Because I didn't know: a few more words on #blacklivesmatter

Hey! I've been gone awhile, sunk underneath papers and theology books and exams. I'm planning to post regularly in December and January, because for some reason writing is what I want to do with my break from school (!?). So stay tuned for awhile if I haven't tired you out yet. For today, I am diving straight in to a topic that may not be fun, but is important, and is what I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

Photo by Fibonacci Blue

I am writing today about Ferguson and Eric Garner and justice. I am writing not because I have great insight; I am writing not to start a war against police officers, most of whom are doing their jobs with great honor and often sacrifice; I am writing not to speak for black people, who I could never speak for. I am writing because to keep silent for me would be to bow out, because we have to be in this all together, because we have to stop throwing stones at each other over fences and we have to break down the fences and we can only do that if we are honest and speak what we believe is true.

Let me start with this: I've never in my life been under the illusion that there was racial equality in this country, or racial harmony.

In seventh grade, my classmates started moving away, across the county line. That was the same year we moved to a majority black middle school; that was around the same time more black people started moving into our neighborhood. By the time I was in high school, my brave father, who was editor of the local paper, decided to do a series of stories about changing demographics and race. People didn't want to talk about it, because race was a thing of the past; this wasn't white flight, it was families in search of better schools. But I could see it, the divisions and the bits of fear and the subtle, creeping lie, unintentional and toxic, that our town was not as good with more of those people.

(I was in seventh grade in 1999. I didn't know that same year, a West-African immigrant would be shot 41 times by police officers in New York, for pulling a wallet out of his pocket. All the officers would return to duty.)

I went to college halfway across the country, and I flew a lot. It was the post-9-11 world and I noticed that I never ever got chosen for a "random" search. To this day, despite having taken probably close to 100 domestic flights, despite having traveled to Israel, Tanzania, and Bangladesh, I have never once gotten stopped by TSA or customs. I look innocent.

(In 2005, the year I packed my bags for Bangladesh and slipped through customs by my innocence with an unlabeled ziploc bag of green tea leaves that could've been anything--that same year an unarmed 25-year-old black man who with his hands up, locked behind his head was shot by police in Oregon. I didn't know).

After college, I taught and coordinated a program for adults to learn to read in DC. Because 20-30% of adults in DC can't read (only slightly higher than the national figure of 14%). We taught two or three hundred students while I was there, and probably two hundred others came through for testing or orientation or workshops who never attended class. And out of all those learners that came through our doors, there was ONE who was white. Many of the students had dyslexia, or other learning disabilities, and a few gotten pregnant or gotten involved with a bad crowd and dropped out. But what about the white kids who had dyslexia or got pregnant or got involved with a bad crowd? Somehow, they still learned to read. Somehow, the system or the community or whatever you want to blame, worked differently for them.

(I didn't know that in 2010, while I was teaching adult literacy, an unarmed, autistic and learning disabled black man would be shot by two police officers in LA for looking suspicious. The officers were ruled justified in shooting him.)

So no, I never thought we lived in a post-racial society. I just didn't know it was this bad.

I didn't know what was going on all those years. I didn't know that within a six-month span in 2014, a 22-year-old man holding an air rifle in Walmart could be shot by police; I didn't know that a 12-year-old boy holding a toy gun in a park could be shot; I didn't know that a 19-year-old could be left in the street for four hours after being shot for being black and 280 pounds. I didn't know that not a single one of these people who killed these young men would be taken to trial, and that juries would say these cops were "justified in their use of force."

Reading these accounts and watching these videos makes me nauseous.

If I were black, I believe it would make me terrified, and outraged.

This was going on the whole time I was growing up, going to school, having enough resources (some passed down from the wealth of my slave-owning heritage) to go to a private college and then volunteer in Africa and in Americorps after college.

I didn't know any of this until August of this year.

And because I didn't know, even though I thought myself sensitive and worldly and well-enough-integrated into black communities to have a clue--I think it's probably time for me to listen.

It is probably not the time for me to debate the ambiguities of legal cases (hundreds of ambiguous cases stop being ambiguous and start being a pattern). It is probably not the time for me to say things about looting (because, as my professor Valerie Cooper points out, don't you see that by talking about looting and vandalism when they are talking about lost lives, it feels to so many that we are equating black lives with property again--and do we really want to go back to that?). It is probably not the time for me to get into the nuances of how difficult it is to be a police officer, and how many police officers are trying so hard (though that human side is important, and there will be a time for that, too).

It is probably time, rather, to listen, to people who know much better than me what it is like to be pulled over for no reason, what is it like to walk down a street at night and have approaching people cross the street for fear of your dark skin, what it is like to wonder if you can figure out a way to keep your black son away from all toy guns everywhere, forever, what it is like to feel so many other things I can't list here because I just don't know.

I'll recommend just a few voices to listen to--black voices, brave voices, voices that are trying to break down walls. I trust you will find them reasonable and helpful and true, if you take a moment to step into their shoes:

• Speaking Fear, Praying Shalom by Osheta Moore- a black mother's honest and thoughtful recounting of what to do when her 11-year-old son steals a pair of sunglasses
• Everything by Austin Channing- her blog is thoughtful, provocative, well-researched, and tirelessly prophetic.
• After Ferguson by Willie Jennings- he's one of our profs at Duke Divinity and I think this is a helpful piece about how the root of all of this is violence.
• The Cross and the Molotov Cocktail by Christena Cleveland- another woman whose work I'd like to be more familiar with. A helpful perspective on how to understand the rage that has led to vandalism and looting.

Well...we've got a long way to go. But listening is a start.

Pressed but not crushed, part 2

Read part 1 of Paulina's story here.

I went to see Paulina in the spring, at the family compound where she was staying with her mother. She still swung her hips and insisted on a feast of coconut fish for her guest. Edwiggy crawled around with a little doll. The Tanzanian pop radio and children’s shouts were a more pleasant background than the busy road where Moses lived in the city.

Here in Moshi is where she had first met Moses. He had grown up here, worked at a shop selling rice and sugar and soap. Her mother would send her to the shop for tea leaves. Sometimes Moses bought her a Coke and induced her to linger a few minutes at the store.

“He was charming,” she told me. “Different than he is now.”

“Has he tried to call you?”

“He calls, but I will not go back,” she said as though it was that easy, as though she could simply toss him aside, like the chaff she was sorting out from the rice. “Once he pulled his gun on me.”

*

She was working at a hotel in here Moshi when he asked her to come live with him. She weighed the options—a meager job cleaning at a tourist hotel, better than most of her schoolmates, but long hours for low pay—or keeping house for charming Moses-from-the-shop. As soon as she arrived in Dar es Salaam, she knew he was different—drinking, drugs, sleeping with other women. The police job and his co-workers were pushing him in a direction she didn’t know how to handle. He came home angry and didn’t have much to say other than to ask about dinner.

When she was pregnant with Edwiggy, that’s when he first started beating her. In her seventh month, scared for Edwiggy’s health, she went home to Moshi. Her mother trekked to different markets every day to buy and sell sweaters and coats, thrift-store throwaways from the U.S.  Paulina could only sell coconuts from home and help with the laundry and cooking. She didn’t know if her mother and siblings silently resented her as another giant belly to feed. After all, she’d gotten fat in the big city.

She delivered the baby in Moshi. Moses pursued her. She convinced herself he had beaten her because of the pregnancy. He’d be better now that the baby was born. She returned to Dar.

The beatings resumed after a few weeks. She started to get scared when she found messages from other lovers on his phone. She was terrified of AIDS; the Tanzanian public health campaign had been in successful in getting the word out about condoms and HIV testing. The marketers, the government, the newscasters could talk about it. You just couldn’t talk about it in real life, with your lover; no real man would consider wearing condoms. All Paulina could do was question him. “Why do you have messages from other women on the phone?”

Every question meant a beating.

One night, when Edwiggy was only a few months old, Moses came home wasted, complaining about the food she’d prepared. She snatched his phone in suspicion or retaliation. He pulled out his gun.

Paulina talked him down. She lived with him for several months after that. She slept with him, cooked for him, and raised their child. He never apologized.

*

After a day of coconut fish and storytelling, and watching Edwiggy try to stand, it was time for me to go. I stood to leave. That’s when she brought it up again. “Do you have the money to help me start a business?”

She had a vague plan about going to Nairobi to buy secondhand clothes, to sell them at markets like her mother did.

I had dangled money in front of her eagerly once, in hopes it would make her leave an abusive relationship. Now, after more thought and other experiences of being ill-used for cash, I balked a little. I feared she didn’t have a good business plan, might become dependent on me for help. She and Edwiggy were safe now. Did I need to help beyond that?

But she still needed to provide for her daughter. And I had offered her help. I gave her $100. “Use it for business,” I said. “Be careful with it.” Another woman I knew had begun raising goats, sheep, and chickens on the same initial amount.

When I came back to see Paulina one last time before my departure from Tanzania, she asked me again for money. “I haven’t started business yet, and I had to use $25 to take Edwiggy to get her shots,” she said.

I swallowed and told her I didn’t have any more to give.

In retrospect, I was wrong. She had used the money to provide needed health care for her daughter. I could have encouraged this. I could have helped more. I could have done research on micro-lending groups, tried to refer her to someone to help. I could have found more seed money, sat with her to make a business plan, stayed an extra day and gone with her to invest in inventory. But it was so complicated, and I needed boundaries, and I was tired of being asked to be a savior, tired of these murky situations, and I was going back to America, and I knew nothing of business, and what more could I do?

I gave her a big hug and promised I’d come back one day.

*

When I think of Paulina, I think how it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that she had such a heavy load, that there was nowhere to turn for sustainable income or assistance, no way for a woman with a primary-school education and an infant to make it in her country, no legal recourse for the wrongs that were done her. It isn’t fair that I couldn’t, or didn’t, help her more.

But I also think of her grin, the gap in teeth when she giggles, her sing-songy voice, her hospitality, her caring father and mother, her great love for her daughter, and how she doesn’t give up.

I have a feeling, or maybe it is a hope, or only a desperate prayer—that she and Edwiggy are doing okay.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Pressed but not crushed, part 1

I visited Paulina my first week back to Tanzania. I hadn’t seen her for a year. She carried her six-month-old daughter on her back as she bent over her kerosene stove to fry potatoes and plantains. She swung her new-mother hips as she walked proudly to the refrigerator to retrieve the orange-papaya juice she had squeezed and blended for me that morning.

Juice in hand, I sat on the red plush sofa in a bare concrete room and stared at badly-translated, hokey photos on the wall (“house is where the heart is”) while I dutifully ate the plantains and meat she brought me. Paulina insisted I relax while she cooked porridge for her daughter Edwiggy, fed her, fretted about her lack of appetite, bathed her, dressed her. “I’ve been so busy rushing around, I ran into the door,” she giggled, touching a bruise on her head.

After a quick afternoon trip to meet her old grandmother and run by the market, we returned with baskets full of onions, tomatoes, papaya and watermelon. Paulina’s boyfriend was watching TV, irked that we’d returned late and dinner wasn’t ready. Paulina cooked dinner, fed Edwiggy again, put her to bed, made more juice. She brought out the food for me and Moses, and served his plate. She turned up the American hip-hop louder and heated bathwater for Moses as we ate. She washed the dishes.

By ten I was exhausted from merely watching her. Paulina flashed me her smile again.

“Katherine, sit,” she commanded in Swahili. “Let’s tell stories.”

She moved her shoulders to the music and sang along in English as I explained the meaning of songs to her. She asked me six times what I thought of her baby daughter.

Beyoncé danced across the screen. “In America, do people walk down the street naked like they do in the music videos?” Paulina asked. She helped me review Swahili words for all the body parts, including the ones seen in the music videos. She giggled. She asked me when I was going to make enough money to buy her a plane ticket to America.

As I was leaving the next morning for Arusha—eight hours away by bus, where I’d be living for the next year—she touched her forehead. “I didn’t really run into a door,” she told me as we arrived at the bus stop. “Moses beats me.”

I shook my head and tried to listen, but the ranting Swahili was too fast for me. My bus pulled up. I hugged her goodbye.

*

Three months later on a Christmastime visit to the city, I sat in her neighbor’s extra bedroom, sweating from the heat, as Paulina made the bed for me. She pulled her khanga up to her hips, exposing her legs. Baseball-sized bruises, blue and green and purple, adorned her thighs. “Moses got drunk,” she said. “He is a horrible person.”

“Leave him!” I exclaimed.

Her reasoning was practical. Moses, in his job with the national police, brought home money for food. He brought home money for Edwiggy. Paulina didn’t love him anymore, but where would she go without income? What kind of work could she do with a nine-month-old baby? Who would take her in? She figured she would endure it until Edwiggy was old enough to walk. Then at least, she wouldn’t be burdening her family too much.

I hesitated, knowing I should think this through, but the words burst from my mouth: “What if I give you some money?”

How many times had she begged me for money for a plane ticket, for a trip to America? She was always asking for help.

Now I tried to meet her deep brown eyes. “If you had a little money, could you leave?”

She refused. Maybe she didn’t want the charity, or maybe she thought I needed the money, or maybe her no was a cultural way of being polite. “You are a student. You are a volunteer. Keep your money.” She turned on the fan, tucked me into my mosquito net, and told me to sleep well. I ached for her. But I was twenty-two and she was twenty-one, and we saw no solutions.

*

Three weeks later, when I had returned to Arusha, Moses came home drunk with another woman.

Paulina walked out with her baby daughter and took with her enough of his money to buy the bus ticket back home to her mother, in a small town close to Arusha.

I read her text message while I lay on the lavish bed in the Kudu Lodge after the second day of safari with my parents, who were visiting from the U.S. It had been a day of elephants, cheetahs, soup and salad and steak. The dissonance made me uncomfortable.

A few minutes later, another text appeared. Will you help me with some money to start a business here?

-- 

The second half of Paulina's story is up here.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.