for a just world. And it takes devoting our lives to shifting systems. Systems don’t change over night. They change, then they change back. We have to be willing to try, see what works, try again, for a lifetime. We have to give up the quick fixes, the clean windows, the coverups, the fake accolades. We can’t do it alone, we have to create communities willing to catch each other in our own prejudices. And when they do, say thank you. A Nigerian friend of mine said to me once: “I’m thankful for anything you say to me, that will make me a better human being.” We have to be willing to invest in being better human beings and encourage others to lead us there.
We need to tip the scale to change our systems. If you want to fight racism, invest your time in changing systems. Systems suffocated George Floyd — lack of accountability and healing for officers and communities, systems killed Ahmaud Arbery — housing and education segregation, systems killed Breonna Taylor — criminal justice system that assumes Black folk are guilty until proved innocent, our systems need to change. Actually every system is connected. It’s all ONE system: System with a Captial “S” our System has to change. Screw trying to prove people are or are not racists. If you don’t support racism, support systems change — there’s no other way.
The white supremacy nationalists who infiltrated these protests turning them violent, count on fake niceness, on us forgetting this ever happened, on our own hidden assumptions that Black people are violent. They count on stoking our pre-existing fears, on our lack of ability to look at ourselves. They’re counting on us cleaning windows today and ignoring how many Black men are incarcerated tomorrow. They count on us erasing the memory so we can go on with business as normal. They count on us giving up because we’re too hurt, tired, exhausted, so we shut up, numb the empathy we feel now, and then look the other way because that is what we have done for centuries. We don’t have to convince the white nationalists, all we need to do is unite and get serious about a just nation and work our asses off to bring that forth. If we invest in truth, if we invest in solidarity, if we invest in uncovering our own shame, blame, and guilt, together, and we invest for the next 10 years, we have a chance at getting some results. So let’s stop pointing fingers at the “bad people” and start looking at ourselves. Let’s pull up our sleeves and invest in shifting our systems, as a collective. Reconciliation is possible, but not without Truth, not without amends and right actions. Officers who joined the protests, thank you, it’s a great start, but only the beginning. Now it’s time to keep going and change the System, we need you too.
I’m devoting my life to this to ending systemic racism. But I can’t do this alone. I have brothers and sisters in this struggle of all hues, but we need as many as we can gather. Come, be in it for the long-haul.
Thanks to JO.
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Previously published on “Equality Includes You”, a Medium publication.
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Photo credit: Rita S. Fierro