"Is that real?"

I continued to order a pot of tea at my favorite coffee shop (they love me here) when I heard the question being asked again, mre emphatically this time. "Is your hair real or is it fake." Glancing about to see who the woman was talking to, I can't describe the embarassment I felt when I figured out that (1) she was talking, loudly, to me and that (2) the people gathered here  at the shop were all waiting for an answer. So, like a good little llama in a petting zoo, I explained (with patience that surprised even me) that yes, my hair is real...no, I really do wash it...no, it doesn't take hours to do...(please, God, take me now) and no I don't unclip my hair at night, take it off and put it on a rack.

I'd never seen this white woman before in my entire life.

I'll say, at this point, that white people--you know I love you--but sometimes, you can irritate the piss out of somebody.

I think I'm a little sensitized these days, as many of you either can tell from my blogging or have felt for yourselves. Before coming here, I had another experience that left me wondering how much love I really do feel for my fellow melaninized cousins.

I don't want to talk about the "he said-she said" of it all--there's no integrity in that and, besides, it only serves to make others wrong. What I do want is to try to suss out what it is about that discussion that's left me so disturbed--so profoundly dissatisfied.

Are Our Leaders, Well, Leading?

I'm an on-again/off-again member of a race relations group in the city. Given the kinds of conversations that we've been in (or better yet, not been in) since Senator Obama's "Toward a More Perfect Union" speech, I thought it important that I check back in on this well-meaning group of civic, government, academic and business leaders and others like me--firmly in the peanut gallery.

What I found myself in was a very careful conversation--process-driven and cheerfully facilitated (by two wholly and entirely white therapists)--on the issue of race. No blow-by-blow can capture the sense of frustration and, I think, longing I felt on the part of those who were there wanting...something to happen. Some wanted the reins carefully fastened while others wanted the reins off and the lug nuts loosened. Choreographed to prevent some conversational injury (or career catastrophe), the process seemed to press the juice out of the berry before we'd determined just what the berry was.

The Meeting Where We Met on the Meeting

After the meeting, those gathered continued to yearn for that something. I wound up coming back into the meeting "after-set" to land in a conversation where I found me pushing my own buttons. I'd like to say that the smug brother I was talking to pushed them, but he doesn't have that kind of power. Talking about how Black people are at the effect of the white, male dominated power structure, I challenged him to consider that we aren't taking responsibility for the things we are responsible for and have power over--like our children.

He was ready for me, "what if they don't have a dad in the home"..."what if they don't go to church"..."what if the teachers don't care"..."what if..."

"Shut the fuck up!" I wanted to suggest, but he operates in a world I don't live in...and never will--one where black people can only ever hope to advance as a people at the whim and by dint of white largesse. One with no hope whatsoever. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I'd never engage in a conversation of this type if I felt we were irrecovably doomed from the start.

We Blacks aren't as monolythic as one would think.

Dangerous Conversations

So, when I found myself, 30 minutes later, at my shop with this white chick asking if I bought my hair, I was more than a little peeved--that, sprinkled liberally with more forebearance than I knew I could muster...a holdover from my earlier conversation at the after-set.

"Deliver us, O God, O Truth, O Love, from quiet prayer..." So starts one of the best open meditations I've read in a long, long time. Thanks to Regina Sara Ryan for crafting it out of her essence...and for having the courage to share it with us. I needed it for a day like today:

Pray Dangerously

Deliver us, O God, O Truth, O Love, from quiet prayer from polite and politically correct language, from appropriate gesture and form and whatever else we think we must put forth to invoke or praise You.

Let us instead pray dangerously-wantonly, lustily, passionately.

Let us demand with every ounce of our strength, let us storm the gates of heaven, let us shake ourselves and our plaster saints from the sleep of years.

Let us pray dangerously.

Let us throw ourselves from the top of the tower, let us risk a descent to the darkest regions of the abyss, let us put our head into the lion's mouth and direct our feet to the entrance of the dragon's cave.

Let us pray dangerously.

Let us not hold back a little portion, dealing out our lives-our precious minutes and our energies-like some efficient accountant.

Let us rather pray dangerously-unsafe, profligate, wasteful!

Let us ask for nothing less that the Infinite ravage us.

Let us ask for nothing less than annihilation in the Fires of Love.

Let us not pray in holy half-measures nor walk the middle path for too long, but pray madly, foolishly.

Let us be too ecstatic, let us be too overwhelmed with sorrow and remorse, let us be undone and dismembered...and gladly.

Left to our devices, ah what structures of deceit we have created; what battlements erected, what labyrinths woven, what traps set for ourselves, and then fallen into.

Enough.

Let us pray dangerously-hot prayer, wet prayer, fierce prayer, fiery prayer, improper prayer, exuberant prayer, drunken and completely unrealistic prayer.

Let us say "Yes," again and again and again. and Yes some more.

Let us pray dangerously.

The most dangerous prayer is "yes."

Discussions of race, frankly, aren't for cowards of those with a weak sense of self and identity. I think they require a certain sense of abandon...a kind of "no holds barred" willingness to get messy and take a punch so you can get to the other side and find out what's there.

Clinical Collisions

For many whites, there has been an almost clinical discussion of "Black Anger" and an even more clinical dissection of discussions for any evidence of it "We need to make this a safe place.," though only one part of the discussion can afford to ever feel safe--anywhere.

What's been missing has been an equally detatched, clinical discussion of white unwillingness to engage--the kind of flattening of affect that would allow a people to stand idly by and watch as others were abused for centuries (it chills me even now to think about the narratives of slave masters wives) or demand that conversations with Blacks on race have safety nets with multiple redundancies like parachutes with a reserve chute in case the main chute failes.

Even the worst therapist knows that familial abuse can traverse generations with it growing and morphing into something almost incomprehensible that leaves some asking "why can't they just get over it?" Denial--of fact, of impact, of awareness, responsibility or denial of denial itself--is our National Disease. In a much earlier blog post, I commented on a slave era cartoon. It depicted a slave (Black) under the boot of a standing slave master (white). In the cartoon, the master was tossing off invectives at the slave: "You're nothing... just a thing under my shoe." The slave's response: Massa, with yo foot on my neck, ain't neither one of us going anywhere.

And here we are.

Social Salons

Years ago, before moving to Indy-inert-polis, I'd been having a series of "social salons" in my home where we ate and talked about race, religions and a host of other topics in my little house in Dayton, IN. Maybe there was something about the times or something about the house, but for a little less than three years, we gathered almost every Wednesday to talk and to get to know each other--really know each other. No process. Just food and a willingness to try to understand.

I'd like to try these again. Anyone else interested?

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