Yesterday was the spring equinox and most of the day had been a bit “eerie”, starting with the night when I had a horrible, horrible life-like nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from. I don’t know if the spirits are more alive during the spring equinox or if it was that I’m suffering from severe heat exhaustion because even though it’s only March the temperature this week has been as scalding as if I’m living through the high summer heat. I needed to stabilize myself, I just felt “off” mentally and I with the stress of everything going on politically I needed to “get back into my body” and so I last minute booked a dance class (which I’ve only been taking the past month or so) to “shake off the stress.”
It worked like magic! The beginning of class I’m always “rusty” and by the end I can feel my feminine energy. my essence pouring over my body as I “let loose.” As I as walking home from dance in my “post dance glow” I felt a nudge – I don’t know if it was from deep inside my body, my intution, or something trying to guide me – to put on my headphones (and to be fair I usually do wear my headphones on the walk home). But I was just feeling so alive in that moment I didn’t want to listen to a podcast and escape reality – I wanted to feel in the moment, in the body, and I also felt this fleeting moment of quite pride in the young woman (is 38 young?) that I’ve become, the quiet struggles that I’ve faced and the semblance of a beautiful life – it’s small, no boyfriend, not a lot of friends and a family that although it is fractured I still love even more than myself. And the fact that even fighting and barely surviving through my grotesque spiritual and physical transformation I’ve managed to create a life where I go to dance class, I live with two other female roommates (not having to navigate living with creepy men like I’ve had to in previously), and that I’ve built a life where slowly and surely with barely any guidebook I’ve shown up for me. I just wanted to soak that moment in and so that’s what I did. Madonna recently did a podcast with Jay Shetty and in it she shared her own spiritual practice and her sad observation that everywhere you go people are on their headphones – even when their walking in the sunshine. And so I wanted to walk in the sunshine (it was evening but with the recent time change the sun was still beaming) and soak in the glow.
And as I did a slew of young kids – my guess is they were about 10 rode by me on their bicycles, and one of them let out an “Oooooh!” and this might sound crazy but the way he said it with such excitement I knew something about the “Oohh!” was bad. And as the group of children rode past me at least one of them yelled out NIGGGGEEERRRRR as loudly as they could as they sped past me.
It was a busy street full of businesses and people in their cars. Other people saw and heard and for no one to check on me or say
“Hey you’re a Queen,” made me feel like they also agreed with the kids that I should be called a n***. An old guy silently watched from his car and I hate modifying my actions with the next person because of what I went through with the previous one but when I crossed the street I just walked behind his car in case he somehow felt the same way but now that I think of it I think his jaw was set that way because he was upset at what he had seen ( or maybe it was completely unrelated I’m not sure) but the only reason why I’m sharing that is because although physically and I think even mentally I was ok, a few minutes later my energy shrank like a violet shrinking and it’s nothing to do with him but that I took a minute to avoid confrontation with the next white person while I stabilized myself (which is completely okay). I also feel bad for the Black man who was a small distance behind me because I know he how powerless he must have felt in that moment, he had been so respectful and kind when I walked by him. I knew he would have wanted to help but there wasn’t a way he could have – maybe both individuals did or maybe not, but in that moment I felt alone.
Now I’ve been raised in mostly white towns. So my experience is while one person with a certain skin color can be racist towards me the very next person I meet of the same skin color can be the nicest person in the world. Which I think is a vantage point that “the other side” might not always experience, it’s like the movie Crash. But I also don’t make sweeping broad generalizations. It does take a moment to recalibrate myself because silence is compliance. I now realize that putting someone down is about “training them to use the back door” in an energetic sense.
I went back home and told my roommate who was super sweet and kind about. She can’t relate to my skin color but she was shocked that it happened. I think I need to do a little bit more research about the area I’ve moved too (I’ve been here about 6 months and lived in the general area for a little over a year), when I first originally arrived here and back then I only stayed for a little over a month I didn’t experience any racism at all. Aside from paying “The sunshine tax” everyone was bright and cheery. But every since moving back there’s been more and more elevated levels of racism. It’s all throughout the country. However as someone whose lived in Georgia and Texas (and also you would be surprised at exactly how racist the North can be) the racism here, at least in my experience has been very creepy – which it always is, but there’s been so many times where I’ve been quietly minding my own business – grocery shopping for example and someone has walked up to heckle me.
And so how do you heal from something like that?
I was taking a Lyft one time (which by the way shout out to Lyft for allowing female passengers to request female Lyft drivers)! And asked my Lyft driver who was also a Black woman what her experiences with racism had been here and I shared with her that I’ve lived in the south and that I’ve experienced more racist incidences here than any other place that I’ve been and that it’s so surprising because it’s not an area where you thought it would be. Even at the Juneteenth celebration that I went too – the police showed us and gave us rules that they don’t give any other groups and motorcycles heckled us as the kids were sharing their poems about the racism that they’ve experienced growing up here and how they’ve been treated less than dirt. It was so sobering to me. It’s one thing to go through it myself and then another to realize that other Black people are also facing this. I think because the Black population is so small maybe that’s why their able to get away with it? But still I think there’s roughly 17,000 African Americans in the area which I originally didn’t think was a small number.
The lyft driver (we had been sharing about our spiritual awakenings and beliefs together so we had a connection) she said that she had been living here all her life, her and her family and had never encountered any racism. As she picked me drove me back after our stop (this was a trip where she had done a round trip journey to help me pick up an item) she said – and I’m paraphrasing here – “You know I know why their doing this too you. It’s because you radiate softness. And not in a weak way, you are radiating soft feminine softness. Like everything you talk about feminine energy you literally are. I’m really rough around the edges so their not going to come after me because I’ll kill someone and they know it. They don’t like it that you know who you are. Even the way you walk – people can see this is a woman who has been through stuff and knows who she is. They don’t like that they know who you are and so when people are seeing you they are putting you down intentionally, their intentionally trying to make you feel small and put you “down there” because they don’t want us to know who we are.”
What this Queen said really resonated with me. However in those moments when a little child is screaming at me that I’m a Nigger (which by the way the fact that it was a group of children kinda made me not care about the word because they are just 10 but then I know that these kids are saying this to others and what kind of adults are shaping them and the kind of adults kids like this become).
And what I’ve found is that the same black feminine softness that makes me such a target is what has been so healing for me to recover from this. I reflect on Delroy Linda and Michael B Jordan reaction to being called a nigger at the Bafta awards, President Obama’s reaction to his face being put on a chimpanzee by the current now president of the United States – their silence, poise, and dignity as confirmation that I did the right thing by not reacting (although in some moments you should but it’s definitely a moment by moment thing) and then I watched clips of black women being soft and taken care of. And you know what clip strikes me the most?
First it was a short of Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson in their promotion for the movie Creed III and then it was this scene….
This woman feels so open and soft here and that’s the feeling that I want to feel all life long.