Search Results for: forgiveness

Florida, White Privilege, and Racism

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At Oxford American, Scott Korb reflects on his white privilege, the state of Florida, and its racist history — a state in which his life was irrevocably changed at age 5, when his father was killed by a drunk driver in May, 1982. In 2008, Korb visits Dwight Maxwell, a black man who was behind the wheel of the car that killed his dad and confronts not only his father’s killer but also his deeply held racist beliefs: “Throughout my life I’ve held shameful attitudes about black people, attitudes that embarrass me now.”

As an adult, I’ve traveled to Florida again and again to learn what I can about the end of my father’s life, which was largely a mystery to me as a child. My aunt, who was in the backseat of the car, once took me out to where he died. The road there has been widened, made safer. She says his last words were, “Hold on, we are about to be hit!” At impact, he was not wearing shoes. The man who killed him spent eighteen months in prison, and in January 2008, I shook the gate of a fence around his yard in the rural outskirts of Dunnellon, Florida, thinking that we could each benefit from talking about our shared history.

For a long time, I knew only two details about this man, Dwight Maxwell. He was drunk when he smashed his dark Ford into the car with my father in it. I also knew he was black. (Until 2005, I didn’t know his name.) These details, which I learned from the adults around me, haunted me as a young person. I didn’t drink and was fearful of alcohol until after I graduated from college. Throughout my life I’ve held shameful attitudes about black people, attitudes that embarrass me now. About Maxwell specifically, his blackness—and my whiteness, I see—made it easy to concoct stories about him. Originating in nightmares that deepened a child’s fear of the dark, as early as six or seven my father’s killer appeared to me as a lecherous monster, lewd living and aggression being characteristic of a man properly locked away for murder. The nightmares invaded my waking hours, and even as I became a teenager I would privately picture him in the leisure suit of a Blaxploitation pimp. Not knowing his actual name, I’d supplied one of my own imagining: Chester Washington. Chester, after the comic character “Chester the Molester” from Hustler magazine, which perhaps we knew as kids from the porno stash of a neighborhood father.

As an adult I’ve slowly come to understand what I did in my childhood to racialize and demonize this man. My trip to meet him in 2008 was meant to put all that behind me. Over several years, I’d circled him like a private dick, reading newspaper accounts and court records, flying to meet his family in Florida, building up the nerve to visit the man himself. I was proud of myself for trying to reach him. A girlfriend called me brave, and I believed her. The hope was reconciliation, a vestige of my grandmother’s Catholicism; I’d sloughed off those old ideas and was seeking forgiveness for them; I’d let him know I’d turned out okay, that we as a family had survived and moved on. On a cold afternoon under a tree in his backyard, I said what I’d come to say, then he apologized and before long disappeared inside. I went away. Years passed. In 2013, after Dwight Maxwell was arrested for felony possession of crack cocaine and hydrocodone pills, plus two misdemeanors, I drove with my mother to the Marion County courthouse, in Ocala, to attend his court hearings and try to speak with him again, to see what more I could learn about the day my father was killed. My last day in Florida, I returned to Maxwell’s house, but, encountering him at the side of the highway, where he’d been pedaling a bicycle, he ducked into the woods, saying he’d told me all he ever wants to. Not understanding— unwilling to, it seems—I chased him into the woods that day, wanting to talk more, though I’ve left him alone since.

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‘Mami’s biggest lesson’: On Storytelling and the Weight of Words

SANTA FE, NM - JUNE 17, 2018: Cumulus clouds form in the sky above New Mexico. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)

In a personal essay for BuzzFeed, author Ingrid Rojas Contreras considers what observing her mother’s work in divination taught her about metaphor, yielding to experimentation, and the power of the right words.

When Mami first started to do readings, she gave her clients only the straight answers they sought: Yes, your husband is cheating on youNo, you should not go on that trip. Yes, he likes you, but he is not meant for you. Her readings were brief and to the point, and none of her clients came back. Sensing something was wrong with the way her message was being received, Mami experimented by disguising what she saw in a story.

There was a young woman, for example, who been disinherited by her father. Mami didn’t tell her the simple truth — that she needed to extend forgiveness to him before he extended forgiveness back to her. “Some truths are so simple, people dismiss them,” Mami said. “Nobody wants to be told: be a good person, be nice to your family, be kind. But sometimes that is the answer.”

Instead, Mami told the woman that the day her father had disinherited her, he had pinched one of her plants in anger, and until this plant was cleansed and released into the wild, her father would be deaf to her entreaties. Apparently, it was true that the father had been toying with a plant when he told his daughter she was to receive no more family money and was on her own. Mami and the woman wore surgical gloves and drove the plant to a nearby river, where they cleaned it with river water, said prayers, and it was at this point that Mami instructed the woman to forgive her father. The plant was a metaphor, but the woman would never know. Mami had given her a tangible task in the face of a broken relationship.

Whether the ritual worked or not is beside the point, in my opinion. In the attic, Mami told me, “You have to speak in metaphors, in paradox, in symbolism. You have to tell a story that will allow the client to experience the truth without you ever having to name it.” Mami gave the woman a story, and the woman forgave her father, and eventually, he forgave her, too.

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Stripped: The Search for Human Rights in US Women’s Prisons

Illustration by Wenjia Tang

Adam Skolnick | Longreads | September 2018 | 36 minutes (9,904 words)

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“God’s mercies are infinite. They are new every morning.”
— Lamentations 3:23

Though its pews were packed, the courtroom was silent as a sanctuary. Most onlookers who filed into Pierce County Superior Court in Tacoma, Washington, on January 25, 2013, were residents of nearby Gig Harbor, a community shaken by a shocking crime, here for the final act: the sentencing.

In the front row, Kay Nelson watched nervously as her sister, Karen Lofgren, the defendant, prepared to make her final statement. The sisters lived two streets apart. Nelson’s children were like older siblings to Lofgren’s two daughters, who were just 6 and 9 years old. Conservative and Christian, Nelson had always been an advocate for tougher crime laws, and until her sister landed in Lady Justice’s crosshairs, she could have never fathomed praying for a judge in criminal court to show mercy on her behalf.

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Why Do Men Fight?: An Interview with Thomas Page McBee

Corbett Sullivan Wrestling, January 1, 1892 / Associated Press

Cooper Lee Bombardier | Longreads | August 2018 | 15 minutes (4,084 words)

In his new book Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man, journalist and memoirist Thomas Page McBee trains for a charity fight. The book interweaves his immersion in the world of boxing — McBee became the first transgender man to box at Madison Square Garden — with research, interviews and stories that explore how we’ve arrived at a moment of collective reckoning with the toxic masculinity in American culture.

Amateur is an ambitious project, questioning not only what it means to be a man in our current culture, but what it means to be a trans man, interrogating the opportunities and privileges arrived at through a shift in socialization and lived awareness. The change in how others treat him as a man — at times better and worse in equally disturbing measure — as well as reports of masculinity’s demise, like the 2010 Atlantic cover story “The End of Men” which declared America to be in the throes of a “masculinity crisis,” spur McBee to search for a healthier idea of what it means to be a man. Read more…

Ancestor Work In Street Basketball

Tim Mossholder / Unsplash, Columbia University Press

Onaje X. O. Woodbine | Excerpt adapted from Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball | Columbia University Press | August 2018 | 25 minutes (6,825 words)

The spirit of the dead must live its life one more time in an accelerated fashion before departing to the realm of the ancestors. . . . It is believed that doing what was once done frees the living from the dead and vice versa.

— Malidoma Patrice Some, Ritual

I had just attended the 2013 Community Awareness Tournament in Roxbury. It was dark. I walked aimlessly along St. Mary’s Street near Boston University. Painful images of the young boys and men of Roxbury flooded my head. That afternoon Russell had asked me to read Marvin’s “Let It Be Magic” poem at halftime to the crowd. I couldn’t do it. Grief racked my body. I left the game. Tears rolled down my eyes as the full impact of the interviews and stories of Boston’s black young men hit me. This wasn’t a few suffering individuals — it was a collective injury. Take Marlon, whom I mention in the introduction. He was a long and skinny six-foot-two-inch player from Roxbury, versatile as a Swiss army knife. He shot threes from deep, made defenders fall with his hesitation dribble, and dunked on players off of one leg. A rhythmic beat reverberated through his head and the sound would grip his body during games:

It seemed like I always had a song going in my head, but I never knew what the song was. That’s just how my game was. It felt like I was dancing on the court. It’s not trying to show off, it’s just how my mind was going and obviously achieved. My mind had a song and I’m bumping to it in my head so now on the court it got me — I’m about to go dunk on somebody or I’m about to go shoot somebody’s lights out. I’m about to cross somebody. It was funny, it’s like I don’t know how many dudes that I made fall just from a simple move. Not even a crossover. A quick step and like “see you later.” Go down, roll it, dunk it.

Marlon, however, was almost raped by his abusive stepfather in a pissy Boston housing project building as a child. Fortunately, he fought him off, dressed his little sister, and hustled down several miles of snow-filled sidewalks to his grandmother’s apartment. His biological father was in prison and his mother was a drug addict, like so many parents of other ballplayers that I interviewed. “I’d run into somebody that was always like, ‘Your mom just copped [bought] some morphine,’ ” explained Marlon. “I tell them, don’t sell nothing to my mom. I’ll kill you. That’s what I tell a person. It’s like, ‘little n***er get the fuck out of here. You ain’t got no gun.’ ‘Oh, I don’t. Okay, be right back.’ [I’d] walk right into the projects. Saw one of the older dudes that know my mother and know my father like, ‘yo’ such and such this and such and such is my mom’s.’ ‘Here take that . . .’ ” and the older gangster would hand him a gun.

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The 17-Year Itch

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Laura Jean Baker | Longreads | August 2018 | 10 minutes (2,590 words)

 

5.

Four years ago, in the nook of our L-shaped kitchen on Hazel Street, my husband Ryan — equal partner in marriage — proclaimed, “I think I’m probably a little bit smarter than you.” He paused, remembering to cut me a compliment sandwich. “You just have a better work ethic.”

To what did I owe the pleasure of this rare expression of sexism? In our family, men and women belonged at the hearth. Ryan washed dishes, burped babies, and curried meals. We’d just pulled our fifth bun from the oven, a little boy, exactly what Dad had ordered to tip the balance in our two-boy-two-girl household. Are you hoping for a boy or a girl? With the first four pregnancies, he’d dare only to say, “a healthy baby,” but with Gustav, he’d openly declared his preference for the Y chromosome. My husband was sometimes a stranger to me, a throwback, a modern man sprung from an old seed.

Experts in family studies predict that by 2050, men in heterosexual partnerships will share equally in housework. That will be a year shy of what may — or may not — be our golden wedding anniversary. But can sociologists predict when men will totally reconfigure their mindsets? Is there such a thing as a blank slate, free from the ghost outlines of patriarchal history?

Household chores are tangible problems we solve together. How to empty the sink trap; how to polish the countertops; how to make a bed and sleep in it, alongside your wife. Implicit bias is a much more sinister thing, a bad omen for any marriage founded on equality.

On the day of Ryan’s regrettable comment — his decree of superiority — we’d foolishly cycled back around to an old conversation. As childhood sweethearts, we’d taken the ACT exam together — same test, same day. After two hours and 55 minutes, the proctor had authoritatively announced, “Time’s up.” Our equitability — our gender equality — had been examined and documented by American College Testing. We both scored 28 (very good but not impressive, according to the internet, which didn’t yet exist). We’d landed together in the 90th percentile. Our brains matched. We planned to become in real life what we represented on paper: equal-opportunity partners, relishing our shared smarts.

But as with athletes demoralized by a tie game, we were left longing for something definitive. We wanted to know who was smarter, and as it turned out, he still believed, on some deeply ingrained and unquestioning level, that I was just a “try-hard.” This is how my 12-year-old son, Leo, describes classmates, often girls, who labor over extra-credit projects. He’s talking about me, I concede internally, nearly surrendering to a new generation of boys and men.

“Teachers like girls better,” Leo says. “It’s reverse sexism.” He too believes he has something to prove. At least twice a week, he sends a cryptic message from his school-appointed Chromebook: “Come pick me up. I hate it here.”

One day, the message just reads, “Help.”

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An Igbo Slaver’s Descendants Reckon With History

LONDON - MARCH 29: HMS Northumberland (L) escorts a replica 18th century wooden square rigger ship 'The Zong' (R) on a choppy River Thames on March 29, 2007 in London, England. Today's events form part of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade act. The Zong was at the centre of a court case in 1783, after 133 slaves were thrown overboard in an insurance scam. The resulting public outrage led to the rise of the Abolitionist movement. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

For the New Yorker, author  dives into the history of her great-grandfather, an Igbo slave trader and palm merchant who participated in the transatlantic slave trade. “African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather,” the author writes. She reveals a complex caste system that pre-dated European influence, and shows how current generations of her family are accounting for their ancestor’s relationship to the suffering of many.

On the first day of the fast, members of my family met in small groups in London, Atlanta, and Johannesburg. Some talked on the phone, and others chatted on social media. Thirty members gathered under a canopy in my parents’ yard. With tears in his eyes, my father explained that, in Nwaubani Ogogo’s day, selling and sacrificing human beings was common practice, but that now we know it to be deeply offensive to God. He thanked God for the honor and prestige bestowed on our family through my great-grandfather, and asked God’s forgiveness for the atrocities he committed. We prayed over a passage that my father texted us from the Book of Psalms:

Who can understand his errors?
Cleanse me from secret faults.
Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins;
Let them not have dominion over me.
Then I shall be blameless,
And I shall be innocent of great transgression.

During the ceremony, I was overwhelmed with relief. My family was finally taking a step beyond whispering and worrying. Of course, nothing can undo the harm that Nwaubani Ogogo caused. And the ohu, who are not his direct descendants, were not invited to the ceremony; their mistreatment in the region continues. Still, it felt important for my family to publicly denounce its role in the slave trade. “Our family is taking responsibility,” my cousin Chidi, who joined from London, told me. Chioma, who took part in Atlanta, said, “We were trying to make peace and atone for what our ancestors did.”

On the final day, my relatives strolled along a recently tarred stretch of road to our local Anglican church. The church was established in 1904, on land that Nwaubani Ogogo donated. Inside, a priest presided over a two-hour prayer session. At the end, he pronounced blessings on us, and proclaimed a new beginning for the Nwaubani family. After the ceremony, my family members discussed making it a yearly ritual. “This sort of thing opens up the mercy of God,” my mother, Patricia, said. “People did all these evil things but they don’t talk about it. The more people confess and renounce their evil past, the more cleansing will come to the land.”

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Silence is a Lonely Country: A Prayer in Twelve Parts

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Sadia Hassan | Longreads | July 2018 | 18 minutes (4,468 words)

I.

On the night of the election, I call my father from the group home I am working in as a residential advisor. Things are eerily silent. No one playing the dozens or making a milkshake way past their bedtime; no one singing at the top of their lungs or crouched behind a fridge ready to jump out and scare the ever-living mess out of me; nobody asking questions about tomorrow, because, of course, nobody believes it will arrive.

At dinner, one of my students wants to know if I voted. I remain aloof.

I watch another student’s hands clench and unclench on the kitchen table.

“Man, if I could vote …

The truth was I could, and I had not. It did not feel like a choice to me. It was a question of degrees and integrity. It was a question of belonging or estrangement; between one drone strike and another genocide. I understood this country could never belong to me, so I did not vote and that night, overcome with the sinking weight of an accumulated shame, I could not catch my breath.

The thoughts ran through my mind: the Muslim ID cards, the internment camps, the CIA black sites, the border, the drones, the undocumented. We will all be [       ].

My father’s voice on the other side of the phone steadies me. I am a river rushing around a single, steady boulder, my father’s voice a buoy. “Aabe macaan,” I begin. “Are you watching the elections?”

“Aabe,” he sighs, the phone shifting awkwardly in his hand. He was clearly in bed.  “We have our children. What can they take from us?”

Even the children, I want to say. Instead, I say nothing.

Baba returns me to my body. When we were kids, he would hold his hands before our faces, slowly folding down each finger until we held his limp-wristed fists faceup in our tiny little hands. We were each of us as vital and necessary to the body of his love as each limb was to his person. Instead of “I love you,” he would say, “You are my two front teeth.” Instead of telling us to shut up, he would ask, “Take a breath.” Perhaps, my father was a poet. For him, the body is the only language that remains after everything falls away.

I put the phone down to get a drink of water. Really, I step away so my father does not hear me cry. I want to take off running.

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The Crushing, Ever-Present Weight of Debt

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After both of M.H. Miller’s parents lost their jobs during the financial crisis and his mother was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, Chase bank foreclosed on the family home. To create a better life for their son, the family had borrowed to cover his education, resulting in crushing student loan debt to faceless financial institutions unwilling to refinance to help the family make ends meet. In this harrowing piece at The Baffler, M.H. Miller shares his family’s story of financial collapse and explores the crippling effects of long-term debt.

After the dust settled on the collapse of the economy, on my family’s lives, we found ourselves in an impossible situation: we owed more each month than we could collectively pay. And so we wrote letters to Citibank’s mysterious P.O. Box address in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, begging for help, letters that I doubt ever met a human being. We grew to accept Citibank as a detestable Moloch that we feared and hated but were made to worship. The letters began to comprise a diary for my father in particular, a way to communicate a private anguish that he mostly bottled up, as if he was storing it for later. In one letter, addressed “Dear Citi,” he pleaded for a longer-term plan with lower monthly payments. He described how my mother’s mounting medical bills, as well as Chase Bank’s collection on our foreclosed home, had forced the family into bankruptcy, which provided no protection in the case of private student loans. We were not asking, in the end, for relief or forgiveness, but merely to pay them an amount we could still barely afford. “This is an appeal to Citi asking you to work with us on this loan,” he wrote to no one at all.

Still, following completion of this degree, I enrolled in night school because the cost of a French class at New York’s Cooper Union, an action that deferred my having to start paying off the debt, was cheaper than making the monthly payments I owed. Once I could no longer delay and the payments began, a question echoed through my head from the moment the day began, and often jolted me awake at night. I would look at the number on my paycheck and obsessively subtract my rent, the cost of a carton of eggs and a can of beans (my sustenance during the first lean year of this mess), and the price of a loan payment. The question was: What will you do when the money from the paycheck is gone?

I never arrived at an answer to this question. At my lowest points, I began fantasizing about dying, not because I was suicidal, but because death would have meant relief from having to come up with an answer.

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Why Were We All So Upset About Jason Bateman?

Mitchell Hurwitz, Jeffrey Tambor, Jason Bateman, Jessica Walter, and Will Arnett at ceremony honoring Bateman with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP)

NPR’s Linda Holmes wrote about last week’s painful New York Times interview with the cast of “Arrested Development.” Why, in a time of constantly horrifying news about how men treat women, did this story — which is “only” about verbal abuse — strike a nerve?

But maybe it was this interview because the disrespect felt so benign in the delivery and so destructive in the effect. How can you have “zero complaints” about a workplace someone else remembers as containing the worst verbal abuse of her career? Is that not, itself, a complaint? Why is it important that over and above forgiveness, Tambor receives absolution from the utterly unaffected men in the cast, right in front of the woman who initially told the Hollywood Reporter she didn’t even want to talk about her history with him in the first place? Tambor brought all this up, put all of it out in public, just so everyone else could explain why it didn’t matter? Is this reverse roast, this closing argument by a self-appointed defense attorney — is this supposed to be his reckoning?

Many of us — yes, women, but humans in general — prepare for conflict by trying to toughen up. We build leathery skins and metal bones, and we learn how to fight back without being blamed for the force we used. Come at us throwing rocks, and we cross our forearms and hope they bounce off. Come at us in secret, we run for light. Come at us harder, we at least try to get away. But there is something about these gentle poisoned touches, where someone puts a hand on your shoulder and says, “I understand, but after all,” and an audience cheers, and something bad seeps underneath your skin and up your neck.

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