Is There No Balm In America?

I wrote this last year in the wake of the Charleston church shooting. The sentiments here, still hold true for the violence of our current moment…and all the preceding moments that gave led to now. (Originally published July 3, 2015)

What do we do now? Now that nine families must bury their loved ones, murdered by hate. Now that the autopsy confirms the homicide of Freddie Gray; now that hundreds of thousands of Haitian-descended Dominicans and Haitian migrants fear “repatriation”; now that two black girls seek to heal physically and emotionally from the physical bruising and the weight of violence inflicted upon them by officers who are supposed to protect and serve — what do we do now?

The bible says that earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal — and I wonder to myself, what does that healing look like in the public sphere? Here, in this hour, as we grieve collectively for these nine lives, and so many other black lives lost to the absurdity of hate-filled, fear-filled violence, I wonder what does healing from racist ideologies that both perpetuate and obscure systemic oppression look like in the public arena.

Our task is not done at the grave. As we mourn with those who mourn, as we sojourn the stony road of sorrow as a nation, we must realize that true mourning and the veracity of our gait together lies not in the sympathy and the empathy we extend, or the tears we shed together, but the world we build when the crowds disperse, when all the prayers have been prayed, when all the hymns have been sung, and when and the media cycle moves on.

We must have the courage to build a context where the conditions that have made the violence against black bodies a norm, no longer exist. To be clear, this work is not merely the unhoisting of a hateful flag . Flags are symbols, and symbols point to tangible things, ideas, and states of being — it would be a misappropriation of energy to remove a symbol while maintaining the systems that feed off the oppression of blacks and the poor.

If it is indeed the case that earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal, the healing that must happen cannot happen if we do not elevate the ground from which we articulate our vision. That healing cannot happen if we continue to keep our vision so small as to mistake the optics of justice and the appearance of freedom for the work and the actuality thereof. This is not the time for a piece-meal pragmatism that says if we inch our way toward “progress” we will get there eventually. No, this time, we must go higher. This time we must be committed building the dam from which justice will roll like waters, and casting the bell from which freedom will ring. The bible also speaks of a man named Moses, who did not mince words when he told Pharaoh that it was time for the people to be free.

And it is time for us to be free. My ancestors fought, and prayed, and tarried, and cried, and marched, and sang, and voted, and died too often and too long for my generation to have to live through what seems like a remix of a horrible, violent chapter in their lives and in the narrative of our nation. I don’t want my children, or my children’s children fighting the same battles. It is time to finish the work of the Reconstruction period and the Civil Rights Movement.

We can begin, by pushing for a constitutional amendment that enshrines and guarantees our human rights and the non-acceptance of apartheidic conditions toward blacks and any demographic group based upon race, religion, class, gender, ability, or orientation. We can begin by pushing for the complete eradication of the condition of involuntary servitude. We can begin by pushing for a guaranteed annual income to allay the weight and effects of poverty that impact every area of the lives of every person living in poverty extreme poverty here in the U.S

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said that the evidence of love is manifested in how we tend to those who are no longer with us. May the evidence of our public love, for all the black lives lost & injured, for all the black lives behind bars in a state of legal involuntary servitude, for all the black lives living in extreme poverty, trying to make a way out of no way — may that love be evidenced by our collective courage, to be co-creators with God, in making real the healing that heaven offers for the sorrows here on earth.