Charleston Shooting Let the Church Say Amen
My grandfather has the early onset of dementia, and this is a pretty tough time for our family because he has been our Superman. I’ve never seen him meet a stranger because he LOVES to talk. Our family became aware of his disorder because of his constant repeating. He can say one thing, and a minute later, he will repeat it as if he never said it. It breaks my heart, but I listen as if it’s the first time I heard the story. However, lately, I’ve been listening closer.
The common denominator in his stories are rooted in trauma, things he never said are now seeping their way out. Understandably, as a retired veteran, he constantly revisits his experiences in the war. He served a few tours and often weaves in how he was treated during Jim Crow. Born and raised in Columbus, GA, there was no escaping it, and although he brushes over it and sometimes jokes about how he was called “boy” as an adult, watched family inventions taken and patented, treated as if he was dumb, and remembers walking by lynched bodies as a "boy," this was his reality, a reality that still haunts him to this day.
While Granny weirdly, almost removes herself from discussing experiences during Jim Crow except for nodding in agreement, Granddaddy refuses to forget yet tries to glaze over it by reminiscing about the “good ol’ days.” This sugarcoating is very reminiscent of Sweet Home in the novel Beloved where Toni Morrison provides vivid description of Black men and women savagely raped and beaten physically and psychologically during slavery. And although every inhumane possible thing happened at Sweet Home, when removed, the characters still spoke about Sweet Home nostalgically. However, there was nothing sweet about it. In fact, it was everything but that.
This "Sweet Home" trauma still lives in Granddaddy and has been passed down to all of us. I guess this can be viewed as another form of generational curses, constantly living in the “never forget” and are forced to remember through sporadic traumatic, experiences.
While I never forgot the essence of my grandfather’s stories, I became accustomed to them to the point of almost becoming numb because they were just that… “stories.” Although I have always felt a little sting, I never thought I'd feel the fire.
Jim Crow has never just been a Southern thing.
Somehow, though I did not live through the trauma of slavery and Jim Crow, I still lived it in other ways. I lived it through my mother’s anger about her own experiences growing up and my father’s advice of always being mindful, but I also had a few of my own.
Growing up in Orange County, California as a teenager, I remember being randomly stopped for unquestionable searches for just walking, being pulled over when riding in the car with my friends while driving speed limit and being asked to take our pictures by police officers just to have them on file, being watched when walking in stores, being overlooked in certain settings, and having “the talk” about having to be 10 times better because I’m a Black woman. What do these messages say to a child?
The paradox is that in a land that “sees no color,” I am ALWAYS reminded that I am Black, by what I see and don’t see in the media and by continuously seeing people that look like me being mistreated and murdered, a series of modern day lynching camouflaged by “we are all one human race” speeches…Indeed, we are one human race, but who actually believes it and lives it?
Lynching is still very much alive. Trayvon Martin, Michael Browne, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Miriam Carey, Yvette Smith, Andy Lopez, Rekia Boyd, the Charleston Massacre, and not so subtle messages in between, We are lynched daily. Many of us knowingly and unknowingly are born with a noose around our necks and death sentences waiting to happen.
Who wants to tell their child they can be anything they want to be “even the President of the United States” but have to give “the talk” behind it by having to explain double and triple consciousness (Being American, Minority, and Black)? where the child has three options: overly rise to the occasion at the cost of neglecting his own culture, do just enough to fit in so no one bothers you, or do much less because of feelings of defeat and ignorance. All are modern day slavery and psychological lynching.
I guess this is part of what Michelle Alexander speaks of when she writes of The New Jim Crow.
I wonder if America is like the functional drug addict in need of an intervention, constantly everyone around sees that there is a problem, but America, like the addict, thinks everything is okay because we appear to be functioning okay, yet we are dying, and killing the very organs that gave us life to begin with.
I’m fearful of lessons unlearned repeated and rearing its ugly head.
This time it took a Bible study of 9 harmless people to awaken us yet again.
I can honestly say that I
try to see God in everything, but I am trying my best to find God in this...Perhaps, God is in all of this as a wake up call.
“Let the church say Amen?”
I don’t know, but we need to say and do something…
