My husband and I have had many arguments in the past few days. “There is no excuse for riots and looting,” he says, “they are hurting their own cause.” My Indian husband comes from a family with a mother who anticipated his every need and a father who worked long days and years to ensure that he had the freedom to go to any school in the world. As a result, my husband is highly educated and respected, speaking English with no trace of an accent. He has experienced racism surprisingly few times, once in small town Michigan, once when being mistaken for a refugee in Greece, once on a train in Paris, and of course, Border Control at airports. Each time, he was left temporarily infuriated. However, my husband has never experienced hunger, he has never known the hatred of someone who should love him. and he has never been struck down by those who promised to serve and protect... over and over and over.
I grew up in chaos and fear, a conveniently absent father, rotating “stepfathers,” constantly changing addresses and schools, the smell of bars and cigarettes wrapped up with Saturday morning cartoons. In school, I learned how to stay awake in class while hiding bruises and missing hair and I learned to sit in defiant silence when the state intervened and sat me before a counselor. I remember one Easter in particular, I was in either third or fourth grade, I walked alone to the Baptist church down the street and I looked with envy at all the beautiful hats, colorful hair clips and shiny shoes. I crammed into a pew with strangers, embarrassed by my too small skirt and out-of-place exposed pale legs, but those thoughts were forgotten when the woman next to me took my hand and the singing began.
Each time the State, eager to get another child off their books, sought family reunification, I learned of the metallic quality of the taste of hopelessness. I built walls, trusted no one, and from behind my walls, I sneered at the kids who had family, the kids who could be in the school musical, the kids who had rides home from soccer practice, the kids who had parents who told them that they loved them, rather than how much they hated them. My jealousy and anger burned.. every. single. day. I graduated high school with straight Cs and the occasional D and I failed out of college just short of my degree.
Though twenty years have passed, today, that little girl is raging inside of me. She is smashing windows and stealing shoes, because she knows that the only reason she has become who I am is because of our white skin. It wasn’t until my early thirties, when I was living in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood and learning the names of the kids selling drugs on the corner, that my foster parents, the first people to help me do my homework, told me that they had said no to the placement of a little black boy, shortly before I was placed in their care. These chosen parents of mine didn’t say no out of racism, but rather out of fear that this little boy would have too many battles to fight in their rural white community. Even so, I think of this little boy every day. Has he found love and hope? Is he alive today? Is he smashing windows and raging at a system that has abused, humiliated and broken him? I don’t condone destruction, looting, and stealing, but I do empathize with the rage. The whole world is raging and I along with it.
But my anger is so small in comparison to the anger, fear and bitterness aimed at an unjust centuries old society. George Floyd was just a couple years older than me. We would have been in school together. There are no words to encompass the horror of what was done to him. While window are being smashed, we should all be smashing through our own complacency. We should be signing up to tutor, calling our representatives, using our churches as points of outreach rather than selfishly serving ourselves. We should be working with schools in every neighborhood, to ensure that every child has a chance. We should be speaking up when witness to racism. To the little boy who’s place I took and to the man that he has become, let me stand next to you, holding your hand... much as the woman in church held my hand so many years ago.
For a small sound of hope, I am attaching a recording from the Moria Refugee Camp. These women have endured countless abuses, a horrific journey and are still daily robbed of their humanity in Moria. Yet they sing and they teach me about who God is and what it means to hope for a better world.
