Why Us? Why Now? Why here?

Welcome!

Greetings in the name and spirit of all that is good and filled with positive energy and intention!

After reading our blog guidelines, please consider offering your own blog contribution here. If you want to post a blog on this site, please send us a message so that we can be in touch with each other. You may trust that everything within my power will be done to create and maintain a thoughtful, respectful, and safe space for people of color to feel comfortable sharing here.

The word selah, from the Hebrew language appears throughout the Book of Psalms. According to Google, its precise meaning is mysterious, but it is interpreted as a pause to breathe and reflect on important words. Accordingly, I truly look forward to hearing and receiving thoughts, positive energy, and rich stories, ‘in selah.’

You may be thinking, “that’s nice but who the heck are you?” That’s a fair question.

Fractured And Estranged

I am recovering and am one of many initiates of a larger conversation that is sweeping across this world about a nasty habit associated with severe amnesia that has led to chronic disease and can cause terminal illness. What’s worse is the aftershock that it causes in community -- the wholesale suspicion/suspension of our ancestral beliefs about creation, sustenance, and provision. Our habitual dependence on, and fixation about money in American life-practices and society is increasing in strength. People of color are drinking the poisoned well water to their own, and our collective spiritual detriment.

To be candid, I am wondering how strong the bond that people of color share actually is, and if money has left us so desirous of gain that we share very little faith in each other.

I hope we use this forum to collect the many ways that people of color resist the status quo so that generations to come can lay claim to how we give honor to ourselves and others in ways that have little to do with monetary gain or compensatory offerings. People of color, whose cultures of origin were established long before the American Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, once knew all that we need to know now about how to be sustained and facilitate the sustenance of others by relying on Spirit Guides and elders to help deepen righted relationships and share them more abundantly.  

I hope we share about how proud, filled with hope, and armed with strong communal ties to countries of origin some of us are when we first come here, or before we were exposed to, and swallowed by, the dominant culture. I want to hear about why some come to make a better life for their children. I want to know what people of color feel once we have the capacity to get plastic cards with our names on them. What happens when we turn our naturally dark hair blonde, or surgically round our naturally beautiful, almond shaped eyes? What messages are sent and internalized when bone straight hair flown in from Korea is worn in America atop a kinky haired person from Kenya? Are we truly happy while working jobs with no benefits, in hopes that some bank manager extends our credit line so we can better distinguish ourselves as being more American than our fellow people of color in America? What do we think of impoverished people that are born here when we walk past them to the corner store, tuck a smidgen of what we earned in our pockets, and wire the rest back to our homelands? Do we wonder why they squandered their opportunity to thrive? Pity them? Or think they’re lazy?

Subconsciously, white Americans think of race in binary terms. No matter how we feel, what we think, or what is said, or by whom, many people of color in America feel and to some degree are forced to choose between whiteness, or being perceived and treated as the newest ‘nigger’, ‘redskin’, ‘spik’, or ‘chink’ on the block by those who uphold white American cultural norms and expectations.

Who do we say that we are?

Do we game the ‘system’...you know...wear the American-mask with accompanying suit and tie uniformity to make ourselves look more like the Anglo-cultured TV shows we watched bits of when the power grid ran back in our country of origin? Is the reality we live now close to the enhanced facade we still watch on TV? Is the American myth we were sold on worth what we gave away in order to acquire a new set of Pax Americana (i.e, relative peace) values that submerge our own best intentions?

Now American culture demands that we need to ‘park’ our elderly parents in a nursing home; our families use to take care of them. We didn’t have to call ahead before visiting close friends; their doors were always open to us. We never set ‘play-dates’ for our children; they just played! We cooked fresh food daily; there were no fast or frozen foods filled with empty calories. We didn’t skip sharing quality time with our sweetheart(s); we were more emotionally available to them!

What value is there in falling in bed at 2am just to wake at 5am to ready ourselves for mega-church service, to hear the sermons suggest that the reason people like us don’t have more stuff we don’t really need, or lack the necessities we really can’t afford, is because we came from “shit hole countries?” Who benefits when we are told that we are not as “blessed and highly favored” by the white Jesus (pictured on the hand-held fans), or by “Father-God,” as is the person seated in the pew next to us who prays harder, tithes more, and invests in the preaching “pastor’s” salary?

How divided and conquered did we become when we sought to leverage foreign missionary advantage for ourselves before someone else in our community beat us to it? Did we question how diminished our collective strength might become should we condemn people for who they love, consider all Muslims to be terrorists, or suspect that all Christians are Crusaders?  Have we paused to consider if religious teachers and preachers of ‘The Book’ indoctrinated us for their own nefarious purposes? Or have we forgotten (again) how colonizers who cloak themselves as foreign missionaries operate, what they most needed from us, and why? Simply because we are persons of color, does not mean that all of us are committed to our well-being (any more than it means that all Anglo-Saxons forego becoming our true allies.)

What are the ties that bind our ideals, beliefs, spirits, relationships, and resources in America? And what have they to do with power, control, faith, and money the world-over?

I am needing the sacred online circle formed here to air these kinds of questions and to serve as our chiropractor, of sorts.  I believe that it is inner wisdom that keeps us in right alignment with what is real, time honored, loving, and true. And it takes strong, lasting, community ties to keep that wisdom from God in the forefront of our minds, so that what we do when we are not isolated in/from each other’s presence in America, will continue to be grounded in divinely ordered energy, that’s supported by meditations and prayers.

I think that the essence of what we share in common when we are free to just be, is deeper than what is commonly shared, sought after, or celebrated on the surface of American life. Some Americans would rather we not think in these terms. Most whiteness benefactors with few exceptions find the true capacity of our inner strength very threatening. I think non-people of color are especially concerned about what we could do with the American dollars that we earn, manage, or administer, in the second half of this century.

Extended Family

In the American culture, immediate family members are one’s spouse, siblings, parents, offspring, grandparents, and in-laws. Extended family are one’s nieces, nephews, 2nd, 3rd and 4th cousins, aunts, and uncles, etc. For the purposes of this blog, I consider my immediate family members to be African American and my extended family members to be people of color.  My extended family was not born of a culture dominated by whiteness. People of color can assimilate into the cultural norms that are derived from that of whiteness.  

I self-identify as an African American Christian. I have used the words “we”, “us” and “our” to describe my proximity to people of color because I feel a sense of belonging when I am in their presence that I have not felt in the presence of non-people of color. I think of myself as a person of color who happened to be raised within and has personally experienced, the highly racialized society, which is the United States. People of color make me feel welcome; for me that has not been the case with the vast majority of people who are white, and who, as proponents of whiteness jointly construct understandings of the world that have a basis for shared assumptions and/or perceptions about reality which I have not experienced people of color fully sharing. Are people of color becoming like everyone else in America who rely on transactional relationships (against the backdrop of whiteness in America) to benefit each other or to incur or repay obligation, rather than communal relationships that make the basis of benefit a concern that is shared by people of color for whole communal wellness in America? I sense something shifting... I willingly admit that my biases, wounds, joys, and truths about spiritual belief, money, and my general worldview are impacted by these experiences. I’m not naive or vain enough to believe that people of color share the same degree of longing for closeness with me as I do for them. I’m seeking clarity because when it comes down to money, resources, and beliefs, being too ‘colored’ for some and not ‘non-colored enough’ for others isn’t a comfortable or easy place to be in.    

In the 1960s and ’70s, America was flourishing economically for a large population of southern-moved-north, urban inner-city Black parents who were fortunate enough to attend college by using their parents’ hard-earned “in-white-folks’-houses” money. My peers and I, therefore, were members of the first large population of Blacks to be reared from infancy to adolescence in a middle-class setting. We had large houses, big backyards—some with pools—quiet paved streets, and crime-free neighborhoods. We were latchkey children with housekeepers and our own phones and television sets. We lived a life in suburban Maryland that thirty years earlier most Black adolescents could not even begin to imagine.

My mother used to take me with her door-to-door to pass out literature for a nonprofit that helped young impoverished orphans. My father would stroll me through Anacostia, the economically challenged community where he was reared. It was then that I first realized that the world held people less fortunate than I. It was he who managed our family finances. Just how he did so was never shared with me. Nor did I yearn to learn how or inquire of him to know.

I knew that my maternal grandmother, upon moving to D.C. from Kansas, was told that her credentials, a teacher’s certificate, held little value in the District’s segregated system. Before and long after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which declared separate education was unconstitutional, white educators devalued (or discounted) the education that “Negroes” received from schools in their communities.  Since my grandmother received an excellent education from Negroes, she would have to earn an equivalent degree in Washington that white educators deemed acceptable if she wanted to teach there. She did just that and more. She saved and invested wisely. Before she died, she became a philanthropist who traveled the world and helped to support hundreds of people. It was she who taught my mother who in-turn taught me to save, spend, and give in equal measure.

I also knew of my paternal great-grandfather wrapped his shoeless feet in warm cow dung so that he could farm through the winter. He praised God for the opportunity to feed his family and tithed each Sunday. My brother and I were taught to tithe tooth fairy money and a portion of our modest weekly allowance.

And, I vividly recall sitting at the kitchen table watching my father’s mother bustle about. On occasion, there was a faint knock on the kitchen door. My grandmother leaned outside to listen intently to a quiet voice saying, “Excuse me Mrs. Ford, I don’t mean to bother you, ma’am …”  

“Ah, Mr. So-and-so, how’s you doing today?” she’d say.

“Just fine, ma’am, but I was wonderin’ if maybe…”

“Hold on, just a second, dear. Don’t go anywhere, now,” she’d interrupt.

Then immediately she’d fill paper bags with food she took from the kitchen and the freezer and hand them out the door saying, “Tell So-and-such we said hello now, ya’ hear?”

Without missing a beat, she’d resume her activities. I never knew who those people were, but I did know what her response would be each time they sought her.  Giving was modeled for me in more overt ways than was my own habitual discipline and practice of saving.

As a child, I learned about Jesus from these communities. This is how I first understood Jesus Christ to be: he was the dude who walked the streets with the suffering, holding a picket sign that read “It’s all about the Divine.” Much later I grew to understand just how much Jesus’ personality, as revealed in historical context, truly exemplifies the transforming power of God’s love for all. And I believe he had particular meaning for those who are the disenfranchised because he participated in a society under oppression, was subject to it, and ministered toward its abolishment. So it was easy for me to associate personal sacrifice and giving away what I had come to value with easing other folks suffering. Perhaps it is also my belief that people of color are still suffering from the ways that money and resources have been used to benefit some over others, which makes me feel kinship with many people of color.

I know who I am. I remember where I came from. I honor who came before me. And I respect and want the best for myself. I hope you choose what’s best for you. That’s what prompted me to start this conversation.

And I’m asking the One I pray to for accompaniment while I write this because predicating shared conversation in community about spiritual belief and money by confining it to people of color, I liken to a spider’s creation of its web. Like the web, this endeavor is both tough and delicate.  

I sent a text to close friends a few days ago. I wrote, “I think some folks think my doing this is nuts.” My friend Joe replied, “Nuts = Never Underestimate The Spirit!”

Even though engaging people of color in this conversation feels lonely, and honestly it can feel a bit overwhelming, his reminder still resonates deeply with me!

To one degree or another, all be it consciously or subconsciously, the racist “systems” that people of color experience in America impact the way all people of color in America think, feel, and behave regarding money, and resources. These systems also impact the spiritual, ethical, and religious ways we choose (or don’t) to justify, excuse, embrace, or clarify our behaviors around money and resources.

Community Bond

Rarely do people of color take time to process the impact this has on how we feel about ourselves, each other, our offspring, or our faith communities and spiritual beliefs, collectively.  Yet, we member every domestic religious, indigenous, ethnic, and spiritual group in America. And we are directly impacted by them.

In a brilliant Splinter News article written by Daniel Rivero, the question, “How can someone [even] be a person of color if at first glance we assumed them to be white American?” is raised.  “For example is a light-skinned Cuban American who strongly identifies with Latinxs and the brown experience of growing up in the U.S., but who you could easily mistake for a white dude until you hear [him] speak Spanish a person of color?” Rivero continues:

It's hardly a new subject, but is one that’s been under-discussed, even as the umbrella of who’s considered “non-white” has grown over the years; Latinxs of any race have been considered non-white by the federal government since 1970, which means a Black Dominican, an indigenous Colombian, and I all somehow fall under the same not technically racialized, yet totally racialized, linguistically based category.

Like the Spanish language, Islam has steadily been racialized under American law since 9/11, despite the fact that Arabs and North Africans—often Muslim—are technically white, according to the federal government. Many Asian Americans have also opted in to the "non-white" fold, even though they’ve been told that they don't have to, really, carry the burden of being a ’person of color.’

We attach claims of racism to things that are other types of bias; religious bigotry, classism, and discrimination against country of origin being the most prominent. This broadens the umbrella of the term “non-white” even further.

Politically, it expresses solidarity with other non-whites, and subtly reminds whites that they are a minority in the world. Yet in recent years, “white” is being used as more of an ethnic and class marker, rather as a strictly racial term; over time, non-white people have become white. Latinxs are likewise following suit, while biracial Black and white people generally hold on to their African-American identity across generations, according to the same paper.

The researchers attribute this phenomenon to the fact that “Black heritage has been a much stronger determinant of the individual's life chances than ties to other racial and ethnic minority groups." In other words, [Native Americans and] Black Americans, often see the limitations they face as intrinsically linked to the "experience of deprivation and suffering" of [Native Americans and] Black Americans, in general. With Latinxs and Asians, not so much,” says Rivero. (The Native American reference addition and italics emphasis placed here, is mine.)

“The preference for whiteness among Hispanics parallels a flight from Blackness" and towards more economic opportunity, William Darity Jr., professor of African and African-American studies at Duke University, wrote earlier this year.

Together, this all suggests that the terminology of the non-white/white binary is less about melanin, and more about identity politics, class mobility, and being perceived as anything but Black.

In the most cynical sense, being a person of color is only a stopover or place of refuge against the concerns of a broad swath of ethnic and racial groups—to the exclusion and erasure of Black American issues.

Some Black immigrant groups are “choosing to keep their immigrant status over generations, something which we've never seen before. In the past, they would’ve likely assimilated into Black America, she said, but they now see an advantage in choosing to identify as “person of color” and not “Black,” said Darity.

Before, it was whites vs. non-whites, and whites were keeping out all these other people and deciding over time who could become white. We've now reached a moment in time where it's Blacks vs. non-Blacks, and other non-white immigrant groups are trying not to be in the Black category, including Black immigrants.

So, how does this affect Black Americans? Are we perceived as being in last place in a country of immigrants, because Black Americans are the only involuntary immigrants to the country?

In fact, I wonder how this affects the way people of color are not only assimilated into the predominate domestic cultural norms, but also into their socio- economic stratification, in view of the connection between what theologian Walter Brueggemann calls “the hidden despair of those who ‘have’ and the open despair of those who do not.”  

Middle and upper class people of color place “Freedom, Liberation, and Justice” stamps on envelopes that enclose hard-earned donation checks for “the indigent,” while they try to secure their own self-worth by chasing cocktail party invitations to events where they can, for example, speak French without a trace of African dialect and English without a hint of Ebonics. There they give pat responses to wealthy white people who ask them questions about what it’s like for people of color like them to be in solidarity with “the poor?” Yet, these same gold-digging people of color avoid significant opportunities to develop meaningful relationships in America with impoverished people, some of whom may live on street corners or languish in prison. What is lost, thereby?  Who are the neediest among us?  How are we relatively comfortable people of color in America addressing the inner despair we experience when we are deeply confronted in community with “the poor” among us who often, we discover with a jolting sense of reconnection to our own ancestors, are spiritually rich?

Nah, I’m not nuts! I know very well that the phrase "people of color" emphasizes solidarity over precision, and there's some value in that. But to what end and for whose benefit? Is it for our collective benefit with the “least” being the first people of color we have in mind? Or is what we care most about our own particular peeps because it’s “all about the Benjamins” (aka making money for private gain or insular-community rather than for public gain in collective community)?  Perhaps, the best indicator of the choices we make rests in what we teach our children and to whom we feel related, responsible for, and accountable to...which brings us back to who needs to carry the load of American despair in communities of color.

“Does it really make sense that, for example, a son of Spanish-speaking immigrants who’s never dealt with real discrimination in his life, and who might have very well benefited from white privilege—would consider himself in the same group as Black Americans who live such a dramatically different racial or socioeconomic experience and/or religious beliefs and practices?” wonders Rivero.

After all, he observes, “few want to join a coalition unless it is at least a temporary way to further their own goals until they're strong enough to stand on their own two feet.”

But if people of color in America are to avoid becoming so culturally conditioned and lock-step-aligned with the same ways that subjugated us the world over when it comes to money and spiritual practices, then we must take time to reflect, breathe, think deeply, learn, and seek wisdom from each other.  In fact, we would do well to remember that the reason many of us were scattered one from the other in the past is so our sharing like this would prove to be next to impossible!

We live in a time when demographic patterns forecast our being on the cusp of becoming the new “minority-majority” in the US by 2040. Now is the time to think about how not to repeat what we say we deplore about neocolonialism, bigotry, and systems of oppression in America. Now is the time to consider the ways we have wittingly or unwittingly allowed ourselves to be subjugated to their negative worldview and practices toward people of color because we adapt to them and adopt usage of them.

Money and resources greed contort our ancestral remembrances and heterogeneous behaviors. We live in a homogenized and not too subtly hostile Anglo-Saxon/Judeo-Christian normative culture. In order to survive in it, we, people of color, slowly come to overvalue money in a data driven reality that is completely divorced from the ways in which people of color lived in community here and abroad when they were free from the burdens and expectations of (Anglo-Christian facilitated) assimilation and the weight of its oppression. To put it bluntly, our thought and fact-patterns around money and resources have been changed.  

Instead of debating the use of the term “person of color” (as was the case when debate about our use of the terms Black and Afro American was all the rage in my community),  who is person-of-color “enough,” or who’s suffering more to one degree or another, it is high time for those who self-identify as having been “sun kissed” and adversely affected by prejudice at all, and persons of color who don’t wish to be affected by said prejudices but are considered by whites to be non-white, regardless, to begin to draw water from an old well in an entirely new way. And we can start doing that here by thinking deeply and sharing together abundantly about spiritual and religious belief, money, and resources.

Shift To Wholesome Wellness

In the New York Times on February 20, 2019, an opinion piece titled “The Good Enough Life,” by Avram Alpert explores the idea of rejecting the binary (either/or) choice between either self-enrichment or uplifting the WHOLE community, by choosing “the middle path.” He wrote that “Buddhism, for example, offers a criticism of the caste system and the idea that some people must live lives of servitude in order to ensure the greatness of others. It posits instead the idea of the ‘middle path,’ a life that is neither excessively materialistic nor too ascetic. Some Buddhist thinkers, such as the 6th-century Persian-Chinese monk Jizang, insisted that this middle life, this good enough life, is the birthright of not only all humans, but also all of nature as well.” I imagine it would be interesting to hear more about what a practicing Buddhist who is a self-identified person of color in America has to offer all people of color regarding what he/she thinks about this.     

According to the National Congress of American Indians web page on religious freedom and sacred places, “it is impossible to refer to Native American religion or spirituality in the singular context. Native religions and traditions vastly differ from tribe to tribe, but the one thing that all tribes have in common is their continuous struggle” to protect their religious freedom from acts of suppression—including denial of that which they deem sacred, their use or possession of sacred objects, and restrictions on ceremonial practices.

By extension, I understand this may also be the context in which their uses of resources – be they monetary or not -- form and inform their interactions and behaviors for the good and survival of their tribes. I would like to hear more, for example, about what some Native Americans think the universally held lessons may be regarding the use of resources while living in community in America.

There are four areas that I have dedicated my life’s work toward consolidating: equity, stability, growth, and justice.    

In recent years, I have been grappling, writing, and talking about substantive ways to respond to this question: “What rests on that hyphen that is sometimes placed between the words African and American when it comes to faith and money?”

An essay I wrote is slated to be published in a book about sacred memory, by the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. in 2019. The essay offers the Black church another way of thinking about money and its uses. The language I used to write this piece is targeted toward Black Christians. However, the thoughts and suggestions I shared in it about how to resist free market fundamentalism (i.e. gross consumerism) are offered to all people of color and allies who want to end systemic economic injustice while rolling up their sleeves to address the chronic issues that plague historically marginalized communities.

The call to action given voice in this essay culminates in what is envisioned as a nation-wide proliferation of small, self-empowered, radically inclusive, equitable and intersectional, community development projects, and community-owned entrepreneurial businesses.

I argue that a linchpin that can make a shift of this magnitude possible is likely as ancient as the recovery process from addiction to a mentality of over-abundance and scarcity, is innovative. Prioritizing forward leaning belief(s), practices, and relationships over commodifying people and time as if they both were easily dispensable is also key to making lasting societal transformation possible with the aid of money and other resources. Members of communities of color have based too much of their sense of self and mutual esteem on money. That which we gain through our relationships must remain greater than the sum of our monetary transactions. When we recognize this, and live on this basis, the riches replenish our deepest and most vital community needs combine, compound in the eyes of our offspring with interest, and remain at hand for generations to come. The greater society does not appreciate why we know this to be true -- yet.

When people of color tell our own stories, each story bestows this common remembrance: The driven aims and ventures encouraged by and for the benefit of those who have held power and who work at funding “progress” at the expense of all else in mind, will continue to fail at an unprecedented rate of acceleration. The fallen privileged will turn to us and ask for wisdom and guidance that we will have been positioned over many centuries of struggle to offer. And I think that, my dear family, is poetic equity, stability, growth, and justice, indeed. Just claiming it so feels healthy to me, just as my sharing with you holds out an opportunity for transformative healing for all of us, haves and have nots alike.

That’s not merely restorative. It’s truly priceless!