Common Good Collective

Reader, Sabbath: Time for the Unexpected, Structure Of Belonging, The Abundant Community Permalink

Rest as Reparations by Sandra E. Garcia

On Sunday, close to 1,000 people gathered in Brooklyn at Herbert Von King Park to collectively meditate. The last moments were dedicated to remembering the excruciating length of time that George Floyd, whose killing set off a global wave of protest, was pushed to the ground, a police officer pressing his knee into his neck.

Today, the simple act of taking a deep breath feels like self-care.

The hardships and inconceivable loss that have occurred since 1619, when the first enslaved people were brought to America, including Jim Crow, mass incarceration and police brutality, have caused incalculable trauma to black people.

Direct experiences of trauma can result in depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, body tension and chronic fatigue, according to Dr. Andrea Roberts, a senior research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who studies the health effects of trauma.

“Physically it manifests itself as increased hormone reactions to stimulate bodies becoming frozen,” said Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, the author of “The Body Keeps The Score.” “Life expectancy is shorter and immune systems get altered by trauma.”

But while research around an individual’s trauma is more established, the research on “intergenerational trauma” — trauma passed on through the generations — and its impact, is still emerging.

The Spiritual Power Of Birdwatching

When the world is going through enormous changes, birds offer some Americans a sense of normalcy and comfort.

As people stay home during the pandemic, the decrease in traffic and noise pollution means we can now hear birds more clearly — and they’ve gotten bolder about landing on our porches and window sills.

Signups for bird-identification apps like Merlin by Cornell Lab have doubled since around this time last year.

But some have found solace in these feathered friends. Birds are not just beautiful creatures that are fun to spot — they can also hold spiritual resonance as symbols of hope and freedom for some marginalized groups.

J. Drew Lanham, birdwatcher and professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University, and Mike Webster, bird song expert and professor in Cornell University’s department of neurobiology and behavior talked with us about the power and pleasure of birdwatching .

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Possibly: Freedom for A New Story, Reader, Structure Of Belonging, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Frederick Douglass from his 1852 speech "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro"

While neck-deep in a global pandemic and worldwide protests for Black lives, Americans prepare to recognize 244 years since the colonies created their Declaration of Independence. While we, as Frederick Douglass said in his speech “The Meaning of July Fourth to the Negro”, honor the founders of this country, “for the good they did, and the principles they contended for,” we also must confess that many Americans were willfully left out of it’s proclamations. Douglass asked his audience at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall this searing set of questions regarding the purpose of his invitation to speak on that day:

“What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?”

As the streets of our nation continue to swell with protestors demanding that their lives matter as much as their white counterparts — and that policies in the public and private sector codify this reality — may those of us that believe in the power of the communal sense of belonging consider what The Fourth of July means to our neighbors. What does Independence Day mean to the parolee? What does Independence Day mean to those who are houseless or fearing eviction? What does Independence Day mean to the immigrant day laborer? Read more

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Eliminating economic isolation, Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Reader, The Abundant Community Permalink

Reclaiming Power Through Collective Ownership

The following article by Audrea Lim for Harper’s Magazine is about a Black farmers’ collective called New Communities, Inc. NCI was started in 1969 by leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in southwest Georgia to help secure economic independence for African American families. In 2016, producer Helen S. Cohen and director Mark Lipman created the documentary film “Arc of Justice: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of a Beloved Community” that brings the story of NCI to life on the screen.

Decton Hylton guided his tractor through a grove of pecan trees whose canopy of leaves filtered the sun. As we drove across the 1,638-acre farm near Albany, Georgia, on a scorching day last October, Hylton told me about the nut’s history in the South. In the nineteenth century, he said, an enslaved man known only as Antoine, who worked as a gardener on a Louisiana plantation, was one of the first people to experiment with grafting pecan trees. He was largely responsible for turning the nut into a commercial crop, and the variety he developed is called Centennial. “It’s like an heirloom variety of pecan,” Hylton said. “It’s one of the best.”

Back in Antoine’s day, black farmworkers would have climbed the trees and shaken the branches by hand, flinging the nuts to the ground. Now, Hylton showed me, a machine with rubber-lined arms embraces and shakes the trunks. He imitated how it works, stretching out his arms and convulsing with a smirk on his face. Once the pecans fall to the ground, he said, another mammoth machine vacuums them up.

Hylton hoisted himself back onto his tractor, and we drove beyond the orchard’s shade, past open fields of grass and rows of satsuma orange trees. Hylton, a fifty-nine-year-old Jamaican with dreadlocks and a rolling accent, belongs to a community organization that supports small black-owned farms like this one. Once part of the estate of General Hartwell Hill Tarver, one of Georgia’s wealthiest slave owners, the land was sold in 1912 to the farmers who planted the pecan grove. These days it belongs to New Communities, a black farming cooperative founded in the Sixties that is widely considered to be the country’s first community land trust. Read more

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Imagination: The Prophetic Act of Living an Alternative Narrative, Poetry for Building Community, Reader, The Abundant Community Permalink

God Speed The Year of Jubilee by William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrison (December 10, 1805 – May 24, 1879), who signed and printed his name Wm. Lloyd Garrison, was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely-read anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which he founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by Constitutional amendment in 1865. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and promoted immediate, as opposed to gradual, emancipation of slaves in the United States.

God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore. Read more

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