It is a reoccurring dream really. No, it is a nightmare. Worse, it is my reality.
I am away from my body. – whether awake or asleep – and I can see that I am in distress. I feel distressed. There are people all around me some black, some brown, many indigenous and we are all – disconnected – not moving at all. We are making no sound. But our lips are moving. The anquish, the grief, the shouting are apparent and all silent. Silenced.
It is that dream where you call for help but make no sound, where you try to run but your legs don’t move, where you reach out your hand to the people you love, but your hand moves through them.
This is my hell. Kept alive, yet in suspended animation. Generationally liminal. Lost, yet highly visible. Alive, yet sentenced to death. I am dying while I am living and I am buried while I am breathing. I am not breathing. I cannot breathe. Yet, I am moving – not moving.
There is a labor to this existence - to being a black transracial adoptee. There is a white expectation of my survival and my persistence despite or because of what they do or do not do to me - or about me. There is the pushing and pulling, skin tearing, soul dying tension from being a white family's black daughter. The tension of being their property, while bearing witness to their racism, white supremacy and profound hate of black lives. It is the tension of hearing a racist say that they saved you and you should be grateful. It is the bone shattering pressure of being told that you cannot be black here. You cannot be that kind of black here.
It is hearing your family members saying "all lives matter" and knowing that "not yours" has been etched in your black skin - a branding. It is the cutting away. The losing of self. It is the intentional. blocking - willful disruption of genealogical locations - that make breathing impossible. It is one of the millions of ways we kill black people every single day.
I am envious of my genetic cousins, brothers and sisters who were raised in our black family within black communities. It has taken me far too long to be in relationship with black people in the ways that my soul needs to be. I still have several additional steps to move through and heal from my experiences and processing of racism and the direct threat to my life that white people, especially my white adoptive family, continue to pose.
Having been willfully separated from my genetic family, and left to weather the deep racism that is the blood force in the white, trumpian, family in which I was raised; leaves me rutterless. Because of the damage of transracial adoption and my genealogical dislocation, I have not had black people around to BE with. I have no idea how to BE. But, at 50, finally, I know one thing for certain - I am BLACK. And, that is exactly, singularly, who I want to BE.
There was never a time in my life when I thought I wasn't Black. But, I will no longer have my blackness, black intellect or my black abundance suppressed or articulated as a wrong-ness. My black voice will not be silenced. I realize why my truth is such a threat, espcially to my white adoptive family. They know I have seen and heard them in the organic ooze of their whiteness. They are well aware that, if they can no longer control my voice, they can no longer outrun their own racism and white supremacy.
In the today space, it takes longer and longer to get out of bed – to take my first morning’s breath. As my lungs push against my chest – to breathe ... I cannot. There are days when I don’t want to.
I think about all of the suspended – animated – othered – oppressed – hated – killable bodies. Those are the bodies of my kin, of my genetic parents, of my Memphis neighbors, of my community of black scholars and of my sons and granddaughters.
And, for them, I PUSH… I breathe. I breathe, and so many of us breath, because we still can. Breathing is a privilege I cannot ignore or not perform. I learned in fourth grade that breathing can get me killed as a white sixth grader chased me across the playground calling me nigger until he got me cornered and stoned me. I learned in the 42 years that followed that there are an infinite number of ways to stone black people.
... an
infinite numbers of lynchings.
more soon...
Baby Girl Murphy
