The Fire This Time

The Fire This Time: Josh Buchin

America is on fire. In truth, America has always been on fire. The fire has raged for 400 years. But now it feels as if people are finally looking out their windows and noticing the conflagration. While America burns, I’ve been thinking about privilege, one of the main reasons America is aflame. Some people have privilege and others are denied access to what advantage brings. Consider two kinds of ‘entitlements’: the privilege of ignorance and the privilege of choice. Combined, these two permit the larger indulgence of inaction.

It’s maddening how slowly we respond to the suffering of others. Had the level of outrage happening now taken place years ago, perhaps George Floyd would still be alive. Breonna Taylor might still be among us. How many African-American lives could have been saved? But belatedly, people are paying attention. And by people, I mean white people in America. Because if you are a Black person in America, you never have the luxury of not paying attention to race. Your whole existence is defined by your skin colour. And now White people are thinking about race too. The fact that, like most White people, I have spent most of my life never thinking about my own race is privilege. White Americans have always had the liberty to plead ignorance about race, to talk about it only in the context of the other, to behave as if race is something that happens to someone else.

The second privilege relates to choice. I’m reminded of a piece of text from the Babylonian Talmud, the central work of Rabbinic literature, which is the major guiding light for Jews. Composed in Babylonia, now Iraq, the 6th century CE text feels eerily prescient, telling us: “Anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of one's household and does not, is punished for the actions of the members of their household; anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of one's townspeople and does not, is punished for the transgressions of the townspeople; anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of the entire world and does not is punished for the transgressions of the entire world.” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 54b-55a).

This text tells us something that should be intuitive – all of us, living in interconnected communities, are responsible for one another. However, just because it’s intuitive doesn’t mean it’s easy. I find many excuses not to actively protest. Primarily, my life is not threatened by a police force that exists to subjugate and control my race. Had I been born a different skin colour, my priorities would reflect this. But I am not afraid of the police, have never had any reason to be. My experience is a White one. I don’t know what it’s like to be pulled over while driving for doing nothing, to have to keep my hands where the officers can see them at all times, to fear my life is endangered by this encounter. I don’t know the urgency people of color feel right now. As a White person, I have the privilege of choices that many do not.

The privileges of ignorance and of choice combine to soothe me. I don’t have to do anything, retreating into my cave of Whiteness. I can stop Googling “protests,” ignore the New York Times for a few weeks, let everything go back to normal. What I am most afraid of is that this is what will happen. That most White people will feel that too much is being asked of us already – we are living through a plague, after all! – and that trying to navigate 400 years of systemic racism and systematic oppression is beyond the scope of what we can handle right now. I am worried that the fire currently igniting America will subside and leave only embers in its wake. I am worried that the privilege of inaction will win out.

Eventually, life will go back to some kind of normal. But for people of color in America, normal is totally unacceptable. We must continue to show up; not just now while BLM is trending on Twitter, but forever, even when doing so is unpopular again. We must change how we view people of color, starting with an examination of the ways we see our own race. We must advocate for deep structural and systemic change to almost every aspect of American life. Most critically, we must not fall back on our privileges – of ignorance, of choice, and of inaction. Moving beyond our White gaze will be uncomfortable, scary, challenging. But it’s time to give up our privileges, time to find a new way of being in the world with others.

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Recommended reading: So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo; How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi; I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin. .https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/306/306949/i-am-not-your-negro/9780141986678.html

Josh Buchin is a rabbi, scholar, teacher, writer. He currently does all of the above in Berkeley, California. He can be reached at joshbuchin@gmail.com

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Chalking It Up

Oakland, California; Spring 2020: Chalking It Up

When COVID-19 hit Oakland, California, the first thing to go was toilet paper. Videos of shoppers fighting over the last rolls went viral. By the time I got to the store, nothing was left but napkins.

On my first pandemic grocery store visit, I walked around an entire block just to get in line to enter. 6 feet markers were spray-painted onto the pavement to assist shoppers in social distancing. For two hours, dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of impatient strangers stood in line, shifting back and forth and trying not to step in the accumulating gum on the sidewalk. We stooped over our phones. Headphones in. Shuffling up 6 feet at a time.

Once we entered the store, it was a silent war. Over our masks, we glared at one another and speed-walked our shopping carts to the hand sanitizer aisle. The floor had grey streaks from people dragging their carts in the race to canned goods. Anyone comparing products in an aisle was impeding someone exiting the store as fast as possible. And then, in the unusually long check-out line, I realized the store was absolutely silent. No whining children, no negotiating couples, no friends planning parties. Because everyone in the store came alone.

Returning home, I washed the groceries. Supposedly it doesn’t do much for sanitation, but it goes a long way for sanity and the illusion of control. Then back to my “9-5”. I had stomached my shame and moved back to my parents’ house in Oakland to continue searching for a job. My “9-5” was scrolling through online postings. I covered my whiteboard with dreams and brainstorms. I would have my own apartment with a garden in the back. Somewhere pretty, not cemented over and gentrified like Oakland. On weekends, I’d paddle nearby rivers. Mornings would begin with a run through a beautiful network of trails. My partner would come with me to weekly environmental justice activism meetings. Our community would know they had to actively participate in making change, and would mobilize. These jobs would be far away, in places with natural spaces and communities that cared.

Then there were the bad days. I would get a disheartening call from a friend, or slip up and go on Facebook. One friend just rented a house with her partner. Another friend just became a model. Someone else got published. How were they already so successful even though we are the same age? On those days, I counted the rejections I’d received. I reread the emails from organizations that had asked me to interview, only to shut down or cancel their job opening. I deleted all notifications saying there would be a delay because my application was one of thousands. There was no time for rest – I was competing with thousands! On those days, I had to justify my breaks with productivity. I’d head to the grocery store or pull out a recipe book. Let my hands feel good at something while my mind was despairing.

At the grocery store, the toilet paper is back on the shelves. A paper sign informs shoppers the store is enforcing a limit on how many rolls one person can buy. Everyone wants to be prepared for the apocalypse, but now we’re forced to let our neighbors survive too.

At home, I ask my sisters, finishing their university classes online, to help me wash the groceries. We argue over whether someone is legitimately too busy to help, before all pitching in. Then I check my email and fabricate the times I am “available” for an interview. Actually, I am all too eager to move my 10:00 breakfast or afternoon bike ride to any time of any day to start making progress. What does progress even mean in a time like this?

I daydream images of myself meditating, decide to sign up for some online classes, and somehow end up drowning in the most recent news updates and Coronavirus counts. I imagine being propped up on a hospital bed and breathing through a tube while sitting with the question everyone has when they are sick: am I going to be ok?

My siblings complain about their professors. I complain about how there are no jobs in my field. But this feels futile when I think about friends and family dying. I pick at my split ends and worry. Realizing I’m not getting anything done, I end my day at 4:00 on a bike ride.

I just start pedalling. Clunking over Oakland speed bumps and potholes, I tear up behind my sunglasses and mask. My breath feels heavy with thoughts of death and mortality, but my neighborhood forces me to keep looking around – if only to avoid hitting the dozens of other bikers who need the same escape I do.

A door slams and a neighbor shuffles onto the porch balancing gardening tools. Across the street, another neighbor is already on his knees in the dirt, humming. A camp chair sits on a porch awaiting social distance cocktail hours with friends. A block’s worth of kids are squatting in their front yards, fingers and knees covered in chalk. Up the street, a cardboard fort sits on a front lawn. Someone has a pool table in their driveway with rules about neighborhood quiet hours. Many houses have teddy bears tucked into street-facing windows.

Even with the pandemic’s horror, my neighbourhood is kid-friendly, urban, not unhappy. My friends and I trade photos of our thriving sprouts and joke about dreams we once had about our lives after college. In the void created by the pandemic, I can hear the world and the movements around me much more clearly.

And then the world explodes again. George Floyd is murdered. Minneapolis is on fire. Streets all over the United States are filled with chanting protestors. My neighborhood responds, and I am caught up in another enormous societal upheaval.

News reports tell of four Black people found hanging from trees. When it’s phrased that way, it sounds far too peaceful. Like a swing swaying in the breeze. It doesn’t consider the struggle leading up to that point. I can only imagine if it were me being pinned down and subdued by others’ brute strength. My own fear stifling my ability to scream; unable to draw upon my own strength because my body already knows and is quaking out of my control. That moment when I feel someone else overpower me, and I realize I’m going to die. My human life. Not a swing.

I start recognizing neighbors at Black Lives Matter protests. The antithesis of silent grocery shoppers pitted against one another. My voice unites with strangers’ as we chant and dance down familiar Oakland streets. We are thousands of diverse individuals marching to the same heartbeat. Even as we go back to isolated homes, we read and view the same things. We cry privately, but together. In front of the Oakland police department, several protesters kneel to chalk words of love for Black lives onto the pavement.

I see these messages affirming Black lives written on handmade signs taped to my neighbors’ front doors and rear windshields, painted in the windows of local shops. Black Lives Matter. Stay Safe. Defund the Police. Kindness is Everything. White Silence is Violence. We are All in this Together. When I climb on my bike, my tires roll over faded chalk-art and the meticulous labor of writing out the names of Black lives lost to police brutality. As I grapple with the weight of this time, I read in the chalked streets of Oakland that this struggle is shared.

Samara Rosen

Samara Rosen recently graduated from Hampshire College with a degree in the Human Dimensions of River Conservation and a craving for activism. Her recent research explores relationships with rivers and the motivation behind river rebels and change-makers. These days, you can find her exploring public lands, learning about the intersection of social movements and chalking up some Oakland sidewalks.

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We welcome your reactions and thoughts to any and all postings. Please email us at editors@emergingvoices.co.uk or respond via our social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

“Black People are Not Allowed to Enter this Restaurant”

I am not a stranger to racism. Racism is a global experience for African people, and Coronavirus is intensifying that reality. I am an African woman currently residing in the United States. I was confused when I heard the slogan,“We are in this together.” Who is this “we” the mainstream media is talking about? In the U.S., because of systemic racism, African-Americans die at a higher rate from the virus.

You would think China would be more empathetic since it was the first nation to be impacted by the pandemic. On the contrary, Chinese citizens singled out African immigrants by attacking their businesses, barring them from public services and evicting them from rented apartments. African women, who depend on demeaning jobs mostly as domestic workers, are humiliated and often deported from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

With no evidence, these countries blame Africans for spreading the virus. As my village elders in the Yotti/Bali community of Northern Nigeria put it, “when a person is drowning, he or she would hold onto even a straw.” Blaming Africans gives racists a sense of comfort in a time of uncertainty. And because anti-Blackness is normalized globally, racists have no fear in dehumanizing Black people. Africa has been good to the world, yet the world does not reciprocate. The world can learn from Africans about ubuntu (the philosophy that teaches about community). A true community looks out for its members--and also looks after strangers--in times of crisis. When Europeans were searching for greener pastures and natural resources in order to build their infrastructure, they came to Africa. Unfortunately, many of them repaid the continent by forcibly colonizing and enslaving Africans. This maafa (a Swahili term for great suffering) did not prevent Africans from being kind to foreigners, especially refugees. In my region of West Africa, we opened our borders to Lebanese refugees fleeing violence in their home country, making it possible for Lebanese to thrive on African soil. In fact, African hospitality goes back to ancient times. It is said that Ethiopia provided shelter for the Prophet Muhammad and his disciples when they escaped persecution in their homeland of Mecca. To avoid the wrath of King Herod of Judea, Jesus and his parents are reported as having fled to another part of Africa--Egypt.

Africans provide a concrete model for how to treat vulnerable members of a collective. Being in community entails a commitment which means letting go of some comfort in order to make room for others. The racist attacks that Africans are experiencing during the pandemic tells us we are not in this fight together. Perhaps someday we may get there and see Blacks of whatever background as equal members of the human family.

Yoknyam Dabale