Traumatized and Human

You’ve been traumatized. Your mind won’t stop even when your body does. It feels like you can’t quite pull enough air into your lungs. Your fingers fidget and your eyes glance quickly at the unexpected sounds that would generally go unnoticed. You’re simultaneously so very tried and completely – desperately – awake. You’ve lost count of the tears.

This is trauma. You saw the videos. Men whose skin solidified them to yours as a brother, cousin, son, and father were executed by those whose murderous ways are the summation of this country’s means and ends. You saw them die. You heard the woman’s cry. You heard another woman’s deathly calm voice, narrating in real time the death of her beloved. And the child. You can’t stop thinking of this beautiful child. Will it be her first memory?

Last night I sat next to a Black woman who said, “I remember Emmet Till. I remember the pictures.” This country proudly lynched your ancestors to terrorize those with Black bodies like yours. Newspapers printed the time and location of the upcoming attraction; postcards with the demonic scenes were sent around the country. The pictures, and now the videos, serve to terrorize and traumatize. The perpetrators of lynching did not fear the publicity of the newspapers and postcards. They knew the values of the state on whose behalf they acted. Is it any different now? The videos rush at you with brutal force, and to what end? Are the murderers punished? Are you made to feel safer, more human?

This is trauma and it’s real and it’s on purpose. Your Black body, in the depraved mind of this nation, has been marked for terror and trauma. It’s always been this way. It is true and unfathomably wrong.

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Please do what you can to quiet the voices of the liars, especially those who bluntly try to discredit your experience.  Ignore too, however rudely, those who use smart sounding deception to move quickly from your suffering to the phantoms of fevered white imagination – black on black crime, epidemics of fatherlessness, criminal pathologies. They are each lies and require none of your energy or time.

Nurture your faith. It’s not a luxury for you, not a Sunday state of mind. Your faith is what connects you to the truth about yourself. Your faith in your God, your people, and yourself is more true than 90% of what you will be told by our media.

Sink into your humanity, into your flesh, bone, muscles, and mind. You are a member of humanity, reflecting the image of God. Find reasons to laugh. Stream that movie this weekend. Cook something delicious. You have a large emotional capacity. You can and will feel tremendous grief and anger. But you can and will feel more than these and it’s OK to remind your body of this at times.

Remember that there are people who love you more than you can imagine in this moment. There are people who will fight for you. Some of us will die for you. Notice the difference in your routine between quiet and isolation; the former is necessary but the latter is this nation’s telos and it must be resisted no matter how vulnerable you feel. Be with people who get you, who require no explanations, you accept your everything at face value. Then be that person for someone else.

Meditate on the Christ, the lynched Son of God. There is no prescription about what you are supposed to feel about your faith in this moment. But these are the exact moments when our suffering can draw us to his, when our despair can bring us to his, when our screams into the apparent nothingness can join his.

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You’ve been traumatized but only humans can know trauma. So you, beloved human and creation of God, can know this deep evil without being overcome by it. Even in this place and in this time, you will express your humanity in ways that cannot be controlled, manipulated, or quenched.