Tag: news

If they come for you in the morning

Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night. — An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis, November 19, 1970

There are a couple of great lies about history that we tell ourselves as Americans these days.

One of them is that when something horrific happens — like the imprisonment of infants at our borders, the separation of children from their families, the cruel and barbaric implementation of white supremacist policy without proper process — that it’s the horrific manifestation of the work of a singular evil person’s vision.

But what we know is that history repeats itself. On American shores.

Black and brown children have been caged in this country for many years, have been separated from their families and sold. Native American children, too. These things are often called something different, the process and systems sometimes less extreme and more subtle. These things happen over time — through mass incarceration systems and through broken foster care systems. But they happen here. Disproportionately to black, brown and poor children. Every day.

They have happened, before. After Pearl Harbor.

Last night, I was thinking about this — I’ve been so busy and also trying to protect myself from the trauma that I didn’t read Laura Bush’s take that included the mention of Japanese internment camps — but even before that, I thought about writing in Seattle, after Sept. 11th, and talking to people there about the possibilities of internment camps returning to the U.S. again — this time for Muslim Americans.

In Foreign Policy, (where the image and caption first appeared) George Takei writes an astounding passage about his family’s experience in internment camps:

At least during the internment, when I was just 5 years old, I was not taken from my parents. My family was sent to a racetrack for several weeks to live in a horse stall, but at least we had each other. At least during the internment, my parents were able to place themselves between the horror of what we were facing and my own childish understanding of our circumstances. They told us we were “going on a vacation to live with the horsies.” And when we got to Rohwer camp, they again put themselves between us and the horror, so that we would never fully appreciate the grim reality of the mosquito-infested swamp into which we had been thrown.

Left: A Japanese-American woman holds her sleeping daughter as they prepare to leave their home for an internment camp in 1942. Right: Japanese-Americans interned at the Santa Anita Assembly Center at the Santa Anita racetrack near Los Angeles in 1942. (Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images/Foreign Policy illustration)

Left: A Japanese-American woman holds her sleeping daughter as they prepare to leave their home for an internment camp in 1942. Right: Japanese-Americans interned at the Santa Anita Assembly Center at the Santa Anita racetrack near Los Angeles in 1942. (Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images/Foreign Policy illustration)

What is different now is that we can hear the cries of anguished children, and as our country becomes more authoritarian, see only a few images. So most of us can only imagine what journalists are describing, really. I feel a similar despair and rage that I witnessed Rachel Maddow displaying on my timeline last night. It’s hard to know what to do when there’s already so much that it feels like needs to be corrected and done.

Thankfully, there are a lot of committed people who are sharing resources for how to help if you are able to donate, spread the word via social media or more. Today also happens to be World Refugee Day, and there are a record number of people around the world who are displaced. I hope we remember that what happens to others happens to us, and if they take others in the morning, they’ll be coming for us later on.

The truest thing about American history is that it repeats itself.

Below is a list of suggested actions from one of the list-servs I’m on from when I served in the Obama Administration. Help if you can.

CALL YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS:

Urge Members of Congress to use Congress’ oversight authority to stop separating families and to VOTE DOWN the two anti-immigrant bills moving through the House this week.

The House is expected to vote on two anti-immigrant bills on Thursday, June 21st: one proposed by Rep. Goodlatte and another proposed by Speaker Ryan. Neither bill addresses the administration’s policy of separating families, and neither bill fixes the administration’s decision to end DACA.

On the two anti-immigrant bills:

Please speak out publicly against the Ryan bill and Goodlatte bill in advance of the vote. Statements are particularly needed on Tuesday, June 19th.

United We Dream’s call tool opposing both the Goodlatte bill and Ryan bill: 844-505-3769 directs calls to target House moderates; when folks call the line, they will hear a recording directing them on asks.

Sample script:

  • Oppose Speaker Ryan’s bill, the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2018. The bill hurts immigrant families and communities more than it helps them and damages the moral credibility of the United States by worsening the family separation crisis occurring on the border
  • This Bill Will Worsen the Family Separation Crisis at the Border. Nothing in the bill prevents the Trump administration from taking children away from their parents, despite claims to the contrary. The current mass separations are a matter of policy – not law – and this bill does not compel the administration to change its policy. Not only does it not solve this abhorrent, manufactured crisis, it actually puts children in more danger by stripping away decades of bipartisan protections. The current crisis began with the Trump administration and can only end with action from the Trump administration itself.
  • Sample Vote Recommendation on the Ryan Bill

 

Additional resources from the Immigration Hub:

Analysis/Summary of the Ryan Bill

Fact Sheet: Ryan’s “Compromise” Bill Does NOT End Family Separation

 

On family separation:

  • Ask Members to urge the administration to end the policy of forcibly separating families, particularly by weighing in on social media.
  • Ask Members to also push for President Trump, DHS Secretary Nielsen, and Attorney General Sessions to end the practice of separating and jailing families via letters, appropriations requirements, and Congressional hearings.
  • The ACLU has a call tool specifically for Senators; the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) has a call tool that directs calls, tweets, facebook posts, and emails to all Members of Congress.

In addition, this is a summary of draft bills in the Senate to protect immigrant families that need Republican support:

(S. 2468) The Fair Day In Court for Kids Act.

A bill to provide access to counsel for unaccompanied alien children. You can find the full text here. This is important because every day the U.S. government brings children into immigration court where they are forced to defend themselves without counsel. As a result, thousands of children, some as young as 3-and 4-years-old, are ordered deported without legal representation. Here is the fact sheet from the ACLU.

Please make sure your senators are supporting it here.

(S.2937) The HELP Separated Children Act (Humane Enforcement and Legal Protections for Separated Children Act)

  • This is sponsored by Senator Smith in the Senate and Representative Roybal-Allard in the House. Full text here and list of supporters here.
  • Make sure your Senators AND house members support it.

(S.3036) The Keep Families Together Act

Sponsored by Senator Feinstein. This would define when children can be separated from their parents. Full text here and list of supporters here.

Please make sure both your senators support it.

DONATE

 @netargv
They are some of the best story-tellers of the border region and they are also taking donations for families sleeping outside of ports of entry in extreme heat. They need Diapers, Underwear, Bras, Baby wipes, etc. https://netargv.com/…/take-action-help-asylum-seekers-at-t…/

@LUPE_rgv
One of the most powerful & inspirational organizations is ‪@LUPE_rgv. If you want to help people power grow in this region donate here: https://lupenet.ourpowerbase.net/civic…/contribute/transact…

@TXCivilRights
We can create more accountability if immigrant-supporting civil rights impact litigators have the resources they need to try to intervene in this process in as many ways as possible. One TX based organization doing amazing work is TXCivilRights. They need help to cover more proceedings in more courthouses so that litigators trying to stop this have a better sense as to what is happening as this process lacks transparency across the board. You can donate here: https://texascivilrightsproject.org/donate/

.@RAICESTEXAS
Once parents are separated and prosecuted some move back over into DHS custody and get moved around to other detention centers. This is where having more lawyers who work inside detention centers to help figure out how to get these parents back w/ their kids is important. RAICES has a bond fund to help reunited families and fight their cases from the outside. You can support that bond fund here: https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/bondfund…&

@CCharitiesRGV
You can clean your closet & supply cabinets and clothing donations to Catholic Charities RGV’s shelter for refugees. People arrive with nothing and this place helps clean, feed and clothe them.
Here is a list of items needed:
• Toiletries for men and women (deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrushes, combs, etc.)
• Shoes (sandals, tennis shoes, loafers, etc.) for men, women, children and infants of all sizes
• Clothes (pants, t-shirts, blouses, underclothing, etc.) for children and adults of all sizes
• Baby supplies for toddlers (Pampers, baby wipes, baby bottles, etc.)
• Sealed snack food (granola bars, chips, peanut butter & cheese crackers, etc.)
• Gift cards to purchase food items
• Phone cards
• Plastic bags for families to pack sandwiches, snacks, and water for their trip
And a link to their Amazon wish list:
https://www.amazon.com/…/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awwl_xs_RAajBbYZT9…

BEYOND TEXAS:

The Florence Project legal and social services for immigrant families

Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) provides legal assistance to minors

National Immigrant Justice Center, the NIJC is asking for donations to provide legal representation to parents in IL.
Everything said about Texas is needed everywhere else right now, so check out ‪http://InformedImmigrant.com plug in your zip code find out what organizations are near you and help by volunteering there!
For those interested in helping the children and families separated by the recent raid in Sandusky Ohio, advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) has multiple opportunities to help: https://americasvoice.org/…/advocates-for-basic-legal-equa…/

VOLUNTEER

If you are a lawyer, you can sign up to provide pro-bono services here:

You can also volunteer at Sacred Heart Church, NETA, ProBAR, and the Texas Civil Rights Project listed above if you are in TX or willing to travel there.

You can also refer to the Families Belong Together Guide on How to Help for details about different actions around the country, including the June 30 demonstration outside the White House.

SPEAK OUT
Continue speaking out on social media to raise awareness about the administration’s cruel policy.

Sample tweets can be found here.

 

A full week into Pride Month, but nevertheless…

Transitioning back into writing full-time has also meant getting used to learning how to manage my time — or, I guess, reclaiming it (thank you, Auntie Maxine) — but it also means that as my friend Jennifer has remarked, you realize that “Linear time is a trip.”

h_14472295.jpgAnyway, I worked on this piece for the Village Voice on how erasing black LGBTQ women from Pride almost 50 years after Stonewall defeats the point of what Pride is supposed to mean. I hope you dig it.

While I was working on it, I thought about the piece I reference toward the end, the Questioning Continuum, which I wrote for Bitch back in July 2014. This week, I met someone who said that someone told her that coming out is not really a one time process but something you’re always doing. That, to me, feels kind of exhausting, so I’m not entirely sure about that — and back then, I wasn’t even convinced that I needed to come out at all.

But there are a lot of people who feel, like I do, that they’re not quite heterosexual and they’re not in another category either. And maybe queer doesn’t fit them. But they know that they could fall in love with another kindred spirit and that’s the thing that matters. This blog is for them, or if it’s you, it’s for you. Happy Pride.

Roses for the Living

122517-news-erica-gardner-on-life-support

Roses for the living.

I was thinking of this saying when I first heard that Erica Garner had a heart attack and we were all hopeful for recovery. I was surrounded by my family, and my sweet nephew led us in prayer for her, and my thoughts were consumed with her and her family, what they had been through and the burden black women are asked to constantly carry.

When I was first starting my newspaper career, I wrote for a time almost exclusively about black death and black pain, whether it was killing in Oakland or incarcerated mothers with families trying to sort through how to live without their needed matriarchs. I didn’t fully appreciate then, because no one had ever told me to, the notion of taking care of myself. I did not think that I was sensitive in any particular way to the harrowing and depressing work of being a witness, of being an advocate and especially of straddling the worlds between corporate journalism, where I had to translate the working class and middle class black experience, and the worlds of black folk.

I’m sure it was someone during this time who first used this phrase, to remind me and to remind others that we should give roses and praises to the ones that we love, the ones that are doing the work, while they are still here.

I was also thinking of another ProPublica piece, this one about black-serving hospitals where black mothers have been dying because of substandard care, a reality that could easily be corrected by improving care for them and making it equal to that which white women receive.

My answer to grief and fear and rage, to emotions I can’t name and want to understand or run away from at the same time, is always the same: I pray. I meditate. I read. Then, I try to write.

I looked to Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body and The Gloria Anzaldua Reader and Evelyn C. White’s The Black Women’s Health Book and Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and even bell hooks’ Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. I wanted to lean on the words of someone wiser than myself, someone who has lived this harrowing closeness to death and daily destruction, who understands the weariness of spirit that emerges when you just feel like you don’t know how else to ask the world to stop being willfully reckless with black women’s lives and hearts.

I found some passages that were connected. Some statistics, though we are more than numbers and metrics. Maybe I didn’t find the right words because I am supposed to write them, because they were stuck in my throat.

The only housewarming gift I gave to myself in 2017 was a Molly Crabapple print which is a painting of Audre Lorde with a quote, “Your silence will not protect you.” I put it up in a prominent place in my apartment so that I always have to consider it, so that I never forget. What I most respect and love and admire about women who step forward to fight the battles of their lives as Erica Garner did is that they understand this in a visceral, frontline way. It is not theoretical.

It is easy to feel that if we say nothing, that we are protected. That the suffering of the world, the tyrannies that obstruct justice will forget us. But reading from the full lecture that the quote is derived from, delivered a little more than exactly 40 years ago from a paper published as “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” helped me to remember why it is important to remember to continue to resist the temptation to clam up:

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.”

I had forgotten that this quote talked about how breaking silence gave Audre community, how it gives me, gives us, gave Erica, community even if community is not always enough to save us. Audre wrote this, too:

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear – fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson – that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is also the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you to dust anyway, whether or not we speak.”

That visibility which makes us most vulnerable is also the source of our greatest strength. 

This resonates, and feels true, but also we know from the death of Kalief Browder’s mother, Venida, and now Erica, that the vulnerabilities that come with being visible while fighting the good fight often don’t make us feel strong at all. People praise us with their mouths, but outside of public view is where the real war is – with keeping a life together, with staying healthy, remembering to rest, remembering to grieve, remembering that if there are no roses given to you that you can seek your own — but that too comes at a cost.

As Erica’s mother, Esaw Snipes said, “The only thing I can say is that she was a warrior. She fought the good fight. This is just the first fight in 27 years she lost.”

I tried to not write this at all. I had some down time. I was doing other work and I made myself stop being productive to take care of myself, so that I wasn’t spending an entire day during the last hours of the longest year in modern memory thinking of how many broken hearted black women have died while a complicit nation apologized and watched and then proceeded to kill another one.

I took a friend’s beautiful book of poetry with me to the great continent of Brooklyn for a birthday party, had a couple of drinks, met some great folks, had a good meal and came home, haunted, exhausted, near tears in the wee hours of the last day of 2017. I will not be defeated, not while I’m living, not by racism, not by sexism, not by silences or complicity. Or, at least, I can say I will keep trying not to be.

I do not know how to give myself the luxury of looking away when the world is too much, though, and it is often too much. Zora said there are years that ask questions and years that answer. I hope that 2018 has answers for us.

Who Will Help Black Women Win?

“won’t you celebrate with me

what I have shaped into

a kind of life?

I had no model

Born in Babylon

Both nonwhite and woman

What did I see to be except myself?

I made it up

Here on this bridge between starshine and clay,

My one hand holding tight

My other hand; come celebrate

With me that everyday

Something has tried to kill me

And has failed.” ~ Lucille Clifton

Being a black woman always means having to offer context for your humanity.

It has always meant this. Before Doug Jones’ win. Before this administration. Before hip hop. Before the Black Power movement, the civil rights movement, the Harlem Renaissance.

You get my point.

Being a black woman means that even though you are hypervisible, the intersection of racism and sexism renders you invisible.

As we march toward 2018, it means that unless black women continue to do the important work of contextualizing and elevating our own stories of how we survive, how we win, in the face of continued aggressions and microaggressions, no one will know anything about what we have faced from our perspective.

Earlier this year, the National Domestic Workers Alliance published the State of Black Women in America to zero fan fare at all: “Black women consistently work for a better country, but our country is not working for them,” the report says in part. It details facts that you might suspect but are still tiring to see in the aggregate:

  • More than 80 percent of black women are the primary breadwinners in their families
  • Over 60 percent of black women participate in the labor force — among the highest of any ethnic group, despite the fact that our earnings lag behind that of most everyone else, male or female
  • Nearly 17 percent of non-elderly Black women lack health insurance, though we suffer from higher maternal mortality rates and a host of other health disparities exacerbated by the stress brought on by racial discrimination. (If you missed it or want to know more about the extent to which health disparities are killing black women in particular, this piece co-published by ProPublica and NPR is important and astounding.)

I think about these statistics and many others that aren’t listed above but I just know from my lived experience and from working for much of my life and I wonder how to reconcile this with the continual dismissal of black women’s lived realities. Because even when there has been a legacy for hundreds of years of black women fighting for the survival of each other and everyone else, the work of centuries can be reduced to relevance only for a single moment, a single victory in service of a single man of any race from anywhere in the world.

And then that becomes the narrative that is the most important about what black women are, and what we are good for. That the presiding narrative of being a black woman at the end of 2017 is that we are good at being of service and helping other people win is discouraging. It also begs the question: Who will help us win?

The day that Doug Jones won over Roy Moore in Alabama was a busy one for a lot of reasons, but that’s not why I wasn’t celebrating as hard as everyone else. I was still stunned by news footage of Roy Moore on a horse at the polls, almost certain that the imagery was meant to be as racially intimidating as the underreported voter suppression, and that image stayed on my mind all day.

I turned on my television for approximately two minutes to look at the exit poll data before polls closed. Moore was ahead at that point, so I turned the television off.

Of the effusive love poured on black women in the aftermath, 98 percent of whom voted for Senator-elect Doug Jones, Marcia Chatelain sums it up best writing for Dissent Magazine:

Those who are concerned about black women’s votes may want to study the incredible history of black women’s political organizing in the South, as well as the current odds that are stacked against them across the country. The post-2016 election narrative about red and blue America fixated on the gulf between conservative and liberal whites. This narrative also mourned the loss of a robust, left-leaning white electorate that has shifted rightward because of the incompetence and indifference of the Democratic Party. This analysis, which often elides the importance of racism and xenophobia in predicting white voting patterns regionally, also ignores the complexity of black voters and their motivations. In this moment, perhaps observers should take a few moments to consider how black women in Alabama and Virginia are not that different from black women in California and New York — all are contending with the forces of racism, sexism, and class immobility. Yet local challenges and regional differences dictate both the strategies and the resources black women have to fight these forces. Therefore, appreciating, or simply noting, black women’s voting patterns cannot provide reliable information on ideological divides across region or class, nor can expressions of gratitude make up for the need to organize whites to do anti-racist work.

I want to underscore the very last point: “…Nor can expressions of gratitude make up for the need to organize whites to do anti-racist work.”

In the past year, this has been my main point to anyone who asks me anything about what it is like to be a black woman right now. I am in search of true allies. I am exhausted by the notion that I have to keep repeating that this is not the work of the marginalized to do and to continue doing. I am not sure why media narratives opt instead to focus on more trendy forgotten demographics and yet, it makes perfect sense.

Black women know the work that is ours to do, so we do it. It is now up to other people, people with privileges that we do not have, to work to divest themselves of the comforts that come with their privilege in order to experience even an iota of what it is like to be us by committing to doing the hard work of anti-racist, anti-sexist work. (My friends Courtney and John model what this looks like. Courtney just posted a great piece on organizations led by black women you should support.)

Privilege, of course, is the elephant in all of these organizing spaces that remains unchecked and unchallenged. It is the economic engine that allows for progress. But it is not without its drawbacks if privileged progressives cannot be confronted about their blindspots.

Privilege means not having to confront the uncomfortable truths that black women have to live with, have to breathe in and don’t get to exhale, every moment of every day.

Privilege means knowing that significant swaths of women across economic classes have internalized misogyny and, often, problematic, racist views that allow them to justify it but instead of interrogating them or this trend as it relates to specific candidates, looking on the bright side, and thanking black women for saving you once again.

Privilege is understanding full well that words have power and meaning; remembering that the U.S. Holocaust Museum in November 2016 reminded the world that “the Holocaust did not start with killing but with words” — and still deciding to be complicit in the use of the vague, soft language of bigotry, coddling profiles of hate-mongers and homegrown Lone Wolf terrorists of the like who murder Christian patriots in their own churches simply because they are black, by supporting institutions and people who do not call racism by its true name and are not explicit about the very real, imminent dangers of racism to our democracy.

For our part, it is clear to black women that outside of standing in (surprisingly, occasionally) as a kind of avatar for the moral conscience of state and national electorates, if only because the narrative above feels so distasteful, generally we are the only ones who come to the defense of one another. I’m thinking specifically here of Rep. Maxine Waters, April Ryan, Jemele Hill, Rep. Frederica Johnson and Myeshia Johnson but they are not the only ones, unfortunately.

In one way or another, an attempt was made to silence or bully each of these black women this year — from the President of the United States, no less, or members of his administration — simply because she was a black woman in possession of herself and her voice and for nothing more.

The first and loudest voices coming to their defense, every time, were other black women. For a culture and society so polarized, it is understandable, though it is one of the more troubling ongoing paradoxes of our democracy that we have reached a moment of reckoning against some sexual predators and institutions under the banner of a movement started by Tarana Burke, a black woman, made more visible by well-known white actresses and erasure of working class people who continue to face the fall out and repercussions of unchecked power and manipulation because they cannot afford to come forward without the protections that privilege affords.

Like icons Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, who aggressively, actively and strategically organized against antilynching laws, and the many unsung women of the civil rights movement, of feminist movements of yesteryear and present day, I vote in my best interests. I continue to organize, write, read and amplify voices that are in my best interests and therefore, in the best interests of other black women in our nation, because we are the only ones, apparently, who are invested in us winning.

There’s a lot wrong with that, but the biggest tragedy in that to me is that whatever happens to black women ultimately happens to other women. Being both black and woman, at the bottom of the skin and gender hierarchies, our trajectories are bellwethers for everyone else.

I don’t mind being part of a tribe trying save everyone else. It would be nice, though, if other folks would actively decide to take on some of the responsibility for doing some of the saving. If 2017 taught us anything, it is that there is more than enough work to go around.

Self-care in a time of racial terror

A friend and I were discussing the heroics of Bree Newsome this weekend when I ran out of things to say. Driving in the rain, attending to the life chores that are demanded of us, I was at a loss for how to describe the light that filled me when I saw the video of her climbing that flag pole, descending with Scripture on her lips, calmly informing the irritated men on the ground that she was prepared to be arrested.

The image of her holding on to that flag like a New Age Lady Liberty gave me chills. But it was something else. It felt like permission to breathe after a series of stories in the news that have left me breathless. It was not unlike President Obama’s eulogy for Rep. Clementa Pinckney in Charleston, which was not only one of the most beautiful speeches I’ve ever heard, but also a pointed affirmation of the power of black love to restore back to us our humanity.

In a world where black women are too often invisible, Bree Newsome was and is a symbol of renewal. She gave me life with her act of rebellion, a symbol of how the resilience of black womanhood sometimes eclipses detrimental symbols of hatred. The echo, was “She did it herself.” #WeHelpOurselves, indeed.

Has it been a year, or several months, or an eternity that these headlines have been assaulting us? In the aftermath of Charleston, Dylann Roof, Rachel Dolezal, McKinney, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Marissa Alexander, Rekia Boyd, and the other names of the dead, dying, racially infused, racially polarized or racially symbolic, I have found myself more weary from the news than ever.

There was a time when I felt adrenaline coursing through my veins logging on to social media, to see what news the day or night had brought. Now, I feel a sense of dread and mourning on first glance and it only takes a few minutes for me to feel like I should crawl right back into bed and forget the day.

I have, for all of my adult life, been tethered to the news as a journalist and a writer. Newsrooms were my first sense of community, after the context of classrooms and schools. Even before I became a journalist officially fifteen years ago, I inhaled newspapers and sometimes local TV news in the Bronx. When I was just a consumer, I had the leisure of controlling my consumption. I could put down the paper or magazine; I could turn the TV off. I could create some distance.

I still have that choice but the game has changed. Writing is not just who I am and what I do but it is how I survive in the world. To be a writer, now, is to also be considered a journalist, especially if you are a black writer. These are not problems in and of themselves, but they present special challenges.

When I was researching my new book, I read a line from a journalist of color who said that she was expected to be both a witness to the struggles in her community and an interpreter for her white editors. Though I no longer work in a newsroom, I experience this same conundrum, along racial and political lines. Reaction is considered reporting.

My friend told me what she had read about the Confederate flag, about Dylann Roof, too, and she started to share. I appreciated getting the filtered version from her, I said, but I told her that I had stopped reading the glut of information that came in. Because it was painful. It was too much. I needed time to process and to feel and to see my own emotions, to grieve. To regain some sense of power. To breathe.

Research affirms that black women react differently to witnessing traumatic events than other groups and that includes experiencing the news. There is something about our double jeopardy, our doubly oppressed status that triggers a response in us that is similar to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We lose our appetites. Our sleep is disrupted. We feel anger, fear, despair.

I thought about this again when I watched What Happened, Miss Simone? which chronicles the life and demise of Nina Simone, the high priestess of soul who was not only undone by manic depression but also her political expressions of rage against racism and racial terrorism. In the film, you can see how systemic racism squelched not only her voice but her spirit.

What black women know, what we feel, at all times, is that there are multiple prices to pay for acknowledging our truth and speaking it. We have seen it over the decades. Strange fruit, swinging from the trees. Literally, figuratively.

As a black woman writer, I pay two tolls when news of racial terrorism breaks: the first is the impact it has on my body and spirit; the second is the weight of expectation that I perform my reaction, that at the very least, I publicly process the act of witness, making that more of a priority than reconciling a deluge of images, commentary and reporting over my internal, personal processing.

To be black in America is to know that few people care about your health or safety or well-being.

It is to live daily with the reality of a horrific, skyrocketing suicide rate among little black children who do not have the luxury of believing we care about a future that affirms their lives.

It is to be told outright or by silence that even when you have nothing to say, even when you are too tired to react or respond, you stand in the gap. But for grace, you might be dead now, so speak, in spite of weariness or fear or dread.

There is truth in that. It is also true that self-care is a political act. An assertion of worth. An assertion of the belief that you deserve silence and time. You deserve your love and attention as much as anything or anyone else.

Sometimes, when I am silent, it is not because of apathy, but an abundance of feeling. An acknowledgment that I need to step back before lashing out. To rediscover joy. To heal. To witness. To hold symbols of hate in my hands and work to dismantle them while praying the consequences that unfold will not destroy my life.