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Featured Curator: Courtney Napier

Courtney Napier is a writer, journalist, gatherer, and liberation coach from Raleigh, North Carolina. She has written for national outlets like NewsOne and The Appeal, as well as regional and local publications such as Scalawag Magazine, WALTER Magazine, The Carolinian, and INDY Week. She is also the founder of Black Oak Society, a collective of Black creatives in the greater Raleigh area. Their flagship publication, BOS Magazine, is a literary magazine focused on giving Black Raleigh her flowers now. Finally, Courtney has coached individuals and organizations as they seek to lead and live in a way that undermines white supremacy and honors the humanity of all people. She loves to love her spouse, David, of ten years, and her two little humans who are endless hilarious meme reels.

Treva Lindsay and Melissa Harris-Perry on misogynoir, poverty, and violence
By Courtney Napier

On a recent girls’ trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, my friends and I made the visual arts exhibit our final stop. I glimpsed the work of Bisa Butler out of the corner of my eye and ran towards it, giddy with admiration. Before me was Butler’s quilted portrait of Harriet Tubman, with her black velveteen hair and full skirt adorned with purple and yellow flora—an icon of liberation, wrested by the hands of Black women.

Just over my shoulder, the presence of a vacuous black space interrupted the triumphant moment. I slowly turned until I was face-to-face with Amy Sherald’s arresting portrait of Breonna Taylor, hanging in solitude in a blackened enclave. The people who stood in line waiting to both admire its beauty and pay their respects could not hold back their cries. In front of me, a Black teenage girl buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. My friend Gloria did the same in mine while she wept.

The visceral sense of anger and hopelessness that we experienced in the presence of Breonna Taylor’s portrait captured some of the same emotions that propelled Dr. Treva B. Lindsay to write her latest book, America Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice. 

On April 22, media host and scholar Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry joined Dr. Lindsay at Rofhiwa Book Café, a Black owned bookstore, for the Durham launch of America Goddam. There the two discussed Lindsay’s new book and the ways that harm—economic, medical, police, and intimate partner violence—shows up in the lives of Black women.

“I want Black girls and gender-expansive people to curl up with my book and feel like, ‘Wow, she sees these issues that I’ve experienced, that friends have experienced. I’m not alone.'”

Dr. Lindsay has experienced these kinds of violence first hand. Her book names the same truth that the murder of Breonna Taylor and the layers of political violence that followed, revealed to the rest of the world. It’s a truth that Black women have known our entire lives: America doesn’t give a damn about us. The fact that we only learned about Taylor’s killing in the wake of the murder of George Floyd—which occurred three months later—along with the fact that none of Taylors’ killers were sentenced for her death, proves that Black women have never been regarded as full humans, let alone full American citizens.

What makes Lindsay’s book unique from others that deal with the violence against women is its expansive definition of the word “violence” itself. Each chapter of America Goddam addresses a distinct, death-dealing system that causes harm to Black women and gender expressive people.

Lindsay wrote of her book, “I bear witness and with-ness to what’s on these pages.” America Goddam is a mandate from her ancestors to pass down not just her intellectual knowledge of how our country became such a violent place, but her hard-won wisdom on how to survive it.

Lindsay’s own journey began in Washington D.C. “I grew up in Chocolate City when it was still Chocolate City,” she said with a wry chuckle. Her parents, both North Carolina-bred Fayetteville State University graduates, instilled in her both a love for the South and a love for Black people.

Too often, Americans from the North and the West love scapegoating the South as the nation’s Superpredator. America Goddam examines the murders of Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor, two women slain in Southern states. The last chapter of her book, however, is written as a letter addressed to Ma’Khia Bryant, the teenage girl murdered by the police in Columbus, Ohio, where Dr. Treva Lindsay lives and teaches as Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University.

“I always wince when I hear people over-determine that the South is uniquely violent in the context of America,” she explained. “As though once you move from there, somehow the anti-Blackness, the patriarchy and all of that just just disappears and that it’s not entrenched in these other regions across the nation. I’m very intentional in talking about violence that’s happening all over America to really make it America Goddam.”

She also acknowledges that certain cases of violence that stood out to her needed to be examined and written about specifically in their Southern context, which made her conversation with Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry at Rofhiwa all the more significant.

“Each region—and sometimes regions within regions—have their own distinct histories and have their own resistance histories that I think are super important to put [certain cases] into context.” But while the South has a uniquely oppressive history, it also carries an amazing organizing history, rich with incredible traditions of Black radical resistance and reverberated throughout the country.

Lindsay shared the story of Francis Thompson, a trans woman who, in 1866, was one of the first people to testify before Congress about being sexually violated. “It’s a Black woman from the South who is speaking in front of Congress—one hundred plus years before Anita Hill, and later Christine Blasey Ford—about sexual violence. The South to me means so much in terms of the documenting of the violence, and the documenting of the incredible resistance.”

“We see such an acute attack on Black communities, Black kinship networks, Black families, and then at the core of that Black women and girls who feel that disparate impact of this targeted divestment from the public good.”

Lindsay herself is another living example Southern femme resistance, and looms large in the field of Black feminism as a historian and prolific writer. She has also been awarded an array of awards, fellowships, and grants for her work, including the ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellowship, The Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University, and The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship—and has made a significant impact on her community outside of academia, founding the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative and co-founding the Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House, both in Ohio.

Appearing on my computer screen with a crown of locs down past her shoulders and a stunning dress in a springtime green, her smile accented a soft yet focused countenance. Her presence was powerful, like her words that followed. The depth of her love for Black women and gender expansive people was effervescent.

“This book is for Black girls and Black women,” Lindsay replied with pride when asked about her intended audience of readers. “I wanted them to know that there are those of us who deeply care about our stories, who deeply care about the lives we live before this moment of harm, that deeply care about highlighting and amplifying the work of those who are working to end violence against Black women and girls.”

She has made herself accountable to Black women and girls concerning the impact of America Goddam, too. “If other people find it and can take something away from it, that’s awesome,” Lindsay explained. “But I want Black girls and gender-expansive people to curl up with my book and feel like, ‘Wow, she sees these issues that I’ve experienced, that friends have experienced. I’m not alone.'”

One chapter that especially struck me is entitled “Unlivable: The Deadly Consequences of Poverty.” I had recently been introduced to the term “the feminization of poverty” in my Introduction to Sociology class, and it resonated deeply as memories of various family members, nightly news clips, and my own past experiences of trading WIC vouchers for milk and eggs swirled together in my mind. It also reminded me of one of a famous quotation by one of America’s unsung orators and activists, Coretta Scott King:

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” 

Lindsay was unsatisfied with the treatment of poverty in mainstream conversations about violence against Black women as incidental instead of a system of violence in its own right. “We have millions of Black women and girls who are barely surviving, without resources, but overworked, underpaid, and hyper exploited,” she said.

It is common to hear a poor Black woman or gender-expansive person describe their lifestyle as “making a way out of no way.” Lindsay points out that this effort of navigating the impossible nature of poverty with a disappearing social safety net is just that: Impossible. “We see such an acute attack on Black communities, Black kinship networks, Black families, and then at the core of that Black women and girls who feel that disparate impact of this targeted divestment from the public good.” Here, she is referring to the “welfare queen” and “crack baby” tropes that were created to dehumanize and demonize Black women and girls and turn white voters against everything from public housing, to unemployment insurance, to pell grants.

She also reminds the women, girls, and gender-expansive people of color that we gave birth to the wealth this country works so hard to keep from us. The impact of this lack of access to wealth, plus the hyper-exploitation of our bodies for productive and reproductive labor, results in multiple layers of violence including kidnapping and trafficking, workplace injuries and abuse, mental health decline, and “weathering,” or physiological decline due to chronic racism-induced stress—which, studies have shown, are linked to the most common killers of Black women: heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

In our conversation, Lindsay pointed to the internalization of these tropes as evidence of capitalist violence. “Why have we constructed an imagination in which we maligned welfare, so much to the point that we then do the work to dissociate from it?” she asked, rhetorically. “The impulse to dispute the stereotype of [the welfare queen] as a Black woman still leaves intact the lie that receiving welfare is a negative or something to be maligned for, instead of a part of the robust safety net of a nation that proclaims to care.”

Much in the manner that James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens inspired a generation of Black people to not settle for survival, America Goddam grasped the torch and carried it passionately into the 21st century.

In her endorsement, journalist and author Melissa Harris-Perry says America Goddam is “not a memoir, but it’s personal. This is not journalism, but it reports. It is not an easy book, but it’s necessary. And in the end, Lindsey challenges you to choose hope.”

Dr. Lindsay’s book is, indeed, a work that defies category. It is a tapestry of narratives from the past and the present, from the personal to the global, and from the familial to the political. These narratives tear off the cape of invincibility forced upon Black women in an anti-Black world and instead wrap us in quilts that gather us up in a future safety.

This article was originally published by Scalawag Magazine.

“I Have a Dream”
By Herbie Hancock

‘I feel what women feel’
By Southern Exposure

Donna Bazemore, a former poultry slaughterhouse worker and an organizer with the Center for Women’s Economic Alternatives in North Carolina, talks on the phone in the offices of the CWEA. (Photo from the Southern Exposure archives)

 In meetings, Donna Bazemore is usually silent — until someone asks her to explain what life is like for a worker in a poultry processing plant. Softly, steadily, and with growing intensity, she tells why people take the jobs, what happens to them inside, and what they can do to get out.

Bazemore should know. She is the first person ever to win a workers’ compensation claim against Perdue for carpal tunnel syndrome, the crippling hand disease. She got a little over $1200 — not much for a single mother of three children. But in the process, she learned a lot about herself, about fear and freedom, stress and self-esteem, and “serving the cause of low-income women.”

Donna Bazemore is now an organizer with the Center for Women’s Economic Alternatives, based in Ahoskie, North Carolina, not far from her home where this interview was conducted.

* * *

My mother was real strong, and she projected all that on us. She didn’t have a lot, and her self-esteem sometimes was really lousy. And it still is. She believes you have to work hard to survive; she expects it to be bad. She will take whatever the system dishes out and say, “Well, it was meant to be this way.”

I think I was the black sheep of the family. I was the one that got into mischief. I was loud. And I always got out of the hard work. My grandparents farmed, and tobacco used to break my skin out.

My uncles and grandparents had big farms in Bertie County, lots of land, tobacco, peanuts, corn. Later on, they got into soybeans. My grandfather died, and my uncle took over the farm. But like many Black farmers there, they had to stop because it was costing them more than they were actually bringing in.

My uncle is now working at a poultry plant. The farm went under, and now he’s on the saw, cutting chicken breasts. He was the first one I ever heard use the phrase “like a closed-in field” to describe the plant. I call it “a closed-in slave camp.”

Once you walk in Perdue, once you go through the door, everything changes. Your whole attitude. When you come out, you’re like two separate people. It has to do with the stress and pressure they put you under. The treatment. People like my mother have been working in the plant for 15, 20 years. And they bring in kids fresh out of college or high school, white kids, and they make these young white men the foremen who tell her what to do. And here she’s been in that plant, and knows everything a chicken ever had to offer you.

I didn’t see making a career out of Perdue. When I was in high school, I said, “As soon as I get out, I’m going into the Army.” And I’m going to do this, this, and this. I had all these dreams. Then I had this baby when I’m 17.

Hard balls was coming at me, one obstacle after another — things I brought upon myself by not being obedient. You feel trapped into doing what you think is best. So since I had this baby, I thought I should marry her father. And that was like jumping out of the pot into the fire.

I left my mom’s house and went to my husband’s house, and I had not yet found my identity. And I also had this total attitude that I didn’t grow up with my father, so I’m going to make damn sure that my daughter grows up in a house with her father so she can have all the things that I never, never had.

So I stayed in an abusive relationship for a lot of years, a lot of years. Mental and physical and verbal. He would come home and take out his anger on me. I always felt it was something I had done, that I was doing.

Finally, I asked myself, “Did God really put me here to be miserable?” When I was going through all this, I had no self esteem, no sense of being motivated to do anything. I was like his possession. So I sat down one day and wrote out on a paper, “How Do I Build My Self Esteem?” It was like a memo to myself. I got the idea from watching a motivator on TV.

You have to constantly tell yourself, “You are somebody.” Look in the mirror and say something positive about yourself. I’d look and say, “Gee, you got a big nose, but it’s cute!” And I began to make sure that I’d say something positive to myself and my daughters, every day, two or three times a day. I also read a lot of articles in Essence and Ebony about women who have done this or that, and it’s very motivating to me.

When I got out of that marriage, I thought I could do anything. Because it took a lot for me to leave. My mom thought I should stick it out with him. I think she was afraid I couldn’t raise the kids on my own. And neither did I, so she wasn’t far off. But she told me it was totally up to me. She taught us, “If you make a mistake and fall on your face, I’ll be there to assist you to get up, but I will not get you up.” And that makes sense to me.

My mom also left it up to me if I wanted to work at Perdue, but she never wanted me to work there to begin with.

She’s really glad that I came out.

* * *

I went to Perdue to buy a dress. I was still married then, in ’83, and I went to get one paycheck to buy this dress. My daughter had a play she was in, and I needed a new dress to go see her. After that paycheck came in, I said, “Wow, I got money! This could be real useful.” And so I stayed on. And then I just got settled back into working.
I liked the money, but I hated the job. My first job was at the rehanging table. The chickens fell on the table and I said, “OH MY GOD!” I could not believe all those chickens! My eyes went together. I got dizzy. And I got sick. I threw up.

The man told me, you pick up the chickens at the back and flip them over so the feet slap against the shackles and they catch. You use both hands, just hang them on the line. Well, the blood was gushing all over my face as I hung them up, and I was trying to wipe it off. He says, “We don’t have time to be cute, Miss Bazemore.” And I was spitting all over the table. Finally, he says, “I don’t think this job is for you.” And I said, “You got that right.”

But I stayed on that job for about six weeks. Both hands are just going constantly — it’s a rhythm you get into — 72 birds a minute. You can actually do it with your eyes closed after a couple of weeks. I actually would sleep doing it, it’s so boring and so hot. You’re right after scalding, and all that heat is coming at you. It’s at least 95 to 100 degrees.

I did everything on the eviscerating line. I began to open chickens. I had to stick my finger in that chicken butt hole and cut down the sides. And I was cutting my fingers because you have to work so fast. I got this scar from opening. And this one from cutting hearts and livers.

I kept complaining and they moved me to trimming. I did that for about a year. And I really liked that. I worked with a good inspector, a young white guy named Cliff. He’d point to the bad part of the bird, and my job was to cut it off. Tumors, bruises, skin diseases, sometimes the chicken head would still be on. He was sympathetic and basically helped me do my work.

I was depressed. I had tried to go to college at nights. But that was just too much on me, so I had to quit. I wanted to go back, so I asked personnel if I could work nights so I could go to college during the day. When I transferred to nights, my grandmother kept my baby daughter and my oldest was in school. And my mother kept them at night.
I went to school from 8 to 12 noon, some days ’til 2. And I worked nights from 10 ’til 6:30 or 7 the next morning. I’d come home, shower, and go to school. Some days, I couldn’t even shower. I had to be in school at eight o’clock. Things were tight here, with so little money, and I had not yet learned to budget. So I began to go back out to Perdue at one o’clock and work ’til 4 or 5. And then I would come back home, and go to sleep, get back up at 9, and go back to the plant.

I did that a couple of months. In the day, I was working with Cliff. At night, the inspector’s name was Harold. This was during the time when I was having serious problems with my hands. So I couldn’t keep up, and that really aggravated this man — to keep stopping the line for me. I couldn’t trim the birds fast enough, and I would have to run around the line to get them. And when he would say something to me, I would say something back.

Every time I’d say, “My hand hurts,” they’d give me three or four pills. I knew what an Advil was. But these other ones had no name on them. And it got to the point that I was happy to go to the nurse’s station to get piped up so I could do this work and totally disregard the pain. I didn’t know what I was taking.

I couldn’t squeeze my hand. I couldn’t zip up my pants. And this was before the disease had really affected me. I couldn’t work the lock on this screen door, using my two fingers. I felt like cutting through chicken bone should have made me stronger, so why am I having problems zipping up my pants?

I went to the doctor’s office and I started to read up on carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis. I learned you could actually lose the use of your hand. And if I lost the use of my hand, I’d be left to sit around waiting for a welfare check. I couldn’t see that. And I can’t raise my kids on that kind of money. I just kept thinking of that and focusing on what I had to do. I had to raise hell about my hands. I had to overtalk management, because they would try to talk you into thinking that you don’t even hurt, that you’re just imagining.

It got worse when I went to night shift. I couldn’t open my car door or turn on the ignition with my right hand. Sometimes it was so bad, I would get up, shower, and get out of here and my hands would still be asleep. I’d hold this right hand up on the steering wheel and shift the gears with my left hand.

When I got to work, I’d get my hand bandaged. You almost had to stand in line and wait to get into the nurse’s station to wrap your hands with Ace bandages. Some women would take big bundles home and wrap their hands on the way to work. Some would buy them from stores. There are very, very few people that I know on the eviscerating line that don’t have a problem with their hands.

The nurse at this time was a man. And he gave me a hard time. And I gave it right back. He told me one night, “Why don’t you just quit?” And I said, “Why don’t you just marry me and take care of me.” He said, “You think you’re so smart and cute.” And I said, “Man, you don’t know horseshit about me.”

Well, he reported that to personnel. He said I was rude and obnoxious. And they called me into Bill Copeland’s office, plant manager, and they had three or four plant supervisors there. And they told me what they were going to do, and what I had to do. It was like they thought they were the sperm that I came from. They actually feel like they own you. It just made me remember, I’m living in the days of slavery all over again. They just took me out of the field and put me in a building.

* * *

The next morning, Cindy Arnold and Beulah Sharpe came knocking at my door. I saw this white woman and Black woman, and I thought they’re selling insurance. I didn’t want to listen to them, but I wasn’t rude so I invited them in. Cindy told me about the Center for Women’s Economic Alternatives, and talked about my rights. They had heard about what I said to the nurse — it got around real fast, everybody in the plant knew about it!

Cindy said that I had the right to file for workers’ compensation and the right to go to my family doctor. So I went back to Perdue and I said, “I need a workers’ compensation claim to take to my doctor.” Bill Copeland said, “We have to make an appointment for the doctor. You don’t need to do anything but get your body over there.” I said, “Wow, this white woman must know some stuff.” He had totally changed. Later that night — at 3 a.m. — he told me I had an appointment to see a doctor in Greenville the next day. So I knew things had changed.

I went to that doctor, he checked my hands, and I went back two days later for nerve tests. He diagnosed me with carpal tunnel syndrome. He put a splint on my hand and told me to wear it for six weeks and it should strengthen my hand. I was still working on the line and the metal in the splint kept pinching my hand. Bill Copeland wouldn’t listen to me, so I went back to the doctor. He wrote a letter saying I should be put on light duty. I was put on the salvage department, and I worked there until it was time to report back to the doctor.

He referred me to another doctor, in Little Washington, and he told me I needed surgery on my hand. I thought it would help but it actually worsened. Now I suffer from a different set of problems — severe muscle cramps, bad throbbing pain in the muscle by my thumb, numbness in my fingers, pain shooting up my arm.

When I went back for my last visit, the doctor said, “You have equal strength in both hands.” I said, “But I had more strength in my right hand.” He says, “They told me you were a troublemaker.” I said, “Doctor, I can’t order parts from Sears. All of these parts came with my body, and they’re not replaceable.” He told me the strength would eventually come back even though he didn’t do any nerve tests for the deterioration or anything. He told me I was able to work.

I said he was crazy. I never went back to work after that. I knew that if I had gone back, something would have happened and I would have lost my self control and I would have hurt someone. Because I totally felt that Perdue hurt me intentionally. I felt that there was something that could have been done. The abuse that people at Perdue showed me when I went to them with my problem was unbelievable. And their definition of “light duty” was just stupid. I just think they are unsympathetic people that want to be the slave drivers. They like to feel like “this is my block of niggers and I’m going to whip them into line.” Even when Black men come into what little control or power they have at Perdue, they become oppressive. They get the whipping style, too. And I understand that. They want to keep those positions because it makes their life a little easier. And that’s bad.

Several times I stood on the line and said, “If this man says one more damn thing to me, I’m going to stick this knife in him.” That’s how bad it was. You actually felt like killing someone. Women shouldn’t have to work under those conditions, regardless of where it is.

* * *

I really want to be able to do something for Black women. To help them share their stories so they don’t have to feel all alone, all pressed and stressed out. Let them see that there are other women out here who got beat up, who got put out of their house, who were abused at work. Let them know that there’s someone out here that cares, that will offer support.

I feel what women feel. I know how hard it was — and still is — trying to overcome obstacles that seem to just block your whole path, your whole view. You feel so limited, so afraid.

There is so much fear at Perdue. We were passing out leaflets for the hand clinic, and I heard women say, “Aren’t you scared that the Klan is going to bomb your house.” Or, “Would you tell my story, but not use my name?” They don’t want to lose that job. Or face harassment from Perdue.

One way to deal with that fear is to share stories, and know that it’s okay to be afraid, frightened. It was real intimidating to go to a bunch of white men and say, “I’ve got this problem and your job caused it.” I was scared half to death to walk into this white man’s office that has what I consider to be the keys to Heaven and Hell in his hands.

I go back, because I was raised in the church, to the 23rd Psalm: “Yea though I walk through the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” I’ve tried to keep that in focus, that the Lord will be there to provide. I’ve wanted things I couldn’t get, but I’ve never been hungry.

Even if you don’t have a religious view, you can keep a positive dream in view. That’s how books I would read about other women’s stories would really motivate me. Like Sojourner Truth, her life and her sayings. And Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream.” That just stuck in my mind. I have a dream, and now I have to set my goals and objective. I don’t want to settle for what I have caused my life to deal to me. I don’t want to wallow in self-pity. I want to get up and get out and do something, and become this important member of society.

I can’t honestly say that I’m ready to die for the cause of educating and organizing Perdue workers. But I think I am willing to die for the cause of feeling free and having the sense of helping women find freedom. If I can educate this woman about carpal tunnel syndrome and workers’ compensation, and even if she goes back into the plant, at least she knows. She’s free from not knowing; that helps her be free.

I can’t just tell a woman to step out like I did. I can show her the options and get the facts and figures together. I’ll try to steer her in the right direction, but I won’t do all the work for her. She has to take the steps for herself.

That’s one thing the Center imposed on me. “You take on this leadership position. You do this, this and this for yourself.” So I was really educated about the power that anybody has, even low-income women. I found out that if you can talk, you have a lot of power. You can get your message across, open the lines of communication and use them for yourself. I can’t impose my values on someone, but I do want to help people before they get to the breaking point.

This article is republished as part of Poultry and Pandemic: Meat Industry Workers and COVID-19, a months-long investigative series about the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on Southern meat industry workers. It is published in conjunction with a reported essay by Olivia Paschal on the poultry industry since 1989, and a new interview with organizer Magaly Licolli of the Arkansas workers’ justice group Venceremos.

Our Trespasses 
By Greg Jarrell

On a crisp November morning in the year 1960, Charlotte Redevelopment Authority Director Vernon Sawyer walked up the steps into Friendship Baptist Church. He was bringing a message to Friendship this morning, though he had not alerted them to his visit prior to his arrival. A deacon in black suit, crisp white shirt, and black tie greeted him at the door, transforming his surprise at seeing a white man coming to church at Friendship into a look of welcome. Sawyer found the pastor and asked for permission to occupy the pulpit for a special announcement.

Sawyer was not bringing good news. Friendship, one of Charlotte’s most prominent Black churches, was going to be torn down as part of an Urban Renewal project. That federal program was going to pay for the city’s efforts to raze 238 acres of the historic Brooklyn neighborhood, home to more than 1,000 families, hundreds of businesses, a dozen churches, and more memories and sacred moments that could be counted.

Sawyer broke the news, and then tried to frame the news in terms that sounded like a special mission: “The time is getting late to make plans to rebuild your church,” but, “I’d like to point out one thing. Somewhere in the span of endless time, it was you who were chosen to lead in solving this problem in this crucial hour…. The challenge is before you.”[1]

Only a few years later, and only a few blocks down the street, the all-White First Baptist Church of Charlotte was at the end of years of conflict over moving from their prominent, but small, site on Charlotte’s Main Street. The congregation had nearly fled for the suburbs a few years earlier, but in a contentious meeting that nearly split the church, they decided to remain downtown. By 1965, they had located the site they wanted – nine acres in the newly cleared Urban Renewal area, just a block over from where Friendship Baptist had intended to stay, prior to Vernon Sawyer’s visit. The city was auctioning off the land following the eviction and displacement of every family and institution that had made its home there, all of them Black.

In a united and happy meeting, First Baptist voted to approve their move into the Urban Renewal area. Following the vote, they closed their business agenda by singing a hymn: “Lead on, O King eternal, the day of march has come…. the crown awaits the conquest; lead on, O God of might.”[2]

Interestingly, though, the primary arguments for First Baptist moving within downtown, and not out to the suburbs like many of their peers, were grounded in the language of mission. The church belongs downtown, one key leader argued, among “drunks, unclean people, people without the right clothes.”[3] That language chafes, but I get the impulse – as a member of a Catholic Worker-adjacent community, I’ve heard myself say similar things. I’ve talked extensively about God’s preferential option for the poor, about the importance of living together in solidarity with the oppressed, about how the Church is found among those who strive for liberation from the margins of the Empire. The language and the ideas are a bit different, but I’m still unsettled as to how close I am to the same legacy. Hidden just below the surface of the missionary impulse is the politics of conquest. I inherited that legacy.

In our intentional community, sixty years later and only three miles away from those historic Charlotte institutions, we’ve tried to reckon with the legacy of the missionary impulse. Then, displacement of Black people came in the form of Urban Renewal; now it is happening through gentrification. Our community has made the fight against gentrification our central focus. It hasn’t worked. The trickle of displacement has become a gaping wound. There are no solutions in sight.

We’re left to wonder whether two decades of our efforts have only been cosmetic, an attempt to spare ourselves the x-ray image that might show us how little deep the cancer of White supremacy runs in us. Have our attempts at solidarity merely obscured in our own eyes the history of missionary conquest that courses through our veins?

We’ve struggled against it, done our best to justify ourselves and our presence, but we cannot avoid it: White supremacy comes attached to White people. My presence on sidewalks and porches is a sign of safety to the newest batch of conquerors as they ride through, looking for real estate deals. It is also a signifier of the coming damage to my Black neighbors, as yet another generation faces displacement from places they called ‘home.’ I’ve worked so hard against those impacts. I’ve tried not to be White. But nobody – my old neighbors, my new neighbors, “the market” – is fooled. White supremacy will use every one of us to grab title to every square inch of land on God’s good earth, our best efforts and intentions be damned. None of us racialized as White can be pure or exceptional. There is no escaping Whiteness, only abolishing it.

I think a lot about Vernon Sawyer’s cruel speech to Friendship Baptist now. Vicious politics still get framed as benevolent mission. The wrong pulpits get seized and the bulldozers run in the wrong places. A great reversal is upon us: the mission field of our moment is not the disinvested neighborhood, but the barren souls and frozen pews of those of us who think we are White.

The challenge is before all of us who have been taught we are White to get at the foundations, down deep into the stolen soil we inhabit.

[1] Charlotte Observer, 7 November 1960.
[2] Cited in FBC’s newsletter, The Church Voice, 25 Feb 1965.
[3] Charlotte Observer, 28 Oct 1963.

This essay was originally published by Geez Magazine.

Backwards
By Warsan Shire

The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room.
He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life;
that’s how we bring Dad back.
I can make the blood run back up my nose, ants rushing into a hole.
We grow into smaller bodies, my breasts disappear,
your cheeks soften, teeth sink back into gums.
I can make us loved, just say the word.
Give them stumps for hands if even once they touched us without consent,
I can write the poem and make it disappear.
Step-Dad spits liquor back into glass,
Mum’s body rolls back up the stairs, the bone pops back into place,
maybe she keeps the baby.
Maybe we’re okay kid?
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love,
you won’t be able to see beyond it.

You won’t be able to see beyond it,
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love.
Maybe we’re okay kid,
maybe she keeps the baby.
Mum’s body rolls back up the stairs, the bone pops back into place,
Step-Dad spits liquor back into glass.
I can write the poem and make it disappear,
give them stumps for hands if even once they touched us without consent,
I can make us loved, just say the word.
Your cheeks soften, teeth sink back into gums
we grow into smaller bodies, my breasts disappear.
I can make the blood run back up my nose, ants rushing into a hole,
that’s how we bring Dad back.
He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life.
The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room.

Warsan Shire, “Backwards.” Copyright © 2014 by Warsan Shire.

“The V-Word”
By Courtney Napier

I like to think of myself as a gentle person. I get it from my mother. She is one of the sweetest, gentlest people I know. I remember having friends over as a teenager and they would say, “Your mom is so zen!”

What many don’t know is that, while gentleness for majoritized Americans — white people — is a cultural ideal, for Black women like my mother and I, it is also a technique for our survival. Earning the moniker of “angry Black woman” can be a difficult and oppressive label. The power elite in American (and Western) society does not account for the range of emotion and expression that white men and women receive. In fact, the spectrum is such that white men have incredible latitude for emotionality and reactivity to life’s highs and lows, as we have seen in historic moments from the Boston Tea Party to Disco Demolition Night to the UNC Tarheels defeating the Duke Blue Devils in their NCAA Basketball Final Four matchup this weekend. On the other hand, women and minorities have little room to respond to life’s most powerful moments with true human authenticity, however fair or flawed, without drastic repercussions.

This societal pressure cooker does two things. The first is that it sends those ripples of traumatic emotionality down our societal hierarchy. Minoritized men and masculine-presenting people take out their frustrations on each other, minoritized women, children, and so forth. Secondly, the Power Elite and their allies cannot fully flourish because they have preoccupied themselves with policing the behavior of others and protecting their privilege instead of embracing the human struggle in its proper, collectivist reality.

This leads me to the “V-Word”: violence.

A couple years ago, I was in an impromptu discussion about the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. I was the only Black woman in the conversation, and my comments included the words “violence” and “justified” in the same sentence. I wasn’t able to finish my point — which was that while there was very little retaliatory violence during the protests even in the midst of the state sanctioned violence inflicted by the police — before the other individuals in the discussion were immediately up in arms. The phrases “violence is never the answer,” and “violence is unacceptable,” and “only non-violent protest is effective. Violence ruins the important work of liberation.”

I thought of this moment when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars two weeks ago. Again, the immediate reaction by many (predominately white) celebrities and commentators was swift and intense vilification of Smith’s actions. The issue here was very similar to what I experienced, which is a very specific and intentionally narrow definition of violence. I use the word “intentionally” because there is a conscious or unconscious desire baked into white supremacy to make violence something only a small number of inferior people do, and not something that happens on a broad, systemic level. The purpose of this is to obscure the many harms that are inherent to white supremacy while spotlighting behavior of individuals deemed deviant (notice I did not say deviant behaviors, because Elites and their closest allies are often excused of such behaviors and rarely face consequences).

Coretta Scott King, a woman who faced many forms of violence against herself and her family during her life, had this to say:

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.”

Indeed, the society we at Common Good hope to contribute toward building is one with little to no harm of any kind. To get there, it’s important to not write ourselves out of the story and be generous in our definitions of harm and violence so that they can all be addressed.

In an onboarding meeting for a new Common Good team member, I shared something that I want to share with you. Our three pillars: a sense of belonging, significance of place, and eliminating economic isolation, are purposefully undefined in explicit terms because there is power building a common understanding based on the diverse perspectives of the collective. In the Beloved Community, there is no need for the idea of deviance (and, therefore, disposable individuals), nor is there a need for the binaries that create such criteria. Instead, each one does their best to both reduce harm and to speak up when harmed so that an opportunity of reparation and reconciliation is realized. When we choose to reject the urge to make a feature of our current society taboo, we can finally see it in the spectrum in which it exists and address it with collective wisdom and authentic accountability that will bring us closer to the safe, flourishing society we deserve.

Poet Warsan Shire Hopes You Can Make the Voices in Your Head Your Friends

Somali British poet Warsan Shire has had many projects, including running a popular Tumblr page and collaborating with Beyoncé. Now, she is out with a new collection of poems called Bless The Daughter Raised By A Voice In Her Head. That title is an ode to how she was raised, having to take on a lot of responsibility from a young age. But Shire told NPR’s Sarah McCammon that it’s also an ode to the children who are able to turn those voices into their friends instead of struggling with them as she has.

“There Is No Table Long Enough”
By David Whyte

One man’s unspoken inner edge of darkness
un-confronted and un-transformed
sitting far away in his own fear,
like someone looking through
the wrong end of a child’s telescope,
like someone sitting at the end
of an absurdly lengthened table:
holds his intimate circle in fear of death
and torture, threatens their families,
poisons their lives along with his enemies,
sews everyone into the straight jacket
of immobile fear, then carefully tailors
a uniform of death for every single one
of his bullied young men to wear.

May we see then, in this allegory,
as we too, in this time, sit so far away,
the simple way an individual life
no matter how imprisoned,
transformed by generosity, saves
so many lives in the future.

May we take the time, while we confront
this fear now, on the outside
with necessary and courageous physical action,
to preempt any future evil by bringing
every hidden edge into the light, by bringing
our inner troubles into the conversation,
where heads are allowed to lean close
to one another at a table shortened
to the point of mutual understanding.

There is no table long enough
to keep us from our own unspoken darkness
but, thanks be to God, and every power
beyond us, there is no table long enough
to hold the riches of darkness transformed,
to hold the wine raised and the bread
consumed, to hold every item of our shared bounty,
brought from every field of our endeavour,
in a promised future, that despite ourselves,
will always be destined to forgiveness.

This poem was originally posted by Compassionate San Antonio