What to the Black Mother is the 4th of July?

Celebrating this country’s birthday feels like walking behind the casket in a New Orleans second-line procession.

On this day in which so many neighbors shoot fireworks, parents dress their children in the colors of freedom, and the nation indulges in its most conspicuous patriotism that heralds the United States of America as a beacon on a hill, I gnash my teeth along with so many Black mothers, that even in 2023, our lives are seen as expendable and our children as less than human. In this land wrested from the indigenous peoples and gifted to those claiming Manifest Destiny, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness remain an elusive aspiration for those on the losing end of white privilege and anti-Blackness.

Today, the words of civil rights and women’s rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer echo in my head, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” as I meditate upon depraved indifference to Black lives buried deep in the marrow of this country. The murder of Ajike “AJ” Owens, the 35-year-old mother of four young children barely a month ago in Ocala, Florida is but one recent example. Sister Ajike was shot in cold blood by her neighbor Susan Lorincz for being a black mother called, once again, to run interference between the vile tongue and hands that would seek to do violence to the bodies and spirits of her babies. Our babies. We know the specifics of Ajike’s story and the universal truth within that experience: a fellow human being decided to sink to their most despicable instincts because they could, treating our children worse than they’d ever treat an orphaned dog. So many of us know the tiring drill of defending our children from racists when all we want to do is love on them and live our lives. On June 2nd, Ajike’s murderer robbed Ajike of her life and stole her out of the lives of her children. And in the four long days that followed this wanton act and preceded her arrest, she peddled the lie that she felt threatened, knowing it held more weight than the truth of her depraved and racist indifference to Ajike’s inherent human value.

A month before Ajike’s senseless murder, the world became aware of the untimely and tragic loss of Olympic medalist and world champion sprinter Tori Bowie, who passed away at the age of 32 years old, seemingly due to the pregnancy complication of preeclampsia in her eighth month. Sister Tori’s heartbreaking loss is but one in a long line of Black pregnant women–including prominent elite athletes Serena Williams and Allyson Felix–who have experienced a life-threatening pregnancy-induced illness. Unfortunately, Tori did not live to tell her story. Indeed, as the maternal mortality rate among African American women continues to trend upward, this alarming story of fatal and near-fatal maternal illness for black mothers isn’t ringing enough alarm bells. (Tori’s loss clawed at my heart in a personal way. I was 32 when my own first pregnancy required an emergency c-section because of my life-threatening battle with HELLP Syndrome at 24 weeks pregnant. My daughter, Grace, born weighing only a pound, passed away after a heart-wrenching four-day battle.)

Oh, to be a black mother.

Like other mothers, I have bandaged scrapes, dried tears, explained math problems, made dollars stretch, served as chauffer to my kids and their friends, retrieved errant soccer balls from the street or a neighbor’s yard, salvaged unsuccessful meals, weathered teen angst, and bought last-minute snacks for the school potluck. But as a black mother, I’ve also written strongly worded emails to school administrators about foolhardy school policies that trained brown-skinned kindergarten boys to walk around with their hands shoved deep into their pants pockets, teachers who casually called 2nd graders ‘little monkeys’ or counseled middle or high schoolers to replace the n-word in required texts with the word ‘friend,’ and the adultification of black girls which leads many to think that assaults on black girls’ bodies are the consequence of their ‘womanly wiles.’

Just yesterday, the eve of this holiday, my family had occasion to visit the plot of land at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation curiously named “Burial Ground for Enslaved People.” As I pondered the juxtaposition of this plot of unmarked graves so close to the grandeur of the residence for our country’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, I was pained by the historic example of disrespect Jefferson showed for the more than 600 people he compelled to serve him. Only stones and the advocacy of descendants of the enslaved forced the plot to be recognized as a burial ground at all. And though some names of enslaved people are sprinkled onto placards in the Monticello Museum, visitors can easily ignore the inconvenient history of slavery and the dehumanizing treatment of human beings by Thomas Jefferson and his fellow ‘founding fathers’.

As I think about the many families that will seek the perfect perch from which to view tonight’s fireworks in towns and cities across the country, I lament how the mundane stuff of child-rearing always requires the black mother to stand ready to defend her children’s humanity. I recall the mother at the Brooklyn Aquarium who intentionally rammed my two-year-old daughter’s legs with her toddler daughter’s stroller so her child could be first in line to pet a starfish, causing my daughter to fall and sustain a nasty gash. (Thirteen years later, she still has the jagged scar on her leg.) I recall the terse retort I had to conjure when a young woman asked my then nine-year-old son what he was “in for” when he and I stopped by our local police precinct to pick up a temporary parking pass for a dear friend who would soon need it for an upcoming visit. Whether a microaggression or a flagrant assault, these injuries inflicted on our children’s psyches are designed to diminish them and us as their first and fiercest protectors.

Celebrating this country’s birthday feels like walking behind the casket in a New Orleans second-line procession. The music blares and our bodies move, but our hearts are pierced through with loss. I grieve for my fellow mamas who mourn children lost to gun violence and childbirth casualties. I grieve the children who mourn mothers gone too soon, like Ajike Owens. And I grieve the countless Black mothers claimed by COVID, domestic abuse, underdiagnosed illness, and the stress of living in a world that sees us as a nuisance if it sees us at all.

The Grief Thing

My father was born on June 26, 1940. Eighty-one years ago today. My mother would have turned 83 on May 6th. And my first daughter, Grace Ayodele, would be a young woman of 18 on December 12th of this year. If they had lived. It’s weird to think of my loved ones at ages that they never saw. Or maybe in their eternal realm, they’ve seen those ages. Perhaps age is a constraint that means nothing beyond the confines of this lived life. I don’t know.

But from where I sit, I feel the gnawing of healed-over grief. It’s not new. I didn’t just lose these people from my life. And though I wish I had gotten more than the time I had with each of them, I’m thankful that I’m not wracked with the ache of new grief. New grief sucks. If I never experience it again, I’ve still had more than my share. But the grief thing is still…a thing. It still lives in me. And when I’m feeling a little bit blue, it can latch on to the amorphous blueness, giving it more shape and substance.

Earlier today, I tweeted something that felt profound at the time I wrote it: Being on submission feels like being pregnant with the world’s baby. My skin is stretched taut, my stomach a knot displaced to the top of my belly. The baby wants to be born and greet the world to which it belongs.

I’m a writer on submission. A writer with another kind and thoughtful rejection under her belt. They are bitter round pills, rejection. They roll around in the stomach, undigested. “I love your vision, your ambition, your scope, but no.” That’s what I was feeling when I wrote that tweet this morning. But though I still agree with it now, I realize that the knot at the top of my belly wasn’t just about my books that want to greet the world. The rejection of my writing from an editor stirred up feelings of outmoded love that no longer has a living person to receive it. Both phenomena can feel like unrequited love.

Don’t get me wrong, grief is deeper and more expansive than rejection. And more permanent. I know that the editors who have rejected my book haven’t killed me or even wished me dead. But that feeling of a round, undigested pill sitting at the top of the belly is somehow akin to my longing to actively love the ones I’ve lost. So because it can feel like grief, it may trigger it, awakening the grief that’s always there within me.

Shout out to all the grief long haulers. I know that the millions of untimely COVID losses around the world have swelled the ranks of our ever-growing community prematurely. I’m so sorry about that. I know that there will be things that will trigger grief in our bodies that some of us will not understand. It’s real and it sucks. But I find that being able to name it gives it a place in my body that is neither too big nor too small. It gives my body permission to make the necessary connections and to show compassion to myself. And then I can lay it down knowing that it’s there but it’s not all there is.

Living Free At 50: My Juneteenth Reflection

I turned 50 a week ago. I marked the occasion at an Airbnb rental house in Indiana with my husband, kiddos, and my brothers. It was the first time I had celebrated a birthday with both of my brothers since we all lived under one roof as children. We ordered great food (takeout because, COVID). We played rambunctious games of Uno until we were worn out.

 These components of this 50th birthday celebration didn’t even exist in my mind when I turned 48. After all, just two short years ago, there was no COVID, no brother living in Indiana, and no reason to choose to spend this most auspicious birthday in an Airbnb playing the card game of my childhood. If I imagined anything for 50, it was of my husband and me (and maybe the kiddos, too) soaking up the sun in a non-English-speaking international location with Instagram-worthy backdrops at every turn. I would have ‘returned’ to my ideal weight and posed in culture-conscious outfits that complemented the toned arms and well-earned wisdom of my new decade. My hair would be a shimmery silver freeform TWA and my feet would kiss the earth as I walked with the assuredness of a woman whose third and fourth books (and maybe fifth and sixth) had already been launched successfully into the world, doing the work of changing hearts while expanding minds.

That’s what I imagined 50 would be. But the real 50 was none of that.
Nevertheless, this 50 was just right. NOT perfect. Still striving toward toned arms and books launched and international destinations. Still wearing masks. (Yes, I’m happily vaxxed but my whole crew doesn’t yet qualify. And newsflash: COVID is not over.) And my hair is a less dramatic but wholly age-appropriate salt-and-pepper mini-‘fro that I sometimes temporarily color blue or silver.

This real 50 is one I cherish in a way that I couldn’t at 48 partly because I hadn’t yet lived my COVID 49th year that was filled with a good deal of non-COVID drama and trauma as well. What all of that was will likely remain unwritten because all that’s lived needn’t always be shared. And not all of it is mine to share anyway. But I was forged in the fire and, by the grace of God, I’ve come out the other side with all of my loved ones who sat at the dining room table playing Uno with me last Saturday. A miracle and a blessing

As I get to know this new year and new decade of mine, I imagine great things. But 50 means that I’ve lived long enough to know that other things will also come. I’m trusting that I’ll be ready for it all when it does.

It makes me think about my foremothers and forefathers in Galveston, Texas who were greeted with the news of their release from chattel slavery on June 19, 1865, fully two and a half years after it had been proferred. Freedom brought elation and an opportunity to dream but also filled so many with the realization that, though they were free of their physical enslavement, they had so many loved ones lost to them, perhaps forever. They had to learn to negotiate a way forward in a land that despised them, lied to them, and labeled them as the country’s enemy. It was a difficult freedom, and even as they grasped hold of and it, it flinched, pulled out its claws, and swiped.

I’m immeasurably grateful to all the ancestors I will never know this side of eternity for their willingness to walk by faith out along their bold, fragile, and wild dreams for tomorrow. That I can choose joy, pursue audacious dreams, and love my family is a gift they have given me. I stand at 50, free to be myself in my glorious imperfections, because of them.

Bad Anniversary

Not all anniversaries are good.

Not all anniversaries are good. Today commemorates the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd.


Mr. Floyd suffered an excruciatingly slow and painful death, his very breath crushed out of him by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The cruelty of his means of death was compounded by the horrible irony that kneeling–what one does before our Higher Power, what Colin Kaepernick chose as a means of protesting police brutality against black and brown bodies–was perverted by Chauvin and became exhibit A for why all humans of good conscience should proclaim Black Lives Matter. We know this. We saw it. And just like those of us who lived through the 9-11 terror attacks in 2001, we will always remember when we first saw this horror. We couldn’t unsee it. Some of us were shocked. Some triggered, retraumatized by the ghastly regularity of black lives cavalierly extinguished by those who carry a badge.

Today is a bad anniversary, first and foremost for Mr. Floyd’s family, his loved ones, his community. They witnessed what we all did. But they knew Mr. Floyd in a way that we did not. For them, this is the anniversary of pain and loss. And we bore witness to this pain. Mr. Floyd’s pain. His family’s pain. His community’s pain. And our own.

Months into our stay-at-home pandemic orders and our work-from-home and school-from-home reality full of anxiety and a brand new vocabulary, we were shaken to our core by anger. Our anger forced us into the streets and compelled us to act. This senseless and dastardly act of wanton disregard for yet another black person’s life had to be the beginning of something. A racial reckoning some called it. Folks were hired and folks were fired. Corporations threw money at causes and issued statements. Books flew off of bookshelves in bookstores and libraries. Legislation was even proposed and Chauvin was found guilty of murder.

It felt like a modicum of progress. A modicum of justice. But today, one year after Ms. Floyd was killed, he’s still dead. His daughter has lived an entire year of life that she was robbed of sharing with her father. It’s a year later and the proposed legislation that bears his name has yet to be passed, reduced to a “political issue” by those who shamelessly equate the Black Lives Matter movement with the insurrectionist mob that beat police officers and called for the assassination of Trump’s vice president.

This is a bad anniversary. Mr. Floyd didn’t seek to become a martyr on May 25, 2020. He didn’t wish to become a hashtag and a household name the world over or to have his brutal death burned into the world’s imagination. But today, a year after what became the last day of Mr. Floyd’s foreshortened life, we sit mired in the same hatred that killed him. Many more black and brown people have been killed after him for being black or brown people who someone suspected of possible wrongdoing. (This, after tens of thousands of mostly white people who were caught on videotape beating police officers, brandishing weapons, and desecrating the citadel of American democracy lived to travel back to their hometowns and be arrested another day.)

A year later, we cry out for an end to Asian Hate. A year later, we seek an end to the demolition of Palestinian homes and safeguarding Palestinian lives. A year later, we call out antisemitism. Today, we stare in the mirror at the many brands of hatred that afflict us domestically and abroad.

Tomorrow I will remember to be hopeful and to pray and to fight. But today I remember Mr. George Floyd’s family and I’m sad.

Who You Gonna Call?

Do police officers have the will or the skill to deescalate crises when they are called to help?

As a child of the 70s and 80s steeped in the pop culture of the time, I could always be counted on to shout “GHOSTBUSTERS!” in response to the question, “Who you gonna call?” It never got old. At least not for my young teenaged self. And I’m sure many a black and brown person within 10 years of me in either direction could do the same.

We the kids of the post Civil-Rights era, had been taught to embrace a desegregated America and our parents tried to believe that we had overcome the police brutality that they had born witness to on fuzzy black-and-white TV screens and suffered through their own bodies. We grew up with Soul Train, proud Afros, and African-inspired names. Unencumbered by Jim Crow era policies and policing, we were destined for greatness. Our generation, and the generations to follow, would secure the bag and stake our claim to everything that our blood, sweat, tears, and taxes had earned us and our ancestors, too. It was a collective hope, of course. One that we all wanted to believe.

We knew that in our real world, there was no calling of Ghostbusters. But we tried to believe that, though racism still lived in hearts and lurked on street corners, if we handled our business we would surely thrive. And when an emergency came our way, as they sometimes will, we too would be caught by society’s safety net that was just one 911 call away. Like our fellow citizens, we had a backstop for the vagaries of life:

  • if a wild animal had wandered too far from its natural habitat and put our lives or homes in danger
  • if our teenaged child (an inexperienced driver) became disoriented or overwhelmed
  • if our grandmother’s breath was shallow or our uncle seemed to have experienced an overdose
  • if the celebration of our favorite sports team led to late partying and too much to drink
  • if we had been threatened or felt like we were in danger
  • if a loved one or a neighbor were experiencing a mental health emergency

We should call 911, right? I mean, who are you gonna call but the emergency system to help us with our emergency? Even at school we had been instructed on how to place the 911 call and what to say. Speak slowly and clearly into the phone. Give our name and full address. And then, when help arrived, open the door and trust them to help.

Surely this is what 32-year-old Isaiah Brown thought when he sought help to quell a domestic dispute happening with his brother. He called 911 and spoke to the dispatcher who would send the sheriff’s deputy to his Spotsylvania County, Virginia home. In speaking with the 911 dispatcher, he had been forthright; he explained to the person that his brother had a gun but he did not. He wanted help for his brother who was experiencing a crisis. But instead, within seconds of the arrival of the sheriff’s deputy, while Brown was still on the phone with 911, we was told by the deputy to drop the weapon that was by his head–that is, the cordless telephone he was on–and then the deputy shot him at least 10 times. As of this writing, Brown remains in very critical condition at the hospital.

The Muñoz family of Lancaster, Pennsylvania had initially resisted calling 911 as they sought help for their brother, Ricardo Munoz, who suffered with mental illness. They were reluctant to call 911 because of the recent police killing of 27-year-old Walter Wallace Jr. as he had a mental health crisis in Philadelphia just a few weeks before. But they were nevertheless compelled to seek help through that means on a weekend afternoon. Within an hour of that call, their 27-year-old brother was dead, shot by a police officer. The family’s worst fears had been realized.

Columbus, Ohio police were quick to release the bodycam footage documenting an officer’s killing of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, who was allegedly in a fight with another teen or young woman in front of her foster home and armed with a knife. The reason: they believe it shows the “appropriate” use of deadly force in quelling the teen girl’s aggression toward another. But many of us are critical of this police officer’s use of deadly force against a teen girl. This scenario begs the question: do police officers have the will or the skill to deescalate crises when they are called to help?

For black and brown people, the answer seems almost always to be no.

Crises happen in all segments of society, whether domestic disputes, mental health emergencies, or fights. And in the case of three of the four instances I list above, the person for whom 911 had been called were purported to have been holding knives at the time they were shot and killed. In the minds of some, this would be reason enough to exonerate the police officer who used deadly force and dismiss the maiming or death of the person in question as an unfortunate tragedy. But if we are told to call 911 to seek help for a person in crisis or seemingly out of control, why is it that the black and brown people needing the help are so often maimed or killed?

I could write many more paragraphs documenting the numerous times police officers were called to address a white person’s crisis and managed to deescalate the situation and get that person the help they needed. Whether the help comprised counseling, psychiatric care, addiction treatment, or even police custody, these emergencies didn’t end in the death of the person who needed help. Or any of their loved ones or innocent bystanders. But when black and brown people call for help, we and our loved ones are seen as threats more than anything else. And so cell phones or even knives in the hands of hurting and scared black or brown people don’t trigger an impulse to help but to crush. Crush the threat. Silence the yelling.

Too many police officers who have sworn an oath to protect and serve and who are our country’s first line of defense in crisis intervention view the lives of black and brown people as not worth the effort needed to save us, perhaps from our own emergency. We are expendable. As long as undertrained police officers operate on their own biases, they will continue to compound the traumas that created our emergencies, and subject our brown and black bodies to more violence, including deadly violence. Whatever has brought us or our loved ones to the crisis for which 911 was called will now be used against us to justify ending our lives.

This is why so many call for defunding the police and putting those resources into crisis intervention services that would dispatch trained personnel who can deescalate emergencies and provide appropriate emergency care. This is why so many call for better screening and training of police officers. This is why so many call for the dismantling of the blue wall of silence that favors closing ranks around officers who traumatize black and brown communities with their overreliance on aggressive tactics and deadly force over transparency, accountability, and trust. This is why so many continue to proclaim that our black lives matter!

After all, if we can’t call 911, who are we gonna call?

To Watch a Person Be Killed

I’m a member of a peculiar group. I’ve seen both my parents–whom I love dearly–in the immediate aftermath of their deaths, before the niceties of preparing their bodies for burial. And for my father, I was there when he took his last breath in this life and transitioned into the great hereafter. I will never forget what I saw, what I heard, and what I believe he experienced. Both my father and my mother died peacefully and in relative comfort, to the extent that they could have been comfortable when dying of illness.

So, when I am accosted by the images of black people dying, being killed violently by the police, I am overwhelmed at being a witness to their murders, to their lives being crushed out of them by a police officer’s chokehold or knee or their breath snatched by multiple bullets piercing their flesh and destroying their vital organs. I feel a visceral pain for the victims of these heinous acts of violence, pain for their loved ones who witnessed it in real-time, sometimes with their own clutched cellphone bearing witness to the final moments of their beloved’s life on earth, helpless to do any more. And then that same murder runs on the television as a commercial preview to the news or as a visual introduction to a news story on social media, or even as a meme or the latest #challenge trending on Instagram or Tiktok.

The act of consuming black suffering and death as bloodsport is not new. The people of this country have long participated in the deaths of black people, whether as executioner or witness. The history of lynching is one that has been well documented by the photographer’s lens, capturing the intergenerational crowds of white people who came to picnic at the lynching site. They didn’t have supercomputers in their back pockets as we do now. So they went to see it in person. And not just see it but hear the moans and words of terror that would issue forth from the brutalized victim’s mouth and add their own taunts as a part of the last words that person would hear this side of eternity. To smell the smells that would emanate from a person whose fear at their imminent fate might make body systems malfunction and whose burning body–set ablaze either before or after death–would coat the air with the stench of burning flesh.

I was there, holding my father’s hand and singing him a church hymn when he let go of this life and entered the next. I will never forget the sight and the sounds and the smells. I remember how his countenance changed at the very moment he crossed over. My father died a good death, surrounded by prayers from afar as well as two of the people who loved him the most in the world. I don’t know everything he saw or experienced in that room; I won’t know that until I am at my own moment of transition. But I know that he heard and felt love.

For those who are murdered, this is not so. And for those whose execution is a community event enjoyed at their expense, those final moments must feel especially cruel. What moral depravity lives in the mind and heart of a person who will taunt and jeer and celebrate someone’s murder? But let me come a little closer. How can anyone bear witness to the violent death of a person who is running away from his pursuers or who has already been subdued by her pursuers, or who is outnumbered and outgunned by those who were called ostensibly to protect them from the bad guys without their own naked outrage at the cruel injustice of it? Just offer a #SMH and move on. Or worse yet, conjecture that the execution, which we all just witnessed, must have been warranted for reasons that some unscrupulous person will unearth well after the fact. People will go into overdrive compiling a dossier of the deceased’s most unflattering selfies or questionable posts on social media; will look for any possible “evidence” of previous drug use, alcohol use, an expired license, or a car with some amount of disrepair (missing tail-light, anyone?); or any history of previous brushes with the law, however slight. And then this compilation of so-called offenses will be used as justification for the person’s violent death at the hands of the police or a self-described civilian militia or vigilante self-appointed to investigate and “stand their ground” in the face of anyone they deem to be a threat.

In this, the land of the free and home of the brave, the insistence by a white person or a police officer of feeling threatened has always been enough of a defense to justify the killing of black and brown bodies. The mere existence of a black or brown body taking up space in any activity can be called a threat: driving, sitting in a parked car, talking on a cell phone in a grandparent’s backyard, taking a wrong turn and getting lost, going to the convenience store, napping in a university dorm’s common room, jogging, playing, having a mental health emergency, bird watching, waiting for the bus, selling lemonade, barbecuing with family, sleeping. Any activity that a black person might be engaged in can be labeled a threat by a white person. And even when that “threat” is met with deadly force, a judge and jury can be convinced it was warranted. Why? The common denominator is that it was a black person doing it.

How do we know this? Well, we all know this. This is why a ramshackle assemblage of armed white men can take over government buildings without fear of physical reprisals. It’s why a group of white football fans can throw trashcans, flip cars, vandalize property, physically and verbally assault each other, and break every noise and public nuisance ordinance in Philadelphia in celebration of the Philadelphia Eagles SuperBowl victory and still make it out alive and home to their families that very night. It’s why a white man can attend a bible study at a black church and then laughingly admit to shooting dead nine of the people he just prayed with and the police who arrested him not only manage not to kill the armed and dangerous man when they arrested him but the officers stopped at a fast-food restaurant to buy the murderer a meal since he was hungry.

There is no end to the list of examples of how black people who are just living their lives are called a threat, abused by those who have sworn an oath to protect and serve, and then maimed and killed with impunity. (Even those who live through the ordeal of being body-slammed to the ground for “fitting the description” have physical and emotional scars that can’t heal because they are wounded repeatedly.) Think about all who are forced to witness this brutality and all whose lives have been shattered by those depraved actions.

By contrast, the myriad examples of white people flouting the law and living to tell their stories aren’t even on any list. There’s no list because there have traditionally been few, if any, consequences. This country’s lakes and rivers still are full of the bones of black and brown people whose lives were snatched as bloodsport. The stench of burning flesh still wafts from government-sanctioned execution rooms where black people are killed not because they are guilty but because they are too black and too poor to afford legal counsel that would assure due process under the law. The blood of black women and men still runs in the streets and in police holding cells. The bodies of children are still warehoused in cages with only a concrete floor, a foil blanket, and other crying children surrounding them, but no parents. And too many, too many, watch our black and brown fellow human beings have their lives wrung out of them, their humanity stripped from them with little more than some hand wringing and a sad-faced emoji before they scroll on. The tolerance for black and brown suffering and death continues to be high.

The perverse irony is that this pandemic–itself a disproportionate burden on the black, brown, immigrant, and poor people who are overwhelmingly the essential workers providing the necessities that allow others the privilege of sheltering in place–is the reason why the world couldn’t look away and unsee what it saw when former police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd with his knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Thankfully, as a result, some more people have joined the frontlines of the fight for an end to police violence and the brutalization of black and brown bodies writ large. But think, Mr. Floyd has loved ones who witnessed his final terrible minutes of life, too. Breonna Taylor had a loving partner who watched her body become riddled with bullet holes from police officers who broke into her home as she slept. Philando Castile‘s partner and pre-school daughter watched him be shot to death by a police officer as he sat in the same car with him. Sandra Bland‘s family had to claim her deceased body from the coroner after watching dashcam footage of her brutalization days before she was to begin a new job. I could go on.

Families ripped apart. Communities terrorized. Blackness criminalized. That is, looking phenotypically of African descent–brown skin and coiled hair–just trying to live. Anti-poverty bias and gender so often at the intersection. Seeing brown people as an impediment to white freedom. Freedom to pillage the land–committing genocide upon its first inhabitants in the process–and steal people. Desecrating life that doesn’t service the desires of white people. This started long ago, yes. But it’s not over. When will it be over?

On Hypocrites Claiming to Espouse the Sanctity of Life

Here’s the deal. I can appreciate that there are some who have an authentic conscientious objection to abortion based on their religious and moral beliefs. But if you are to claim a bonafide ‘pro-life’ position, you must also support the following:

  1. Universal prenatal care
  2. Universal maternal care (Related to #1 but not the same. Read this, this, this, and this)
  3. Paid maternity and paternity leave, including cases of adoption
  4. Universal healthcare, including mental health services
  5. Social supports and food programs that promote food security
  6. A living wage, including equal pay for women
  7. Affordable housing
  8. Potable water (Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have lead-free water)
  9. Affordable, quality childcare
  10. Universal Pre-K/Headstart programs
  11. Fully funded public schools (including well-paid teachers)
  12. Disruption of the school-to-prison pipeline that fuels the prison industrial complex
  13. Universal sex education, including issues of consent
  14. Universal domestic abuse prevention, rape prevention, and healthy masculinity education (like Men Can Stop Rape)
  15. Removal of all structural protection for rapists, child molesters, and sexual predators of all types
  16. Strong prosecution of rape cases, from processing rape kits to heavy sentencing for convicted rapists (none of this or this or this)
  17. Laws blocking the parental rights of rapists (yes, rapists’ parental rights exist)
  18. Outlawing the death penalty
  19. Supporting strict gun control
  20. Outlawing all assault weapons
  21. Widespread drug treatment programs
  22. Wraparound supports for military families, including domestic abuse prevention
  23. Humane treatment of immigrant and refugee families, including the reunification of families displaced by the United States’ separation policies
  24. A path to citizenship for undocumented individuals (ideally accompanied by a civics lesson on how previous generations of immigrants legally immigrated to the US and why the current system makes legal immigration nearly impossible to do)

This list, while extensive, is hardly exhaustive. If a person deigns to call themselves ‘pro-life’ but they don’t support those structural changes, legal protections, social services, healthcare access, education, and immigration policies that promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then they are not pro-life at all, merely pro-birth. And those who seek to require all pregnancies be carried to term even as they support policies that devalue, disenfranchise, incarcerate, or cut short the lives of so many sound like they are trying to control the production of a woman’s uterus for their own purposes. Not a good look. (We recall that, not so long ago, enslaved women were raped with impunity, partly to ‘breed slaves’ for the economic gain of slaveowners. If we understand that the prison industrial complex is the latest iteration of forced labor in service to the economic gain of a few, then we can make a reasonable deduction about the real reason driving the passion with which many men argue for the sanctity of lives they don’t value and won’t invest in.)

Abortion is a difficult issue for many. There are some women who oppose abortion for themselves, even in the face of very challenging circumstances like rape, incest, the viability of the pregnancy due to genetic abnormalities, or even the risk to their own health. For those women and girls who wish to carry those pregnancies to term, there should be ample supports for them and their families to do that so that they all have the best chance at health, education, and fulfillment on the other side of birth.

But there are women who agonize over this multi-pronged issue and arrive at a different choice. And they should have that choice. It comes as no surprise to any of the most strident voices opposing abortion that all pregnancies result from a person who is biologically male having sex with a person who is biologically female. All. And yet, those biological men always have a choice. They can deny their culpability, claim there was consent, miss child payments, shame and silence women, or even win parental rights for the child conceived by their rape of the child’s mother. This is a problem.

You can be pro-life and pro-choice, too.

Into each life some rain must fall (reflections on Mothers’ Day)

For the last three days, I have watched TV meteorologists perfect their apologies to mom that this Mothers’ Day would be filled with clouds and rain rather than sun and flowers. But the rain is perfect. Not just because I’ve been acutely aware of the losses I’ve experienced as mother to my first child and daughter of my deceased mother, grandmothers, and mother-in-law, but because motherhood is as much about rain as it is sunshine. What it means to be a mother, a parent, a human, is a mixed bag of so much joy and sadness. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote–and Ella Fitzgerald sang–that “into each life some rain must fall.” Many a writer of our sacred texts and our most profound secular texts remind us that rain is necessary for the harvest. And, Matthew 5:45 reminds us that God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

And so today, Mothers’ Day 2019, is rain-filled. Many a mother is crying for the loss of her child and the children of others ripped out of this life due to gun violence. Others miss the children plucked from their loving arms, for the crime of being undocumented immigrants seeking a better life for their families here in the US. Still others carry the singular pain of mourning children killed in retaliation by former domestic partners. And so many others grieve the losses of children lost to physical and mental illness, addiction, accidents, and prematurity while others cry private tears for miscarriages and even their own lost fertility.

Not everyone is a mother, of course. But on a day like today, some of us nurse fresh wounds of loss or the gnawing of many years missing the mothers we once had or maybe never had. So, let it rain today. Rain with our tears and rain for the harvest to come.

Affirming Conversations

I feel full. A day at Ibram X. Kendi’s First Annual National Antiracist Book Festival has fed my spirit. So many affirming conversations, so much love and black excellence, so much knowledge sharing! When my husband, Kevin, gifted this event to me for our 14th anniversary, I had tears in my eyes. Through this gesture, he showed me not only that he loves me (which is a beautiful thing!) but that he SEES me. He sees that I’m birthing untold stories and that I am a part of a community of writers and readers who are creating more pathways to our collective liberation. I was happy to be a part of the inaugural event that is spreading the antiracism gospel.

So, today’s affirmation was personal. As I push forward in the writing of my third novel and re-enter the author’s space, I have needed to be reminded that I belong here and that what I have to share should be heard. I received those messages today: to write through fear without seeking permission or devaluing its worth. So many pearls of wisdom were offered in the name of love. Grateful.

Fickle

I remember when I first learned that word as a girl of about seven. I liked it when my mother first said it. It sounded like ‘tickle’ and made me laugh. Then she asked if I knew what it meant. Her tone, the look in her eyes, made me know that there was more and that ‘more’ wasn’t as good as it sounded. I shook my head no and she told me the meaning. I knew immediately that I didn’t want to be fickle, the cuteness of the word notwithstanding.

I take some pride in being a person of my word. I try to live with integrity. I bristle at the idea of over-promising and under-delivering. And when it happens, I am humbled or even ashamed.

When I started this blog more than three years ago, I chose the day carefully. I had visions of writing something profound or at least terse and witty multiple times a week. With each new entry, I would leave my imagined audience wanting more. And I would supply it in a steady stream.

Instead: nothing. After days stretched into weeks, I could no longer figure out how to pick up without admitting some sort of defeat so early into the blogging game. So I just didn’t write. Now, after my unanticipated and belated return to this blog, I stand between wanting to offer some contrite explanation and desiring to strike the page with no record that I had ever started. In a world of alternative facts, I rationalized that my omission would be inconsequential to all but me.

The last three words, “all but me” is what stopped me. Why should I misrepresent myself to myself? Why pretend my false start was really no start? I realized that I feared being seen as fickle, even to myself. It flew in the face of my preferred narrative: my decisiveness and sticktoitiveness.

But maybe that’s the point. I mean, I am on a journey, after all. And my journey–with its many destinations and detours, a general direction, and an endpoint as yet unknown to me–exposes me to be more nuanced and blemished than my preferred narrative. I can be fickle sometimes though I try not to be. I strive for integrity and perseverance and clarity of vision. But life is not a straight line. I’ll offer myself grace and continue on the journey.