White Fragility is 242 years old today. It stinks. Can we finally bury it?

Disclaimer: If you haven’t read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, this article will likely enrage you.

Two hundred and forty two years ago today, The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully held in bondage (PAS Society) was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It’s founder, Anthony Benezet was a French born Hugenot who became a Quaker at fourteen and immigrated to America at the age of eighteen.

Benezet’s analysis of race, privilege and power was centuries ahead of his time. In 1766 he published a tract entitled: A caution and warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies in a short representation of the calamitous state of the enslaved negroes in the British Dominions which challenged the then popular notion of ‘inherent negro inferiority’. Two decades later he gave what may be the earliest articulation of white privilege in his book Some observations on the situation, disposition, and character of the Indian natives of this continent. Benezet states:

“[Native Americans] mental powers are equally with our own capable of improvement; the apparent difference in them, as well as in the Black people and us, arises principally from the advantages of our education and manner of life.”

Benezet’s determination to speak truth to power led him to write to Kings, Queens, scholars and societal influencers. He gained the support of well known founding fathers like Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin. Yet it was Benezet’s unwillingness to break white solidarity by criticizing those very allies that led PAS down a slippery slope of paternalism less than two decades later.

Franklin and Rush were not as liberal as Benezet. In 1774, Benezet wrote a letter to Rush extolling the virtues of British abolitionist Granville Sharp’s theological argument for liberating slaves. Sharp cited Deuteronomy 23:15, stating true Christians have a moral obligation to assist escaped slaves in gaining and maintaining their freedom. Benezet wanted Rush to publish this argument in the newspaper. Rush replied: “They would knock us on the head if we did.”

Rush’s unwillingness to discuss racial oppression in a way that might alienate or discomfit other whites adhered to a set of unwritten cultural rules that would remain nameless for the next two hundred and thirty seven years — White fragility.

Robin DiAngelo defines White Fragility as “the reduced psychosocial stamina that racial insulation inculcates”. She goes on to say that “White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”

Rush’s fear of reprisal from other whites permeated the very fabric of PAS. By the time of Benezet’s death in 1784, the society had gained high profile supporters at the expense of watering down their message. By 1787, Benjamin Franklin had been elected honorary president of PAS, a position he used to subtly pedal his own white supremacist viewpoints on other psuedo-liberal whites.

In ‘An address to the public, from the Pennsylvania Society for promoting the abolition of slavery, and the relief of free negroes, unlawfully held in bondage’ Franklin legitimized three particularly harmful stereotypes which persist to this day.

1. Blacks are less deserving of and capable of handling freedom than whites. Franklin writes: “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that it’s very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils… Under such circumstances freedom may often prove a misfortune to himself and prejudicial to society” — implying that black freedom and success is contingent upon white supervision. He later calls it the duty of whites “To instruct, to advise, to qualify those who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty.”
2. Police should pay special attention to blacks. Franklin goes on to say: “Attention to emancipated black people, it is therefore to be hoped, will become a branch of our national police”, again reinforcing and normalizing white fear of blacks’ ‘inherently violent nature’. Policing black bodies is not just a branch of modern policing, it seems to be the entirety of its focus.
3. Blacks are naturally lazy. In addition to qualifying blacks to enjoy being free, whites were also “To promote in them the habits of industry.” This is perhaps the most egregious statement in the entire document. Instead of addressing the fact that whites didn’t want to pay free blacks a fair wage when slave labor was cheaper, Uncle Ben Franklin advances a false narrative of black laziness and white industriousness. If blacks were inherently lazy, why were whites so dependent upon their free labor? Likewise if whites were so industrious, why didn’t they pick their own cotton?

Franklin’s Racial Arrogance reinforced and legitimized white abolitionists paternalism. Instead of becoming catalysts for black agency and complete person-hood, PAS served to further marginalize people of color by seeking to ‘qualify’ them for the civil liberties and access to opportunity that whites of all economic statuses were entitled to.

By adhering to the unwritten rules of White Fragility, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society set a dangerous precedent for white allies — the ability to don the cloak of liberalism without addressing one’s own accountability for or complicity in systems of oppression.

Ninety years to the day after the founding of PAS, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Booth was a veritable case study of White Fragility. According to DiAngelo, challenges to white solidarity are often perceived as triggering to Fragile Whites, sending them into a state of emotional stress which leads to angry or defensive behavior.

Booth’s triggering event occurred on April 11th, when Lincoln made a speech supporting partial enfranchisement of blacks in Louisiana. It is worth noting that Lincoln, like Franklin, was a proponent of conditional freedom and only supported voting rights for “the very intelligent, and (on) those who serve our cause as soldiers.”

Still, the mere possibility of some blacks gaining political enfranchisement was anathema to Booth. Lincoln’s (limited) support of ‘the negro cause’ challenged white solidarity and was perhaps the motivating factor in Booth’s personal virulent hatred of Lincoln. On the evening of April 11th, he told co-conspirator Lewis Powell: “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”

Three days later, Booth smuggled a gun into Ford’s theater and shot President Lincoln in the head at point blank range, fulfilling his own prophecy and birthing the myth of the ‘white lone gunman’.

The truth of Honest Abe’s assassination was a bit more complex. 

John Wilkes Booth was born into privilege and power in the town of Bel Air, Maryland. His father was a wealthy, slave owning drunken Lothario who left his wife and two kids in England to shack up with John Wilkes Booth’s mother in America, a woman who would bear him nine children before he finally ‘made an honest woman’ of her.

John Wilkes Booth had less acting talent than his father and older brother, yet rose to stardom on little more than his family name and classic European features. As an actor, Wilkes Booth received an annual income upwards of ten thousand dollars at a time when most Americans lived on three hundred dollars or less per year. Wilkes Booth understood that his way of life depended on the systemic oppression of others. In fact, in November of 1864 he wrote to his brother in law, saying: 

“This country was formed for the white not for the black man. And looking upon African slavery from the same stand-point, as held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one, have ever considered it, one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.”

In this statement Booth demonstrates DiAngelo’s principles of white centrality and racial belonging. To John Wilkes Booth, white domination of black and brown bodies was the natural order, and Lincoln’s attempt to ‘elevate’ blacks to the status of citizens, even second class ones, was a heinous perversion of nature.

Although Wilkes Booth is often framed as a ‘lone wolf’ or ‘deranged fanatic’, nothing could be further from the truth. As a former confederate spy, Booth was plugged-in to a network of ‘supporters of the southern way of life’. He used these contacts to recruit at least six co-conspirators, arrange for covert interstate transport of firearms, and secure the schedules of the President, Vice President, and Secretary of State.

Wilkes Booth and his crew originally planned to kidnap Lincoln to force the President to release Confederate prisoners of war. This plan fell through on April 9, 1865 when General Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant and the Union Army. Lee’s surrender meant there was no safe place to store a kidnapped President. Like many people of privilege today, John Wilkes Booth may have felt that there was no ‘safe space’ for those who thought like him, those who equated black freedom with white oppression. Perhaps it was this fear that motivated him to form a new plan to cripple the United States government by assassinating the President, Vice President, and Secretary of State on a single night.

Although seven men and one woman were convicted in the plot to assassinate Lincoln and other heads of state, only Booth succeeded in killing his target.

The manhunt for John Wilkes Booth lasted nearly two weeks, during which Booth had help from friends and Confederate allies to evade detection. During the manhunt, dozens were arrested on suspicion of complicity, but at the end of the day, only eight people were tried and convicted by military tribunal. Booth was killed at the site of his capture, yet somehow the role he played in the assassination attempts so far eclipsed the other players as to render them invisible to the eyes of history.

Then as in now, the myth of the lone gunman serves to underpin DiAngelo’s “split consciousness” resulting from the dual framework of Universalism and Individualism. Universalism allowed wealthy southern landowners like Booth to claim solidarity with the tenant farmers and laborers they exploited on the basis of shared skin tone. In this way, southern whites of all socioeconomic statuses consciously and unconsciously identified Booth as a vigilante ‘hero’ — preserving the privileges of whiteness. At the same time, white American individualism allowed others who shared Booth’s views and level of privilege to deny complicity by framing him as a lone gunman, an individual acting outside of societal bounds.

Booth’s ‘success’ as an assassin was more a matter of luck and White mediocrity than any brilliant planning on the part of himself or his cohorts. 

White mediocrity is the flip side of black exceptionalism, the set of societal expectations that predicates a racially restrictive dual path to success. People of color are expected to excel in their field to succeed, whereas whites as the dominant, normative race, are allowed to be… well, normal.

White mediocrity is what allowed officer John Frederick Parker, a known alcoholic with an abysmal track record and a penchant for whoring to be assigned to the President of the United States. Instead of protecting Lincoln, Parker decided his time was better spent at a local tavern with Lincoln’s footman. According to Smithsonian Magazine,

“Parker’s record as a cop fell somewhere between pathetic and comical. He was hauled before the police board numerous times, facing a smorgasbord of charges that should have gotten him fired. But he received nothing more than an occasional reprimand. His infractions included conduct unbecoming an officer, using intemperate language and being drunk on duty. Charged with sleeping on a streetcar when he was supposed to be walking his beat, Parker declared that he’d heard ducks quacking on the tram and had climbed aboard to investigate. The charge was dismissed. When he was brought before the board for frequenting a whorehouse, Parker argued that the proprietress had sent for him.”

Despite his demonstrable incompetence, Parker was never arrested or charged in conjunction with the assassination plot.

Even if Lincoln had been assigned a competent protective detail, chances are the officer would still have permitted John Wilkes Booth into the President’s box based on his celebrity status. In the same way that Universalism allowed whites to generalize people of color as violent, lazy, and devious; whites as a whole were juxtapositioned as nonviolent, industrious, and trustworthy. Thus celebrity combined with the privileges of whiteness almost guaranteed that John Wilkes Booth would have access to Lincoln on the eve of his demise.

John Wilkes Booths’ inability to see or address his own White fragility left him feeling triggered and hopeless. Lincoln’s continual challenges to white solidarity, white centrality, and white normativity made him a symbolic target for those whites most invested in the privileges of whiteness. White America’s presumption of white innocence and cultural acceptance of white mediocrity ensured that Booth would have opportunity to execute his plot. Yet instead of addressing the psycho-social and cultural roots of White Fragility, our paler skinned brethren chose to scapegoat a single individual who was ultimately a single symptom of a terminal cultural illness called white supremacy.

Now, two hundred and forty two years after the first White Ally group was founded and one hundred and fifty two years after the most effective White Ally that Black America has ever known was murdered, white Americans once again face a critical choice — — whether to continue to pay lip service to “superficial racial toleration and acceptance”, or to finally take responsibility for their own complicity in their pitiably fragile collective state and begin the difficult work of building white racial stamina to discuss and address issues of race, privilege, and power.

One path leads America backwards down the slippery slope of conditional freedom and paternalism that ‘made America great’ for wealthy white males and shitty for… basically everyone else. The other propels us forward into a space that is imminently less comfortable for people of privilege yet infinitely more safe for black, brown, and female bodies.

This second path cuts through an undeveloped wilderness of cross cultural incompetence and inter-sectional accountability. If America decides to forge this new path, all who are brave enough to walk it will come away scarred. These cuts and scratches are unavoidable when navigating unfamiliar territory. Yet by embracing this discomfort we transform painful scars into badges of honor, exchange conditional freedom for unconditional love, and finally begin to live up to our legacy as the greatest nation on earth.

My Life in Black

There was never a time in my life that I did not know I was black.

My mother never let me get away with using slang at home. If I used improper English, she would pretend she couldn’t hear me. She ignored me until I said the sentence correctly. When I got to school, my grammar and diction was very different from that of my classmates. They would tell me that I “talked like a white girl.” I didn’t know any white people personally, and probably neither did they, but I did sound like the white people I saw on television. My mom and my teachers told me I just had good grammar.

I never saw being black as a bad thing. Everyone I knew was black, so it wasn’t even like it was a particularly different thing. In second grade, we had a special educator named Mrs. Elizabeth Clarke. She had been to Africa and dressed in bright, dramatic prints. She had a voice and a carriage that demanded respect, although she was little taller than her students. She told us that we were young, gifted and black. She taught us that to be black was to be the strongest of the strong, the descendants of kings and queens that had been stripped of their dignity and yet somehow survived. She taught us that the first people to walk the face of the earth looked like us, that the builders of the pyramids looked like us, that we were the creators of jazz, blues, rock and roll, that we were inventors, doctors, and innovators. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back on it now I see that she was preparing us for the death of 1000 paper cuts that is inhabiting a brown body in a white world.

My first ‘deep cut’ came when I was eleven. My mother and I were walking to visit my grandmother at University Hospital. I forget where we had gone before that, maybe the movies up at Severance, but for some reason we were coming down the hill through Little Italy instead of walking up through University Circle. Along the way my mom had to pee. She stopped in several restaurants asking to use their bathroom. All of the restaurants told her that the bathrooms were for customers only and that she could not use them. After the fifth or sixth place told her no, my mom couldn’t hold it any longer and she ended up peeing on herself. She was wearing white linen pants and it was very obvious that she had had an accident. My mother continued to stop in restaurants asking if she could use their bathroom to clean up, and people were very rude to her. I was embarrassed for myself and for her. I couldn’t understand why no one would let us use the bathroom and why my mother had to be humiliated like that. My mother never cried in public, but she cried that day. When I asked her why everyone was being so mean to us, she said: “because we are black, and they don’t like black people in Little Italy.” That was the first time I realized that being black could be a bad thing in some places.

My parents are the same race. All my siblings are the same race. I have a sister and brother that are half Liberian. My father’s great grandfather (on his mother’s side) was a railroad worker from Singapore, but I don’t know anything about them. My mother’s great grandmother (on her father’s side) was Blackfoot, but I don’t know much about them either. My African stepmother and her family are very culturally different from American blacks. They are wealthy and well educated. They live in top cities around the world and have immaculate houses. They look down on American blacks and say we are lazy and too focused on sports instead of education. My stepmother has a thing about knives. She keeps them in the garage instead of the kitchen. I asked her why one time and she told me that she had seen friends and relatives cut apart with knives in front of her, and she did not want them in her house. Her accent is not very heavy but it gets thicker the angrier she gets. I can tell if she and my dad have been fighting by how thick her accent is when she answers the phone.

My mother and father both grew up here in Cleveland. My mother went to Villa Maria Prep School in Pennsylvania for two years. She was one of less than five black students and she hated it. She used to get into fights with the other girls because she was black and poor. She didn’t fit in with the other black students because she was poor. She ran away from school twice and finally my grandmother gave in and let her go to Shaw with the rest of her friends. My mother didn’t have any friends of other races or ethnic groups as an adult. She was very wary of white people and was always reminding me that we were just as good as them.

My father was a musician, so he had many friends of different races and ethnic backgrounds. I didn’t grow up with him, so I’m not sure about a lot of details from his childhood. My father moved to Atlanta in his late twenties and worked for Coca Cola. He didn’t like it and eventually ended up starting his own interior design business. As an interior designer, many of his clients are white. He has had several famous clients like Al Horford and Elton John. My father likes working for white people because he says “They’re not funny with money.”

Growing up, I learned that you have to work half as hard to get twice at much. I thought that individual racism was a problem for my grandparents generation, not mine. I thought that racism used to be a big problem, but it was going away. By middle school I had white and Asian friends. I dated outside my race and it wasn’t a big deal to anyone but our grandparents. By college I had a very diverse group of close friends: an Irish girl, a Fillipina, an Armenian, a Southern Redhead, and me. We called ourselves United Nations. I didn’t have a lot of black female friends because I didn’t fit in with them. It was elementary school all over again and I was tired of being accused of not being black enough. Of course my white friends also told me that I ‘wasn’t really black’, but they meant it as a compliment, and at the time, I took it as one. It wasn’t until my mid twenties that I started to understand internalized and structural racism and some of my assumptions started changing.

I am black. I am black because I am black. What I mean is, people in positions of power will identify me as black because of the color of my skin. Culturally, I feel black because of a set of intangibles and experiences that link me to other people of color, specifically Americans of African descent. Physiologically, I am black because my skin has melanin and my hair is the tightly curled coils of my African ancestors, an evolutionary adaptation to living near the equator. I am proud to be black because I am wonderfully made in the image of God!

I grew up in East Cleveland. When I was a little girl it was a 90% black neighborhood. We had a few white families, but most of them lived ‘up the hill’ near Cleveland Heights, not ‘down the hill’ by me.

I was never not aware that I was black.

My first encounter with race was: I was born. No really. I was born in Booth Memorial hospital, a charity hospital for misguided youth that served a largely black population. Even though my grandmother worked at University Hospital where the world class Rainbow Babies and Children Center was located, that was where white babies went to get born. Booth was for the rest of us.

My grandfather called everyone he didn’t like a nigger, regardless of race. He used to talk about his white boss at the post office. It was always That Jew Nigger this and That Jew Nigger that. I knew that Nigger was a bad word but for a long time I thought Jew was a bad word too because it was only brought up in a negative context in my home.

My mother used to tell me that God knows that everyone is the same, but everyone is not godly. She also used to tell me that I wasn’t like my white friends, that I couldn’t get away with the things they could get away with and not to be stupid. She used to say that being black meant I had to work harder to get the same things that white people would have given to them. My grandfather hated white people and did not want me to associate with them. He used to say that white people were snakes and that they would smile in my face and stab me in the back. My grandmother liked southern whites (she said at least they would tell you to your face if they hated you) and Appalachians but she didn’t like Jews or Asians. She used to say that these ethnic groups thought they were white-- a high offense in her mind. Although she never articulated it that way, I think she saw Jews and Asians as sellouts who used gains that black people earned by blood for their own advantage.

I went to Chambers Elementary. We had about 800 kids and only one white student. His nickname was ‘whiteboy’. I don’t know what his name was. Our teachers were mostly black women. Our principal was a black woman. We had some white teachers and they mostly taught either gifted children or special needs. I was in the gifted program so my second, third, and fourth grade teachers were white.

We learned a lot of black history at Chambers. East Cleveland used to have a citywide Black History Challenge. All six of the elementary schools were given a packet of facts about ‘Black History Heroes’. You had about six weeks to study the packet. At the end of the six weeks, you played a jeopardy style quiz game where you answered questions about the people in the packet. Each classroom champion went on to compete against the other classes. Each grade level champion went on to compete against the other grade level champs. This went on for weeks and the whole school was really into it! A single school champion went on to compete against the school champions from the other five schools until a citywide champ was crowned. I was city champ two years in a row. The third year my mother, grandmother, and aunt convinced me that I should let someone else get a shot, so I threw the competition at the school level and another boy from my class won that year. I returned to be the citywide champ for the third and final time in sixth grade.

On MLK Day, we had a half day assembly. The choir sang, we put on a play, and students and teachers read poetry and excerpts from Dr. King’s speeches.

We didn’t learn much about other ethnic groups outside of blacks and whites. In third grade, we read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and learned Origami, but even that was in the context of American history and the traumatic fallout from world war two. We learned a little bit about Native Americans, but again in the context of American history. We learned about Pocahontas, Sacagawea, and Sitting Bull. I still don’t know a ton on Native history. We learned next to nothing about Latinos. We learned about the Spanish Inquisition and the Spanish Conquistadors and the Inca and Maya, but nothing about contemporary or historic South Americans or Latinx Islanders.

I was raised Jehovah’s Witness so I didn’t celebrate holidays growing up. I never believed in holidays but I knew that if Santa existed, he had to be white because a black man sneaking into people’s houses at night would surely get arrested. I had black and brown/latina-looking dolls. I watched mainly white shows like Murphy Brown, Boy Meets World, and Friends, but I also watched mainly black shows like Martin, Living Single, Cosby Show and A Different World. I remember getting really excited whenever a person of color was introduced as a white person’s love interest on a mainstream show. When Angela joined the cast of Boy Meets World, I was over the moon. I thought, if Shawn can date Angela, I can date whoever I want too.

My elementary school was all black. My middle school was almost completely white (we had 11 black kids and an Asian) but I still lived in East Cleveland. My congregation was all black, but God was white. Jesus was white. All the angels were white. Noah, Abraham, Solomon, even the Queen of Sheba were depicted as white in the illustrated bible story book I read every night.

For middle and high school, I went to Hawken. My classmates were white. My teachers were white. Even my Spanish teacher was white. In elementary school, my Spanish teacher was Venezuelan. I had been thrust into an all white, mainly upper class world and I didn’t fit in-- not even with the other black students.

Yes, there was interracial dating; yes, I heard racial slurs, and yes, there were conflicts between people of different races and ethnic groups. All the black kids were friends. Even if we hated each other, we stuck up for each other, because there were only 35 of us out of over 400 students. We all called each other cuz, both out of a sense of kinship and because it was confusing to the white students. Interracial dating happened. Mostly it was white girls dating black athletes but occasionally it went the other way too. I remember my freshman year the prom king and queen were multi-ethnic. Matt, the all American square jawed quarterback was dating this Greek and Jordanian model named Cat. She was very brown, almost my complexion, and they were a beautiful couple. They made interracial dating OK at our school. But cross-class dating was more stigmatized. I remember going on one date with an Italian boy. His family owned a chain of grocery stores. His grandmother told me I was “very nice, for a colored girl”. His father seemed to like me okay but his mother was very cold once she found out that I was on scholarship. She asked me if my mother was on welfare. She was, so I said yes. We never went on another date.

Another incident I remember was a Jewish kid in our class picking on this Pakistani boy who was also on scholarship. The Jewish boy said Pakistani women were whores that did it to monkeys, and asked if the Pakistani boy’s mother had ever had sex with a monkey. Of course a fight broke out, and the Pakistani boy soundly whooped the Jewish boys ass. Yet although both students were in the wrong, the Jewish boy got in school suspension and the Pakistani got expelled. This was more fuel for my grandparents fire.

I spent most of middle and high school being too black at school and too white at home. On top of that, I was stigmatized for being a Jehovah’s Witness. Within my denomination, blacks and whites got along, although congregations, cut along neighborhood lines, were also largely segregated.

I remember during my sophomore year of high school my god sister Janet got married to a white man.They were head over heels in love with each other and I had a crush on his cousin (his other cousin had a crush on me, so that ended up being a big mess, but that’s another story). As a Jehovah’s Witness, I understood that I could date whoever I wanted but I was only going to get married to another Witness. Because of our segregated upbringing, I always assumed that my husband would be black. But Janet married a white man from the west side, and everyone could see he was nuts about her. It was the first time I considered that the man of my dreams might not be the same race as me.

I am self employed, so I don’t have any co-workers. I hope that when I get to that stage I will hire a diverse team of passionate people, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that my first hire will probably be another woman of color.

My church is a PWI (predominately white institution). We have only 10% people of color, making us the most diverse church in our Presbytery (of 39 congregations). My friends are old and young; gay, straight, and bi; black, white, Asian, and latino; male, female, trans, cis, and gender nonconforming. My best friend is a black woman. My mentors are a black man and a white woman, respectively, and my current romantic interest is a white man. I have noticed that I while my friends are mainly Christian, Buddhist or atheist, I don’t have any Muslim friends. I would like to have more meaningful conversations with Muslims outside of the interactions I have with them online or in bodegas. I think there is always room in my circle for people who think, live, and experience the world differently than I do.

Despite my increasingly diverse personal circle, my life is no Utopia. Now that I am more aware of the dynamics of race, privilege, and power, I can see that I experience racism and ‘shallow cuts’ on a daily basis. Here are a few recent examples:

March 1: Tonight was the first night of Lent. I went up to church for a Lenten supper that started at 6:30. My cousin, my Aunt and I were running a little behind schedule so we didn’t get there until around 6:50. All the tables were pretty full, and none of them had three seats available, so I just sat at an empty table. My Aunt and cousin sat down with me. A few minutes later, our friend Sue came and sat down with us (Sue is white). A few minutes after that, another white church member named Tammy that I don’t even know came over to our table and said the following: “I just had to come over here to break up the segregation.” She laughed, and we all laughed with her. I laughed to be polite, but I didn’t really think it was funny. What did she mean by segregation? Did she mean because we were all in the same family (except for Sue)? Or that we were all black (except Sue)? Was I being overly sensitive or was she being lightweight racist?

February 28: We had our wrap meeting for Black History Month committee. One of our members pointed out that the red, black, and green flag had been taken down from the front of the sanctuary, but the rainbow flag was still up. This probably would not have been a big deal except for the fact that last week, the red, green, and black flag was stolen from in front of our church, either by someone who loved it so much they wanted it in their own home or someone who hated it so much they wanted it taken down early. We don’t know which. But we did find it interesting that on the last day of the month our flag was taken down. Again, am I being too sensitive? Was our building manager simply being efficient, or was she instructed to get that flag down ASAP?

February 10: Our “Black Lives Matter Here” banner finally went up outside the church today. Our Church publicity director ordered an indoor and outdoor banner that said “Black Lives Matter Here” in white letters on black canvas. This was because our Black History Month theme was Speaking of Race: Black Lives Matter Here- What We Say and What We Do. The banner arrived in December. The indoor banner went up on February 1st. The outdoor banner was still not up when I went to church on February 8th, so I spoke to our building manager about it. She mentioned that our pastor had some concerns about it being a political statement. I reiterated to her that February was a short month and already more than 1/4 of the way over. She assured me that the banner would go up the next day. The next day, after a very emotional first session of PRISM, I went up to the church to drop off some groceries for the weekend and the banner was still not up. I texted my pastor to find out when our banner would go up. He told me he was visiting his mother and could we discuss it when he got back in town on Monday the 14th? I told him that I hoped his family was doing well but I would definitely need to speak with someone in his absence because the month would be half over by Monday. The next day, our banner finally went up. Why should I have to fight with church staff to get a banner up that says Black Lives Matter? A banner that affirms that my life matters? I was deeply disappointed and hurt to find out that despite all the progress my congregation has made, we still struggle with affirming the humanity and equality of people of color.

Cleveland has its challenges, and I can’t see myself spending the rest of my life confined to this city. I’d love to buy a farm outside of Oberlin Ohio in a few years. Oberlin is about 75% white, 4% Asian, 2 % Native American and 14% black. The median household income is just over $55,000 per year, similar to Cuyahoga county, but the poverty rate is 21%, slightly higher than Cuyahoga’s 18%. I worry that if I have children they won’t get the same excellent black history foundation that I received growing up, and that it might negatively impact their self esteem. I want them to love the skin they are born in and celebrate the richness of their cultural and ethnic background(s). I don’t feel like there is any ‘safe’ place to raise black children. But as I get older I worry more and more about them growing up on a little farm in Oberlin. Will the real world shock them? Will they put on plays about Dr. King in elementary school? Will they read Cullen and Keats? Will they know that they can be a doctor, an astronaut, an engineer, or a basketball player? If I marry a white man, will he know that our kids are black (in the eyes of society)? If we have a boy, will my husband be equipped to raise a black man? These are questions I never even considered in my twenties, and ones I still can’t answer.

It is impossible to distill the black experience into one single image or encounter. Race is a social structure, and like all collective creations is a nuanced amalgamation of hundreds upon thousands of experiences. At times, I have felt threatened. My armpits start to sweat whenever a police car gets behind me, and on road trips to Chicago, I still won’t stop for gas in Indiana when I’m by myself at night. Often, I feel like a minority. When I go to pitch competitions and all the other business owners are white, all the experts are white, all the funders are white, and all my competitors are white, I feel like a minority both because of my racial and socioeconomic identity. But in a way, I always feel secretly privileged. I still remember that the first people to walk this earth looked like me. I have learned that we all share a common female ancestor, and she too looked like me. I grew up with stories of ancestors strong enough to make life and new lives and lives while dying everyday-- a people who survived slavery, domestic terrorism, debt peonage, contract buying and other forms of housing segregation, Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration, political disenfranchisement, legal lynchings by police and still had enough rage, passion and hope to create gospel, jazz, bluegrass, rock and roll, funk, soul, hip hop, neo soul, and whatever you want to call that noise on the radio today. We are a strong people, and the legacy of that struggle lives on in me. And while I am never allowed to forget that I am a minority in this country, I am equally aware that as a black woman, I am in the majority group of the global population.

I love this brown skin I have lived and loved the last thirty one years in, and I am hopeful that the rest of the world will come to love me too, just as I am. I nurture this hope by working for change within predominantly white institutions. And I feed it with positive quotes like this one from online personality (and #officialBlackGirlCrush) Jacob Michael Mason: “Her skin absorbs the sun’s rays and her hair defies gravity. You can’t tell me that black women aren’t magical.”

This is the way the world ends: the problem no one is talking about

Yesterday my friend Mary Susan asked me if I thought all the controversy surrounding Donald Trump was meant to distract the American public from something much more important.

I enjoy a good government conspiracy plot as much as the next girl, but at just two days into a Trump presidency, even I felt that we were seeing the worst unfold right before our eyes.

America had gone from ‘post racial’ to ‘post factual’ faster than you could say Hollywood divorce. Both Presidential candidates were embroiled in scandals worse than Watergate, and rumors abound of international tampering with election results. How much worse could things get?

Still, Mary Susan’s concerns kept me up late last night, scrolling and trolling social media for any nefarious plot to (further) undermine our way of life that I might have missed. At four thirty-five, I found it.

House Resolution 193 aka The American Sovereignty Restoration Act was introduced twenty one days ago by Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL). It is a detailed blueprint for withdrawing the United States from the United Nations and arguably the most dangerous piece of legislation written since the Fugitive Slave Act. This resolution, if passed, will (in part):

1. Allow the President to pull out of the United Nations (henceforth UN)

2. Evict the UN Headquarters from New York

3. Terminate US funding and participation in UN Peacekeeping efforts.

4. Repeal diplomatic immunity AND bar UN members from gaining diplomatic immunity in the future

5. Withdraw US from United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNSECO)

5. Withdraw US from the World Health Organization (WHO)

6. Repeal all UN Conventions and agreements

This piece of legislation has the potential to cause World War Three, yet only six websites are talking about it. Six websites. To put that in perspective, over twenty five articles on reparations were published within a week of Ta Nehisi Coates’ criticism of Senator Bernie Sanders. Thirty one articles were published (so far) this year on Kim Kardashian’s robbery. Twenty three articles were published about Kellyanne Conway’s inauguration coat. Yet this critical piece of legislation that is both an insult to our nation’s legacy and a threat to her future has been quietly referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs without so much as a peep from either liberal or conservative media sources.

The implications of The American Sovereignty Restoration Act are far reaching and pose a threat to all Americans-- from our soldiers who depend on humane treatment as prisoners of war as outlined in the Geneva Convention to artists whose intellectual property is protected by the Berne convention.

While one could posit that removing obligatory accountability on the part of the United States to adhering to international human rights, child labor, and environmental regulations could be good for big business, we must also ask ourselves: at what cost? Are we willing to go back to children dying of black lung in Appalachian coal mines? Are we willing to bring back biological warfare, which, as the Tuskegee Experiment proved, was often tested on our own citizens of color? How about the “higher standards of living, full employment, and socio-economic progress” laid out in Article nine of the United Nations charter? Is that no longer something we as Americans ascribe to?

Our country is far from perfect. As a black woman, I am personally and painfully aware of many of the ways America fails her most vulnerable on a daily basis. Yet I fervently believe that at its core, our nation's citizens agree on the ideals of freedom, peace, human dignity, and prosperity. Though we may disagree on best way to make these ideals a reality, though we may fail to ensure access to these ideals for all of our citizens, these principles remain our Northern Star, the light on the horizon that guides us towards home.

Following that light convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt and twenty five other world leaders to take a collective stand against fascism in 1942 and form what would eventually become the United Nations.

Every man, woman, and child who believes in freedom and human rights depends on the United Nations and the international peace treaties it painstakingly upholds. For over seven decades, America has been an integral part of maintaining that peace. Now, with HR 193 before us and an uncertain future ahead, one cannot help but wonder:

Is this the way the world ends?

Deeply Rooted: Getting Longer, Stronger Natural Hair Using the Lunar Method

When I was a little girl, my mother used to trim my ends every blue moon. I never thought to ask why-- this was the way things had always been, the way my grandmother had trimmed her ends, the way her grandmother had done before her. Some things you didn’t argue with. Some things just were.

Little did I know that our family tradition was deeply rooted in both indigenous wisdom and empirical evidence.

Native peoples recognized thousands of years ago that the natural rhythms of the earth were mirrored within our own bodies. Some cultures deified different aspects of nature, like the sun, moon, and stars, while others  worshiped nature itself, building monuments like Stonehenge and Chichen Itza in celebration of astronomical phenomena like solstices and equinoxes.

In the late seventeen hundreds, scientists began tracking tides, spurring them to formally investigate the relationship between the cycles of the moon and changing tide levels. Here’s what they discovered:

• Tides are created by the gravitational force of the moon pulling on water.
• This force is highest when the moon is full or new, because the earth, moon and sun are aligned.
• During the new and full moon, high tides are at their highest and low tides are at their lowest. This is called Spring Tide.
• When the moon is one quarter full, the moon and sun’s gravitational pull cancel each other out, causing the opposite effect: weak or Neap Tides.

So what does the moon’s gravitational pull have to do with getting thicker, longer, stronger, and healthier natural hair?

Nine months ago I discovered an interesting theory by a veteran holistic stylist named Anthony Morrocco, a simple yet profound theory that he has based a multi-million dollar haircare brand around: The same gravitational forces that impact the water outside of your body impact the water inside your body.

Simply put, if you want your hair to grow fast, you should work with gravity, not against it.

The best time to cut your hair to encourage growth is during Spring tide when gravity is pulling water outward. Cutting during Neap tide encourages stagnation, which makes it the ideal time to remove unwanted body hair.

For the past nine months I have been using the Lunar method to promote hair growth, and so far I love my results!

Not only is my natural hair thicker than ever and growing like a weed, I only have to trim my ends four times each year, on the full moon closest to the winter and summer solstices and vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

This year marks a once in a lifetime growth opportunity for naturalistas like me. The last full moon of 2016 coincides with the winter solstice, a once every twenty year or so phenomena that won't happen again until 2094.

That makes this Wednesday, December 22nd the most beneficial growth cutting day for the next 78 years.

During the winter solstice, the sun is farthest away from the earth, causing the tides to swell or ‘bulge’. These bulges have been known to cause high tides or even coastal flooding when the gravitational effect of the equinox is combined with the natural increased pull of the full moon.

For many indigenous cultures, the Solstice also signifies the beginning of a new season and a spiritually significant period of rebirth. That makes it the best possible time to set goals and start the healthy hair habits that will ensure you achieve them.

Here are four simple tips that will help you maximize your length retention on the best beneficial hair-cutting day for the next 78 years.

While your hair is only about five percent water, the scalp it grows out of is over sixty percent water. Healthy hair starts at the roots, so it’s essential that you drink enough water to maintain a strong and healthy scalp. To make sure you’re maximizing growth potential, challenge yourself to drink one ounce per pound of sixty percent of your body weight in water ounces during the week of the solstice. To easily calculate what your ideal water intake is, simply take half your body weight plus ten percent, then switch pounds for ounces.

For example, a 150 pound woman would need to drink a minimum of 90 ounces (75 pounds plus 15 pounds) of water each day.

Sage has naturally antibiotic and antiseptic properties and has been used for centuries to treat hair loss and stimulate cell regeneration. Try this easy three ingredient sage oil to stimulate your scalp before and after the Winter Solstice.

Combine one part whole sage, one part castor oil, and two parts Olive (very dry hair), Sweet Almond (dry hair), or Grapeseed (normal hair) oil in a medium skillet. Heat on low about fifteen minutes or until oil turns dark (but is not burnt or smoking). Strain the oil into dropper or roll on bottle. Apply to scalp nightly, massaging the oil into your scalp for three minutes before bed.

I have tried a lot of crap methods, but to me nothing works better that trimming freshly washed and detangled hair with a pair of nail scissors. The twists allow you to clearly see where ends are split or heat damaged, and the nail scissors are sharp, guaranteeing a precise trim.

I start by detangling my dripping wet hair with a denman brush. After detangling a two inch square section, I twist it loosely into a two strand twist. Once I have detangled my entire head, I trim the dead or damaged ends of each twist with my nail scissors.

Side note-- I save my ends, rolling them up inside a list I make of all the the things I want to leave behind in the coming season. Then I burn the hair and the list in a symbolic ritual of new beginnings; but do you.

Using a seed or carrier oil or butter, fully saturate the last two inches of your freshly trimmed twists. As they dry they will continue to absorb the oil, forming a protective barrier for your sensitive ends and aiding in length retention. You can even use the sage oil from step two to help protect your ends.

These four easy steps will help you maximize hair growth in the upcoming season. By learning the Lunar method, you can harness the power of gravity to improve the condition of your scalp and grow long, strong, beautifully healthy natural hair.

Take advantage of the best possible day to get a fresh start. As the winter solstice begins a new season, consider beginning new healthy hair habits that will benefit yourself and your family for generations to come.