The Name I Call Myself: On Race (Pt. 1)

How I Celebrated Black History Month
I first realized that I was treacherously unsatisfied with Black History Month about 4 years ago. I have worked in education for the past 12 years, in special education for the last 8. In this time, I have been one of only a handful of black students and coworkers, which has meant, no matter how "diverse" my workplaces have been, that I have continued to exist as a minority among minorities.

When black history month is celebrated in a school, it usually looks something like this:

• Plaster grainy, black&white photographs of famous African-Americans on the walls. Always draw from a pool of the same 20 people. Descriptions of what these people are known for may or may not be included. 
• Talk about segregation in the 1960's and the civil rights movement A LOT. Make it clear to the students that segregation WAS. Use more black&white photos (this time from the 1960's). Talk a lot about buses and water fountains (use my presence in the room as an example that segregation is totally over, if convenient). Talk about how hard it was to be a black person. Invite white students to shake their heads sorrowfully at the reality of former injustices. Do not leave room for me to comment on the lesson. 
• Talk extensively about Martin Luther King, Jr. and how, because of him, black and white people, nay all peoples in America, can be friends. Talk about how great it is that no one is racist now. Emphasize that the president is black.

In my classroom, I have a cultural awareness poster that I change every month to go along with our monthly assemblies. For February in years past, I have done what is expected: I printed out various photos of famous African-Americans and put them up on the poster, along with a poem by Langston Hughes and a map of Africa filled with titles of various careers and occupations that have been held by blacks. I spice things up by intentionally using photos of famous black Americans both in color and black&white, both dead and alive, both male and female. I always feel that I have gone the extra mile, hopefully providing visual proof that not all good black people are dead.

This year, I started asking questions. What is the point of Black History Month? Why do I cringe at the thought of it? What, if anything, can be accomplished in the 28 days we have been given to combat hundreds of years worth of disrespect and dehumanization? Then, it struck me. I find it atrocious that we have to put up, during Black History Month, pictures of African-Americans that are "worthy." It feels like the whole month is spent saying that black people are not all good-for-nothing. It feels like a display of exceptions. And, the worst part of all, it means a month of sitting through classes, staff meetings, and assemblies where people who are not black describe to other people who are not black, in my presence, with an air of unquestionable authority, what blackness is. This gave me an idea.

I returned to my poster. On a 3x5 card in bright red marker I wrote: "BLACK PEOPLE ARE. . ." Then, on more 3x5 cards, in the same red ink I wrote adjectives that corresponded with the photographs I'd chosen. Under a picture of Jesse Owens leaping over a hurdle I wrote "FAST." Under a picture of Harriet Tubman I wrote "BRAVE." Under a picture of Maya Angelou I wrote "CREATIVE." Under a picture of George Washington Carver I wrote "INTELLIGENT." I felt shocked at myself for my boldness: how dare I affirm explicitly and without permission what I know to be true? How dare I not qualify my assertion with the word "some." This is not how Black History Month is supposed to be celebrated.

I think black history month ought to be about creating new language, forming new assumptions, and letting 1,000 positive adjectives fall from our mouths, all about what it means to be black. I just want someone to run around Los Angeles, covering billboards with the phrase "Black people are. . . " and then writing in one hundred thousand good words. Why? Because the other 337 days of the year society is saying "Black people are. . ." and ending that statement in 1,000,000,000 ugly ways. The best thing we can do during Black History Month is to say that it is good to be black, and then to hush and let the words sink in, uncontested.

So I spent this Black History Month entrenched in blackness. I intentionally spent the time celebrating the work of black musicians, artists, authors, and filmmakers. I read books by black authors talking about blackness, I listened to spoken word artists talking about how to love themselves when everyone around them is calling them unlovable. I engaged in discussions with my white friends about their experiences and how they were different from my own; I had long talks with my mother about her experience of blackness in Jamaica and then during the civil rights movement in America as an immigrant. I visited a black, Episcopalian church, I listened to a lot of Nina Simone. I thought about lies I have been told my whole life. I looked for, and found, living black role models, because it is important that we know that not all good black people are dead. And I worked on explicit self-definition, remembering that most of the problems we have with race in America come from us naming each other to make ourselves look better-than, which is an act of destruction.

My Back History Month Bibliography (to date):

• Z.Z. Packer Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
• Tracy K. Smith Ordinary Light
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah
• Toni Morrison Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination 
• Toni Morrison God Help the Child
• Helen Oyeyemi Boy, Snow, Bird
• Zora Neale Hurston Mules and Men
• Tamara Winfrey Harris The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America 
• Issa Rae The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl
• Fran Ross Oreo
• Essence Magazine
• New African Woman Magazine 

The Principle of Self-Determination 
The point: freedom is me naming myself, narrating my own experience, and describing the scope of my own strengths and limitations. It does not matter how kind one's words or intentions are, they are judgments, limits, restrictions, invasions, and impositions. It simply isn't anyone else's job to tell me who or what I am. No one should attempt to tell me that I am worthy or that I am unworthy. Being black is what I say it is. And I say that it is good.


I'm just warming up, really.

Substance and Shadows

This will be a very short post. I just need to say that today I learned something. In my relationship with God, I am the changeable one. When I sin, God is faithful. When I choose righteousness, God is faithful. When I am sad, God is faithful. When I am happy, God is faithful. He is loving all the time, just and holy all the time, slow to anger all the time, and perfectly, perfectly, gracious--all the time. His steadfast love does not change with the seasons, and his love is not shaken by my inconsistency. Isn't that a beautiful thought?

There is a reason Aquinas describes God as the Unmoved Mover. O, Lord, let me live at the still point, where you are.

Branding instead of Beauty

It's the third day of my Nativity Fast, and I'm feeling fond of emotional capitalization. At least, I think so. The weather is cooling, though not cold, as though the days are a preface to sacredness, but not the Thing itself. I have to admit that I'm awful at fasting. Why do I even attempt it? I think one day I'll move past the rudimentary acquisition of discipline and begin to gain something from these moments of self-denial. I've begun reading through Isaiah, which seems fitting, because it starts out in a tone as morbid as my own feelings. Oh, how my thoughts are wandering just now. Yesterday, I finished re-reading Home, by St. Marilynne Robinson, and I feel closely connected to the character of Jack Boughton. 

Jack, the Prodigal Son, can't come home even when he is home. I feel like that sometimes. Jack hears but does not understand, and he sees but does not perceive. And he is lonely. Jack is a faithless character who was raised within the Faith (see the emotional capitalization again?). He is surrounded by others whose lives are filled with Love and Virtue, people who are reaching their arms out to him, longing to comfort him, all day long. But Jack cannot be comforted, it is the nature of his affliction to be alone in his vice. I think his character scratches at my heart so sharply because I often feel like him. I think this is one of the reasons it comforted me to read Home again, because sometimes I need to be reminded that loneliness is part of the human experience. We are born into sin, and alienated from God, after all. What could be more lonely than being at odds with the All-Perfect Creator of your own soul?

So people are lonely. Is there anything more to be said?

I'm currently terrified of reaping what I sow. There are so many verses in the Bible concerned with this general principle: "whatever one sows, that will he also reap." I'm more comfortable thinking that the great Gospel Narrative is about helping me not to reap what I sow.   . . .for all have sinned. . .   No one wants to reap the misery of a fallen humanity.

"Tell the righteous that it shall be well with them,
        for they shall eat the fruit of their deeds.
    Woe to the wicked! It shall be ill with him,
        for what his hands have dealt out shall be done to him.

In these next 37 days, I'm going to try to sow actions I'd actually be glad to harvest."



Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things and give me life in your ways.

A Day in the Life of a Bridesmaid. . .

Yesterday, my best friend of over 20 years got married. Yes, I know. Married. Here are some gratuitous photos to prove it, given here for the gratification of my own feelings. I can't go into a long description of the day, or my feelings about it, because I don't actually want to.  I will say though, that it surprised me. Each wedding I've been in is as different as each of the friends I've attended. Shall I show the photos now? Yes. I shall.

All done crying, by this point.

The Best Man got lost for a while and missed this photo opp.

Using all of my rhetorical powers.

Being the Church

William Wordsworth's "Daffodils"

 Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

The Giving Tree

Listening to the Pride & Prejudice soundtrack at the day's end with my hairpins removed makes me feel so spiritual. I'm sitting here, trying to write honestly. Right now,  I feel the lack of God's presence in my life. This week I've felt so. . .heavy laden. My soul feels as though it has been tied up in knots, twisted and gnarled, my psyche is suffering from Indian burn.

In moments like these, days like these, I see how hard it is for me to be even superficially pleasant. I don't know what makes me feel so badly, and I am aware, almost every moment, of my own inability to live a life of love. At work, one of the instructors read the book "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein. She asked all of the students, and some of the staff, to choose one thing they would like to give others throughout the school year. I decided that I would give love, because that is the best gift I could think of, and the most costly. That gift mocks me every day, as I sit in my classroom looking at the Mother Theresa prayer for those serving the sick pinned to the bottom left corner of my bulletin board. It's hard to love, I tell you! But sometimes it's hard merely to want to love.

Today I feel full of despair again. It's so hard, sometimes, to believe that righteousness is possible. It's very easy to believe that the road to happiness is getting my own way, or the removal of every difficulty: it isn't though. When I pray, it feels like I'm begging an indifferent passerby on the street for sacks of gems. I don't expect anything, because I feel like a) I don't deserve it, and b) giving is not in the nature of the one I am beseeching. This is a lie of course, well, not the first part. I don't deserve anything beautiful, true, or good, but I'm expected to expect these things anyway. It's so hard to pray for joy when I feel like it never comes. It's so hard to pray for faith when you don't believe anything. It's impossible to believe that God is happy when I am so miserable. Or is it?

I need to be re-taught that God is a giving tree, that he hears us, hears me, when we pray, that he gives benevolently out of the overflowing goodness of his own excellent nature. But I doubt it; I doubt.

God is a giving tree. He gives conditionally, in that he gives us what is good even when this is not what we have desired. He gives conditionally, in that he gives when he ask according to his will. Is God deaf to my prayers? Have I sinned against him in a way that would cause him to stop-up his ears? Oh, God, grant what you command, and command what you will.

I have been thinking a lot about St. Augustine, Dante, George MacDonald, John Donne, Plato--everyone who writes about ordinate love and the beatific vision. It is so easy to love inordinately. 

"If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee." 

It's hard to be good. Part of the difficulty of being good is believing that God will make you good when you ask.

But God is a giving tree, he loves to give, to bless. He gives pain and he gives great joy.

Oh, I wanted to relate this back to George MacDonald. I'm re-reading At the Back of the North Wind, and I'm re-remembering (again) all that MacDonald says about being at the still point. Do you remember the still point? The still point harkens back to Boethius, to Dante, to lots of people. The point is this: at the center of the universe is God, a Being supremely perfect and happy. Evil happens around him, and he uses the good and the bad to shape human events while he himself remains wholly uncontaminated and unchanged. If I keep myself at the still point, where God is, I will not be shaken by the things in this life, small or great, that threaten to tie knots in my soul. I need to understand this because it is so easy to tie a knot in my soul. I am derailed by weather changes.

But God is a giving tree. He is a giving tree, and he loves us. He loves us. O! How he loves us!




Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things, and give me life in your ways.

TULIP: Total Depravity

These days, I'm not much of a Calvinist. I can see the doctrine of predestination in the Bible, so I believe in it. But there are other aspects of Calvinism that do not stand out as clearly to me. One of them is the doctrine of total depravity. I've been thinking about it for years. I can't believe that human beings are worthless. But, please hear me, I do believe--yes and amen--that human beings are all sinful and deserving of the wrath of God. I do not believe that people deserve the grace of Christ. That being said, I want to talk about redemption.

For God to redeem something, for God to restore humanity, it seems to me that something in humanity needed to be reclaimed and salvaged. If fallen mankind is completely and totally wicked/vile/worthless, then what is God saving? It seems he's starting all over again, which isn't exactly what he does. He redeems people who already exist, he didn't destroy the human race and start all over. Also, or more importantly, if human beings are created in God's image, then the essentially good image of God rests in them, is part of them somehow.

All being is derived from God, because God is the only being who truly exists completely of himself, by himself, and in himself. That being said, human beings are borrowers of existence. Existence, being an attribute of God, is good in itself. God is the manifold of all perfections. He is perfect holiness, perfect love, perfect power, perfect existence. God is also perfectly good. Everything about him is good. His love is good, his holiness is good, his power is good, his existence is good. God created the world, and the people in it, and called it good. To be a created thing, to be a creature, is to have been made good by a perfectly good being. Wickedness, sin, evil, is a corruption of the good. Someone being sinful perhaps doesn't mean that they are totally depraved without one spark of good in them at all. Why? Because they exist still, and in existence is goodness. Where is the good in humanity? Well, there isn't much, but there is some, and it is all derived. It comes from being created, from being given existence, from being created to reflect the divine likeness. If humans are, by definition, created in God's image, then to lose that image is to lose one's very existence. Thus, when man fell, he didn't lose God's image, he tarnished it. Dragged it through the dirt, dishonored it. So why do I believe there is goodness in man? Because to be human is to borrow God's very image. And God's image is good.


Here is an image that may help explain my ideas. It's from St. Athanasius' On the Incarnation.

Athanasius says:

You know what happens when a portrait that has been painted on a panel becomes obliterated through external stains. The artist does not throw away the panel, but the subject of the portrait has to come and sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material. Even so was it with the All-holy Son of God. He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that He might renew mankind made after Himself, and seek out His lost sheep, even as He says in the Gospel: "I came to seek and to save that which was lost. This also explains His saying to the Jews: "Except a man be born anew . . ." He was not referring to a man's natural birth from his mother, as they thought, but to the re-birth and re-creation of the soul in the Image of God.

Think about that for a while.

Here is something I wrote out 3 years ago, while studying fairy tale literature in Oxford:

MY CURRENT THOUGHTS ON THE DOCTRINE OF TOTAL DEPRAVITY, courtesy of George MacDonald
DOES GOD REDEEM men of a certain mettle? Something in them is worthy already (I think this works for The Lost Princess too). How could someone redeem a slag heap, if there were no diamonds buried in it? To make a slag heap beautiful is to recreate it utterly. To find and brighten the gold specks in a slag heap is to redeem what is worthy and destroy what is unbeautiful. But this thought must make men proud. Calvinism is good at making men humble, because otherwise the slag heap can say, "How fine my gold must really be, for God to dig for me!" Forgetting immediately how a clean, holy, and beautiful God must put his pure fingers into putrid dung to find us. Instead, the slagheap must feel the weight of the awesome love of God, who counts us valuable enough to be worth getting his hands dirty and his heart--and body--broken. The response can only ever be gratitude, humble wonder, and praise. It is this counting us worth the trouble, that renders us with any value at all. We have worth because God says so, and because the light shining in us is one of His borrowed rays.

Perhaps this pokes holes in my own argument, but. . .

*logical conclusion: the devil and demons must have good in them somewhere, since they are created beings.
***BUT: the devil and fallen angels are not create in God's image, perhaps this makes a difference? Also, I'm not a dualist. So, the devil can't be "perfectly" evil, or he would be an opposing equal power to God, which isn't the case. God is the sole divine power and creator, who is blessed forever, amen.

*I think a lot of this might hinge on the idea that evil has no existence, that evil is, instead, a loss of existence.

What do you think?