Sensitivity of the Heart

So yesterday I was sitting in the one place that I don’t ever expect to have to fight a war and realized I was in the middle of a battle that I honestly didn’t and don’t know how to fight. I was mired in the wrestling of my ultra compassionate heart and my very logical head. How’s that for an ideological conundrum?

In my personal space I don’t hesitate from confronting how I feel about anything, except maybe with my husband. However, this was not the kind of space where it was neither appropriate nor where I could confront how and what I was feeling. Hence the feeling is still with me.

It wasn’t what was said specifically, it wasn’t even that it was said; it was the reaction of those I was surrounded by that rocked me to my very core. It was the cheers, it was the myopia they were cheering that made my stomach knot and the vomit in my throat rise. I have figured out the older that I’ve gotten that at heart, I am a woman of compassion. The kind of compassion that makes my heart break at the sound or sight of injustice, the kind of compassion that makes me want to cry at the sight of someone homeless, not because they are without a home, but because I’m not in a financial position to provide one for them.

Though I’m sure that they didn’t even notice what they were cheering for was the injustice of doing nothing about racial injustice. It was the complacency of understanding race through the monolith of growing up and living in a monochromatic segment of society. It was the prejudice of trying to be so racially evolved that we are blind to realities of living in the context of race in America.

“If you are voting color, you don’t know who you are.”

The truth is, that statement is very true. If all that has occurred to you is the color of your vote than you have missed the promise of your vote. But for me, who not only knows the intimacies of color, but the poignancy of our history as a nation, can we honestly say that to not see color is evolved? Honestly, I don’t buy it. The purpose of diversity isn’t to ignore it. So why is being colorless a good thing? How much do we lose in trying to make everyone see without the hues that we all have, how much more do we gain if we can not only see color, but embrace what each of those colors bring?

Here is a bit of my reality. My husband and I are what we lovingly refer to as bi-cultural and what most would refer to as bi-racial. We are also from vastly different socio-economic worlds. My parents raised me in the halls of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Met. We threw and attended wine and cheese parties, discussed politics over brioche and lamented the stock market. I lived in the suburbs and shopped in boutiques. My father encouraged debate, challenged ideals, and taught his children to cherish rights, reason and democracy.

I’ve stood in the cotton fields of the acres that my husband’s family owns. I’ve watched my daughter play in the sea of white and became acutely aware that she has no awareness of the history of cotton or her color in America. I’ve listened to them refer to my daughter’s hair as “good” and marvel at its length. I’ve heard my husband recount tails of his childhood, which sound nothing like my own. Where he’s from people weren’t like my family, diversity wasn’t a given, it wasn’t expected, it was possible. Where he is from his entire family lives within 10 miles of each other and they still sit down every Sunday night and have family dinner at his mother’s house. Where my husband is from town folk might have refered to me as colored and scoffed at the audacity of my husband for marrying me an educated, uppity woman. These are not only the town members they are also the members of the family whose blood runs through my daughter and that I carry in my womb.

It is through this filter that I hear the cheers, the verbal and silent complicity. It is through the history of this country that I hear what challenges every part of my humanity. It is through that filter that I’m rendered to tears and humbled beyond what I’ve ever known humility to be. As a women who happens to be a believer I’m struck with the stark reality of what we have as a society used in the name of God to justify. In the last 100 years of the American Christian identity, I would have been vilified if not hung for being educated, for marrying inter-racially, for birthing bi-racial children, for love beyond color and being every bit as color blind as a colorless society would have me be. Which is such a powerful ideal right until we indict each other for the lack of color that we see, by indicting someone else for the color that we do.

I look to history to remind me of where I should be cautious of the intent of others. I recall the reality that the KKK was established as a Christian organization, that nearly 4 presidents and countless politicians were elected on the backs of the Klan. That Chief Justice Blackwell was a sworn member. I know that this nation was founded as a Christian nation that believed in the ownership of other people because in Genesis 9:22-23 slavery became a biblical precedent and therefore was the WASP right and God given responsibility to treat Africans as chattel?

Do we even question justice; have we decided that we know whose life is valuable and whose rights we need to protect? What is the measure we’ve used to determine whose lives are innocent and whose are perishable? As a people have we begun to perish as a result of our own lack of knowledge? The truth is, it is only a matter of perception and what you’re looking for to believe. Even worse if our leadership endorses our behavior, why would we ever question whether or not it’s wrong? I can only say to each of us remember the words of President Wilson at the release of the Birth of a Nation, “it was like writing history with lightening, my only wish that it wasn’t so true…"
So I have resolved to this, if I’m going to do anything I’m going to ensure that my motives are pure. I’m going to be honest enough to give total disclosure and I’m willing to risk missing it completely for a shot at hitting the bull’s-eye. I cannot pretend that I know the hearts of all men, I know that I will not allow my heart to ever harbor something that will dishonor the very thing that I seek to be authentic in doing. In James, it clearly says that no river can flow with salt and fresh water, in Matthew, Jesus himself requires us to make the tree good or else make it corrupt. So here I am and I choose to make the tree good and to remember without faltering, that what I have done unto the least of these, I have done unto the Father. I will see color, I will acknowledge the injustice that people of color have endured and I will do it with an honest heart.