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.

Learning to read at 60

I first met Shirley in 2009, while working with an adult literacy program in DC. Shirley was sixty, a mother and grandmother, a heart attack survivor, a lifelong DC resident. She was friendly, spirited, close with the other students. And she couldn't read.

I started tutoring her that fall, and over the next three years, we met most weeks in the library or at the building where she took her classes.

At first, we read lists of simple words, and short stories about school or work or family. After a story, sometimes she would pause and tell me about her experiences.

Shirley told me she’d had trouble in school from the time she started. All her brothers and sisters did okay, but she struggled to read. Likely, she had learning disability that was never diagnosed. The teachers passed her along each year. She dropped out in the seventh grade.

As I worked with Shirley, she made small steps forward, and we progressed to reading her mail and managing her bank account and bills. She told me that this was important to her, because ever since her mother died, Shirley’s siblings had been taking advantage of her. They charged her twenty or thirty bucks anytime she needed a favor, like writing out a money order, withdrawing money from the bank, reading a piece of mail. She wanted to learn to do it herself.

Photo by Dvortygirl

She told me that she had loved and cared for her mother dearly as she aged. She had moved in with her mother as a caretaker because in Shirley’s own words, “That’s what I do. I take care of people.” Some of Shirley’s siblings seemed to busy with their own lives to trouble with their mother, but Shirley loved every moment she spent with this woman, who was her role model, guide, and best friend. Her death changed everything.

Together, Shirley and I tackled the frightening task of writing, too: handwriting, signatures, filling out forms. But it was recipes she really wanted to record. When we finally completed a selection of recipes, she named it “Shirley’s Dream Cookbook.”

She told me her favorite thing to do as a child was to go into the kitchen, sit on the countertop, and watch her mother cook. She loved the smells and colors and found that she had a penchant for cooking herself. At class potlucks, Shirley made a mean crab salad and was renowned for her pork chops. On the other hand, she didn’t bake too much. Baking requires reading recipes and making precise measurements.

*

After a couple years, Shirley asked me if we could start reading the Bible.

It was slow going, because the words were difficult. But she also knew them, from years of churchgoing, and it was empowering for her to learn to read phrases like my enemies have disgraced me, O Lord do not forsake me so that she could read them before bed as a prayer.

Tutoring session became almost like a Bible study, and I’m not sure which one of us was the teacher.

One day we read about the day when God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and she told me about the twin girls she had lost only a few days after she gave birth to them.

Another day, we read a psalm of lament, and she told me how she regretted her son’s slow descent into the wrong crowd. She had seen it happening and hadn’t known how to stop it, and it was that path and that crowd that had landed him in prison a few short months after his son was born. She’s convinced he was set up. Shirley’s son is still in jail, and Shirley misses him every day.

We read about God as a refuge and protector, and she told me her husband had survived after getting mugged one night as he walked from the bus to their apartment. He’d had eye surgery, and he couldn’t work for several months after that, but he was okay now.

We read about God’s great love for us, and she shook her head with that kind of wisdom and joy that only comes from trekking through the storm. She said, “Hallelujah.” She said, “Katie, I don’t even know where I would be without God’s faithfulness.”

*

Over the three years we worked together, Shirley improved her reading skills and increased her vocabulary. She opened a bank account, became comfortable with an ATM, and learned to write her own checks and money orders to pay bills. She learned to text. She learned several Psalms. She got a new apartment through DC public housing, one that has an elevator, which is better for her with her heart condition.

Every step in Shirley’s learning process was small. She still needs a lot of help with everyday tasks that require reading. She hasn’t gotten a GED or found a lawyer who can get her son out of jail or learned to read a novel. But in every small step she opened up a little more, found new independence, confidence, and determination.

Last year, Shirley was ready to share her story. She found her fifteen minutes of fame on the local NPR station, where she spoke about her experience battling illiteracy. A couple weeks later, she went with some fellow students to lobby the DC City Council for adult education funding. From memory, she testified in a packed public hearing about the difference adult literacy programs had made in her life. She absolutely nailed it.

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.

It’s not too late if you’d like to contribute a story--your own or someone else’s. Just email me by March 12 at katiemurchisonross at gmail dot com.