It Is All Connected

I grew up before the cable news era. In our household the 30-minute local and 30-minute national news were a part of each weeknight. After Mass, we would return home and the television was tuned to the Sunday news coverage featuring interviews of political and social leaders. Mind you, this was not exclusive to my immediate family. This common pattern unfolded in the homes of other family members, neighbors and friends. Often, there were also newspapers and news magazines on a sofa or coffee table. Each was an invitation to learn about the world in which we live. As people in Black bodies, the adults heard the spoken and unspoken words impacting the reports. This was a living practice for discerning credibility in a racially polarized context desiring to marginalize you.

In paying attention or being mindful to what is unfolding around us, we begin to recognize the obvious connections some would prefer to ignore or obfuscate. This is normative for those with some level of authority, power or privilege. They do what they can to muddy the waters so they protect their status.

Today, many of our governmental leaders are so far removed from most of our lived experiences that it seems as though they live in an idealized ivory tower in which each timepiece is as accurate as the official atomic clock time. There are no power outages, batteries do not die, and no one alters the time. They function, the people not the clocks, with hubris instead of reason and compassion. Because the nation’s so called founding fathers intentionally chose to address the injustice of chattel slavery with silence, I do not see how they were different other than George Washington setting the precedence of leaving office.

Earlier this week, a friend sent me the video of Renee Nicole Good’s murder. My only response was “Colin Kaepernick knelt…” Those three words convey what the hearts and minds of many of us know. Imagine a world in which this woman did not die at the hands of her government. Imagine a world in which the suffering of and deaths in the global community were not exacerbated by the hands of our government. Imagine things being different because the people of this nation heeded the call for accountability and justice. If only their vision was not so myopic, so self-centered.

Colin Kaepernick, a man of privilege as a professional athlete and a man in a Black body, used his platform to nonviolently speak against police brutality and racial injustice by taking a knee during the national anthem. The outrage and threats did not dissuade him. His moral compass compelled him to accept the risk of kneeling during the anthem for each of the 11 games in which he played in the 2016 season. By kneeling he confounded racists as he dispelled the age-old narrative of the violence of men in Black bodies. Five years later, the NFL agreed to stop judging the cognitive abilities of players by race.

In the 2024 presidential election, 92 percent of women in Black bodies voted for Kamala Harris. Our decision-making skills were minimized as others assumed we voted for her because she too is in a Black body. That is projecting onto us what people in white bodies have done since before the nation’s founding. As a child, my father told me that if someone made a Polish joke, I needed to wonder what they would say about me. As women in Black bodies, we are canaries in the coal mine. We seek to recognize empty promises that will harm our communities and ourselves. We recognize the collective. When the majority of us agree and issue a warning, everyone else needs to pause with grave concern because no one is immune from the harm of cruelty.

Many women in white bodies sit with pride on a pedestal of privilege even when they know the truth of it not existing. Pretending to keep them on a pedestal is to prevent them from living fully, engaging with the world and questioning the injustice of authority. Renee Nicole Good’s murder and the government’s response reveal the truth. The falsehood derives from a common claim of racism and white supremacy that men in white bodies must protect their women in white bodies from men in Black and Brown bodies.

You do not need me to tell you how often men in Black bodies are identified as suspects in cases in which they were not involved. If you do need my guidance in this area, research Emmett Till, and Charles Stuart. Again, this an example of projecting one’s behavior on another and is a legacy of chattel slavery when it was a common and legal practice for men in white bodies to rape women in Black bodies simply because they could with no retribution. The wives, women in white bodies, were to accept these rapes and their own because they too were denied bodily autonomy even while atop a pedestal.

My name and this blog are not well known, nor do I have a massive social media presence. However, as a Catholic Christian woman in a Black body born during the Civil Rights era, my lived experiences and contemplation lead me to firm and expanding opinions on the role of race in our society and systems, and how this flawed construct is embodied in particular by people in white bodies who benefit from it as intended by their ancestors. I not only mourn the passing of Renee Nicole Good, but all of those dying globally because of the intentional cruelty and greed of Donald John Trump and his supporters.

Lest we not forget how Covid-19 ravaged the global community during his earlier administration. The first cases were diagnosed here six years ago. Of the 7.1 million people who died of Covid-19, the largest number, 1.2 million, were from the United States of America.  The mortality rates of persons identifying as Black, Native American and Hispanic were twice those of persons identifying as white. It is all connected.