What to do when you are confronted with routine and consistent doubts about your humanity?

In advance of today’s Coffee and Conversation (3pm, Howard Thurman Center.)

There was a knee-jerk fear in America that someone – especially someone young and black – is coming to take your s***, f*** up your brand, destroy the quality of your life, tarnish the things you love. . . [T]he truth is, we don’t want your s***. We came out of the the generation of black people who finally got the point: No one’s going to help us. So we went for self, for family, for block, for crew – which sounds selfish . . . But it’s just a rational response to the reality we faced. No one was going to help us.
– Jay-Z, Decoded

Without knowing it, I have been in search for a solution to a deep public problem. I hope you are able to help me. You see, for the last twenty years, I have been set adrift in wonderful sleep – sometimes when I have been walking – without any dreaming.

It’s hard to tell you to take the high road when you get another sign that your life is worthless and that others can do whatever they want to you – spot-search you, beat you, even choke the life out of you – without any shame, punishment, or consequences.

I don’t want to be the one to tell you to stay chill when you live in a grim block where the only, big school down the block – at its best – is lousy; few jobs up the street that barely pay; and, your whole life is having a strategy to use violence as a means of survival.

Difficult not to gather in the middle of the street and scream? Or throw a rock through a window?

You try not to push back when police officers in black body-armor confront your unarmed body as a demonstrator with big armored, tank-like trucks, tear gas, and rifles in your face. Try to hold to the notion that policing in your space is legitimate.

You try to participate in civic process – to run for office and vote – after you’ve been menaced by your Governor’s state of emergency – a state that was imposed, seemingly, without fact or justification. It makes you think that government is incompetent, or worse, indifferent.

If you lived this life, I dare you to not think about throwing down.

I’m struggling with the question: What to do when you are confronted with routine and consistent doubts about your humanity?

Harlem

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

My problem was that I struggled – with my head down – to keep my dreams. While I clawed and hustled to firm-up my spot on Team Middle Class, I forgot about and never took time to mourn the American Dream. Instead, I fondly hoped and fervently prayed for the possibility it could be resuscitated.

I hung out at art museums, sang songs in bars, and played “what if” around a university while the poor, black, and brown urban spaces continued to void of museums, universities, courts for play, businesses, and poetry writing.

In my name – an uncritically – allowed a War on Drugs and voted for a War on Terrorism that crushed the bodies of dissenters and truth–tellers.

I thought I could afford to be colorblind.

I am a card-carrying member of society more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

How did I get here? Why do I stay here?

Hit me up today for coffee and conversation. In the Howard Thurman Center – 3pm to 5 pm. You bring the conversation, I’ll serve the coffee.

Peace.