How We Fight White Supremacy by Akiba Solomon & Kenrya Rankin

Author:Akiba Solomon & Kenrya Rankin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

QUESTION, ANSWERED

The question we tackle here is: how do you keep the faith?

Akiba

The question “How do you keep the faith?” assumes that I know how to do it. It assumes that I have the strength to resist feeling defensive and exposed about the matter, or that my conscious mind even works this way. I wish I had a less clichéd way to say it, but the jury’s still out on faith for me.

How I came to this particular kind of heathendom has all of the markers of growing up Black and “political” in the ’70s and ’80s. I never, ever, not once looked at that drawing of White Jesus with the flat-ironed blond hair and the Scope-colored eyes and believed that Black folks had any business praying to “Him.” That wasn’t even Him.

I knew that slavers and other genocidal motherfuckers used some fuck-shit that Ham did eons ago to justify some of humanity’s worst crimes.

I grew up saying grace, but a Swahili one that my father and mother created. I was and am Kwanzaa-only. Never did a cross, a tree, or a sugarplum fairy enter our home.

My mother’s general theory of humanity is that we are a failed experiment. She often quips that if the people at the Episcopal church she went to as a kid sang better, she might still give it the time of day.

Meanwhile, my poor father has always been uneasy about and, I suspect, resentful of the irreverence my sister and I inherited from our mother, who is hilarious and brilliant and perfect, thank you very much. But at most, he behaved as a closet Christian with an affinity for liberation theology during our formative years.

Still, I am an adult. I have had plenty of opportunities to figure out a practice that cultivates and sustains my spirit, the lynchpin of faith as I understand it. I did try and fail at Buddhism. Islam never called my name. Culturally speaking, Christianity is the default. There’s a huge amount of pressure for us to “draw on the faith of our ancestors.” We’re taught to put the dramatic and mundane savagery of White supremacy in God’s hands.

This makes me deeply ambivalent about what the Lord appears to be doing or allowing. I’m embarrassed by this, especially as an African American woman who does actually believe in justice, joy, peace, comfort, growth, and health for my people and most other beings on this planet.

To that end, in my younger years, I tattooed two God-related Adinkra symbols on my back. One means “child of God,” which is evidence of my yearning. Another means “the omnipotence of God,” which is what it is. What I know for sure is that some Black person in my life is always losing their mom or dad prematurely, getting laid off, getting cancer, burying their child, having a sudden heart attack, being terrorized by police, or trying to push through the trauma of homophobia or sexual violence. Piety does not seem to save them.

I am authentically

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