“And who is my neighbor?” ~ Luke 10: 29.

After living in the U.S. for almost 40 years, in an area now known as Miami Gardens, I moved to Hollywood, Florida.  It so happened that the house I fell in love with (one feature was the circular window which faced due east, which has provided me with endless and varied morning views of changing sunrises) was in this city.  I had previously read that one feature of Hollywood was its diversity, not just that people from many different ethnicities live there, but that (for the most part) the individual neighborhoods within the city are mixed, no enclaves of ‘Hispanic’ (whatever that means); ‘White’; or ‘Black’.  This was soon evident in my block.  We had neighbors from Nicaragua, Michigan, Florida, Jamaica. 

I had grown up ‘White’ in a rural community in Jamaica.  At an early age I was made aware of the differences between myself and the children I went to school with.  I was White, they were Black.  But of course, children have a hard time making sense of such color-coded designations, since skin complexions rarely matched our black and white crayons.  I was, to many of my schoolmates who did not have TVs, a novelty.  Something different.  To me, my schoolmates were lucky.  They did not turn red in the sun.  Their hair stayed neat in their plaits all day while mine ended up loose and messy.  Although I could see superficial differences between us, I did not see that we were different.

I was a teenager in Jamaica while the Black Power movement was growing in our neighbor to the north.  ‘Black is Beautiful’ was the word.  I had seen books floating around (I did not know they were banned in Jamaica at the time), books by Eldridge Cleaver, by the ‘Soledad Brothers’, and had read some of them.  I knew the role that England had played in the enslavement of Africans.  My education regarding the history of the colonizers and their role in slavery and world domination deepened once I married my Jamaican boyfriend and moved to live in the U.S.A.  There I was exposed to even more history, and saw the role that ‘Jim Crow’ played in the ability of the descendants of the enslaved to advance, or rather, in the obstacles placed in their way.  In Jamaica, with those of African descent being in the majority, even though colonization had resulted in there being ‘colorism’ – social strata that were based on skin color and wealth, by the 70s this was no longer the sole determinant of positions of power or authority.

My informal education included understanding more of the history of ‘America’, and the way that the Native Americans had been rendered inhuman, ‘savage’, wiped out by the invading foreigners.  Despite my being descended from the ‘race’ (biology tells us that this is a social construct, not a physical one) of the invaders, oppressors and colonizers, my sympathies have always been with those oppressed, enslaved, and killed.

This past week has been a tough one.  I almost wanted to start out this message with the famous opening lines of a book by Charles Dickens: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’  On Friday we saw the power of a peaceful demonstration, as the strong citizens of Minneapolis braved the frigid temperatures to come out in protest against the brutal enforcement of a branch of government that appears to have as its  mission the terrorizing of people of color in this country.  On Saturday (whiplash) we saw, caught on video from many different angles, the execution of a protester.

The fact that this latest victim was White (and an ICU nurse) has appeared to have awakened a nation to the rage they should have been feeling all along.  White privilege has allowed many U.S. citizens to not feel the onslaught of the latest campaign as personally.  After all, the Supreme Court sanctioned the profiling of people of color, people who did not speak English, or spoke it with an accent, said it was perfectly OK for assumptions to be made that only White people, people who speak English with an American accent, are legitimately U.S. citizens.

Yes, Virginia, and Minnesota, in the U.S.A., color does matter.  Nothing that has been happening is a surprise to people of color.  For Native Americans who were forcibly removed from their lands and made to walk the ‘Trail of Tears’; or were massacred; or were told that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, nothing that is happening is strange to them.  For people of African descent, who, even after the abolition of slavery, could be snatched up and imprisoned at whim, forced into a chain gang version of slavery, this is not strange.  For Japanese Americans, being rounded up and housed in detention centers, this is not strange.  For White America to experience this usual and customary behavior and think it is strange, that ‘this is not US’, this is the embodiment of White Privilege.

At the same time it is perhaps through the sacrifice of a person like the ICU nurse (and here we have a moment for the hardworking, caring, compassionate nurses that keep us alive) that America may at last confront the truth: that unless we acknowledge the danger that White Supremacy and White Nationalism represent; unless we take steps to address the inherent racism that persists throughout all aspects of life in the U.S. there cannot be real change.  And yes, good citizens of the U.S.A., like with any disease, if we only treat the symptoms we are at risk for relapse and recurrence over and over again.

There have been many inflection points in history, where real change could have happened.  The assassinations of MLK, Jr., and Malcolm X could have been opportunities to address, acknowledge and make meaningful change.  In 1963, after the assassination of JFK, Malcolm X pointed out that: ‘The chickens are coming home to roost’.  But each time we bandage over the real problems; every time we play lip service only to concepts of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’, we allow for an administration to come in and remove from National Parks the history of the enslaved; and to eliminate information about the history of Native Americans, of broken treaties and mistreatment.

I recently saw an interview with a foreign-born NBA player who said (and I may not be stating it accurately): ‘Saying everything that’s on my mind would have a cost too high for me right now’.  In the U.S.A., for those who do not conform to the current administration’s ideal of who qualifies as a citizen, this is true for many.  Which is why it is good and reassuring to see the crowds of protesters willing to stand up to brutal, illegal uses of force as people (human beings) are pulled out of cars and ‘disappeared’.  Which is why it is so good to hear people willing to stand up for their neighbors (of whatever color, nationality, race), to try to show us what the U.S.A. could look like.

This Friday morning I give thanks for the nurses who are willing to lay everything on the line for their patients, for their neighborhoods; I am hopeful as I listen to protest songs, sung in the key of positivity and unity; I am encouraged enough to believe that there are people of conscience with a desire to form a better and more perfect union for all the people.  Imagine. Could you be my neighbor?

Have a wonderful weekend, Family!

One Love!

Namaste.