Tag: American history

The Heart of America is Black: A DC Appreciation Post

A photo I took before a reading at the Library of Congress.

When I moved to DC twelve years ago, it was one of the Blackest cities I’d lived in as an adult. Though I grew up in New York and Philly, my decade-long career in newspapers made it possible for me to live in several cities, most of them in Texas and predominantly white. After stints in Houston, Beaumont, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, I spent eight years in Austin until I had had enough of being away from the East Coast.

You can tell how Black a city is by its radio stations. I remember my arrival in DC at the end of 2013 because the DJs were playing Beyoncé’s first secret album on the radio. Instead of a single station with some Black music which was my reality in Austin, every station the tuner in my car touched seemed to be playing “7/11” or “Drunk In Love.” Music is another home for me so this felt like a good omen. 

It’s weird to be writing about how much I loved DC because it was a hard place to live at first. But the military occupation underway there, with more cities to come, is so unjustifiable and clearly an excuse to normalize stereotyping, Civil War-era gripes and launch Reconstruction era mandates that I have been thinking about what I love about the DMV — the District, Maryland and Virginia, just as it is, just as it always has been. It’s important to me that the algorithm knows more than just one version of our history in all the places that it has shaped America, so DC is as good a place for me to start as any.

So many of the narratives, symbolism and myths about DC I remember from before I lived there were steeped in the kind of power that money buys, the kind of power that, in my imagination anyway, was white. Like House of Cards or The West Wing. Because I’m a student of Black history but specifically Black writers, I knew of the many illustrious names of Howard University alumnae. Still, I moved there without expecting the nation’s capital to be embedded with Blackness, despite my lingering euphoria over the first Black president and his family.

I rented a room in Petworth as I freelanced, finished up my first book – How Racism and Sexism Killed Traditional Media: Why the Future of Journalism Depends on Women and People of Color, which this month turned 10 years old (!) – and tried to rebuild my life after losing my parents, my job and my dog.

The city girl in me loves all kinds of subways even though the first skill I acquired as a journalist was learning how to drive. I parked my car behind the house where I stayed and I learned to appreciate the Metro, even when I encountered musty cloth seats and balked at the cost of consistently late trains. One of my first stops was to the Library of Congress, to get a reading card, since none of the books there are in circulation. My library science degree was four years old by then but my adoration for books felt fresh. I had never really felt like a tourist anywhere until I visited there, craning my neck to admire the ceiling.

I ran in Rock Creek Park, by way of Columbia Heights. I found a good yoga class near DuPont Circle. I stayed in touch with one of my favorite people in the world and popped over to Baltimore to see her and her mom now and then. Once in awhile I attended church with a friend from work who lived in NoVa or Northern Virginia. I was so instantly in love with St. Augustine’s — the first and only Black Catholic Church I had ever attended — that I joined the gospel choir. I had a succession of Black women bosses — a situation more complicated and harrowing than I imagined it would be. I socialized at Busboys and Poets and Marvin on U Street, Red Rocks on H Street when I wasn’t at a choir function. 

I mention this because I came to DC unaware of the polished bourgeois Black community that awaited me. I had dreads at the time, I drove a 10-year-old Toyota, I can’t even tell you what I wore except that when I did get a GGJ (Good Government Job), I had less than business casual outfits of a working woman in Austin, which is to say they were not up to snuff for the siddity Chocolate City Mean Girls for whom I worked. Any working journalist will tell you we’re not legendary for our fashion choices. And at that time, I did not care what I looked like. I worked so I could buy books, eat, have health insurance and pay my mortgage. In that order.

To say I did not fit into Black DC is an understatement. I wore my roommate’s hand-me-down suits and boasted about my GS level as the elder women from Prince Georges County winced; the idea among the privileged and rich or any color is that if you’re really a baller you never talk about money and you certainly don’t give people a range to go look up. What made me an outsider was that I was not at all invested in respectability politics. The politics of respectability had saved Black folks’ lives at some point, or at least, here was a concentration of people who had some kind of proof that it did.

I didn’t really find my actual people, the nerds, until I became a political appointee at the Department of Energy. I started doing CrossFit. I still spent all my money at Busboys and Poets. Leaving DC at the end of 2016 was bittersweet. I kept my real friends and community and gladly left the rest to come home to The Bronx.

I’m always going to appreciate DC as a place of complex Blackness and fertile ground for building Black prosperity and passing it on. Aside from being home to the Smithsonian’s African American Museum now (and hopefully in the future), Benjamin Banneker, a Black mathematician, is one of the men responsible for laying out the city, and DC has one of the largest concentrations of structures designed by Black architects in the country. Chocolate city named the first black mayor of a major city.

Yet, just like most cities in America by design, DC is as segregated as it has ever been. Attacking DC is also attacking what makes America what it is — and the heart of America is Black. The false story of DC as a site of Black lawlessness is just that: false. And it is not the only story, just like mine is not the only story.

Regardless of how it might make people of good conscience feel, the current Administration understands the power of branding. Branding, particularly in a time when our attention spans are so short, is entirely dependent on a good story. A good story does not require truth, it only requires familiarity enough to resonate with the listener.

The story of Blackness as inherently criminal and therefore the only necessary requirement for invoking white domestic terrorism is as old as this country. That narrative has been used to justify crimes as egregious as the current federal takeover and harassment of DMV residents including mass lynchings, voter intimidation, church shootings, church bombings…the list is horrifically long.

Racism aside, if you can cast the most well to do and sophisticated Black people in America as hoodlums, you can tell whatever story you want to justify locking up anyone, regardless of their race. This is not new for Black folks; our dignity and the ability to retain it has always been contested. The only thing that has shifted over the years has been the percentage of the public willing to believe the stories told from our nation’s most influential platform. We have the power to recall, to remember and to counter these stories with our own. We should tell them before it’s too late.

On Merit and What You Deserve

It’s difficult to write through fear and to feel like I have anything of value to contribute, really, in a time when so much damage is happening. But here are some things I’ve been thinking about the lie of merit/meritocracy over diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

We don’t need one or the other, we need both — and much more — and to say anything different is really a lie.

I posted this on Medium, but here’s a preview:

As a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about words and looking them up, because I want to be precise. Language, as we know, especially now that our government wants to ban some of it, is not some neutral tool that you just fling about carelessly — at least it shouldn’t be.

A word I keep coming back to that surfaces from time to time is merit.

Merit, as a noun, means: “The quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward.” As a verb, “ deserve or be worthy of (something, especially reward, punishment or attention.)”

We live in times that seem to the be enemy of context, which is the reason this word has been stalking my thoughts, when I’m walking the dog, when I’m trying to watch a movie. I’m writing this to get it out of my brain, at least for now. And, there are too many examples that I wish my younger self had to reinforce that I was worthy and deserving before I believed the lies of meritocracy in America for me to keep these thoughts to myself.

You can read the rest here.

Highlighting Unsung Heroes: The Women of the 6888th Postal Battalion

It’s hard to believe it is has been almost two full years since the publication of Women of the Post. It feels like the characters in the book are with me all the time, even as I work on my next book.

A large part of that has been the warm reception, the kind words and notes others have shared about the book. It was nice to see, just the other day, that Women of the Post was included in this Book Riot roundup of books about the 6888th Central Postal Battalion. I also loved seeing every member of the battalion listed at the end of Six Triple Eight, Tyler Perry’s Netflix movie — that kind of recognition is long overdue. It’s exciting to see all the different ways creators, storytellers and historians are amplifying the story of the Women’s Army Corps, and the 855 Black women who served as part of the Six Triple Eight.

In the broader world, there is an aggressive push to proclaim the end of diversity, equity and inclusion. That war is separate but related to a false sense of competition between my version of the 6888th history and other versions. First, those of us who embody the histories central to Black History Month and Women’s History Month know that the work of pulling important, erased narratives from the margins to the center of discourse is not done. If it were, I would not get regular emails from readers sharing their dismay that they never learned about these Black women veterans. I would not hear from women veterans all over the country that each year during Veterans’ Day, their husbands are thanked for their service but they continue to be overlooked, even when they are the veterans and their spouses are not.

But second, history has been generous to non-Black and male veterans in this country, to put it mildly. There are many millions of stories, movies, books, plays and other archives brimming with descriptions of service to this country that do not include Black women at all. So there is much more to be written, told and shared about Black women veterans, and Black women, period. There is more than enough room for all of our stories.

It’s encouraging to me, always, to be in the virtual literary community that continues to lift up Women’s History all year long. This year, I’m also delighted to note that Women of the Post is included in great company as part of author Janis R. Daly’s 2025 list of 31 Titles about Women in History that educate and inspire. I’m looking forward to picking up some of these titles myself, and I hope you’ll spread the word about them, too.

Juneteenth: Reflections on Freedom and Writing

Jonathan Soren Davidson for Disabled And Here | Disabled And Here project page

I’ve been thinking a lot about Juneteenth and a common response that I have when anyone asks me how I deal with writer’s block. I know more people became familiar with Juneteenth during the pandemic, but I learned about the holiday in the state where it was born, Texas. (I highly recommend reading Annette Gordon-Reed’s slim, enlightening book, On Juneteenth, which I like to return to once in awhile.) I was in my 30s, working in Austin, when I first learned about it. Before that moment, I had never considered the quantum emotional leap that had to be required for enslaved people to transition to full, legal (on paper, at least) autonomy.

And, as a native New Yorker, I had mixed feelings about the holiday, which on its surface felt to me like the celebration of delayed freedom. And understanding what little I do about the Reconstruction Era, thanks to Bryan Stevenson and Kidada Williams especially, the holiday seems to have been observed, always, in an environment of extreme animosity for former dehumanized engines of labor resting up, relaxing and otherwise trying to see what this nation and its attraction to a simple freedom narrative really meant for them. After all, the end of slavery really reached a chilling crescendo in the twelve-year period immediately following the Civil War, when there were so many promising laws meant to offer Black folks a path to full citizenship.

But as part of a system of racial hierarchy, the caste system built here to justify slavery in the first place, the first tool of dehumanization was to cut Black people off from educating themselves. Because without reading or writing, you are chained to ignorance. Reading as a practice is what lead me to writing. Writing is what became the catalyst for personal expression that built the architecture of this amazing life.

Anti-Black literacy laws in this country were meant to strip us of any chance at navigating the world around us. And, as a kind of shorthand whenever anyone asks me about writer’s block and how I deal with it, I say that given that my ancestors were forbidden by law to read or write, I do not have the luxury that the phrase writer’s block insinuates.

The Harvard library talks about the barriers to education for Black people this way:  

 
Between 1740 and 1867, anti-literacy laws in the United States prohibited enslaved, and sometimes free, Black Americans from learning to read or write. White elites viewed Black literacy as a threat to the institution of slavery – it facilitated escape, uprisings, and the sharing of information and ideas among enslaved people. Indeed, literacy undermined the false foundation slavery was built on: the intellectual inferiority and inhumanity of African-descended people.

The small percentage of enslaved people who became literate did so at great risk – those who were caught were often violently punished, sold, or even killed. Because of the danger, enslaved people had to be strategic and resourceful in learning to read and write. They attended secret informal schools taught by free Blacks at night, covertly learned from white enslavers’ children, or found opportunities when enslavers were away.
 

So, what does this have to do with Juneteenth? For me, when I consider the struggle of being truly freed after being conditioned to believe you were unworthy, I also wonder about what it must have felt like to realize that the promise of freedom is not the same as being truly liberated. And the true liberation of Black people in this country has always been and will always be contested, and greeted with hostility. 

Freedom to read and write does not equal liberation from work — in fact, the more you read and write, the more work is ahead of you. You have to understand the context: Once the slaves were free, they had nothing of their own; everything they touched with their hands belonged to white people — Land, clothing, books. There was hunger and drought especially in the South. The last thing anyone probably cared about was writing about it, but this is a reminder to me to read W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.

The hardest thing about writing is how often you fail, no matter how often you try. Much like the paradox my ancestors found themselves living at the end of the Civil War, writing is not a 1:1 scenario. What you put in is not what you get out. Everything about writing is complex, and it resists platitudes and reason.

But these complexities also make writing beautiful, just like the ongoing freedom struggle. They have made me pledge my undying devotion to sitting in quiet places trying to put my thoughts into the right order to share them with you. 

Writers and those who profit from our weirdness make up so many romantic stories about writer’s block and fatigue and distraction. And those ideas are not entirely without merit. But what Black writers have that others do not is the haunting reality of a legacy truncated by racism and racist practices in this country.

Black people who looked like us, who had dreams for their lives and their families like us, also had to go to school in secret and risk their lives to learn what is so abundantly available to us. How many millions of stories have not been written and therefore remain unread that our ancestors did not have the luxury of writing down? Understanding this past, it feels impossible to believe in writer’s block. Whenever I run out of things that feel new to write, I imagine what got buried in the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage. I try to imagine all the other possible futures for those gone too soon.

I think of this when I have to make much smaller sacrifices to make room for what I am here to write, like getting up early before most of the world (on the East Coast, anyway) is up or writing on the rare quiet weekend morning. I think of this whenever anyone asks me a question about how it is I manage to write so much with all the things that I always have going on. And I especially think of these things when I remember that it was not long ago that my ancestors were enslaved, when this country dragged its feet to do what was morally sound, even though we were the ones everyone said were morally corrupt, dangerous and inferior. 

My offering this Juneteenth/Freedom Day is just the reminder that while our freedoms as Black writers may be fraught, contested and resented, they are, nonetheless, freedoms that our ancestors endured much for us to have. May we continue to revel in this abundance, and write to our heart’s content, in their honor. 

My new novel, Women of the Post

It is with great joy and pride that I share the exciting news that my debut novel, Women of the Post, will be published this summer, in July.

Women of the Post follows Judy Washington from the demeaning work of the Bronx Slave Market to the Women’s Army Corps’ 6888th Central Postal Battalion.

The novel is about Black women’s unvalued labor in the workforce that enabled us to overcome fascism and build morale in order to win one of the most significant wars in American history. It is about how Black women’s love for one another and for our country has been both sanctuary and salvation. It is my love letter to the courage it takes to be unique and also be in sisterhood as you evolve.

I will have much more to say about the book and the process of writing it in the weeks and months and years to come. in the meantime, I hope that you’ll pre-order the book — pre-orders are really important for the success of a book! — which is available everywhere books are sold, including Bookshop or directly from your favorite independent bookstore.

Book Review: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Happy summer, as happy as it can be, I suppose. I wanted to drop by to rave a little about Isabel Wilkerson’s masterpiece, Caste, publishing soon and definitely one for you to pick up. Here’s my full review from the Sunday Boston Globe and an excerpt:

“With an old house, the work is never done, and you don’t expect it to be,” writes Isabel Wilkerson in her new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” “America is an old house.” It is a simple analogy that is classic Wilkerson, whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” chronicled the Great Migration through the masterful weaving of thousands of narratives within the United States. In her new book, which should be required reading for generations to come and is as propulsive a reading experience as her debut, she turns her attention to India, Germany, and what their histories have in common with America’s.

A significant work of social science, journalism, and history, “Caste” removes the tenuous language of racial animus and replaces it with a sturdier lexicon based on power relationships. “Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions,” Wilkerson explains, “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry.” Using examples from around the world, she goes on to demonstrate how the codification of caste throughout the world has hardened economic and political inequality into seemingly permanent markers of difference.

Cut Me Loose | Oxford American Winter 2019

So on Mother’s Day, I wandered around Orangeburg to make peace with the parts of Marguerite I didn’t quite know but which still clung to me like smoke. Early in the morning, I parked my rental across the street from the Edisto Memorial Gardens, home to fifty-four varieties of roses. Babbling in the background was the longest blackwater river in North America, an oil-colored waterway connected to the Combahee River—the same water Harriet Tubman used to lead one hundred fifty Union soldiers to various rice plantations on June 2, 1863, to free seven hundred fifty slaves. One thing I knew for sure: my mother loved water and she loved roses.

Only two or three people were around, so I had the place to myself. Downhill, past incredible, tall trees, I went to the water, looking north and south. I walked west, toward the rows and rows of peach- and wine-colored roses, speckled, small, wide, glorious, with names like Glowing Peace and Coretta Scott King and Perfume Delight. Did you ever visit this place? Now, or then? 

Fondling the delicate velvet of a full-bodied rose, I thought of everything a rose would have meant to my mother. How I took for granted a ten-dollar bouquet of fresh flowers when I wanted to attend to my heart, but how such a simple gesture would have been too much for her to even dream about. Even though no one was around me, I didn’t want to disturb the silence, and also, the unchaining. Something rusty and dark in me moved aside, a stone rolling away from a tomb. This was not the raucous, grandstanding, trumpet-blaring Free At Last freedom I’d always said I wanted, but something more profound. A healing. What sounded like my mother’s voice in my ear. I can’t believe you made it. 

I looked up to stop the tears and spotted a Confederate flag flapping with nonchalance above the trees.

Only after my trip would I realize that, geographically, Orangeburg is a kind of nadir as defined by Imani Perry: “the lowest point in an orbit. It is the location directly below the gaze.” Look for it on a map: in comparison with its northern and eastern neighbors, Charleston and Columbia, Orangeburg is down and out of the way, overlooked. 

The rest of my essay in the Winter 2019 issue of Oxford American’s South Carolina issue is here.

The Kerner Report at 50: Dame Magazine

I haven’t been blogging that regularly since the holidays because I’ve been working on some longer form essays and works in progress, along with working on work work and doing other things. But I wanted to take a bit of time to reflect on the 50th anniversary of The Kerner Report and its meaning for Dame Magazine.

The Kerner Report marked the first time in modern U.S. history that government officials acknowledged media bias that favored white narratives and disadvantaged blacks to the detriment of all of American society by underscoring how lazy, biased journalists in unrepresentative newsrooms took the word of “beleaguered” officials in American cities to publish inaccurate figures that gave distorted impressions about the impact of riots on cities, leading to more damage.

There are, unfortunately, too many examples in modern media to provide a comprehensive account of the ways that we have devolved since the Kerner Report. One example is the failure of media to accurately contextualize the rise in domestic extremist terrorism at the hands of white supremacist mass shooters like Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine at Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina, as a serious threat to national security on the same scale as an external threat posed by foreign nationals, Black or Brown people. In a January 2018 report, the Anti-Defamation League reported that between 2008 and 2017, white supremacists were responsible for 71 percent of all domestic terrorism-linked deaths.

Another example of this lack of progress is the way that Black victims of police-involved shootings are often criminalized in death. Immediately after Michael Brown’s death, the New York Times inserted a line in a story about him high in the story saying that “he was no angel,” as if that would explain why police left the boy’s body uncovered in the street after he’d been shot to traumatize the city of Ferguson, Missouri, even further.

The secondary finding of the Kerner Report was more far-reaching and resonant, and is the finding that all media still have not appropriately dealt with.

By and large, news organizations have failed to communicate to both their black and white audiences a sense of the problems America faces and the sources of potential solutions. The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man’s world. The ills of the ghetto, the difficulties of life there, the Negro’s burning sense of grievance, are seldom conveyed. Slights and indignities are part of the Negro’s daily life, and many of them come from what he now calls ‘the white press’—a press that repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America. This may be understandable, but it is not excusable in an institution that has the mission to inform and educate the whole of our society.

This rings true today in what stories make front page news and what stories are completely ignored or never break through.

You can read the whole piece here.