Lest Our Feet, Stray From the Places Our God Where We Met Thee

December 23, 2006

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,Keep us forever in the path, we pray.Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,True to our God, true to our native Land.

"Lift Every Voice & Sing" –James W. Johnson 1899


Within the last three or four days, I have had several occurrences of discouragement about the state of Black America. I am always one to point out the injustices forced upon my people: historically and presently. I make no bones about criticizing governments, their participants, and any other world system that actively seeks to destroy and/or harm any or all of the African Diaspora. I have, in fact, made the voicing of my objections, and the activism that is essential to make those objections no longer needed, my life mission. Yesterday, I even bit the bullet and got my first tattoo, which is an equal sign (=), on my arm. I never want to forget my life's mission, and I always want to have a reminder in plain sight for me. I will not allow the European descendants of this world to dominate my people any longer without a hearty fight.

However, in the last few days, I've found myself wanting to fight my own people.

Three days ago, I began to engage with in an online debate with one of my Black friends who graduated from undergrad with me. Since I met him about a year and a half ago, I have constantly teased him about various situations involving white people, especially white women. (Once, he came into a program with a white girl and her Black boyfriend, and walked right past me. I wasn't offended because I didn't think he'd seen me. A couple of minutes later, he walked up to the white woman sitting next to me [whom I am a casual acquaintance of] and asked her to come and join the white girl he walked in with. He still said nothing to me. A couple of days afterwards, I called him on it, and his excuse was that he hadn't seen me. Well, as all of you have probably realized, I'm pretty hard to miss. Since then, I have since lovingly referred to him as "The Traitor.")

He wrote a blog, on another website, about the fact that the media refers to Barack Obama as "Black" or "African-American" even though he is biracial. His issue was with the "one drop rule" that most Americans, especially Black Americans, seem to accept as law. He also took issue with the term, "African-American," because he said that he was not from Africa. He'd prefer to simply be called, "American."

Blank stare

His case was that most African-Americans (those who are descendants from those brought over during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade) do not share the same culture as those of Africans on the continent, and that we have more in common with white Americans than native-born Africans. He also pointed out that white people who were born on the Continent have more of a right to call themselves African-Americans than we do. He said that if he must be categorized by his race, he'd prefer the term, "black." He also said, "To term ourselves as art "African" reinforces a sad implication: that our history is basically slave ships, plantations, lynching, fire hoses in Birmingham, and then South Central, and that we need to look back to Mother Africa to feel good about ourselves."

Now, I have no issue with the term Black, but I do take issue with Black Americans who readily dismiss their ancestry. First of all, many native-born Africans do not have the same culture as our shared ancestors had. Europeans too, have readily influenced them. In addition to that, I don't think it's appropriate to measure one's Afrikanity based on what one eats, drinks, or speaks. Also, in my mind, opposite to what he said, terming ourselves as American reinforced a history based solely on slavery, discrimination, and crimes against humanity. For an African-American to only call themselves "American" means that they believe their history started with America. If they believe that, then they believe that their history started with slavery. I know better.

It is sad that people of the African Diaspora do not have any place to truly call home. We are certainly not home (or welcome) in the lands of our captors, but there are times when I feel that we would not be received much better in the land of our ancestors. We are truly a people without a home. But yet and still, we are African.

Malcolm X once said, "If a cat crawls into the oven and gives birth to kittens, do you call those kittens biscuits?" No. You certainly do not. My ancestors were forcefully brought to this land and then they gave birth to the generations who gave birth to me. But just because I was born in this country, doesn't make me of this country. And the sick need to assimilate into "Americanism" will never create an equal society. It will only create poor misguided people who are more concerned with "fitting in," and "making it," than they are with their own people.

The second discouraging situation occurred yesterday as I boarded the public bus to go to the tattoo parlor. When I boarded, a group of African-American teenagers were sitting in the rear of the bus yelling, screaming, and cursing. They did not seem to mind that there were other people on the bus. They didn't seem to mind that their four-letter words were crossing the ears of children and the elderly. It didn't take me long to realize that they were not only yelling, they were arguing. The bus driver got on the intercom and asked them to stop fighting, and to sit down. They did not heed his instructions. Moments later, a large group of the teenagers rushed to the front of the bus. It turns out that one of the girls involved in the argument had begun spraying pepper spray in our objectors' faces. It only took a few seconds for the pepper spray to fill the bus and send all of its riders off of it in fits of coughing, gagging, and choking.

Minutes later, the cops had the bus surrounded as if someone had called in a bomb threat. The perpetrators of the crime had already fled the scene, and the rest of us were sent to a bus stop down the street to wait another 15 minutes for a bus that is supposed to arrive ever 5-10 minutes. As I was standing on the bus stop, I felt tears well up in my eyes. But not from the stinging of the pepper spray. I wanted to cry because I simply could not understand why Black people must act this way with each other. Short of someone killing your mama, what could someone possibly have done to you to make you act this way?

Finally, today, as I was sitting at my aunt's house, we began to talk about the death of the mother of one of my second cousins (the mother of her son's eldest child). This young lady started having children at the age of 15, had 5 more children within a very short time-span and was also a heavy drug user. My understanding of the situation surrounding her death was that she was in the hospital giving birth to her seventh child (who passed away days after his/her birth), and had gotten sick and died. I was wrong.

According to my aunt, this young lady's "friends," came into the hospital and poisoned her. This was found out during the autopsy. Their reason for killing her? They wanted custody of her children so that they might collect Social Security and welfare checks for them. No doubt that their ultimate goal was to purchase drugs with the money they received on these children's behalf.

Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.

How did we, as a people, get so far away from God? (And if you aren't a Christian or don't believe in God, I ask, how did we, as a people, get so far away from the values we once held dear?)

I once asked if integration was the key to our undoing. Was it that we began to appropriate the sick values of our oppressors? Was it that the "American Dream" became so important that we were willing to pay whatever price for it?

Those who responded said that it was a mixture of integration and the crack epidemic. I think it was both of these things plus the whole generation of wonderful Black men that we lost in the Vietnam War. (Those who did not die in the war came back psychologically scarred, and those who ran from the draft probably wasn't about much in the first place. Please, everybody ain't no conscientious objector.)

It seems that Black America is living in a state of confusion. We don't know where we're from, who we are, or where we're going. We don't know what's important, what's miniscule, or what our priorities should be. We don't know how to save each other, our culture, or ourselves. It seems that we've totally forgotten who we are in a very short span of time. Our feet have strayed and we've become sloppy drunk with the wine of the world. We are no longer true to him, each other, or our native Land. And I mean, "we." I know that not all of us have fallen into this trap, but if one of us has, all of us have.

How can I go on, fighting against white folks who want to keep us down, when so many my own are doing a better job than white folks could've ever done? How is it that I, a Black woman born and bred on the Southside of Chicago, would rather be late to an appointment than get on the bus with Black teenagers? How is it that I can even dream about moving back home to the Continent to help those there when so many of my people need help here? But how can I help those in need when they don't want my help? How can I help them when I am too damn afraid to even go near some of my own people half of the time? And why must it be that my fear stems from the fact that I know many of them don't see me as their sista, but as a potential enemy?

How do we get back home? How do we sober up and return to the place where we met Thee? How do we meet each other once again?