When My Brother Tells Me about His People, His Days
To deny. To rebut. To negate. To diminish. To silence.
1
When I look down at my own hands I see my father’s hands as I remember them when I was a child. I am about the same age of my father when I began to notice his hands, their strength, their color of brown sugar, how they showed his age, his experience, his years. I wonder at the men who came before me, & before my father; I wonder at my grandfather’s grandfather. I imagine these hands are his hands. I wonder at the generations between us, that expanse, how our hands in the ages have been given, as gifts, to each next man again & again, from father to son, & father to son, & father to son.
2
I have written elsewhere about how I’ve come to agree with, support, & join the movement for Black lives. Even so, I note here how my story, my growing up & waking up, includes having continually to face my racism — to name it, to distance myself from it, to hate it — & so to learn to un-become racist.
As a result I’ve grown in compassion. I see racism more often now. I put myself in their shoes & I know I cannot imagine what it’s like, what it’s really like.
Today, & this is important, I give benefit of the doubt to the testimony of Black Americans, even if only as a discipline, where I used to respond to claims of “That’s racist!” automatically with, “You can’t prove that,” or, “Isolated incident,” or, “Well, that’s not necessarily true.”
I write, then, as one who knows the inward life of a self-deceived racist. That is, I’ve been there. I get it.
3
Likely, you (sincerely) believe you’re not racist. I (also sincerely) used to believe “I am not racist.”
I couldn’t see my bias, my complicity in white supremacy, my partnership with empire (& its generations & its momentum) that — using religion & denial & policy & rationalizing & fear & media & mythology & brutality & silence — has caused millions to suffer, to die, to feel the impossible curse & burden of invisibility.
4
In the aftermath, then, of a swastika drawn above the door of a Black student’s dorm room — at Biola University, a Christian college, my alma mater, & alongside the response my brother Justin has made regarding its appearance, I have read arguments of well-meaning Christians, most of them white & most of them sincere & most of them “not racist.”
So I want to ask you—ask us.
5
When (& how) did American apartheid come to an end; when (& how) did the Civil Rights movement come to an end — as American policy, as American myth?
6
How often do we respond to claims of “That’s racist!” automatically with, “You can’t prove that,” or, “Isolated incident,” or, “Well, that’s not necessarily true”?
But otherwise, how often do we require ourselves to be convinced of something, of anything, “necessarily”?
Why do we diminish, or refuse to trust, the testimony of Black people when they tell their stories, express their hurt, show their suffering?
How often do we respond to that vulnerability with “not necessarily” instead of with compassion & action?
Why do we demand “necessarily” before we trust their word? What finally would gain our trust? Or what do we protect ourselves from? Why do we believe we are warranted, that we have the background & the experience & the credibility, to have a say — to deny, to rebut, to negate — within the discussion? What warrants our doubt?
Have we imagined that these expressions of suffering — that they are acts of love, of hope, of gracious patience on the part of Black Americans? Have we imagined how even angry-seeming expressions of suffering — & how often do we perceive them merely as angry? — are prophetic calls for us to listen to our hurting brothers & sisters, to love all people, to repair what’s been broken, to wake up from our sleep, to see the sufferings not of the Other but of Our Family? Have we imagined these expressions are hundreds of years old, & long, & deep, & felt, & crafted? Have we imagined the oppressed know better about oppression than the powerful?
7
In school, we learned how taxation without representation justified the Boston Tea Party — a famous, beautiful, effective example of how destroying private property can bring about justice; & how taxation without representation justified breaking away from the British Empire, as we accused our king of tyranny; & how because of taxation without representation, we waged war. Taxation without representation justified a violent revolution.
So why do we not marvel at, & wonder at, & stand in awe of: between the end of the Civil War & before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, no Black Revolutionary War ever came, with its violence, with its Declaration of Independence, even though it might have, even perhaps should have.
Instead, American mythology of Black Americans grew roots, grew strong, grew into empire. & we lynched thousands of innocents. & we used tyranny to silence the millions. & Black Americans experienced taxation without representation, for starters — again & again, for generations, without hope of Revolution.
Clearly, by our American reasoning, war ought to have been waged — we ought at least to have expected something like it. But it didn’t come. What came instead? Spirituals. The Blues. Jazz. Gospel. Hip-hop. The history of American artistic expression. That resistance, that prophecy.
Why do we not marvel at that?
8
What about Martin Luther King? Of course, there is Martin Luther King. He was a prophet, a vessel of change. But he was nonviolent.
What does it look like to marvel at him? Do we thank God that even though King should have waged the violent Black Liberation Revolution, that he had every American precedent to wage that war, that he should have been their George Washington — that instead he marched across bridges & sat at lunch counters & gave speeches & wrote letters from jail & dreamed of love between all people; & instead he was martyred; he was soon a dead prophet; he was Moses who did not cross over, who never saw the Promised Land; he was not a Washington; he was not a Mandela who lived to see the day?
Do we say, “America really lucked out there!”
9
Or, in the decades since his martyrdom, when we see protests & riots, do we feel angry, dismissive, tempted to say, “Thug”?
& do we feel entitled to their non-violence in their protests? Do we proclaim in our living rooms, “Martin Luther King would have done it differently!”
Do we believe he set a precedent we might now demand of them?
Do we unreflectively dismiss riot as somehow not the Boston Tea Party?
Do we think Black America has not, since the Civil War, been justified to bring about a violent revolution?
Why do we believe Black nonviolence is not a gift, but a demand we can make of them?
10
When we hear a story of anti-Black racism, are we quicker to humanize the Mike Brown or the Darren Wilson? If we catch ourselves humanizing the Darren Wilson first, do we think, Oops! There I go again.
& do we fight against that first impulse?
Or do we find ourselves soon saying, “Not necessarily”?
Have we imagined that the liberation of Black people, political & mythological, is more important than the comfort of white people?
Have we read & studied & learned from the arguments & insights addressing our first impulses, so that we ourselves can name them? & have we talked with other white people? & have we begun to doubt our first impulses together, in groups? & have we asked for help?
Have we imagined that the American conquest & colonization of Black & Brown people, that the invention of Whiteness to function as a political & economic weapon, that they worked so efficiently, so thoroughly, that conquest became American mythology? Have we considered that this is America’s greatest & longest-lasting crime — & that it hasn’t yet ended?
11
Not too long ago, I was in an audience at an event in support of Black Lives Matter. I sat next to my friend & cofounder of the Just Love Coalition, Justin Campbell. & I saw his hands. I looked for a long time at his hands, at his slender fingers, at his fingernails, at his dark skin so loose around his knuckles.
These are the hands of a young father, an activist, a scholar, a writer, a professor. These are the hands of one who types for a living, who grades papers & writes in Composition Notebooks & on whiteboards, who opens books & turns pages. These are the hands of one whose son holds onto them as he is swung around & around in parks & in front yards in Whittier where we live. These are the hands of my friend, my brother.
& they are his father’s hands. & his grandfather’s hands. & his grandfather’s grandfather’s hands. They have been passed down to him, as gifts, through the generations. & what have they endured? What brutality have they suffered? What bottoms of ships were they chained to? What cuts did the cotton thorns make? What monuments have these hands built? What plantations did they raise up? What swamps did they drain? What children did they rock to sleep? What women did they hold near? What families were they torn from? What fires have they been held to? What wounds have they mended? What dying friends have they held? What ropes tied them together, handcuffs kept them still, walls were they forced against while stopped & frisked? What protest signs have they carried? What fists have they raised in the air? What prayers, with those slender dark fingers, have they formed?
When my brother tells me about his People, his days, & when I hear the stories of days from so many other Black people, even if I do not measure the data that confirms these stories, by now, by today, having for years partnered silently with American mythology & empire, I ask us what arrogance & defensiveness & hatred & ignorance & apathy & racism keep us from taking his side every single time?
12
When finally will we listen?
Carlos Antonio Delgado earned his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008. He was the winner the 2008 Turow-Kinder Fiction Award. His writing has appeared in Twelve Stories, The Acentos Review, Pittsburgh Noir, and Catholic Digest, among others. He was a K. Leroy Irvis fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and is the recipient of an EIDOS grant. He has taught writing (and literature and philosophy and theology and history and pedagogy and rhetoric) in widely varied settings, at prestigious universities and inner city high schools. He is the founder and director of Life Writers Collaborative, co-founder and co-director of the Just Love Coalition, and Director of Curriculum at WeaveWriter. Today, he lives in Whittier, CA, and teaches writing to undergraduates at the University of Southern California.
