When This Virus Thing is Over, I Will Still Want Some of You to STAY AWAY FROM ME
Truth. Such…..truth.
Sonja sent me that meme on Facebook.
Sonja’s Black. We’ve been very close friends for more than three decades.
She is not my Token Black Friend. She is one of many. She’s also very smart, very funny and the only Black friend in my inner circle who doesn’t have a PhD.
In her case, she doesn’t need one. She’s that smart.
I’d like to say she’s sassy, because she is in that wonderful way my friends are, but I fear that it might be interpreted in that ugly way that Black women are so feared: Angry Black Woman.
Nope. She’s just righteously hilarious, which is so often born of great pain, loss, and a lifetime of abuse by White folks for Being Smart and Female While Black.
That is why she’s my friend: she bears wisdom, as in the above. Like all my closest friends, she is my teacher, my truth teller.
Covid, and the events of this year, have been highly instructive for those of us who have wondered about the people whom we’d called close.
Yesterday Jeanette C. Espinoza wrote a piece about her inner circle, people she’d grown up with, who could not, would not walk with her on the path towards racial equity. Here is her difficult and heartfelt article:
From her article:
These people who knew me and some of the obstacles I’ve worked to overcome felt an obligation to pay lip service to my plight of being a Black woman in this country. They delivered award-winning performances of feigned interest for as long as they could. After all, they weren’t completely oblivious to the fact that they benefit from White supremacy, even though they wouldn’t dare say so out loud. Instead, their guilt played out not by readily accepting and acknowledging the racial inequities in this country, but by asking me if I was okay and what they could do to help.
…The more White people in my life began to distance themselves from conversations related to anti-racism work, the more I knew our relationships with each other were never as they seemed. I had been there for their life events and supported causes that mattered to them but when it was my turn, reciprocity was nowhere to be found. It didn’t matter how long I had known these people or how kind they might have been in the past. The bottom line was they couldn’t comprehend that as long as racism still exists, speaking, writing, and joining groups formed to address it and find solutions would never have an expiration date. (author bolded)
Precisely.
For in truth, and in true friendship, we shoulder the burdens of those whom we love, we share their pain so as to help make its inevitability more bearable, and we are fearless in the forming of deeper alliances because of that pain.
Sonja and Jeanette speak for many of us, as this year has not only cost us our relative freedoms, many of us also our incomes and livelihoods and a whole lot more. As some folks have left my readership (two hundred this summer) in what appears to be a wholesale rejection of MY stance on race, I share with these women my deep disappointment that the lot of us don’t have the moral courage God gave an earthworm to stand for what is right, not just what makes us feel good right now.
Yet it’s much, much bigger than that.
Sonja of course is also referencing what we’ve seen with the issues of masking, which has unmasked our collective inability to acknowledge the safety of others. Their need to be protected from what I might unknowingly carry. That I want desperately to believe I’m not a super-spreader, I have no clue, even as I quarantine myself with care, limit my exposure and do my best to protect. Why is this an issue?
Because the 6'7" man working out next to me at the gym Saturday morning insisted on pulling his mask down, which means that by the time I noticed I could well have unwittingly breathed in his aerosols, which might or might not be carrying something deadly, because clearly he doesn’t have my commitment to prevention, so he might have breathed in someone else’s.
Therein lies the issue. I just don’t know. Neither does anyone else. Which is why this is so key.
The other unmasking was also unwitting. For as Jeanette points out and many of us have witnessed this year, the huge issues which we face as a nation, how we (de-) value women, people of color, other’s rights to a decent life, livelihood, beliefs, basic healthcare and housing and all the rest have torn away the appearances of any kind of politeness. We stand in the rubble of a country in serious decline even as Trump minions shriek how great we are.
I don’t want that shit on me.
I fear it might be contagious, as hate, greed and bigotry tend to be sticky as velcro.
Our friends — such as they are or aren’t — stand unmasked.
Sometimes that is NOT good news, for in seeing those around us for who they are rather than who we very much hoped they’d be, we now have both the freedom and the power to cherry pick who gets to stay in our inner circles, whom we choose to trust with our love, our hearts and our stories, and whom we trust to have our backs.
Too many of those around us are precisely the kinds of folks who will step away when we do a trust fall, allowing us to crack our collective heads on the hard pavement of their disregard. And guffaw at our blood and brains on the sidewalk.
They’ve been doing it all summer long.
This, in a nutshell, is how America has treated the rest of the world, our allies, and other countries who used to be able to count on us.
In both the macro and micro sense, the world is now seeing us for what we stand for as a country, who we are when the going gets rough, and whether they can count on us.
They can’t. We’re happy to strip the world for resources for OUR consumption but when the world needs us, we don’t wanna know.
We are the Great Gordon Geckos of the modern world.
This is precisely what Jeanette and a whole lotta other Black folks have found out this year: folks are happy to strip us for our love, our support, our resources but when we need them, they don’t wanna know.
All that stuff that got flushed down the toilet with Trump, who lives in one.
He IS a toilet, but in some essential ways he also represents what America has become in the world.
Right now the rest of the world doesn’t want to get any of us on them either.
Our closest neighbor to the north continues to make it clear that we are not welcome. I hardly blame him. We’re diseased, we’re carriers of hate and we’re super spreaders.
The problem is that those of us who do care, who are committed, are guilty by association. To be American is not a good thing in the world these days.
But we can collectively continue to do a great deal of good. We can also rebuild, redirect, recommit, and do a hell of a lot better. And in doing that, reestablish ourselves in the world as reliable friends, partners and collaborators for a greater good.
The way you and I do that is to stand up for what we believe in, get our butts out to vote, vote with our feet and our words and our love for those friends of ours whom we love with all the fierceness we can possibly muster.
In the meantime, when Covid eventually gets reined in, the rain of truth that has washed the masks off those who once called themselves my friend, your friend, has done an excellent job of helping us identify who needs to stay away from us from now on.
You can I can the reign in our smaller, more trusted worlds, surrounded by those who have earned our trust and friendship. That may be a brave new world in some ways, but for my part, at least it’s a more honest one.
