My son isn't speaking to me right now.
I forgot to mail success cards to his girlfriends so now he says they're not speaking to him - so he's not speaking to me. I don't know if I can say I forgot so much as I just didn't find the time or energy to do it.
I don't see what the big deal is; I still have the cards - he can just give them to them...but he's never stopped speaking to me before so I guess it is a big deal to him.
It's all relative right?
I did tender my sincere apologies and then proceeded to troll him on Instagram to get him to talk to me. He's not very good at this 'not speaking to you' thing because he keeps replying to my posts with things like 'no' and 'I'm not watching this'.I'm enjoying this a little too much.
But I am sorry.
Sincerely.
And I said so.
Just watched the Facebook Live of this week's Red Table Talk; the topic, forgiveness (and yes, I did slide into my son's DMs with the link)and I love to read the comments on any post that covers a topic close to my heart. They are generally disappointing but the RTT really makes people open their hearts and they outline some situations they're going through that make you just go 'ack'.
Y'know?
"How can I forgive my father for abusing me for years? and he's still doing it?"
"How do I forgive my husband for continuously cheating on me?"
And sometimes I want to reply with things like, "Leave. him." But if RTT has taught me anything is that everyone has their own journey and you have to do what feels right for you.
Anyway, I was pondering on the relativity of hurt and forgiveness and forgiving others and the Grace that makes that possible. I think the one thing that did not come up in the discussions was how forgiveness, like grief, is a never-ending process because emotions are versatile things.
The best example I have to explain that is actually from a fictional work - the Outlander Series. Jamie Fraser was raped by Black Jack Randall in a way that destroyed not just his body but almost destroyed his spirit and left him with little will to live.
With time, he got over it and moved on with his life. About three or four books later, his daughter was raped and she came to him to ask him if killing the guy would make it better. She was having a hard time forgiving herself for 'letting it happen' especially since she was pregnant with maybe his baby.
So...that of course brought his own situation back to swirling life and in order to help his daughter, he had to deal with his own feelings. He had to forgive Black Jack Randall all over again.
And he prayed for the Grace to do that and he received it when he remembered Black Jack's grief at the deathbed of his brother.
He did it by reducing the monster in his mind to a mere man.
He did it by being able to see that man in the fullness of his flaws and failings.
To realize that the shadow of an evil, monstrous, giant that the abuse Jamie was subjected to had made Black Jack Randall into, was actually a small, damaged thing deserving of pity but certainly not fear or anger.
In my own life, I have used this method in order to let go of anger and bitterness and live in a more positive space. For the sake of my sanity, I had to.
The best way to illustrate this is Donald Trump and his army of white supremacist weirdos. They use fear as a weapon to hide their own.
They are cavalier with black lives and use the police to intimidate. They use every institution to instill in the black psyche that they/we are less than. Because they are afraid.
I say 'we' because it's the same method colonialists used/are still using to pillage our resources while we clap for them. Some colonialists are not even foreign.
Did you see the video of Meek Mill on CNN talking about how he did not know any better? That he accepted the false charges the police put on him when he was nineteen because that's normalized, that's just every day in America.
Police will arrest you and charge you for shit you didn't do. You will watch at least one of your friends die violently and very young because that's just life.
No honey, it's not.
But you're indoctrinated into believing that that's how life is and you should accept it. Unless you're Will Smith who decided that the only way out was to become so famous that he moved from the back to the front of the line. That if something happened to him, those institutions would hasten to his aid rather than let him die.
But we can't all be Will Smith, right?
And so people are walking around with this cloud of inevitability, of the non-sanctity of their own existence. Of the evil monstrous white supremacists looming like a shadow over every aspect of their lives. They use the word nigger as the trigger to remind you that you are nothing.
Here's a reminder; You're not nothing.
But if you stop a minute and really study these people you realize just how small and pathetic and quaking with fear they are. They cling to these false beliefs they have so tightly in an effort not to face themselves and what they have done.
I'm not even talking about slavery here. I'm talking lynchings and false arrests and false accusations and petty little everyday shit that they do so they can tell themselves they're top dawg.
It's pathetic.
It's sad.
They have nothing but this. Absolutely nothing. Look at Donald Trump; he's an idiot. That's their savior. That's the best they can do. There's nothing to be scared of. They are relying on your own lack of self-worth to keep them right where they are.
If everyone truly woke up and saw them for what they were, they would not survive for very long.
This past weekend, the world was in South Africa celebrating 100 years of Mandela. And I saw a lot of talk on Instagram about how 'Africa is changing'.
Not really.
The perception to Africa is changing but we been here; grinding, working, freeing our minds from colonialism, having ideas and innovating in our small ways. We been living...
The difference is that the world is now aware of it. I blame Wakanda. And Instagram.
Okay but really, I think that Africans in the diaspora have reached a critical mass now that they can't be ignored; and they are impacting the world in positive ways.
People from Barack Obama (yes, he is half-Kenyan by blood, accept it) Lupita Nyong'o and her academy award, but more importantly her eloquence and black (dark) African beautiful excellence, Danai Ngurira, all these Nigerians taking over the world from Idris Elba to Jidenna to Wizkid; The Shaderoom is owned by a Nigerian; and let's face it, they're the premier source of news for black people worldwide and other gossip sites (be they black or white-centric) tend to be two or three days behind them with news.
It's difficult to ignore that there's a lot more to us than hunger and disease. Hell the entire French National Football Team is made up of Africans. They won the World Cup this year.
Trevor Noah said a very deep thing during his stand up special Son of Patricia.
By the way, if my son ever speaks about me the way Trevor speaks about his mother, I shall know that I succeeded in raising him right.
He said that his mother was crazy but also he understood what she meant when he became an adult and she said that when someone comes at you with racism, the thing to do is mix it up with the blood of Jesus* (*insert whatever religion you follow here*) and give it back to them.
And the words they use will lose their power.
To me, 'mixing it up with the blood of Jesus' means looking at the person abusing you and seeing their inner pain, fear, and anger; and knowing that it's not about you - it's about them. That's how you find the Grace to not only forgive them but feel compassion for their patheticness. In that way, they can't infect you with their unhappiness. Who knows, you might be the one to infect them with your joy.
Guard your joy with everything you have. Don't go giving people the power to take it away from you. Right now, my son wants to take away my joy with his 'silent treatment' but I'm mixing it up with the blood of Jesus and sending it right back to him with trolling.
Have a joyous day, won't you?
Oh and...
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