What Was the Date?

It’s all a blur. And time is basically irrelevant at this point. It doesn’t matter what day it is, it never feels like that day to me and I am always surprised when I find out. And if I tell you a story of something that happened in quarantine, please be aware that it could have taken place two days ago or mid-March. So I get it, dates can be hazy. But I really need someone to try. For the people in the back, i’m asking the people in the front: What was the date? When the complete viciousness of our history lost its teeth? When a country built on land that was stolen through cruelty (torture, genocide) and then built with cruelty (the torture and genocide of slavery) and then reluctantly (when forced through civil war) gave up its most blatant forms of cruelty, only to regroup to reshape and refashion them (Jim Crow, lynching, massacres, mass incarceration, poll taxes, redlining, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera) – when did that entire system built for and by white supremacy cease to have an effect? Because that is your premise when you want to “wait for all the facts” when you see us (Black people) being routinely over-policed, by both police and regular-degular citizens who for some strange and completely untraceable reason feel they have the right (almost like a birthright…) to determine when/where/how we can live and move and have our being. Inconveniencing us (at best) and slaughtering us (far far too easily) in ways and for “reasons” that you would never begin to consider reasonable if the shoe was on a foot in your family.

But we are in your family, white christians… allegedly. And yet, your power structures look no different (and often much worse) than “the world” with the seats at your tables held predominantly by white men. While your silence on issues of injustice is deafening, your platitudes as empty as they are plentiful and your support of cruel (hello old friend!) and corrupt characters disappointingly sickening. All of which is double baffling when you consider that a tenet of the faith for most of you is that we all are fallen and prone to sin; yet it is somehow unfathomable to you, that you (yes you), a product of a white supremacist root system might actually have a racist bone (or two or more) in your body… and I figure that it must be because you know the date. So please, just give me the date.

But in the meantime, forgive me if I have a hard time telling the difference between “saints” and sinners, and clearly prefer one over the other.

#blacklivesmatter