on, starting over.
Returning to Kentucky, making my life in a small town, I knew that this was the end of my journey in search of home. Sanders shares in the essay “Settling Down” that it took him “half a lifetime of searching to realize that the likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground. And he means the land, weather, seasons, plants, animals. Boldly he declares, “I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one. I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place.” Connecting homeplace to spiritual peace, he reminds us that “in belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, at-homeness, a knitting of self and world.” Eloquently these words express my feelings about being here, about my house on the hill and the acres around it that I know will be forever green, recovered from hilltop removal, no sub-divisions.
I am called to use my resources not only to recover and protect damaged green space but to engage in a process of hilltop healing. Although I come from a long line of Kentucky country folk, farming women and men, I am having to learn my stewardship. I do not have the longed for green thumb but with a little (more than a little) help from my community, I am doing the work of self-healing, of earth healing, of reveling in this piecing together of my world in such a way that I can be whole and holy.
7
Again — Segregation Must End
No doubt every writer of essays has one or two that give them pause, make them think again and again, wondering where did that come from. It is usually impossible to explain to folks who are not writers that ideas, words, the whole essay itself may come from a place of mystery, emerging from the deep deep unconscious surfacing, so that even the writer is awed by what appears. Writing then is revelation. It calls up and stirs up. It illuminates. Among my essays one that really shook me up and moved me is the essay “representations of whiteness in the black imagination.” In this essay I wanted to talk about the psychological traumas racism causes. In particular I wanted to write about how black folk living in the midst of racial apartheid come to fear whiteness, come to see it as something terrible. When civil rights struggle first brought national attention to the issue of racial integration, individual racist white folks would often share their “intimate” knowledge of black folks by telling the public that the “colored people like to keep to themselves.” Yet no one ever raised the issue of trauma, that maybe black folks stayed together and wanted to stay away from white folks because of the suffering white folks caused us to feel through unrelenting exploitation and oppression.
The monstrous way in which white racists inflicted and continue to inflict pain and suffering on black people will never be fully recorded or acknowledged. Contemporary, big, beautiful, expensive coffee table books which bring stylish images of brutal lynchings into our homes, making it appear as though these past atrocities are just that, something over and done with, deny that these horrific images documenting the vicious hateful attacks on helpless black bodies by powerful white bodies carry with them a legacy of trauma that has not passed, that has not gone away. Our nation is capable of acknowledging that Jews who were nowhere near the German holocaust, whose relatives, friends, and acquaintances were murdered and slaughtered, suffer post traumatic stress disorder, fear of the “german” other, fear of bonding outside one’s group, and at time the crippling fear that it will happen again are victimized by remembered trauma. But it has only been in very recent years that there has been a willingness on the part of a very minority of thinkers in the psychological community and beyond, to acknowledge that black people who witness grievous racist exploitation and oppression are traumatized. And even when incidents are over that
Returning to Kentucky, making my life in a small town, I knew that this was the end of my journey in search of home. Sanders shares in the essay “Settling Down” that it took him “half a lifetime of searching to realize that the likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground. And he means the land, weather, seasons, plants, animals. Boldly he declares, “I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one. I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place.” Connecting homeplace to spiritual peace, he reminds us that “in belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, at-homeness, a knitting of self and world.” Eloquently these words express my feelings about being here, about my house on the hill and the acres around it that I know will be forever green, recovered from hilltop removal, no sub-divisions.
I am called to use my resources not only to recover and protect damaged green space but to engage in a process of hilltop healing. Although I come from a long line of Kentucky country folk, farming women and men, I am having to learn my stewardship. I do not have the longed for green thumb but with a little (more than a little) help from my community, I am doing the work of self-healing, of earth healing, of reveling in this piecing together of my world in such a way that I can be whole and holy.
7
Again — Segregation Must End
No doubt every writer of essays has one or two that give them pause, make them think again and again, wondering where did that come from. It is usually impossible to explain to folks who are not writers that ideas, words, the whole essay itself may come from a place of mystery, emerging from the deep deep unconscious surfacing, so that even the writer is awed by what appears. Writing then is revelation. It calls up and stirs up. It illuminates. Among my essays one that really shook me up and moved me is the essay “representations of whiteness in the black imagination.” In this essay I wanted to talk about the psychological traumas racism causes. In particular I wanted to write about how black folk living in the midst of racial apartheid come to fear whiteness, come to see it as something terrible. When civil rights struggle first brought national attention to the issue of racial integration, individual racist white folks would often share their “intimate” knowledge of black folks by telling the public that the “colored people like to keep to themselves.” Yet no one ever raised the issue of trauma, that maybe black folks stayed together and wanted to stay away from white folks because of the suffering white folks caused us to feel through unrelenting exploitation and oppression.
The monstrous way in which white racists inflicted and continue to inflict pain and suffering on black people will never be fully recorded or acknowledged. Contemporary, big, beautiful, expensive coffee table books which bring stylish images of brutal lynchings into our homes, making it appear as though these past atrocities are just that, something over and done with, deny that these horrific images documenting the vicious hateful attacks on helpless black bodies by powerful white bodies carry with them a legacy of trauma that has not passed, that has not gone away. Our nation is capable of acknowledging that Jews who were nowhere near the German holocaust, whose relatives, friends, and acquaintances were murdered and slaughtered, suffer post traumatic stress disorder, fear of the “german” other, fear of bonding outside one’s group, and at time the crippling fear that it will happen again are victimized by remembered trauma. But it has only been in very recent years that there has been a willingness on the part of a very minority of thinkers in the psychological community and beyond, to acknowledge that black people who witness grievous racist exploitation and oppression are traumatized. And even when incidents are over that
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