George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin. Apparently he was allowed to “stand his ground” against a young man whom he deemed dangerous by virtue of the fact that the boy was African-American and wearing a hoodie. Trayvon, it seems, was not allowed to stand his ground against the man who was stalking him, first by car and then on foot, because, you know, white people aren’t dangerous. Until they kill you.

What I want to know now is what I’m supposed to tell my daughter, an African-American teenager. Maybe, since she’s a girl, she won’t be seen as quite so threatening by white strangers on the street. Maybe, when she starts driving, she won’t be pulled over by the cops for “driving while Black” – at least not as often as if she were a boy. (Lord, here I was just worried about when my teen starts driving because, you know, Teens. Driving.) Maybe she will just be followed in stores when she goes shopping. Maybe men will just make assumptions about the sexual availability of my beautiful girl.

But I have to explain it to her. I have to explain why George Zimmerman literally got away with murder, and why so many people seem to think that’s OK. I have to explain how Trayvon was armed with a sidewalk – a sidewalk! – which somehow made his young Black presence more of a threat than a white man with a gun. I have to explain, because she’s being raised by white parents, and as a child she was protected from much of the bitter truth of racism in this country. Because we knew to teach our little girl about the Civil Rights Movement and the heroes who fought racism so that she could live in a better world. But we couldn’t stand telling a five-year-old, a six-year-old, a seven-year-old what is obviously the case, that those heroes were only able to take us a few steps down the road, and we have so much further, so much further, to go.

But she’s a teenager now, tall and strong, who carries herself with a dancer’s confidence and grace. And now I’m going to have to explain to her that while she will need to stand her ground with boys who want more from her than she wants to give, and she will need to stand her ground against peers who want to offer her alcohol or drugs, and she should stand her ground against anyone who wants to convince her that their warped world-view is true, that she cannot afford to stand her ground if she is unjustly accused by the police, or anyone else in authority. And she cannot even afford to stand her ground against some self-appointed vigilante who decides to appoint himself in charge of where she is or is not allowed to walk. Because no amount of dignity or self-respect is worth getting killed at the hands of someone who knows you are dangerous because of your clothes and the color of your skin.

She cannot afford to stand her ground. And so I am going to have to. I, and all my other white, middle-aged friends and family who are entitled to walk down a street anywhere we like, we are going to have to stand her ground. We are going to have to tell the truth about racism, about guns, about where the danger in our society really lurks. And maybe, when I know that thousands and thousands of middle-aged white people are standing her ground, standing Trayvon’s ground, then having this conversation with her will not completely break my heart.

I’m a gardener in the upper Midwest, so in July I spend a lot of time pulling up weeds. Just yesterday, along with a lot of other stuff, I probably pulled up a couple of hundred tiny maple trees, growing from the ‘helicopter blades’ that spin to the ground from my neighbor’s maple each spring.

The first year that I saw these sprouting in my yard, I panicked. I think I envisioned our yard suddenly and abruptly turning into a dense maple forest. I paid my kid a nickel each to pull them up; in the course of the summer I shelled out $100!!! Duly sorted in tiny groups of 20 as she collected her bounty whenever she needed spending money.

Now I know that, unless I ignore them for five or six years, these little maples are the least of my worries. Sure, six or seven of them might implant themselves right next to the tomato plant, but a swift yank and they’re gone forever! Nope, the weeds that drive me crazy are much less dramatic, much more insidious, will never turn into trees but will simply plague me in their short green ubiquity. “We’re here, we’re green, get over it!” they seem to taunt me.

The tough weeds, the ones that I will spend my life pulling and re-pulling, never successfully, are the ones that spread underground, in their root system. Crabgrass. Bishop’s weed. Jerusalem Artichokes. (Bear in mind that a weed is just a plant in a place where you don’t want it! In some parts of the world, orchids are weeds!)

This year a friend took a turn at the horseradish plant I’ve hacked at every spring. “I think I got it all!” she declared enthusiastically. I just smiled and thanked her, confident because of past experience that she had not. Sure enough, though it’s gone from the area she dug—a huge four foot excavation—it’s now reappeared five feet away, in the middle of the strawberry patch. Root systems are invisible on the surface, and thus incredibly hard to eliminate.

Interestingly, pulling weeds yesterday led me to think about racism, and what’s going on in the US right now. Hundreds of hours of media attention have been given to the racist utterings of Paula Deen. Indeed, in our media, this story is the central narrative describing racism. From my view, Deen is a maple tree. Her racist practices, weedy as they may be, are isolated, have their own root system, can easily be plucked out. One second; yank; it’s over.

The racism that is harder to see, and harder to talk about, is spreading underground, evidence of its existence popping into view here and there without seeming connection, much harder to identify and eradicate. That’s the effects of the US Supreme Court eliminating the Voting Rights Act, which as far as I can tell is garnering no mainstream media coverage at all. Already in at least seven places, changes have been made to voting that will drastically affect people of color, and all of us, far more than the epitaphs of a random chef. And yet, I don’t even know the names of the people who are enacting these new ways of doing things. I’m not seeing interviews in mainstream media with them, or with the people affected by their decisions.

The problem with oppression is that so much of how it spreads and lives is invisible. It’s not about individual bigotry or what names individual people call each other. It’s about systems, connections of one thing to another that may not, on the surface of things, appear to come from the same roots.

That’s what I was thinking about while I was pulling up the weeds yesterday, anyway.

Horseradish, flourishing in the strawberry patch

Let go of what you know
and honor what exists
Son, that’s what bearing witness is
Daughter, that’s what bearing witness is
~ David Shannon Bazan, Bearing Witness

Less than 15 miles away from the city of New Orleans as the crow flies – or 25 miles if you drive along the every curving Mississippi River – there is a parish (county) called Plaquemines. From the town of Braithwaite to White Ditch, water flowed in over top the river levee just over a month ago. Hurricane Isaac slowly swirled across southeastern Louisiana on the 7 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the Flood of 2005. When the city of New Orleans stayed dry and the power was restored within a week, most of us breathed a sigh of relief and tried to pick up where we had left off – beginning new school years and new jobs, or simply a new season, transitioning from summer to autumn.

On the long stretch of road along the east bank of the Mississippi River, it was another week before the water drained away. Still today the houses, tombs, and trees washed over the road are being cleared away. You have to see it to believe it. And few people have seen it. It’s a rural commuter community downriver. New Orleans did not flood. Next news story.

Driving along highway 39 with Rev. Tyrone Edwards, I was reminded again of the importance of bearing witness. It restores us to our humanity, to our connection with all that is.  It is certainly spiritual practice.

I knew from talking on the phone to partners in the area that the situation on the ground was intense. In addition to houses, cemeteries, and trees uprooted and washed around, dead animals and rotten fruit had to be cleared off of the roads before people could return home – or at least return to where their home had been. It was so hard to imagine that only a half hour outside of my (fairly) functional city, there was utter devastation for hundreds of families, homes, farms, and an ecosystem. I had to travel there, to bear witness to what exists.

So it is with many things, the importance of this journey to bear witness – white people doing the hard work of letting go of what white people “know” to acknowledge and begin to undo the racism that exists, men letting go of their conditioning of superiority to honor the truth of women’s long struggle within sexism, heterosexuals realizing that there are other ways to love, cis-gendered people recognizing that trans-gendered people are living their own truths…when we are willing to let go of what we know and honor what exists, we bear witness to some extraordinary truths.

On Thursday, I journeyed over a bridge, through a tunnel, and on a ferry to bear witness to a community bearing the consequences brought about by forces beyond their control – coastal erosion, chemical spills, underfunded engineering, climate change… As the ferry pulled away, taking me back to the city, a brilliant rainbow arced over the flooded gas station where I had met Rev. Tyrone Edwards earlier in the day. While there is no Genesis promise that Plaquemines Parish will not be flooded again, the rainbow is still a symbol of promise. We can offer the promise of bearing witness to each other – letting go of what we know and honoring what exists. This is what bearing witness is, beloveds. May we find the courage every day to make the journey.