In the richest country in the world, there are hungry children living among us. There are those dying of diseases and illnesses because they cannot get adequate health care. Many of our neighbors are unhoused. Because they cannot afford a place to live.  Many of us are anxious about becoming destitute, unable to provide for ourselves or our loved ones. We imagine being homeless, going bankrupt, and unable to pay medical bills or put food on the table. We lay in bed running the scenarios through our mind…sleepless nights worrying that there is not enough. And even when we see massive amounts of money literally being thrown away by those in power, much of it our money as taxpayers, we continue to believe that there is not enough. We have internalized a wrong idea. It is why many of us begrudge support offered to the poor. We believe they are living off public dollars taken from a “pool of not enough.”

We hear it all the time, don’t we? Our political system is corrupt, we are ruining our environment, there is too much violence. We lament the hunger and poverty that many of us are experiencing. We say we want to live in a prosperous and peaceful world. We want a world based on humane values…love thy neighbor.  And we ask how did it get this bad. Many say we are on the verge of destroying ourselves. I know I have been concerned about the state of our political system, race relations, the climate, the epidemic of violence, and the killing of innocent people by law enforcement. I hear us lament about how bad it is. And I, like many of us, am asking how can we get out of this situation.

Whoever you are, whatever your name or nationality, religion or politics, whatever your ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age or skin color, wherever you live on this planet and however you define your clan, your tribe or your people, I know something about you.

I know that if we could both trace our ancestry back far enough, we’d find that we are kin.

And if we went back a little further, we’d discover that there was a single woman who gave birth to the children from whom our respective ancestors began their long journeys across time.

In other words, I know that we are family.

And yet, here we are, still pretending that we don't know each other, pretending we don't owe each other, and pretending we needn't do better for each other.

When I speak about the idea of Everybody As Our Own, the response is often something like “Really! Everybody as our own? Do you know what is going on out there? The police are killing innocent people. There are Muslim bans, children in cages at the southern border, and riots at the capitol. We are afraid of each other. There is pure hate out there.” 

And they look at me with sad eyes that reflect something like…poor thing, she’s in fantasy land, one of those “touchy feely” folks.

But they don’t know me. I do not live in a fantasy land, and while I welcome a warm hug every now and then, especially in these COVID  times, I am far from “touchy feely”. I know about the things that separate us. I know that in many ways we see ourselves as a society of strangers. 

Dear Pat,

You have come back into my life and I am grateful. You see, we are sisters, born the same year, in South Carolina; but I was born white and you black. That basically meant we would never know each other.

But it is more personal than just being white. It is being white me, Jean, having my personal history growing up sometimes with blinders and sometimes worlds going on around me…white and colored, a “but wasn’t it just the way it was”…“not a reflection of anything bad”.

As an African-American senior law enforcement official, in 2016 I was encouraged to combine my love and knowledge of criminal justice with my love, passion and commitment for social justice. The need was, and remains, for systematic change which spans the widening gap between both facets of justice.

In my community there’s a thought that is ever present: “You have to be twice as good to get half as much.”

This thought summarizes a reality that almost all black people understand. It’s a reality that we live every single day. And in the fight for equity and equality in America, we are constantly fighting against this reality.

The Declaration of Independence states – we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

For minority communities, this was a check written by the founding fathers.

I am your daughter. I am here because you survive. You endured being kidnapped from our homeland. Shackled and imprisoned in holding cells. You endured crossing the Atlantic packed like sardines in the belly of ships named Desire, White Lion, and Henrietta Lee. They would bring you to a hell on earth. And you survive.

I have been feeling as my young clients often say, “some kinda’ way.”

That phrase makes more sense to me now as I am struggling to understand what is going on with me. I have often encouraged my clients to be more specific… articulate…draw a picture…connect to a song or poem. And I feel a bit of a failure as a therapist when those interventions fall short. But I am aware now as I grapple with my emotions and feelings that there is actually space for feeling “some kinda’ way.”

There’s a litmus test I’ve always used to gauge society’s level of racial equality: If I could be born again today, would it matter to me if I was born with “white” skin, or with “black” skin?

If my answer was “yes, I’d really want to have white skin again”, then we had not stopped the ridiculous, abhorrent and brutal hierarchical categorization of people by skin color.

Sadly, over the last 40 years, my answer to this test has always been “yes, I’d really want to have white skin again”. Yet I’ve recently come to think this binary black/white racial paradigm is making our efforts to combat inequality and injustice much more difficult.