Faith
Black Instagram square
I feel like I have turned a corner.
Six months ago, I caught what I thought was the flu from a colleague’s young daughter. Looking back I had many of the symptoms of what we now know as the novel virus Covid19. If it was, I intuitively did all of the right things: got in bed, drank lot of fluids, watched my fever and stayed home. I had not been down or sick like that in a long time and it hit me hard.
After talking with my doctor several weeks later about an antibody test that came back negative, he said that they are not reliable and not really worth taking because we know so little about this new virus and if antibodies are even helpful. “If you had it I can’t even tell you if you could get it again,” he said with a measured amount of both reserve and frustration.
At first, as the lockdown was enforced, I was actually pretty happy to be home. I am a fairly domestic and an introvert. Home is a very comfortable space for me and I had a hard time understanding all the panic. I had plenty of toilet paper on hand, as well as flour and food in the freezer. Whole Foods might have been sold out of essentials, but small stores owned by Black, Latinx and Middle Easterners on the Southside of Chicago near where I live, were still stocked with basic necessities. As things developed, my adult son who lives on the east coast with his family, was laughing at me as I confessed to hoarding oat milk before the limitations to two essential items started at most grocery stores.
As the uncertainty of Covid19 continued, like many of us, I started experiencing larger mood swings and greater ups and downs; sometimes within the same day or even the same hour. Compounded by family losses – one to Covid and one we are unsure about – there were days I was in deep despair. Friends, family and people I knew were dying. Thank goodness the Governor and Mayor of my state and city respectively took decisive action. In contrast to the poor national coordination and lack of forewarning, I was comforted by the fact that someone sprung into action to protect us from this unknown and seemingly uncontrollable threat.
I am an artist, and also am trained and work professionally as a designer. We are conditioned to solve problems in innovative and creative ways. At the art and design school where I teach, our administration and colleagues quickly figured out how we were going to deliver the remainder of the spring 2020 semester to our students. We came together, discovered zoom, and adjusted to remote learning working collectively to share our newly invented best practices. We worked to ensure our seniors and graduate students could complete their degrees, and other students could continue their studies without having to forfeit a semester’s work. Our usual week of end-of-semester culminating activities were transformed by our students as a virtual event, and graduation was coordinated for students and their families to celebrate remotely. It was a bit messy and anti-climatic for our college community, but it happened and most of us are still alive.
The next week at the end of May, when I would usually be visiting my two granddaughters on the East Coast whose birthdays are five days apart, George Floyd was murdered in a brutal display of white supremacy and cruel disregard for human life at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. I still have not been able to stomach looking at the entire video. Watching Derek Chauvin press his knee against Floyd’s neck, smiling, with a degree of pleasure watching the man suffer, his hands so casually in his pockets ( ! ), in a brazen display of control and power on someone who was cuffed and physically powerless calling for his dead mother, brought a flood of salty tears. It appeared that Chauvin was enjoying it, like many a white man who has taken pleasure in the expression of his patriarchism and racism. I recalled such heinousness in pictures of terror in lynchings after Reconstruction, and water hoses stinging Black bodies during the Fifties. We have seen way too much of this kind of hatred and disregard for Black people as human very close at hand.
There was Ahmaud Arbrey. Then Breonna Taylor. Then Elijah McClain. Then Merci Mack. Then Oluwatoyin Salau. Then Summer Taylor. Then, the list goes on. I was inconsolable in my rage. But the assaults have not stopped and not everyone that should be has been arrested and brought to justice.
Some assaults are more subtle while still potentially life threatening, like the Karen’s that can’t even allow a Black man the space to simply watch a bird in peace, or a little 8-year old Black girl the right to sell bottled water on a hot day.
(Some) white people started to see what we have been living with for so many generations in America. Some became allies. Some became co-conspirators. And marched. Some in their shame became fragile and defensive. Some in their liberalism professed alignment with Black Lives Matter and posted black squares or proclaimed solidarity. A few who have been doing their work (and knew our plight, for real) pulled other clueless ones aside to educate them about their whiteness, white supremacy, structural racism, and their privilege. Thank you. Some trying to express solidarity, yet unaware that they were doing so through the filter of white privilege, reached out to ask for Black labor to help them appear to be down with the people–Black people–but unwittingly fell into the trap of white supremacy clocked as enlightened liberalism. They fooled themselves. Unfortunately, and although perhaps unintentional it actually caused more pain.
Black people became very popular and all the Black people that white people said they could not find previously for exhibition opportunities, academic panels, good jobs, fellowships, grants, and for opportunities afforded others, were suddenly found. There were lists and lists of us in various professions appearing everywhere. Our popularity was often disguised as opportunity, when in some cases it was actually labor that the white folks did not want to have to do themselves.
We were all over social media, in publications and news feature stories, brought forward by organizations where we were previously invisible, and our work pulled forward from within museum collections that have largely marginalized our contributions in the canon of American art. All of this as a mask to cover the fact that white people were ashamed that they had not paid attention, not been awake all this time, ignored racism when they saw it, gaslighted us when we did, and allowed it to continue and maintain its presence uncontested by them in American life. They were comfortable.
This new found attention was seductive, and suspicious. I had to do my homework when (some) folks reached out. It came in a flurry: How many of the other panelists are people of color? Exhibition? You want me to do what? What’s the artist fee? Really? How many other BIPOC folks are involved? None? I’m the only person of color?
It was hard to find the space to grieve. It seemed very hard for white folks to just sit in their discomfort, to do their own work and not ask Black people to do their work for them; to let go of the idea that we can indemnify them of racial passivity with our labor just because they asked. White people had no idea how much I kept hearing their reaching out in my head as scenes from The Women or Gone With the Wind; their voices like Scarlett O’Hara–the quintessential “Karen,”–reminiscent of plantation culture and the master/slave dynamic that required enslaved people to care for white masters, which is unconsciously still playing out in the underbelly of the American imagination.
It is now the beginning of August. Most of the classes at my school in September will be remote, some will be hybrid, some in person, maybe. The Chicago Public School system said they would reopen, but quickly rescinded that plan as Covid cases have risen in our city after restrictions had been hastily relaxed. The Democratic and Republican primaries were on and now they are off. Biden has not told us his choice for VP and needs to shut his mouth after again putting his foot in it, after saying that Latinas were diverse and not monolithic like African Americans. If he could get though campaigning without speaking, he may have a chance.
45 is well… 45, and there is no end in sight to his stomping like a two-year old to get his way by causing havoc. Some of it is serious though, like messing with the postal service, which is likely designed to effect mail-in voting ballots. What a mess we are in people, since this is the very mechanism we may have with the pandemic to get him out.
My ups and downs are starting to stabilize into purposeful action around what I can control and how I can (re)build my futures. I had gotten lazy and started operating too easily in a haze of negativity, frustration and helplessness. I reignited the truism that thought is creative, losing some of my fears, reestablishing trust in a supportive universe and creating opportunity with my own attitudes through more discipline in my personal and spiritual practices.
Optimism and positivity are indeed a practice of faith.