Black people : mackenzian

August 1, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

CN: Missing from common memory

CN: frank reflections on anti-Black lynching.

Today, the Equal Justice Institute announced a new historical marker in Letohatchee, Alabama, a tiny town 24 miles south-west of the state capital, Montgomery.

Non-Alabamians know Montgomery as the capital of the Confederate States of America during the 1860s and the site of the anti-segregation bus boycott during the 1960s. Today, Letohatchee is a zebra town: more than 7 of 10 residents is Black and almost all of the rest are White.

They have a bloody common history.

As the EJI explains, this marker is the first to tell the stories of seven Black people lynched by mobs of White Letohatchee residents between 1900 and 1917. Police never arrested anyone for these murders. Prosecutors never reviewed these cases. Justice never emerged, and it still hasn’t.

But as of yesterday, a royal blue metal town marker describes the deaths of seven people killed in Letohatchee: two men, one a father; two brothers; a woman, wife, and mother; a son; a daughter. It memorializes the documented murders of seven more.

Title: Lynching in Letohatchee
Credit: Equal justice Institute
Year: 2016

It can take 116 years for the truth to become a public fact, a fact like “a clay mining company operates in Letohatchee,” and “Jefferson Davis was once sworn in as Confederate president just a few miles away,” and “this town is only 18 miles long.”

One hundred and sixteen years ago, White Letohatchee residents brutally killed Black Letohatchee residents, “and no one was ever arrested.”

No one will ever be arrested, because the murder victims are dead. The people who murdered them are dead. The state officials who failed to intervene or protect or pursue justice are dead.

Native American activists have argued that there can be no justice without common memory. We have to get specific about what that means. Because in this case, as we remember fourteen people whom White people lynched in Letohatchee and thousands of others murdered elsewhere around the country, some people have simply vanished.

The people who’ve killed other people in the service of racist terrorism and White supremacy have disappeared into our euphemisms to the degree that the subjects and the objects of lynchings almost appear to be the same.

Jim Cook was lynched. The Powell brothers were lynched. But by whom? Who lynched them? We lose the names of these actors in passive verbal phrases and impersonal nouns. Faceless, nameless mobs become footnotes a century and two decades after they’ve vented their fear, hatred, and contempt. The evil they expressed in violent gangs and crowds dissipates with them.

A century and two decades is long enough for pews of White supremacists to marry, have children, start grocery stores, keep farming, buy some land, sell some land, babysit grandchildren who move away for college, and die in peace in the woods. So they did in Letohatchee, Alabama. So they have everywhere in this country.

When entire mobs are absent from common memory, the record becomes a lean-to in time and space, a house with a wobbly termite-ridden floor that could buckle under anybody, and does. When euphemism hinders us from perceiving the degree and scope of violence, the truth we need to build our world on can be buried under hagiographies and face-saving histories. And when we simplify the truth for hymnodic myths, we can all band together and doubt whether those who remember accurately want the peace and unity we long for.

That’s not “common memory.” It’s common fantasy.

We need more testimonies of the lives of victims of lynching in the United States, just like those the Letohatchee community came together yesterday to share. We also need full accountings of the people who killed those victims. Because the full story is the ground we all stand on. It’s the toxic water we’re drinking together. It’s the air we’re breathing, and it chokes us, as it should.

It can take 116 years for the truth to be told, and only when the truth has advocates like the Equal Justice Institute. The truth needs many more advocates. It needs us all.

“EJI believes that truthfully acknowledging this history is vital to healing and reconciliation.” So do I.

So do I.

June 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Freedom delayed isn’t freedom.

I’d never even heard of Juneteenth until I started living in Texas. The international mythology around US abolitionism and emancipation is, like British abolitionist mythology, so thick that no one had ever told me it took the enslaved people of Texas two and half years to discover that President Lincoln’s executive order had taken effect in January 1863.

They spent two and a half extra years in slavery.
White Texans spent two and a half extra years deluded about their supremacy.
Two and a half years. Maybe a century and a half more, if we account for the life and death of James Byrd, Jr. (CN: lynching.)

I might not have believed the story of Juneteenth if I hadn’t seen the historical evidence for it, because it’s such a perversely perfect story premise: the people of Galveston are people forgotten in a network of soul-destroying laws and customs whose time has already gone. They don’t know they’re living in the future.

When the sun rises on January 1, 1863, nothing changes for them, and no one brings them the news that could help them to change their lives themselves. The war is over; they don’t know it. Their freedom is recovered; they have no inkling. Life continues as it always has, crushing them one by one.

This morning at work, the choir closed service with Jill Scott’s song “Golden.” (The lyrics are fairly simple.)

This song was playing in the background as I read President Obama describing Juneteenth as “a time to recommit ourselves to the work that remains undone.”

It’s that. It’s also a time to reflect on all of the ways we’re still waiting to inhabit freedom and wholeness we already are, freedom and wholeness undermined in contexts that would rather we be fragmented and compliant, not flourishing, not creative.

In the shadow of 103 of my siblings—LGBTQ, Latinx, Black—I can’t avoid seeing how easily my freedom and safety can be snatched if the raiders have enough brute force, enough fire power, enough doctrinal authority. I hate that something so fundamental to me can be so fragile.

And I’m looking for that news from DC that hasn’t yet made it to my life’s Galvestons. I’m looking for the word that restores the original blessings that are mine. If I’m part of communities that are free but don’t know it and therefore can’t experience the fullness of freedom, the very word, freedom, begins to lose its substance. As much as I’m embodied, as much as you can map my location and trace my life in time, my freedom has to be more than an abstract thing. Our freedom can’t be a theory. It has to be lived, material, as enfleshed and well-formed as we are.

Freedom has to filter into the very same policies, customs, channels, and systems that supremacism and enslavement did. Otherwise we can’t live free. That’s what restoration means: not that we port ourselves into disembodied space where everything’s alright and there are no worries, but that we restructure the world that is until it is the world it can be.

I’m cautioning myself, in the name of my ancestors, to stop looking to people and organizations for permissions that they don’t have the authority to grant or deny, and I’m authorizing myself. I’m not focusing on the ways that the world is committed to my limits; I’m focusing on the steps I can take, the new work I can begin, the facts that I haven’t yet seen because I’ve taken others’ stories about me for granted and haven’t fully claimed my own stories:

I am responsible.
I am capable.
I am free.

The work that remains undone is the manifestation of a world in which we can all flourish, in which we’re all free. Our visionaries have long proclaimed us free, but we still have to get that news to Galveston.

June 16, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Comfort food

Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World. (Image source) — Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World smirks at my self-justification. (Image source)

I ate a quarter of a large Ledo’s olive pizza this morning. For breakfast. It was a meal with all the right pieces: carbohydrate, protein, vegetables.

I don’t always eat pizza for breakfast, but when I do, I wolf down a quarter of it, and then I tell myself it’s a meal with all the right pieces.

I eat a portion of a large olive pizza with the same two beloved ones about every 6-8 weeks. We go to the same restaurant, order the same pizza, and talk about what’s new.

This time, one of my meal-mates is dealing with post-funeral family drama. The other meal-mate and I are dealing with post-pet-loss grief. We’re all dealing with post-massacre fatigue and funk. And in all of this, our monthly pizza is a reliable comfort, something we can count on to be good to us.

Before I went out this morning, I spoke to a friend in East Africa. I wanted to know some of the ways they’ve practiced resilience in their life and the strategies they’ve come to rely on to help them bounce back from trauma.

They were a well of wisdom and I’m looking forward to sharing their comments at a presentation next month. What struck me as they spoke was how much they insist on moving through life as a whole person, not fragmented, not bifurcated into acceptable and not acceptable, but whole.

Then I came home from pizza and watched BET’s recent documentary on LGBTQ people and the U.S. Black church, Holler If You Hear Me. Person after person shares how their religious families, leaders, and congregations affirmed them as long as they’d submit to being broken into parts, acceptable and not acceptable.

Special music: acceptable. Capacity to love and be intimate: not acceptable.

This isn’t abundant life.

I know people of faith with a lot of conscience beginning to ask post-Orlando, “What’s our work in this moment?” I’ve already helped to write statements, and I see peers preparing sermons and litanies for the weekend’s services.

I get that work, and I’m also interested in us cooking up something less like pizza for breakfast, something less instant, less easy, and more fulfilling long-term.

Our work can’t just be about checking off the right “awareness” criteria, and it can’t be just about what’s comfortable, not this time: the lives of real people are at stake and so is the health of the communities we share.