There comes a moment, somewhere between yesterday and today, when it feels like tomorrow may never come. I used to complain to my Nana about all the things that I had to do tomorrow. She would shake her head, put down whatever book she was reading, and remind me that today’s burdens, if handled properly, could be yesterday’s victories and not tomorrow’s plans. I liked to watch my Nana when she talked like this. She mixed laughter with wisdom, her eyes twinkling and squinting at the dust trails of her life and the pathways for my future.
I think I was already a mother, two times over, on the day I showed up at the house, and she was sitting at the kitchen table, tapping her fingers and humming along to her beat. She cocked her head when I walked through the door and started talking even before I sat down. Her eyes, I noticed, were no longer brown, like summer almonds, but milky blue, like a cold winter morning. And, when I did not say anything, she asked me to take her hand. I knew it was coming. My great-grandmother, her mother, went blind from cataracts and glaucoma, and her eyes turned blue. She told me years before that she would fight it with everything she had, but that, in the end, she was only going to see me in her dreams. My great-grandmother lost her sight long before she met me, and I grew up with her touching my face or grabbing my arm. She said she fought it for as long as possible because fighting and resisting are what we do; it’s who we are.
We are at a moment when all we have left is our ability to resist. We are witnessing the collapse of democracy and the creation of an authoritarian fascist regime that is trying to break us, trying to silence us, and trying to erase us. Similar to glaucoma and cataracts, fascism is a disease seeking to take away sight and convince us to believe what they are telling us and not what we see. It is in these moments that we must return to what we know to be true. We know who we are. We know whose we are. And we know what it feels like to be under attack and to fight.
As we celebrate Day #9 of Black History Month, let us commit to cutting through the noise and pushing through the haze to stand tall on truth. Let us hold the truth high and use it to confront every lie they try to tell about us. This is what we teach the world because this is who we are.
We are truth tellers.
We are truth seekers.
We are fighters.
We are resisters.
And we are clear-eyed survivors.
Bending toward social justice,
Karsonya Wise Whitehead
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*Portions of this essay come from my work in Conversations With Dr. Kaye. |
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