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This piece was originally presented at a #BlackLivesMatter vigil at the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis.

My heart is aching for answers, for a way this makes sense, for a way to understand a 12-year old child shot, a way to understand Eric Garner, a father of six, choked to death in broad daylight with his murderers caught on camera—no medical attention, left to die in the street just like Michael Brown, who also received no medical attention. As if their lives didn’t matter, as if they were not human.

I want someone to tell me it’s going to be okay. I wanted someone to tell me there is a way through this, that there is something that will save us from this pain (a pain that will divide us more deeply if we are not careful).

I want someone to say there is a right path to justice, a safe path toward freedom, a path that doesn’t allow fear and despair to overwhelm my heart. I want the comfort of my father’s presence—even if it’s just so we can cry together. But when I face the world as it is, my Dad is still lost to cancer and these murders don’t make sense.

And I realize again that my Dad is still dead. This is something you don’t understand until you’ve lost someone—when time and time again you pick up the phone to call them and they’re still gone. Sometimes I can laugh a little, and say: Yep, I was just checking, just making sure there is still no Dad in my contacts. He’s still not there.

Yet when I lay on the ground for 4.5 minutes during a die-in, I actually heard his voice in my mind, along with my Grandpa, telling me: When people ask you what you are, you say “I am Black and I belong to the human race.” Don’t let hate take you down. I felt the presence of what I can only call my ancestors, and their voices echoed in my heart. They called to me, saying: You. It’s you, Lena. These past few nights they’ve beckoned to me in my sleep: Wake now. There is so much work to do. They whispered to me:

We love you. The world is scary, and you are strong, not because you don’t need anyone, but because you need everyone.

I need everyone.

So in this time I have seen my white friends stand up to their family members with tears in their eyes and with a strength I know that I would not have had if I needed to stand up to my own father in the same way. And I see my Black people, the very ones who love me, who raised me, who claim me with my light skin and hazel eyes as their own, and I see them carrying the sadness, the anger, the pain, and the continued denial of justice. I see my other brown-skinned folks enmeshed in their own fights for justice, uniting with us because we know our fates are tied together and we need each other.

In my heart, I know that we must find each other first, so that we may stumble upon hope together. I am not talking about a fluffy hope that feels light and squishy. I’m talking about the hope of our ancestors that has carried us here; the hope that broke the chains of slavery, made a new life possible for a people who defiantly refused to be broken; the hope that sustained them through the darkest nights, hunted by dogs like animals fleeing toward freedom. It is this very hope that we all must stand on now. This is the unrelenting hope of life’s most basic promise—the hope to stay alive.

This is the hope that carries people across artificial borders, through treacherous terrain, so that they may have a better chance. This is the hope that moves our transgender people into living the truth of their lives, even when living that truth literally puts their lives at risk. This is the very same hope that, during times past, urged our white allies to shutter safe houses and cover basement doors to protect human souls from slavery’s long tentacles. This is the hope that those who came before us lived in, because in their hearts they knew, in their souls they knew.

They knew just as we know now: we cannot let injustice stand. They knew cruelty for what it was. They looked at their own hands and hearts and said, It’s on me, I can do something. I do not doubt that every single one of them had fear in their hearts. Some cast it out with Jesus’ love, some kept it at bay through sheer determination and stubbornness, and I am sure some laughed it away. However they moved through the fear, it was always anchored in the same hope we must anchor to now. It is this hope we must grab hold of in our hearts and let spread like wildfire until it turns to unshakeable trust—in each other, in our power to work for justice. It is a hope we inherited.

Some other things we inherited from our ancestors stick to our consciousness like tar, threatening to suffocate us, but the hope we inherited is different. It can be nearly impossible to hold onto, because if you do, it will call you onto a different path. To hope for a more just world is to believe in our ability to create it. And whatever else it means, believing in our ability to create a new world means we have to tear something down. We have to tear down what isn’t working in our hearts and in the world around us. And we can only tear down and build up if we come together.

Now, I dare say that my Dad, who fought racism all his life and taught me how to see injustice for what it was, had too little hope. Yet he still worked ceaselessly against racism. Up until he was diagnosed with the cancer that took his life he fought—and at times rage consumed him. I will not let rage consume me. For me it is hope that quells the rage.

I make space for rage and then, after it’s had its time, I make space for hope. I am holding onto the ferocity of the hope of my ancestors, who with that hope laid siege to the empire of slavery. Even as we still struggle, I know our work is to face the pain together, to stay awake, and in doing so, to be led down a path toward justice.

When I am out doing a direct action, I am terrified most of the time. But what I am usually most afraid of are the thoughts in my own head—the thoughts that tell me: You shouldn’t be on this interstate. You shouldn’t be shutting down traffic. That police officer just asked us to stop—we should listen. But then I think about what brought me out, and I hear those voices: It’s you, Lena. Wake now—there is much work to do. We love you. You are strong not because you don’t need anyone, but because you need everyone.

Frederick Douglass said, “Who would be free themselves, must strike the blow.” That is true for all of us. To my brown and Black people of all shades and cultures, who speak different languages and come from different continents, I need you. For my white people too, I need you. For whatever reason, these most recent deaths of young, Black boys and men have shaken more people awake than ever before. We need each other. Our hope is here.

Together. Now.

Please don’t go back to sleep. It’s too easy to walk away from this pain, for all of us. It’s too easy to try to return back to our everyday lives, thinking, Well, there is nothing I can do. Other people will fix this. It’s easy to try to turn away from the sheer immensity of the pain in front of us. We try to rationalize it, but sooner or later you can’t explain it away.

I am asking you to face the pain. To look it square in the face. We need to do this not only so we stay awake, but also so that together we can stand on the hope of our ancestors and have the courage to say we will build another world in our hearts, in our city, in our homes. And it is not easy.

So together, we must find the things that need tearing down, the empires within our hearts that would allow injustice to make sense, that scare us away from having real conversations about race. For me those things include believing that I can’t speak at the public hearing because I’m not articulate enough, or I can’t call my city councilperson because I don’t know everything about that policy or exactly how to read a budget. I am afraid of all those white people in that room and that they’ll think of me as just another angry Black woman, so I can’t go speak in that meeting.

But if we are going to tear down the empire we must face what’s in our own hearts—the pain, the voices of the empire that tell us we can’t change things. We can face the pain together, but alone it will crush us. I am not strong because I don’t need anyone, I am strong because I need everyone. We can face this together.

I close with a quote from Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy. She says, in her book An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire:

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories….

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

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Lena K. Gardner

Director of Membership and Fundraising at Church of the Larger Fellowship

Latest posts by Lena K. Gardner (see all)

• Impatient with Waiting - December 1, 2016
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