Columns

WHEN I WAS 8 years old, in June 1998, three white supremacists lynched James Byrd Jr., a Black man in Jasper, Texas. After offering him a ride in their truck, they beat him, desecrated him, chained him to their vehicle, dragged him to his dismemberment and eventual death, and deposited parts of his body in front of a Black church to be found on Sunday morning. I remember hearing about the murder on the evening news and having a newly personal sense of the geography of racial terror. As a child living in California, I could not locate Jasper on a map, but its name, and Byrd’s, were forever fixed in my mind.

Earlier this year, I realized that my great-grandmother was around that same age when, in May 1918, white supremacists lynched Mary Turner and a dozen other Black people, including the baby they cut out of Turner’s abdomen. I wonder if my great-grandmother, as a child, heard the news, and how it affected her. In her case, the lynchings happened not three states but three hours from where she lived in Georgia. Unlike in Byrd’s case, there were no charges, arrests, trials, or convictions of the known and suspected murderers behind these lynchings. I wonder if and how the killings—and the impunity allowing the lynchers freedom of movement—shaped her sense of the landscape.

In Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, geographer Katherine McKittrick writes that “Black matters are spatial matters.” McKittrick identifies the social production of space—how landscape is not a fixed background but is defined by relationships. Fugitivity, precarity, and possibilities of life and death are mapped realities that follow social relationships.

I FIND MYSELF thinking about the significance of “firsts,” the role of faith in the morality of the nation, and the place of race and gender in that project. Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascent to one of the highest seats of political power is historic, unprecedented, and awe-inspiring. Like Barack Obama before her, it is a first that has ushered in, for many, a renewed faith in the nation. Multiply the emotional impact of that first by whatever number captures the firestorm of the past four years, and that faith easily transforms into a belief that “morality” has been secured and that things are going to be, basically, okay.

This train of thought is, I believe, dangerous and wrong. I do not discount the feelings Harris evokes. The emotional impact of Harris’ election registers for me very personally as a Black woman. When I initially heard that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had won the election, my first thought was exhilarated shock at Trump’s defeat. Then, as that fact sunk in, I realized that this outcome meant the election of a woman of color—a Black woman, a woman of South Asian descent—to the vice presidency of the United States. Weeks later, the words still seemed somewhat strange, as if my brain was having trouble wrapping itself around the reality. My inability to readily speak her new position reflects to me the depth of her significance, and the change it portends for how I and future generations of Black and brown girls and women will be able to envision and speak of ourselves. I pause, however, at the unexamined triumphal connections being made between Harris, morality, and political futures.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Emancipation Memorial in my neighborhood of Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C., became the target of national protests and calls for removal. Erected to great fanfare in 1876, the memorial is not a Confederate monument but an homage to Black freedom built with the hard-earned dollars of former slaves. It commemorates a sacred moment in Black history, but does so with the racist imagery—and thus fictive narrative—of Abraham Lincoln dominating a crouching, half-dressed, emancipated Black man.

I resented Emancipation Memorial each time I passed by it, but when the calls began for its removal, I faltered. Learning its history several years ago as a monument fundraised by formerly enslaved Black people forged for me feelings of connection to it, even as I recoiled at its imagery. The meaning of “home” it carried as the landmark naming my D.C. neighborhood and church intensified in light of these feelings. My complicated response led me to reflect on another structure close to home for me that has yet to be dismantled.

THESE DAYS, I gather strength from predictability. Being home from work amid a global pandemic with two children—a toddler and a teenager—has filled my world with inventive ways to press on while working full-time, schooling the kids, and being a graduate student myself.

I have a newfound green thumb—working with my mini-garden, I recount stories from my childhood, stories of triumph, perseverance, and restless hope. I hope my toddler clings to these stories when things seem uncertain. I am also creating new stories to share for years to come. My journal is overflowing with COVID-19 stats, sketches of plants, and day-to-day business. It has become a place I document our lives. When my children grow old, they will look to this time and wonder how we made it through or how we handled this uncertainty because they yearn for a time when things feel hopeful again. I hope my journals will help them remember and understand how we coped with a time when we self-quarantined, socially distanced, stayed six feet apart in masks.

IN MY OWN interreligious instruction, I have become aware of the lack of discussion of Indigenous traditions. The very way knowledge is conceived of is at play here. Margaret Kovach articulates an Indigenous epistemology in her essay “Emerging from the Margins” as “fluid, non-linear, and relational. Knowledge is transmitted through stories that shape shift in relation to the wisdom of the storyteller at the time of the telling.”

As I have engaged Indigenous communities and scholarly voices in my work, I have sought to:

Bust up the category of religion. By this I mean I try to interrogate how interreligious encounters define religion and who is invited to the table, or what parts of a person we invite.

Since I teach at a Christian seminary, religion as defined by doctrinal and scriptural sources takes precedence. I found that many of my Christian students—for instance, those from Tonga—had a deep connection to Indigenous practices woven into their identity. But at seminary this aspect was reduced to “culture” and not given a place at the table. I learned to ask students to self-identify and opened the space to recognize that all forms of their spiritual practice were valid sources of scholarship. They were not asked to cancel or erase parts of their spiritual practice that were considered by others as less important.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I almost did not finish writing the sermon I was scheduled to preach at a special Martin Luther King Jr. Day Social Justice Shabbat service. Usually, I am able to bring sermons to a close without problem; this time, I struggled. Really struggled. Instead of focusing thematically on racism, poverty, war, or any number of issues King spoke out against, I had decided to preach on fear. I felt called to name fear as the root issue beneath so many others, something we struggle with individually and collectively. Fear of scarcity, fear of the unknown, fear of the “other”: the immigrant, the unarmed black person, the queer, the Sikh, the Muslim, the Jew, or the white person now encountering you in your queer, black, immigrant, brown, Muslim, Sikh, or Jewish body.

I found that once I started being honest about the fears we hold and the fears we face, I could barely turn the corner, in a manner of speaking, toward hope.

Eventually, I was able to theologically pivot my sermon and conclude positively. However, that experience of being spiritually stumped with writer’s block said more to me than any happy ending ever will. Rather than yielding answers, my sermon gave me questions, which continue to resonate in the midst of a global pandemic.

MY HUSBAND AND I are privileged to have health care for ourselves and our children. While access to health care is a serious and growing concern in our nation, as well as in our own state of Texas, we realize what a privilege it is to afford, even if barely, health care through our respective employers.

Not too long ago my husband was rushed to the emergency room, and later ICU, in a near-diabetic coma. Last year, we were heartbroken over our toddler’s unexplained seizures. It took nearly four months before she was seen by a neurologist and another six weeks to be able to get an MRI. Two more months passed before we could return to the neurologist for results. For more than eight months, we had to wait on an answer, while our faith was stretched thin. When would God show up?

According to The Commonwealth Fund, Texas ranks 49th of the 50 states for worst health care in terms of access, outcomes, and costs. Texas has also opted not to expand Medicaid eligibility, which has had devastating consequences in our communities. Our elders will say that faith is what keeps them alive when the health care system has repeatedly failed them. Younger generations will say we should not have to choose between groceries, child care, and unpaid health care bills. We have been to the pediatrician, therapy, primary care, specialist, emergency room, and ICU more than we would like.

I SAT DOWN with a co-worker to talk about presence and how to make God manifest in seasons that task us with injury, depression, and even death. Seasons of impeachment hearings, 700 missing women from ICE custody, and children still detained at detention facilities begin to create sinkholes in our spirits. My co-worker likened these experiences to a leaf floating on the waters of a raging river. The leaf is carried by the current without real direction, yet the leaf endures. A season of raging rivers has taken a toll on my faith, has created holes in the fabric of my believing. Every day I ask, where is God in this?

For the last couple months, I have found it hard to articulate my feeling of suspended belief. As a poet, a writer, a lover of words, there is a tension with sharing that information in words. I’ve begun to explore other media for translating these feelings. In November, I taught myself to sculpt paper. I’m not the best at it, because I’m tempted to create words to explain these images, but I need to let the image do most of the work. There is a beauty in doubt, a beauty that makes God manifest through our hands when we can’t articulate it with our voices or our words.

What do I look like inside, in wavering belief? Where do I find God in this? God finds me working meticulously into the morning, at a loss for words, but with an X-Acto knife cutting intricate curves and penetrating delicate layers of paper to make manifest the interior of myself.

AMERICA'S OPENNESS TO refugees has been a distinct feature of our country from its foundation. Our nation was established by communities facing discrimination elsewhere for their religious practices. In the periods when the country was not open to refugees and asylum seekers, such as during the Holocaust, it later became clear that we were on the wrong side of history.

The Trump administration announced this fall an annual admissions ceiling of 18,000 refugees for the next fiscal year, its third straight year of drastic reductions and a historic low. By comparison, almost 85,000 refugees were admitted in President Obama’s last year in office. Trump’s actions come at a time when the number of people fleeing conflict around the world is the highest since World War II.

Faith-based organizations in the United States have been at the forefront of refugee resettlement. The Trump administration decision threatens the already precarious structures around resettlement, which are largely religiously based. For many, the scriptural obligation to care for the stranger is a core religious belief. By having this capacity for service undercut, in many ways the faithful—across the spectrum from conservative to progressive—are unable to fulfill their religious obligations for care. The administration’s refusal to engage the many faith-based leaders and organizations who called for more, not less, openness to welcoming refugees decries its alleged commitment to religious freedom.