Hello y’all,
Wow. I’m feeling an eerie sense of déjà vu. Exactly a year ago, I meant to share the second post of a two-part series… like I intended to today… but instead I was shifted by the importance of honoring this weekend and the life of a man who has influenced me beyond measure. Here is the piece from 2022. And here I am again today, postponing my plan, so I can meet you in reverence and solidarity.
There is no national holiday I respect but this one. And though I think about MLK almost daily, there is an importance to ritual remembrance and to being with this annual focusing of collective attention.
It is a “longread”, and I thank you for your generosity in advance. Also, I do intend to infuse smaller pieces into the flow more frequently this year. ;)
Lastly, there are so many new folks here. Welcome! I’m honored by your presence. This place is filled with diverse offerings — stay a while and try a bit of everything.
"I can't breathe." – Eric Garner, 2014
"I can't breathe." – George Floyd, 2020
"They're trying to George Floyd me." – Keenan Anderson, 2022
I reach down into the soil.
A palm full of California farmland writhes with wriggling heat eager to sprout new stories in its seeds. A palm full of New Mexico hillside paints my skin with cinnamon clay and vibrates crystalline potency in the strong sun. I feel the aliveness permeating through, from land to land, but no matter where I roam it still cries its death to me.
This land, all of it, is a burial ground of state violence.
Here in my adobe cottage in Oga Po'geh Owingeh, which translates to White Shell Water Place, otherwise known as "Santa Fe", I am both settled and ungrounded. I have never felt more at home in a place, and yet this land chews me up.
There is no greater mirror than the all-consuming vastness where you must meet yourself a thousand times in a trickster landscape that seems unchanging over an eternity, and yet continuously shapeshifts with animate shadows and swallowing cracks and dancing skies.
The desert doesn't take any shit. Not like our cities do, a swirl of projection. You try to displace yourself onto the desert, try to evade, try to run away from yourself. The desert says no. It holds nothing of you. It returns everything, and it shows you more than you even knew you held. It says, "this is yours to clear".
It said that to me in 2018 when I read and re-read a book called "Touch the Earth" that stared at me from the bookshelf of the casita I rented for a summer in Taos. I transcribed every single page of it into the Evernote app I am using to write this to you right now. It was a devotional practice to sit with that text, to type each word, to feel it all permeate through my fingertips and embed into my cells. I typed and I cried and I mourned the unfathomable realities of excruciating annihilation.
"The earth was created by the assistance of the sun, and it should be left as it was. The country was made without lines of demarcation and it is no man's business to divide it. I see the whites all over the country gaining wealth, and see their desire to give us lands which are worthless. The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same."
Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, Thunder Traveling to Loftier Mountain Heights, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perse
"We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and the winding streams with tangled growth as ‘wild’. Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild animals’ and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with a brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it ‘wild’ for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, it was then for us when the ‘Wild West’ began."
Chief Luther Standing Bear of the Oglala band of Sioux
“You ask us to think what place we like next best to this place where we always lived. You see the graveyard out there? There are our fathers and our grandfathers. You see that Eagle-nest mountain and that Rabbit-hole mountain? We have always been here. We do not care for any other place. We have always lived here. We would rather die here. Our fathers did. We cannot leave them. Our children were born here. How can we go away? ... If we cannot live here, we want to go into the mountains and die. We do not want any other home.”
Cecilio Blacktooth
“To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret."
Chief Seattle
I sink my hands into the soil and it wails of death.
Genocidal death upon genocidal death. The death of peoples stolen from their lands to die here as slaves, whose descendants are still dying in carceral conditions all the time, whether that's jail cells (see: Senate republicans refused to rectify racist disparities for drug crimes just a couple days ago), or city streets asking for help, or sidewalks simply for existing, as the surveillance state watches on, as the dying look into the cell phone or the police officer's body camera knowing in an instant their name will be another hashtag.
How deep does this genocidal death go until we reach the land where death was the soft peace of cyclical cosmologies enfolding the dying back into the soils their mothers bled them into life upon, not violent murders amidst desperate defense, gasping for breath?
Of course, I knew these truths before 2018. This violent nation didn't miss me. By six years old, I felt a deep fire burning at the center of my gut tracking the disparities and discrepancies fracturing humanity because of skin color. I felt ashamed of my pale skin in the brown town that raised me in ways I couldn't untangle then, but felt viscerally.
But to be honest, I also didn't know. Not in the way I did sitting on that living room floor in 2018 with that sacred book. I'd spent my life intellectualizing, studying, scrutinizing racism and organizing against it - always an outward doing... but I wasn't feeling it, I wasn't willing to see how I was being it. Not until the desert said to me: "no... this is not a problem to solve in your mind or through endless activism, this is a trauma to clear in your muscles and tissues, in your tears and your screams...this is a horror you cannot bypass through thought or action, it is one you must plunge into with your entire being. It is yours to clear."
It is still too easy for white-bodied people in this country to not deeply, profoundly, achingly confront what it means to be white, to understand the responsibility that this is ours to clear. I mean to beat your fists in to the ground, to get ugly, to wrestle sleepless through night upon night, to not emerge for days on end. To see how it's threaded into our ligaments and encoded into our bones, to meet it with the raw open-heartedness of our attention and to step by step transmute every last remnant of it. It is still too easy because it is far too expensive to confront what it means to witness your own whiteness, extract it, destroy it. The deeper it goes, the more identified you become, the more your whole world is built upon a lie. It is its own kind of death, and why would one commit themselves to that, when it's so intoxicatingly comfortable to simply be white?
"A thousand Eric Garners will be tolerated, so long as they are strangled to death in the shadows of the American carceral system, the most sprawling gulag known to man. And so evil does its business in the shadows, ever-fearing not the heat of the Great Fire but the light. To clearly see what this country has done, what it is still doing, to construct itself is too much for any human to take."
Ta-Nehisi Coates
And yet, it is not too much for us to take. It is essential that we take it, the way the desert trusts us to take what's ours to bear. Those who refuse this are participating in their own death on the daily. A spiritual death. A death of the soul.
To be in touch with the lands you're on, wherever they are on this Earth, is to be in great mourning, for few places have been spared this violence that proliferates its brutality in more insidious ways every day.
There is a deep call for white-bodied people to participate in a profound mourning process.
To be in mourning is to be present with grief.
To grieve is to acknowledge, to release denial, and to step into accountability.
To grieve is to distinguish yourself from the death cult, from the perpetrator, from the predator, and say "this violence kills me too. I will not stand here numbly complicit, I will bend to the pain."
To grieve is to "dare everything" as Baldwin says.
To grieve is to make space for new possibilities.
What happens when white people responsibly relinquish whiteness? Not simply abandon it, but transmute it. What is left? I think this is at the heart of subconscious resistance. Who will I be if this is all I am?
Well this is the great irony of it all. When you lose whiteness, you don't lose anything but the unrelenting torture of separation, of delusion. You lose the genocidal deathcult carving away at your own existence. And you gain everything whiteness stole from you and your ancestors: the vibrant, animate, fertile world surviving in spite of the onslaught of genocidal death.
I feel the call for a mighty fire to swallow the house that whiteness built. And I join in that prayer.
Today, as I feel into the horrific death of Keenan Anderson, the 31 year old father, teacher, and cousin of Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors murdered by LAPD in early January, I'm thinking about this thread of connection across the ages.
Artist and activist Harry Belafonte, one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's closest friends, remembers one of the last comments Dr. King said to him before he was murdered:
“I’ve come upon something that disturbs me deeply. We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know we will win, but I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house. I’m afraid that America has lost the moral vision she may have had, and I’m afraid that even as we integrate, we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears the soul of this nation. I fear I am integrating my people into a burning house.”
Six years prior to King's assassination, James Baldwin offered this:
"What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
In 2018, Harry Belafonte was interviewed by NPR correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who asked: "So, what do you think it will take today to make his dream of the beloved community a reality?"
"Until white America begins or even decides to identify a moral course of history, I don't think anything is going to happen. I think America will self-destruct. The only thing left for black people to do is to burn it down. We have been lynched. We have been murdered. And, if you look around, never before in my 91 years of history as an American have I ever seen the nation more racially divisive than it is at this very moment, including the days of the Ku Klux Klan and the segregation laws of the South."
We are called to let the fire breathe. To make room for it. Because the true wisdom of fire is an intelligence that has been carefully cultivated by Indigenous peoples dating back one million years. We now call it "controlled fire", but whiteness refused this technology for centuries, turned fire into something ravenous and hellish by waging war against it instead of communing it. This is the devastation of whiteness. To desecrate the sacred. To know fire (or anger) as generative, not destructive, is both Black and Indigenous cosmology (see Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger” for deeper reading).
I am drawn to Indigenous and Black Futurisms -- sometimes articulated through speculative fiction but also sometimes simply ushered in through Indigenous and Black culture, artistry, imaginations. As a future ancestor myself, my duty is not to neglect the inheritance of my skin color (despite my Judaism) but to claim it and to unmake it. In the Cultivating Culture course, we spend one third of the journey on "futures". The future so many course participants conjure in their visualizations is a simple, prophetic, ancienteternal image: to sit around the fire, draped in sweet darkness, with our undefended hearts as portals for connection to all beings and to the earth, in an unbroken wholeness… like our ancestors did since time immemorial. This is the future I weave myself into.
For white people, this future is built by insisting upon decoloniality, by no longer benefitting from a system that could finally be burned to the ground (may it be so).
May we remember that all land holds this mirror to us, whether it’s the winding freeway or the snaking river or the trickster desert. May we see it clearly. May we speak kindly to it. May we clear what is ours to clear, so that it and we can sing in love.
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