“We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about—survival and growth.”
—Audre Lorde
Thriving is deeply embedded in the DNA of my family. My great-great-great-grandma Melinda Benton, on my mother’s side, walked out of slavery in Arkansas and—with her husband and other Black people—bought hundreds of acres of land in Mississippi. My father’s side, the Bells, also came from a freed Black community. Each generation after them continued to rise.
My family taught me that we’re Black, not African-American, and that they had worked and struggled to get us all—not just our family but also our community—to a place of thriving. We uplift and we save ourselves. We can disagree on things that are substantial, but we agree that the community deserves not just surviving, but thriving.
In second grade, I had my first overt racist experience at the hands of my teacher, Mrs. Schumacher. My mom told me, “You’ll never go back to that school.” So what did they do? My family and another family said, “We can create a school.” They developed the Youth Development Workshop Day School. About forty children went to school in my house, where we learned from professors and activists and artists.
At school mealtime, the rule was: Nobody can eat until the children of different religions bless their food in a way that everyone can consume it. Since there were Christian and Muslim kids; Buddhist, Black Hebrew Israelite, and Black Muslim kids, saying grace took a long time; we weren’t happy about it. But now I understand how it shaped me for all sorts of people to be together, without any one group held above the others. The message was: We cannot thrive if we can’t figure out how to be together in this.
I now believe that in that school, as a nine-year-old, I was radicalized to understand our interconnection: if we’re a thriving community and someone hasn’t eaten, the community has failed. Community was, and is, everything.
Today, I have to be able and willing to do the work of creating community with people who may not understand how dangerous it is for me to allow them to be in community with me. As both a UU and the person who is often othered, my work is to protect myself first—to guard my heart—and also remain as open as I can to build a community with many bridges. If I can’t do the work of being in community with them, then how will they learn? I don’t believe we can survive unless we’re all surviving. I don’t believe that we can thrive unless we’re all thriving….and that means everyone; all of us; the whole of us.
Prayer
Spirit of Becoming and the Became, as generations move through the process of knowing themselves and learning the world, may they be deeply rooted in all of the work of the past that brings them to who they are today.
May we see ourselves as a people of thriving, and respect and honor the sources that got us to that place. May we know love and understanding; may we be willing to give it—and be willing to hold it for ourselves.
May we continue to build towards community in which we all can be free. And may we protect ourselves and others fiercely until that day comes. Amen.