© 2010 The Huntington Archive
I am furious. I am consumed by Kaliesque rage in the pit of my stomach. The shaking that you feel when you know you’ve been pushed too far.
When I sat down to write today, all I could think about was my two year old son. His innocence, his joy. The shaking manifest from my understanding that in a few years, he and I will need to talk about what it means to be a black man in America. My anger grows wings in my realization that I have spent twenty plus years on my mat, thinking/praying that it would be different. Believing that since I see the connection in all things, that maybe we all do. Imagining that he would somehow escape the conversation my grandmother had with me, or her parents had with her. The conversation that lays out that as people of color, we have different rules, different gazes, different demonstrations of ego. I believed that maybe by the time I had children of my own that we would have moved beyond this country’s racial sickness. And, that my little boy would not have to internalize a double standard.
Um, well, no. And, so Kali rears her frightful head. She roars at the thought of my baby keeping his mouth shut when someone calls him a racial slur, or pulls him over for driving his mother’s car. Kali swings her mace at all the police profiling him as he hangs out with his friends or walks from his campus to the convenience store. She rips off heads a the understanding that no amount of education or wealth makes it different. And after her display of anger and violence, all she is left with her is breath. Breathing and looking at the destruction, waiting for a garden to spring out of the blood soaked ground.
I can breath through a handstand, because I know it helps to changes my perspective. I can breath when trying something new on my mat, because I know it’s finite, that with work, commitment and the grace of god, I may make progress. But this, this, I can’t breathe through. It’s not an individual pursuit. For anyone that feels the internal sinking on the mention of Treyvon Martin, for those of you that hear things that make you want to swing a mace in the face of the speaker, for those you that want to roar but feel the need to keep up appearances. I ask you to stop holding it in, to take a deep breath, and exhale together.
Change this big requires the work of many, maybe all, to breathe collectively, and push through the stuck spots in our consciousness that don’t want to budge. We make progress as a society when the load to bear becomes too much for too many. Even though we can be consumed by rage, I want to use it as a door opener. I don’t want this conversation to end, because the news cycle does.
Can we use this anger, and the fear that precedes it to move into conversation? Can we challenge ourselves and others to keep our eyes open? Can we breath? And, then can we talk?
prana project 