shadow work is fun for the entire family! a poetic response to white guilt

_{descent
/dəˈsent/
noun
an action of moving downward, dropping, or falling.
"the plane had gone into a steep descent"
synonyms: dive, drop; More
the origin or background of a person in terms of family or nationality.
"American families of Hungarian descent"
synonyms: ancestry, parentage, ancestors, family, antecedents
descent is sometimes confused with decent and dissent}

an opening in the wood
beckoned you to see the thing just beyond the surface for forever that
everyone noticed but nobody looked at

but why should i feel guilty

for my ancestor's great ancestors' ancestors of ancestors' ancestors' ancestor

feel touched by the light you've been granted to see
you see

it's a favor not a burden

none of us are free
til all of us are free

---

there is a story wanting to come through every life, a story which connects backwards through time to one's ancestors, one's chthonic place, to one's bones, which are the bones of the earth itself. if we can, through our listening, draw that story into the open, there is a chance that we can begin to live in alignment with our deepest contributive nature - a fact which will serve the entire community.[1]

---

---

anon anon anon again

the shadow a community
begging to be remembered
//go down and enter through
like you traveled into
the oak in the woods
//the blacksmith in the
underbelly has news for
you yet
//See
be willing to see and to
//feel
the work will not kill
you pain never killed
only tempered like fire
burning, we need more forging,
that honest day's work
//don't go back to sleep
there are whispers of the
ages who have picked your ear
//Listen
you were never alone

but they whisper to me
and before i sleep
i hear
"why should i feel guilty for something i wasn't even alive for
can't i just enjoy the score"

---

“An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.” [2a]

---

is acknowledging my ancestor's power over your ancestor when your ancestor
was yet 3/5ths of a white man [2b]
guilt

guilt is only one step on the journey toward reconciliation
(they all whisper, keep going)

just last week i learn Guillaume Vigne
my 12th Great Grand Father
was Theodore Roosevelt's 7th Great Grand Father

and when Teddy was entering office,
on the privilege of merit
& bloodline, of course,

at the turn of the 20th century
inheriting $125,000 from his father's death, enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life. [3]
African Americans
"lived and worked on farms in the South and did not own their home"
just as the Jim Crow Laws were taking off and
Plessy v. Ferguson legalized segregation [4]

do you feel guilty about this?
why should you // you didn't do it
so are you being made to feel guilty
and what do we do about it now
as white people who for
generations were given a leg up
(and why do white people contend this fact as if 80 years were enough time to make up for over 200 years of buying, selling, raping, breeding and whipping)

leg up-not even by money (maybe your ancestors were poor)
but based on the
sheer fact that
you could drink
out of whatever water
fountain you pleased

and didn't see
your friends or
uncles
being
lynched

this is the sad painful past
we all must
come to grips with
even if you always knew it
nearly all our ancestors
looked away
or remained silent (as was their privilege)
or kept working hard

---

why not let yourself be forged in the fire
descend
to contend with these facts
that your history & theirs
differs in startling ways

do not let emotions of turmoil
turn you away from doing the work

and anyone who says that whites are being made to feel guilty, keep going
while the united states continues its surveillance and subjugation of black and brown bodies,
we are wondering at our guilt

even in the 60s biracial couples had bricks thrown in their windows
and daddies across this nation still hope their princesses
marry white prince charmings
(while ppl still contend #notallwhitedaddies)

these are the painful tales that haunt us still
racial slurs surfacing in families even to this day
(it is the collective unconscious of our continent
continually resurfacing for us to see
because we haven't done the work
of fully facing it)
i myself face "jokes" from neighbors
about muslims, blacks, anyone different

and it's not funny
and unless we descend
"drop in"
and take a look & stand up
,,, who will?

the steps that Amurrica may have
made do not discount
the countries it's destabilized(ing)
putting false regimes in their place [5]
the bombs it's delivered on children
on the wings of Bible-backed prayers [6]
to uphold American exceptionalism
and hunt 1 man, Osama bin Laden,
forever

and until this makes the evening news
on fox news
we have work to do

do you think that none of these things
have baring on the present?

"I hear a lot of people saying this country is a "nation of immigrants"... Yet when you say that you make invisible the intentional genocide of native people whose this land of origins is, and the intentional enslavement of black African people who were brought here without their consent. Digging deep into learning more about the intricacies of the history of this country so I can teach my children well.

These sorts of revisionist histories that share a potent first hand perspective of those whose voices have been too often silenced is what is needed in these times. Listening to the voices reverberating in this powerful book remind me that the voices of the ancestors still echo and we still have so much to learn from their lives lived, however intense and painful their memories might be. It is how we honor them and ensure these atrocities don't continue to repeat themselves." -Rowen White speaking of the book Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston (story written from interview of Cudjoe Kazzola Lewis of Africatown, Alabama, who was the last known survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade.)

---

maybe you grew up learning about these things, but i did not.

---

[1] Toko-pa Turner "Belonging"
[2a] Ta-Nehisi Coates in WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (2017)
[2b] 3/5 Compromise: "The compromise solution was to count 3 out of every 5 slaves as a person for this purpose." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt
[4] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/african-americans-in-the-twentieth-century/
[5] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/20/mapped-the-7-governments-the-u-s-has-overthrown/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change
[6] During George W Bush's 9/11/01 address to the nation he said,

Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a Power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23:
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for you are with me.

---

a poetic response to a comment i received on yesterday's piece

Indigenous Erasure on the 4th of July: Prayer for a Common Memory