The Trayvon Generation

“what will be the sacred words?”

The problem of the twenty-first century remains the color line. Yes, we are mired in overlapping societal struggles and challenges. But white supremacy and its many manifestations—some of them sly and cloaked, some of them clear as a Confederate flag flown by marauders in the US Capitol—has been a fundamental problem for every generation in this country since Black people first came to this land. W. E. B. Du Bois’s “How does it feel to be a problem?” is still the question implicitly and explicitly directed at Black people. The race work of the generations of my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents, and myself is the work of our children’s generation. I don’t wring my hands that “we didn’t fix it”; clearly it is unfixable by us alone. White supremacy is not the creation of Black people. I both lament and am enraged that this work is undone, and that our young people still have it to wrestle with.

Racial ideologies are insidious. They instruct in intricate, ambient teaching systems. The country is their classroom and everyone is in school, whether they choose to be or not.

Thus the color line is a fundamental, formative, constitutive American problem.

I was raised in troves of blackness: born in a Black metropolis, Harlem USA; reared in Chocolate City, Washington, D.C., which, in my childhood, was nearly three-quarters Black.¹ From my family, I was given a sense of pride in our people and history, the need to understand myself as part of a larger whole and to be as helpful as I could to others, the familiar imperative to work “twice as hard,” and the responsibility to speak up when injustice was done.

When I found my professional path, it was as an educator, a scholar of Black culture, and an organizer of words, mostly poems. I wrote and thought and taught about the importance of witnessing; about the crucial functions of storytelling and history; about how the specter of violence hangs as constantly as the moon over Black people. I found knowledge and guidance in words, and possibilities in music, dance, and art, where I could go outside of words and access feeling and deep knowing. In Black history and culture, I encountered the full range of human experience, conundrum, perseverance, beauty, foible, and particularity. Here everything could be understood and I evangelized in my teaching and writing about this wellspring.

I believed that representation mattered, and that if more of “us” occupied spaces where justice-minded decisions could be made, power shared, and examples set, “the race” could move forward and, with that, all of society would strengthen itself and mend the corrosion of ignorance and racism.

Here is the thorny truth: while many sectors of society are now more integrated, violence and fear are unabated, and the war against Black people feels as if it is gearing up for another epic round.

This poem by Clint Smith gets to the perennialness and sorrow of race in America:

Your National Anthem

The small word may is the devastation in this poem. In the scene at a supermarket, the precious Black boy—the speaker’s son—is admired by a white woman who in the same breath decries the actions of a Black man asking better of his country, as we always have; she upends his belonging—that baby, in the words of his father, may grow up to “be a black man.” Not will but may grow up.

Racial violence exists on a long continuum, and we refuse to understand that at our peril. Though I may worry in particular ways about my own sons as do other parents of Black children, this is a worry that we all must share. When human beings look at other human beings in their midst and instead of seeing other human beings see a threat, see something monstrous, or don’t see at all, our very humanity is at stake.

Layered atop the never-ending anxiety of parenting, Black parents live with the truth that we cannot fully protect our children. As a people, we have lived with too much suffering, and we live among many others who do not go through life with the same degree of precarity and loss. When yet another young Black person is shot dead—in their neighborhood, while jogging, in their bed—we brace in anticipation of the tableaux to come: the neighborhood funeral, the raw grief of mothers, the unlikelihood of a trial, and, if a trial, the character assault on the person who was murdered—they were out too late, they were in the street and not on the sidewalk, they had smoked a little weed, they passed a counterfeit bill, they dangled an air freshener from the back window, they asked why they were being stopped, they had a shiny object that turned out to be house keys in their hands. We who live consciously in this reality stay distracted and anxious, those feelings heightened when there is a trial and our faith is tested once again, and our children feel no safer. Our anxiety may even stifle the joy and exuberance that should characterize their childhood.

In addition to the crisis of violence against people of color, we are at the outer edge of an era of a crisis wherein speech has been debased from the highest levels of governance, and abusive language and its violence are increasingly ambient. Words are vessels filled with meaning and intent. Our language is what we live in, and thus how we collectively express ourselves, one voice at a time. If we believe in the power of words, and that words matter, and that precision with words matters most; and if we believe that words not only carry meaning but also carry something human, that shared language and the exchange of language are among the things that make us human; and if we believe that striving for absolute truth with the word is one of the ways that human beings can communicate deeply enough in order to overcome that which is not understood between us; if we believe also that there is too much language in the air right now that is imprecise, false, harmful, operating not to bridge understanding but to create misunderstanding, to divide, and that there is very precise if inelegant language that is being used for the purpose of misnaming and dividing us; then we might ask: What is the power of our words? How are we responsible for them? What can we do with them, and do words move us closer to the hoped-for ideal of beloved community?

Language is one of the ways we share our perspectives, our very selves, and one of the zones of hope I have for reaching across the voids between us. I do not mean to suggest that talk and explication are a solution. Indeed, the burden of explaining has always been hoisted on Black shoulders, and it has not solved the fundamental problem. Black people did not create the problem; it’s a great societal head fake to look to us to solve problems not of our making and behaviors not of our doing.

But for all of us, language is how we say who we are, and we cannot solve our problems without it. Language is one of the few media with which to make conundrums visible and solutions tangible. Language is how we learn across difference. And language is in trouble.

Poets especially use words in ways that are visceral and remind us in the best of poems that they are products of the human body. People, and peoples, tell their stories to each other; the tribe needs to chronicle itself. Human beings in all cultures across time have yielded to the impulse to make song. A poem is physically a small thing, but it has the density and potency that in the best cases is a force forever.

In Black culture, our poetry sometimes holds and memorializes our history. Amid insufficient memorializing and in the face of scant or buried histories, Black poets have made experience solid and enduring in too many examples to count. Black poetry remembers, and Black poetry memorializes. Poems are how we say, This is who we are, how we chronicle ourselves when we are insufficiently found in history books and commemorative sites. And as with monuments, the poem outlasts the poet.

The times stay challenging and our society urgently needs repair. The fundamental proposition and question that arises at the end of the poem “Ka ’Ba” by Amiri Baraka, published in 1969, continues to resonate:

I hear it in my head most days: What will be the sacred words?

“here lies”

Monuments and memorials ask that we remember those who have died and make permanent what they stand for: individuals, communities, ideas. The word remember has a physicality to it—re-member—the idea that without remembrance the corpus of the person or people or place or idea or ideology has been physically torn asunder.