Tracie Spencer and a Love for America

John Coltrane’s, A Love Supreme, has been the soundtrack for this project. It has been a fittingly melodic and chaotic companion.

Happy 250th to the United States of America.

During the summer of 1988 I fell in love with Tracie Spencer, an older woman at that, she was 12 and I was 11. Who is that, you ask? Tracie was (is) a RnB / Pop artist. Her song, Symptoms of True Love, not only was it my favorite song in the world, but it described my feelings for her. I watched her music videos hundreds, if not, thousands of times - and this was back when you had to rewind tapes.

Nonetheless, I was undeterred by the struggle.

My family went down to Tampa that summer and one of the items I took was the Tracie's album, which on its cover had, a large portrait of her face. When I slept, the album -- this is a little embarrassing to admit -- rested next to me on a pillow. When I left for the day, the album was placed safely on her pillow.

I later got in trouble with my parents as I'd called #411 to get the number of the recording studio in Iowa, where she recorded her album. I called and (lied) told them that I was the president of her fan club and I we sought her contact info. The guy on the phone, politely declined.

I never succeeded in making contact with Tracie Spencer. Despite the depth and nature of my real feelings, I'd never met her. I didn't know her at all. Ultimately, I was infatuated with the idea of a person I'd never met.

It wasn't until Bible college and life in Chicago when I began to learn about truths about the treatment of my people, which defied the stories I'd been given through high school. That hurt. I'd also met students who told me of America's foreign policy in action in their countries. And of the coups we orchestrated. And of the despots and dictators we helped put into power. This defied the history I'd given through high school.

Despite the nature and depth of my real feelings, I didn't know my country that well. Ultimately, I was infatuated with the idea of a nation that didn't exist.

Like so many of my fellow Americans, I was taught of our noble heritage and of the purity of our Founding and of the perfection of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. We were a people without peer. Chattel enslavement was a mere footnote and a moral accident by deeply moral people. Genocide of the indigenous was never spoken of.

It became aware to me that If America's mother is freedom and liberty our father is genocide and slavery. Like many other nations, we weren't birthed in innocence. It's just that too often we deny who our father really is. We are afraid to look into the mirror because some days we look like our mother and other days just like our father.

I've had countless numbers of conversations on race, racism, and American history and life with countless numbers of white folks - it's been part of my work and civic life for a number of years. On occasion one of them tells me about many in their broader friend and family networks. "They don't know and they don't want to know." Meaning, they don't care to know about how their America has treated non-whites past or present.  

Let's just say, that one day I met Tracie Spencer and we hit it off. And, as we were growing closer, she begins to share the pains of her life, what's been done to her, what she's done to herself, and what she's done to others. And, I say, "I don't know and I don't want to know". What would we call this? This isn't an act of love, its rejection.

I try to be careful about making absolute statements, unless I'm quite sure, and with this I believe that I am:

Most of the Americans who claim to love America the most know the least about America. They are infatuated with the myth and fantasy of a nation that has never actually existed. They don't want their kids or any school anywhere to teach about the evils of our nation with any depth, or at all. They want the books that tell a fuller and fairer American story banned from libraries. They don't know and they don't want to know.

This isn't love for America, this is rejection of America.

Maybe, they are afraid that if they learned the fuller and fairer story of America, they'd grow to hate the country? Or maybe they don't know how to hold it all together in their hearts and minds - freedom and liberty and genocide and chattel slavery?

We cannot love what we do not know.

Speaking as one who's put in work (not complete) to learn a fuller and fairer story of America, there were times when had to put the article down or stop the documentary or pulled over the car and turned off book. The shock, grief, and shame were overwhelming.

There were also times of joy when I learned about the secret struggles and successes of those who were not yet free. Or, of those who set their captives free. Or, of those who somehow believed in and loved a nation that did not love them back. I was also blessed to walk alongside others who were in the midst of their work of learning more. And there were elders and guides who illuminated the journey.

We can't make someone love us back. There is nothing in the Declaration of Independence of Constitution about America's love for its citizens or its citizens love for it. There is often a quick national disposition to bully or heckle Americans who may not love the country.

Love must be given freely. Maybe, we can offer curiosity instead of a demand for loyalty. Maybe, for some they've found a way to love their neighbor and their community while struggling to love our powerful, yet imperfect nation.

We are not well and this sickness began a long time ago. And like an arthritic who senses when the rain is on its way, many of us feel that more violence is to come if we don’t out wrestle our demons.

We are not what we once were, but we are not yet what we can be. It’s not too late for us to set aside the untruths of old and take up the liberating burden of accepting the truth of our national story and legacy of our original sins. It may be that the future of America depends upon us reckoning with the implications of the past upon the present.

Genesis

Not long after my own beginning I discovered that the land beyond my neighborhood was ruled through some kind of color-based hierarchy. Those with the lightest skin were in command and were nearly the only faces I saw on tv. When I was 5, like so many African American kids before and since, I saw the innumerable images of white faces and thought that I had one too.

One day I said to my mom, “I’m white and you and my brother are niggers”. I remember the look on her face - she was stunned, appalled, and distraught. It was obvious that I had done something very wrong and I became embarrassed and ashamed. Through her pain she provided evidence to convince me that I wasn’t white. Before I could name all the colors in my box of crayons the caustic rays of white supremacy had already began to poison my young soul.

My family moved from North Carolina to the suburbs of Chattanooga, TN in the mid-80s. We were a black family in a white neighborhood (the first to integrate), who went to an all-black church, and attended white, private Christian schools. I was a social theorist at a young age and loved learning. Oddly enough, my favorite tv show was Perry Mason.

As a 9-year-old I had good grades and was the chess champ of my class. Yet, I continued to see the magnitude of images (news, tv, movies, etc.) of where people like me were in society and within the apparent story of human history. It became evident that because I was black, I was supposed to be unintelligent. I concluded that the education system couldn't be for me and created a new plan - my way forward would be through extracurricular activities and sports.

As a 4th grader I stopped studying. My grades fell and I was never the same.

Ultimately, I became a socially successful student politician and athlete, but remained a sub-mediocre student. I had kind, talented, and dedicated teachers and it was in school where I gained my deepest sense of national pride and exuberance about being born in the freest nation in the history of mankind.

I was taught that God breathed into America’s founding documents and our Founding Fathers were akin to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And that America was a special, Christian nation foreordained by God before the foundations of the world. We were the neo-Israelites - God's modern chosen people.

Slavery was a mere moral accident that was fixed by Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, but the ethnic cleansing of natives was the silent sin of America no one ever spoke of. It is common practice in American schools to tell a stunted story of our national sins.

In my high school's U.S. History textbook slavery was covered in 4 short sentences. 246 years of a complex and near ubiquitous system of abduction and stolen labor that enriched the colonies and the nation was reduced to 4 sentences. I vividly remember the moment in class. It was jarring - I held my breath in shock.

I was no Henry Louis Gates, Jr. or Jon Meacham but I knew that slavery was too significant and harrowing to be shoved into a single paragraph. An evil myth that was implicit in the framing was that what happened to Africans was logical and inevitable. Anyone who would've gone to Africa 4 centuries ago would've seen the utter intellectual, moral, and societal void and deduced that Africans (me) were cursed by God and fit for enslavement.

During my time in college at Moody Bible Institute, in Chicago, I began learning from friends who were taking African American history classes. What they reported was intensely irksome, perplexing, and confusing. Abduction, rape, grand theft, mass murder, branding humans, and violent forced labor weren't Christian ideals I'd ever heard of. Nor, did those actions match the purported character of the Founders.

Because of my family and church, I'd always known the story was more complex and violent, but not to what extent. I didn't understand why they (school, tv shows, movies, politicians, news, etc.) couldn't just tell me the truth. I felt violated and betrayed. I had to make the choice to either actively blind myself to the truth or to set aside the myths.

One-year campus was stricken with an outbreak of widespread, overt racial strife. My RA and good friend, J.P. Wilson, was a young black man from Des Moines, IA, chosen vision and theme for the year was, "Unity in the Midst of Diversity". He was and is an affable, perceptive, caring, astute, pastoral, and funny person. He hosted impromptu discussions on race.

I often attended and noticed a few trends. Firstly, my white floormates would inevitably say the wrong thing and I could sense it before it happened through their nonverbals. It started with their feet and worked itself up and out their mouths. Secondly, my black floormates would often get wounded by ignorant comments and would sometimes respond in anger.

In turn, my white floormates would withdraw. Inevitably these conversations broke down quickly. The history that so many of my white friends were taught left them ill-prepared to engage effectively - they were so much like I was only months before; they didn't know their own history, yet they were absolutely confident in their sense of history.

The reality of what I and my black floormates lived often left us impatient with this learned ignorance - it was painful. What I didn't know then, is that we were all traumatized by our nation's racial sins. It was during that time that I became convinced that a part of my working life was to be spent working within my community toward racial healing.

Before I left Chicago, I began studying economics around the time of the 2004 presidential election season, which for me are like the Olympics, NBA Finals, Super Bowl, fresh snowfall, puppies, and my mama's macaroni and cheese combined. I've missed only 3 debates since 2000 and that includes the primaries. One trend that stood out was how the loss of manufacturing jobs due to automation and relocation effected many American communities.

As the son of a former office worker, former labor organizer, and longtime entrepreneurs I became obsessed. I saw that that trend first hit inner cities and that those losses destabilized what were once vibrant communities in New York City, Memphis, Chicago, Birmingham, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, and Gary among many more. It had been difficult for me to reconcile the state of many African American communities post the legislative victories of the 1960s.

Before the Civil Rights movement began the jobs where millions of black folks worked were being automated out of existence or began moving out of their communities, first in the North and then in the South, into white suburbs where they couldn't legally purchase homes.

The fastest way to a complicated individual and communal crisis is the economic crisis that rapid structural changes in the economy yield. What was troubling beyond these facts, was that there was essentially no national mention or empathy.

Poor African Americans were simply portrayed as being lazy, welfare queens, morally unchaste, and government dependent, or were pitied. Yet, the 2016 election was largely one of lament and mobilization for the white communities that were ultimately (later) devastated by the same kinds of massive job losses. Those communities were rightly seen as victims of bad economic policies, offshoring, corporate interests, and automation.

A double-minded nation is unstable in all its ways, as is double-minded church. We were founded with a moral and psychological schism within our soul. Like many nations present and before, we yielded to the temptations toward excess, cruelty and violence. Within our prominence - our Golden Rule and our Great Commandment became an insatiable lust for money, land, and power.

Can freedom and liberty spring forth from enslavement? Can life and the pursuit of happiness spring forth from mass murder? In the midst of our power, we have a longstanding tradition of dehumanizing groups of fellow humans and image bearers of God, in order to morally justify taking their lives and liberty.

We are being haunted by our past. Despite the efforts of our greatest citizens a vast shadow cast by unaddressed racial wrongs and unhealed racial wounds makes bleak the brightest ideals expressed by the Founding Fathers. The only unalienable right my family had in 1776 was the freedom to labor in enslavement for the emancipation of white, land-owning men and America itself.

The evil effervescence of racial strife hid its public face from some for term but abounds anew. The scope of our profound divisions has dulled our collective, creative capacity to imagine and labor together toward freedom and healing.

We are being undone by or present. An immense and consuming pressure is mounting in the U.S. in the midst of a mass redistribution of wealth, political pettiness and gridlock, demographic changes, and a great technological awakening. Many of our advancements have brought increased efficiency and life but many also have wrought devastation and death.

Many of my fellow citizens have been displaced from jobs that pay the bills and many more fear that there is an inevitable tide of loss and economic blight soon to vanquish all that their families have worked for. Our mass incarceration, our opioid crisis, our mass shootings, our tent cities are not merely chimes blowing in the wind but clanging bells warning that these winds of change are actually a hurricane of upheaval and volatility.

How long can our divided house stand?

In my attempt to be responsible to what I began to understand in college, over the past 5 years I've read thousands of pages, had hundreds of individual conversations, facilitated hundreds of discussions, and presented to numbers of audiences.

Beyond our many myths the story of the United States is not for the faint of heart. Tragically the American house was built upon stolen land and its foundation by the hands of stolen labor.

At our genesis was genocide – the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous and the mass theft of billions of acres of their ancestral lands, the grotesque and grand trafficking and enslavement of millions of Africans, and the unsavory subjugation of women and the poor. We like many other nations sold our soul for stolen soil and free labor. I Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil”.

Will we ever relish the warmth of a unified home?

We are not what we once were, but we are not yet what we can be. It’s not too late for us to set aside the untruths of old and take up the liberating burden of accepting the truth of our national story and legacy of our original sins. I believe that there something profoundly life giving for us on the other side. Until we reckon with our genesis there can be no revelation of reconciliation.