Living Faith in the Light of Racism

American racism is still with us—in our minds, hearts, and souls. In every sphere, in every place, in every corner of every role that constitutes who I am, the tentacles of race and racism infiltrates. I am focusing specifically on racism because of a particular class discussion that chipped away at the edges of my soul. But make no mistake; it is certainly not the only “ism” grinding at the edges of our souls. If there is any area in my life where I struggle most to have faith or to live out my faith, it is in the area of racial healing.

My soul feels at times to be a sculpture of sorts. And there have been times when my soul has painfully cracked.

When my Dad first whooped me with a belt, I felt it crack. When I fully understood that because of my mixed racial heritage I belonged fully to no people and no community—that I am in the in-between no-whereness in the culturally and racially constructed world of humans—it cracked. When my super-sized body was consistently and constantly rejected, laughed at, and objectified by boys and men—it cracked. When my light eyes, tan brown skin, and “good hair” made (and still make) me a pariah in the African-American community—it still cracks.

Everyday my work is to fill these cracks with love. I fill them and patch them over with soothing love putty that oozes down into the weeping places, dampens the pain, and seals it off. Soon after, I can no longer feel the crack as open, raw, and painful, but the scar remains.

Everyday I wake up and find in love and gratitude the patchwork I need to feel whole, human, and worthy…once again. Some days I am more successful than others. Some days the cracks, the fissures of these particular spiritual and emotional wounds around racism, threaten to widen beyond what I am capable of repairing.

Many times I fear I will run out of love to fill in those cracks. But fill them I must, even if only partially, because I know that if I should fail (as I have in the past), what takes up the space in the cracks is bitterness, anger, and sadness…even hatred. I do not want those fissures to widen and deepen; I fear that would cause my soul to rot from the inside out. So I find the love and pray that I never run out of putty.

While I am not interested in playing the Oppression Olympics (comparing who has it worse or which group of people is worse off than African-American women), my soul does yearn for simple acknowledgement that the very particular hurt of racism is real and still with us. I think my healing, and the healing of the world from racial injustice, necessitates that acknowledgement.

The greatest and most insidious component of racism is that it obscures and obstructs this acknowledgement. I feel it everyday as I continuously patch the cracks in my soul. Because as I patch, I can also feel a concurrent chip….chip….chipping away at all that I do and at the essence of my soul. The pervasive racialization of consciousness marks me in particular and from more than one side.

Whites know I am not white, many blacks don’t see me as qualifying, though culturally in my heart I can be and am nothing else, and people from a multitude of “races” and cultures ask me on the regular,“So…what are you, anyway?”

I feel the chip. “You don’t talk black.” Chip. “You aren’t really black, you are so different.” Chip. “You got that good hair.” Chip.Yet there is nowhere I can go to find hair care products or skin care because people like me exist nowhere in the dichotomized racial consciousness of America.

Chip. Flesh color is still always pink or beige. Chip. “I’m sorry, I can’t date you…you just wouldn’t ‘fit’ with my family.” Chip. “I bet you are really good in bed, aren’t you? I’ve always wanted to f*-% a black chic.” Chip. “Why are you always so loud? You don’t have to get angry about it.” Chip. Chip. Chip.“Really, you like canoeing?” Chip. “Can I touch your hair?”

Chip…chip…chip…and my soul finally cracks…yet again. Sometimes an old crack re-opens and sometimes one is formed anew.

I know I cannot go on like this indefinitely. I want a way out—I want to be seen as a person informed by African-American culture, not inflexibly defined by it, as a human wounded by racism and healed by love.

I now know that the intersection of racism and sexism has eroded my sense of self worth since I was a small, small child. I still fear it may destroy me. And I find myself waiting, bracing at times for that one chip that will irreparably break me. Sometimes, I just stop patching. I wander into the wilderness, into nature. I go to nowhere-ness. Strangely, it is only amongst the trees, the water, in the forest where I am afforded my full humanity. Somehow the cracks are assuaged into a new smoothness—renewed and ready to be scarred all over again.

I am under no pretense that it is unique to seek solace from the ways of the world in nature. I am not asking to be compared with someone who has it worse. I realize there is a proliferation of all kinds of evils in the world. I don’t need anyone to point out the myriad other ways people are oppressed, because I see that, I recognize that.

But I think it behooves us all to explore what it is inside us that triggers those responses when I speak my truth about the experience of racism in my being and in my life. I call that trigger by its name: racism. “No, surely you don’t see it as it is. People don’t mean it that way. Kids in third world countries have it way worse”…Chip…chip…chip.

What are you, anyway?