Our Awakening — Àdisà

There is a form of incomplete awakening that looks complete on the surface, it is blindness masquerading as sight. Now, when we awaken, we have healthy bodies inhabited by thinking minds. When many such people with able bodies and thinking minds are united by a shared goal, consciously chosen and embraced, the resulting interaction is powerful, purposeful and loving. That interaction of minds moving toward a shared goal is the closest thing I know to religious power.

— Ayi Kwei Armah

Awakenings can be painful. In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus gives Neo the choice between the blue pill (the continued slumber of blissful ignorance) and the red pill (an awakening). Neo accepts the red pill and the reality he is awakened to, while rooted in the real, is nonetheless painful. America for all of its boastfulness about exceptionalism and being beacon of light and life remains, paradoxically, a painfully insular, ahistorical and therefore self-absorbed society. We think that things only exist when we become aware of them. It is a salient feature of an Object Permanence society.

Twitter and Facebook are abuzz about what bad shape the world is today, how things seem to be getting worse. We point to the atrocities being conducted by Israel in Gaza; the violence in Iraq; the civil wars and diseases in Africa; poverty and quality of life struggles in Latin America; the wanton destruction of Black bodies and lives here at the hands of law enforcement and vigilantes as if these are new phenomena, or at very least a rising occurrence in an old phenomenon.

But…

Palestinians have been catching hell since they were pushed off their land in 1948; America has been overthrowing democratically elected latin American governments and supporting brutally violent dictators for decades; supporting violence in Iraq and other countries in the region for as far back as at least as the US effort to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mosaddegh, and installing a puppet, the Shah of Iran in 1953; King Leopold chewed up and spit out ten million African lives; Stalin destroyed perhaps as many as twenty million lives, and we know about a holocaust that extirpated around eleven million of which six million were Jews.

Closer to home, the white vampiric destruction of Black bodies and lives by a blood thirsty society has been an constant feature of American life since at least 1619. There has never been a time in American history when Black folks were safe, just times when we assumed ourselves to be in less danger than others. Brother Mike Brown, Sister Renisha McBride, Brother Trayvon Martin, Brother Eric Garner and so many others are new names added to an old, ever expanding roster of lives prematurely and unnecessarily destroyed at the hands of the few whites, quietly supported by the dulcet complicity of the majority of whites in this country. It is telling that the destruction of innocent Black lives, many of them teenagers, is met with silence by so many of this nation’s white citizenry. The lack of white outcry our the poor treatment of their fellow citizens is tantamount to tacit complicity.

When we as a nation share a collective wail over Columbine or Newtown, and then, notice an absence of white wails and protest when unarmed innocent Black teenagers are deprived of opportunity and oxygen by the police or vigilantes, your silence tells us ever more clearly who you are and what you stand for, especially when we then hear a a rising crescendo of your collective wails again over animal cruelty. Your silence speaks for you, tell us exactly who you are, and what you stand for—that despite liberal protestations, you agree: Blackness is a de facto crime punishable by death. But wait for it, we know: You voted for President Obama.

White murderers no matter how heinous the crime will almost always be afforded context: whiteness must remain humanized at all costs, even in its demonstrations of inhumanity. White supremacy is the sanitizing context, the only context that is assumed to be self-evident.

White supremacy is a chameleon though, and a shape shifter. Aside from the salient oppressive manifestation, it also takes peculiar and distorted forms when one Black life erases another. Here the Black wails are sharp and loud too, but they are not sustained; at least not with the force and vociferousness of protestations of a Black life erased by a white person. Here context is introduced as well as its function is to push a deeper conversation about community culpability and responsibility to the margins and let blame have the floor. The context is the same as for the whites: White supremacy, it has merely assumed a different grotesque form.

A grotesque form in which the tacit implications are that a Black life erased by a white life is more valuable than a Black life erased by a Black life. Even in this carnival of Black carnage, we still behave as though the white person’s murdering is of a better quality—more deserving of passionate intensity—than the black person’s murdering. The logic of the white man’s ice being colder prevails even in tragedy.  In the algebra of white supremacy the answers for both is that same: One more Black life deprived of its giving promise.

The twentieth century was particularly brutal, bloody, misanthropic and violent—more so if you were a Black or Brown person. The twenty first century is no different; it is really just the twentieth century trying to improve upon its performance, trying to overachieve by offering us a more necrotic humanism. And yet, something seems different about the contours of this age. I submit that what may be different is not the violence or venality— or its frequency and intensity—but our awareness—our awakening.

Social Media has invited more of the world into our small personal universes. Made it impossible for us to ignore the systemic and systematic design by which hurt is planned, organized, structured and executed. Twenty years ago Mike Brown’s murder, Eric Garner’s lynching, Renisha McBride’s execution would have likely been local stories that garnered very little media attention –locally. Most likely their lives would have been relegated to the hinterlands of local newspapers—the metro section under crimes. They almost certainly would not have made national news and would only get local coverage on a slow news day to fill up airtime.

But social media has made us aware of the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, all over and everywhere. For many, Twitter and Facebook has become their red pill, their awakening; others have chosen the blue pill, choosing instead to turn over and continue the long good night. But there is a third group, those who have taken half of the red pill and half of the blue pill and have become indifferent without becoming inured. 

They are legion. 

The incessant flooding of our timelines, newsfeeds, twitter feeds and instagram feeds of images of lives irreparably destroyed, of communities ripped apart and torn bodies, of lives cut short in their prime—without the slightest acknowledgement that this is someone’s husband, daughter, brother, mother, father, uncle, niece, friend. Just totems of carnage meant to emphasize our vacuous point, to keep our feeds poppin’. Ostentatious displays of our lack of humanity as we rush to be the first or the most current poster of atrocities. We post under the disingenuous guise of awareness and concern. An awareness and concern that is rarely followed up on to tell us what has become of the person or their family that we used to fill our feeds. In our rush to demonstrate the bigness of our commitments we often reveal the smallness of our compassion. Many of us have become Hashtag humanist or if you prefer, #hashtaghumanist.

We need another freedom movement like the one that SNCC had in the South, where we work with people in assisting them in organizing themselves in a variety of areas: neighborhood safety and protection, food development and resource identification, knowledge and resource banks, political awareness and action collectives.

 
In this age of social media you could establish community groups that discuss how best to identify, develop, and organize their resources. Students and others could volunteer in the summers to work either with their home communities or communities that they have adopted. Seems to me that we have enormous resources that are poorly arranged, underdeveloped and therefore under utilized.

You cannot beat systematized and organized violence with individual initiative detached from organized resistance, no matter how well intended.

Being awake simply means that the day has begun. We still have to do something with the day, to make the day count. Because if we don’t the only difference between us and person who took the blue pill is that while they are sleeping, we are merely walking while asleep. (Sleepwalkers can be a danger to themselves and others.)

All the great spiritual traditions of the world teach us that an awakening is not an destination point, but invitation to begin the journey to locate our best selves—and along the way introduce some beauty into the world.

In life, love and liberation,

Àdisà