For millions of people—white and Black—the election of Barack Obama was a sign that America had become a postracial society. Even in those early years of optimism, I knew better than to expect so much. I do not want to dismiss the deep meaning I felt watching the Obama family wave at the crowds in Chicago after his victory speech, a feat I myself had called an impossibility just a year before. And yet, beneath the celebration, most of us (Black people) were still afraid. Given America’s history of murdering Black civil rights leaders, in our bones we worried that someone would assassinate him for this accomplishment of winning the White House. We were aware of the protests not about his policies but about his race. We saw the signs and the nooses, the comic strips and the billboards, the essays and the articles, the constant condescending language that President Barack Obama simply “didn’t understand” an issue, a policy, a law, or America itself.
Though it bothered me to no end, I had braced myself for the backlash to Obama’s race, at least on the part of average white citizens. The stupid signs, the offensive comics…In my mind these were to be expected. The election of Barack Obama had not suddenly ushered in a postracial America. And yet.
What I didn’t see coming was Ferguson. Like that moment in the lynching museum years earlier, the gap between history and present closed once again, this time on my living room TV.
It took a while for the mainstream media to realize news was being made in this suburb of St. Louis, but the residents of Ferguson knew. Days later, once cable news caught up, the images began appearing on our television screens nightly. Police faced Black residents as if ready for war. They donned riot gear, held dogs by the leash, threw tear gas, and confronted residents with tanks in front of the damn McDonald’s. If all you could see were the police officers, you would’ve thought these images were from another country, or that the police were staring down folks armed with rifles and bulletproof vests. But in the widened camera lenses, we saw that the standoff was with our parents, our aunts and uncles, our cousins and children. All of them dressed in shorts and T-shirts demanding that an officer be held accountable for the shooting of an unarmed teen.
The parallels to the photos from my history book could not be ignored.
By the time the era called Black Lives Matter began, I was already familiar with the theory that racism never went away; it just evolved. But as I stared at my screen in horror and sadness, watching Black residents being treated like enemies of the state, it seemed to me that racism hadn’t evolved at all. Instead of confronting Black residents on horseback with nightsticks, police now showed up in tanks with automatic rifles strapped to their backs.
I was frustrated and sad—and yet it all seemed so familiar. Like I had been here before. Like my parents had been here before. Like my grandparents had been here before.
White people often want me to be grateful for America’s so-called racial progress. When I lead trainings, discussing America’s history, they want me to praise America for “how far we have come.” This is where they want me to place my hope—in the narrative that says things are getting better.
But I cannot.
Don’t get me wrong. I am eternally grateful to my ancestors who carried the unbearable weight of slavery. I am grateful for those who lived and loved and worked and played before there was any talk of a national movement to secure equal civil rights. I am grateful for my great-great-great-grandfather, who escaped slavery to join the Union army. For my great-great-grandmother, who refused to ride in the back of the train when traveling to visit her sister in Arkansas. I am grateful for my ancestors’ struggle and their survival. But I am not impressed with America’s progress.
I am not impressed that slavery was abolished or that Jim Crow ended. I feel no need to pat America on its back for these “achievements.” This is how it always should have been. Many call it progress, but I do not consider it praiseworthy that only within the last generation did America reach the baseline for human decency. As comedian Chris Rock says, I suppose these things were progress for white people, but damn. I hope there is progress I can sincerely applaud on the horizon.
Because the extrajudicial killing of Black people is still too familiar.
Because the racist rhetoric that Black people are lazier, more criminal, more undeserving than white people is still too familiar.
Because the locking up of a disproportionate number of Black bodies is still too familiar.
Because the beating of Black people in the streets is still too familiar.
History is collapsing on itself once again.
On Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb tore through the walls of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Inside, Black congregation members had been preparing for their Sunday service, unaware that members of the Ku Klux Klan had laid sticks of dynamite under the church’s stairs. Twenty-two people were injured in the planned attack, and four little girls were killed: Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins—all fourteen years old—and eleven-year-old Denise McNair.
Just two weeks earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the National Mall and gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In the following days, Alabama began integrating high schools and elementary schools for the first time in its history. The world was changing, and segregationists who worshipped at the altar of white supremacy could not contain their hatred and frustration. This was the third bombing in just eleven days since the integration order—but the first to prove deadly. White folks were making clear that they would rather see Black people die violent deaths than attend school with their children.
Though I grew up hearing this story about the Four Little Girls, there was a lot I didn’t know. I didn’t know that bombings had been a regular form of intimidation, or that the famous March on Washington had taken place only eighteen days before. What I knew was this: White people had been willing to bomb a Black church, right in the middle of Sunday school, and kill four Black girls. These weren’t just words in a history book. I was a teenager who loved being in church. What if I had been born in another day and time?
I stopped wondering when the distance between past and present closed yet again one evening in June 2015, when a white supremacist walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and took as many lives as he could with a Glock 41 handgun. I was just about to turn over and go to sleep when I saw a tweet from an MSNBC anchor announcing that there had been a shooting in a Black church. With only 140 characters to spare, the tweet was short and declarative, yet my heart sank. The chances that it wasn’t racially motivated seemed nil. I turned on the TV and watched the news for as long as I could stomach. My heart grew heavy as my eyes took it in. My beloved Church had been attacked again.
I’ve never stepped foot in Mother Emanuel, the loving nickname for that Charleston church. I don’t know any of the congregation members, and I had never heard the name of its beloved pastor, or of any of the people killed that night. And yet, despite the geographical gap, it felt as if my own home church had been violated. The goal of terror attacks, after all, is to inspire fearfulness beyond the target.
It worked.
Until June 17, 2015, I had never been afraid of walking into a Black church. Black churches are gracious and hospitable, loving and welcoming, filled with people who like hugs and can’t wait for the opportunity to speak goodness into your life. Even the shooter, on the very night of the rampage, had been a recipient of this love. And while many Black churches have members and pastors who are politically active, I had never carried the fear of church bombings or that local heroes would be victims of political assassinations—these were fears my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents had known. That was all past, or so I thought, until the terror gripped my heart.
My fear lasted through the night, while the shooter remained at large. What if he went to another church? Would there be more death that night? Was the shooter working alone, or had a group of white terrorists spread out across the city—or, God forbid, the country? When I fell asleep that night, I still didn’t know. And even when I woke up the next morning and discovered he’d been captured, the fear remained. What if the shooting inspired copycats? I deeply resented that the next time I walked into my own church, I would be afraid to sit with my back to the door.
That resentment turned into anger, and anger into defiance. I got up, got dressed, drove to a quiet church, and cried.
I cried for the lost lives of Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson. I cried for the family members and friends who would miss them. I cried for the survivors who watched people they love die in front of them. I cried for the congregation members who would never be the same.
But I also cried for me. I cried not because I felt sorry for myself but because—in spite of all I had witnessed in the previous year—I still wanted to believe that America had become better than this. Ain’t no friends here, I heard Dr. Simms’s voice in my head, and the tears could not be stopped. I had wanted to believe that some things were now off-limits. But I was wrong. I underestimated the enduring power, the lethal imagination, the insatiable desire for blood of white supremacy. And I felt stupid. I should’ve known better. Had I not spent the last year writing about the persistence and deadliness of hatred for the Black body? It hurt to know America could still hurt me.
For all their talk about being persecuted, white Christian Americans don’t know this kind of terror. Generations of Black Americans have known nothing but this kind of terror.
Allowing the reality of the moment to settle around me, that the past is still present, that racial hatred can still take our bodies in mass, I had to return to Black writers who understood the pain of societal hatred. Ntozake Shange wrote the following in her exquisite choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf:
i thot i waz but i waz so stupid i waz able to be hurt
& that’s not real
not anymore
i shd be immune
In this particular poem, Shange writes in the voice of a woman who can’t believe love has crushed her once again. But for me, this poem puts words to my relationship with America. I know the surreal feeling of believing I have achieved immunity from racial hatred only to feel the sting once again. I ought to be immune by now; I know too much about our racial history to be surprised. I’ve learned about slavery and lynchings, about white riots and bombings. It’s not fair that my knowledge doesn’t save me, that I can still be hurt. But I am human. I am human. And I am still alive.
Even when the world doesn’t believe that Black bodies are capable of love. Even when it doesn’t believe that I survive on intimacy, that I need other beings for love. Even when I would prefer to be immune, I am human. I demand intimacy. I demand tomorrow. I demand love.
As I cried and prayed and sang in an empty church sanctuary that afternoon, I knew what I needed to do next. For the first time in years, I needed to return to my childhood church with the green carpet and giant double doors. I needed to be with my daddy. I needed to go back, and that Sunday I did.
Turned out the carpet was no longer green—but all the important things were still the same. We still held hands while praying at the altar. Pastor still wiped his forehead with the same white towels after preaching. Church mothers still sat on the front row, and ushers still passed out fans with MLK on one side and a funeral home advertisement on the other. The choir still sang.
How excellent! How excellent! How excellent! iiiiiiis your naaaaame!
Jesus, is the sweetest name I knoooooow.
My soul is anchored. My soul is anchored. My my my my soul is anchored in the Lord.
Our voices grew stronger with each song. We would not let our generations of worship be halted by terror. Like so many times before, we found safety in one another and discovered that the Spirit delighted in who we are: in our praise, in our proclamation, in our prayers—but also in our person. The Spirit moved through our brown hands lifted in surrender, our hips swaying to the organ, our rich voices lifted in song. The Spirit moved among us. The Spirit was with us, just as she had always been. We would go on.
That Sunday also happened to be Children’s Sunday, when the kids of the church prepared Scripture readings to deliver before the congregation. There was not a dry eye in the place as those little brown faces recited words of hope—some with bold confidence and others shyly repeating the words of the children’s pastor. It didn’t matter. They were here. We were here. We would go on. God would be with us.
I cried all the way through that service and many times in the days that followed. America had reawakened me to the power of its devastation. I recognized that history is still on repeat. Four little girls in 1963. Nine Black parishioners in 2015. But I also experienced again the love of other beings. I was surviving on the intimacy of the Black community—online, in real life, in the Church and outside of it. I was baptized again into the tradition of Black love—love for self and love for one another when the world deems us unworthy of life itself. We would stand and declare that our lives mattered. And as the days went on, and we kept protesting, organizing, marching, writing, and creating, I knew I could face tomorrow.