Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(4)

Police was Al-Qaeda to black men.

And we also study Beyoncé. Many of you have danced to her feminist rhymes and absorbed her insistence that black life matters. That insistence rings out on her song “Formation,” whose video features the songstress sitting atop a sinking cop car in the post-Katrina Louisiana bayou and a message scribbled on a wall that says, simply, plainly, unapologetically, “Stop Shooting Us.” Beyoncé also sang the song during an epic Super Bowl halftime show, garbed in black, as were her fashionable phalanx of backup dancers, paying tribute to the Black Panthers. Many cops charged that she was anti-police and threatened to withdraw protection during her “Formation” tour. “Let’s be clear: I am against police brutality and injustice,” she told Elle magazine. “If celebrating my roots and culture during Black History Month made anyone uncomfortable, those feelings were there long before a video and long before me.” On tour her radiant blackness and her ecumenical humanitarianism never once clashed.

We also study Kendrick Lamar. We listen to his racial catechism and thus absorb as well his subtle and stirring exploration of black life in all of its magnetic contradictions. We watch the black-and-white video for “Alright,” a song of cataclysmic hope amidst cops’ fiendish assaults on black men and women. The video unveils the uplifting dimensions of an urban magical realism. Lamar flies over hood landscapes until he lands on top of a high streetlight, only to be felled by the imaginary bullet spun from a cop’s imaginary gun, a gun formed by the cop’s pointing fingers. Kendrick falls in slow motion, dead, or at least we think he is. Then he opens his eyes and smiles widely. He lets us in on the joke, on the artifice of what we have just seen. It is, too, a stinging rejection of the power of blue to determine black life and death.

These are our griots. These are their songs. These and a thousand others are the hymns that answer the reign of terror that consumes our days. These are the hymns that rally us against the fantasy of our erasure. May these hymns be sung loud until our slaughter ceases and our blood no longer spills.





III.

Invocation

O! save us, we pray thee, thou God of Heaven and of earth, from the devouring hands of the white Christians!!! . . .

The whites have murder’d us, O God! . . .

We believe that, for thy glory’s sake,

Thou wilt deliver us;

But that thou may’st effect these things,

Thy glory must be sought.

—David Walker


Almighty, hear our prayer.

Oh God, how we suffer. We your servants are ensnared in tragedy that doesn’t end. We can do nothing to make our tormentors stop their evil. We cannot convince them that we are your children and don’t deserve this punishment. We have tried everything we can to keep them from slaughtering us in the streets. They hide behind the state to justify killing us. They say we are scary, that they are afraid for their lives. They say this even when we have nothing in our hands but air. They say this even when they are armed with weapons meant to remove us from the face of the earth. They say this even when they must throw down guns to pretend that we intended to do them harm. They say this even when video proves they are lying through their teeth.

Oh God, we are near complete despair. How can we possibly change our fate? How can we possibly persuade our society that we deserve to be treated with decency and respect? How can we possibly fight a criminal justice system that has been designed to ensure our defeat? How can we possibly combat the blindness of white men and women who are so deeply invested in their own privilege that they cannot afford to see how we much we suffer?

But most of all, Oh God, how can we keep racism from strangling every bit of hope left in our bodies and minds? How can we arrest the blue plague and keep it from spreading to our children, and our children’s children? Oh God, I have already seen the tragic imprint of grief and suffering on my own children’s fates. I have seen how the poison of racism has tried to claim their bodies and minds from the time they were babies.

*

Oh God, I pray for all children who have to endure the curse of bigotry. It is the most wretched feeling of helplessness when one’s children suffer that fate. My daughter Maisha was six years old the first time racism stole upon her. She had been invited to an ice skating party hosted by a dear childhood friend. Her friend’s parents had moved the family from the inner city to a Chicago suburb. Yes, Oh God, you moved them on up like Weezie and George Jefferson. Maisha was delighted to see her old schoolmate. She was equally excited to get a taste of the suburbs. The group of kids that attended the party spanned the black rainbow from pale vanilla to dark chocolate. A few of the girls decided to break away from the group and play a game on the ice. As they huddled in a circle, three white girls between the ages of six and ten approached them.

I know they’re your creatures, too, Lord, but sometimes white folk act like the Devil is all in them. The Holy Ghost is nowhere in the vicinity. Well on this occasion the white girls yelled at my daughter and her friends in unison, “Move, niggers!”

Lord, Maisha was stopped in her tracks. She squinted her little green eyes to make sure that she’d truly heard what she thought she heard. The oldest girl in Maisha’s circle demanded, “What did you just say?” And those lovely little minions, with no hesitation, with the kind of confidence that whiteness offers in spades, blurted out again, “Move, niggers!”