"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." -Audre Lorde
The past few weeks have not been easy ones for me.
As an openly gay man of color the weeks since the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando have been very difficult on many levels. As a 'mature' Black gay man, the fact that I have survived to this point in my life is something which I do not take for granted. Sadly, that is not the case for many others.
For the past few summers we have had to continually confront the reality of Black bodies - such as those of Mike Brown in Ferguson or Eric Garner on Staten Island - as they lay dying on our streets. As a proud Black man, the relentless instances of unwarranted police violence perpetrated on the lives of young Black men and women have been painful to hear about and to witness.
The recent murders of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philandro Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota at the hands of law enforcement officers, followed by the unwarranted attack on police officers in Dallas at an otherwise peaceful protest, all playing out in 'real time' on the internet has been almost too much to process, and to bear.
The recent events in Dallas remind me of experiences in my youth that helped shape me as an adult. The 1963 assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas and the vitriol of the 1964 Johnson/Goldwater Presidential campaign with its fear mongering and threats of nuclear annihilation changed the way that I thought about the fantasy of power and access as a gateway to safety.
In 1968 riots engulfed my neighborhood on Cleveland's predominately African American eastside following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Then in 1970, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire killing four students at Kent State University students who were exercising their rights as US citizens to peacefully assemble and to protest. As these events unfolded on my black and white television in my living room, they changed how I thought about social engagement and activism, and also highlighted its risks and dangers
Now, in 2016 I watch helplessly and in horror live via the internet as innocent civilians and police are senselessly gunned down on America's streets. It is almost too much to take in and to deal with.
My late mother, with her usual "mother wit," would often say: "two wrongs don't make it right." That is indeed true. What happened in Baton Rouge and in Falcon Heights is not made right by the actions that occurred in Dallas, nor is it okay or acceptable to blame the justified protest that followed those events for what occurred in Dallas.
This has been done in the past. In a December 2014 Today Show interview, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton sparked a debate while discussing the shooting of two police officers by a mentally ill man. He stated that "the targeting of these two police officers was a direct spin-off of this issue of these demonstrations" about police use of force against unarmed Black men. Psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl, who has studied the nexus of mental illness and social protest movements says that he sees parallels to an issue he's researched: how doctors "pathologized" the politics of the 1960s and as a result, schizophrenia "became a Black disease."
Writer Corrigan Vaughn in a recent article entitled 'White Discomfort Does Not Trump Black Lives" states:
"We think it's perfectly normal and acceptable to live in a country that carries on like the Hunger Games, where the only way to avoid upsetting the power structure is to pit the people against one another and make them enemies. This country is not white vs. black, or police vs. black, or immigrant vs. citizen, or any other binary opposition we accept as part of the game of America. But it sure is convenient to frame it that way so that we pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. When we say "black lives matter" and you respond "blue lives matter," you're not telling us something we don't know. You're saying police lives matter MORE -- like you think we're two opposing sports team cheering our own and booing our competition."
I, for one, have no desire to play the part of a real life Katniss Everdeen.
In the words of the African American spiritual as a people and a nation we truly need "A Balm in Gilead."
There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.