In this post, I decided to share a bit of my family history to illustrate how an average family is affected by racism in this country. New laws and policymaking that lack historical context makes for really bad laws and policy decisions and people of good will who lack this understanding will make harmful voting choices. The faith, living conditions, economic status, attitudes, and prospects of black people living today were largely influenced by past discriminatory laws and policies that were rooted in racism and white supremacy.
I was born in Detroit, Michigan. My grandparents, both maternal and paternal, were hardworking family-oriented people who left Mississippi during the period known as “The Great Migration”. Like many other blacks, they left the South to seek manufacturing jobs and better life opportunities while also fleeing the racial tensions and oppression of the Jim Crow laws. Both sides of my family found jobs in the automobile industry, allowing them to purchase homes in the safety of segregated black neighborhoods and to obtain an education for their children. For a time, both families enjoyed a stable black middle-class lifestyle in a thriving black community, complete with music recitals, a black-owned and operated newspaper, Sunday morning church services, annual family reunions, access to higher education including membership in Black Fraternal organizations.
My parents met in college. My dad was an Alpha Phi Alpha and my mom was a little sister. My mom’s best friend and several aunts on my dad’s side were members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated (where I also enjoy membership). Things were going well for my parents and their respective families who were gainfully employed and living a segregated but peaceful middle-class lifestyle in Detroit. However, conditions were horrible in the South and continued to drive black people north. As more people poured in, things started to change in the North as job opportunities shrank, access to home ownership became more difficult (due to red-lining and discriminatory bank policies), basic civil rights were denied, and aggressive policing took over. Frustrated, angry, and desperate people tend to break laws in order to survive. In response to oppressive laws and policies, the Civil Rights Movement was taking wings, finding sympathy and support from blacks in the north who were now in distress on all sides. This was the situation my two brothers and I were born into.
Shortly after I was born, my father decided to move our family of five to Los Angeles in search of safety and opportunity. My father was an ambitious and highly intelligent black man. It could not have been easy for him to have his opportunities both in business and in life continually limited because of the color of his skin. Shortly after arriving, he left us in Los Angeles in a housing project while he pursued a law degree and accounting certification in Texas. Meanwhile, my mother went to work at the Los Angeles County Hospital, my brothers spent two years back in Detroit, and my grandfather traveled to California to watch after me until a Mexican family started caring for me.
When my dad returned to Los Angeles, he provided professional expertise to many black entrepreneurs in South Central Los Angeles as they built their businesses in the black section of L.A. Yes, California was also red-lined and segregated. For a time, we lived really well. We were well-connected, well-dressed, well-housed, and well-fed. For reasons still unknown to me, my parents separated for the first time when I was about six. We moved into a lovely house in Culver City and lived there until my mother made the mistake of marrying a man who was abusive to my brothers. That marriage didn’t last long. In the summer when I turned eight, my mother sent me to Detroit to stay with my grandparents.
When I returned, my mother and father were inexplicably back together and we were living in his beautiful home with a swimming pool. No one explained anything about what transpired while I was away, and I knew enough not to ask. That “culture of silence” surrounding trauma, sickness, and loss remains as a detrimental cultural legacy to this day. I was twenty-six years old when I finally asked what happened that summer. My mother’s response was short and lacked the clarity I desired. She clearly did not want to talk about it. I’m sad about the culture of silence, but I believe there are reasons for it that probably don’t serve us in the end.
I once thought it was a form of denial. But now I believe it is a kind of emotional defense mechanism to help us endure the hardships constantly coming our way. Perhaps to talk about the plethora of bad happenings to acknowledge pain, weakness, helplessness, or worse, a lack of faith. Perhaps there is a belief that wounds can’t healed if they are talked about. Perhaps we feel an obligation to spare others the emotional cost that accompanies sympathy and empathy because we are well aware that they are suffering their own trauma. Being black in America means there is plenty of trauma to go around.
There are the everyday indignities that black skin invites, both intentional and unintentional. There are blatant actions of discrimination at school or at work to contend with. There is the fear of violence from all directions including law enforcement. And then there are normal human problems to deal with on top of it all. With all that trauma, perhaps it is both inconsiderate and counter-productive to talk about painful incidents. That is the mindset I grew up with and to this day, I have friends and family who suffer in silence and die without anyone knowing what ailed them. For too long and for too many black folks, trauma is endured, but rarely shared, and probably accounts for the facade of the strong black woman who secretly suffers from high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, and any number of other ailments.
This post is becoming incredibly long, and I have so much more to tell. I will continue the story next Sunday. Until then, for my black readers especially, I want us to start talking. I know many of us take our burdens to the Lord and leave them there. But that deprives others of our experience and creates a false narrative about what our lives are really like. This silence doesn’t help political allies, nor does it help the children who come after us to understand our concerns, warnings, and admonitions we thus upon them.
Beyond telling our stories, I encourage therapy or at least journaling to ease the emotional burden of dealing with the everyday microaggressions, the injustice of discrimination, the many losses, the violence, the scars, the family secrets, and the numerous other traumas we were taught to handle in silence. I hope this post is shared with family and friends of every race because we have a big battle before us, and we all need to understand what is at stake and to be strong enough to fight.