With Carolyn, my church friend who invited me to be part of the Black History Month celebration in her assisted living facility.
Despite years of teaching and formative years spent performing in theater, I confess that public speaking sets my heart racing. But like any good exercise, I know that it is good for me to get out of the house, get out of my comfort zone, and push myself just enough to at least break a sweat.
So thank you Carolyn, for the invitation to share some thoughts. And thank you all for your hospitality and willingness to listen.
I thought this talk would be a meditation on how the world, our country, and my family would be if three contemporaries - Anne Frank, Martin Luther King, Jr., and my grandmother, Janie Mae White - had all survived the torments that killed them - directly with Anne and Martin - and indirectly with Grandma. But that reflection was bringing me into a place of pithy cynicism. And then four days ago, my Uncle Henry - the Griot of our family history - passed away. And I’ve not been able to resume the thought exercise. We can never know the What Ifs of an alternate timeline where loss and horrors are beaten back. When we try to imagine it ... what we try to imagine ... always says more about the daydreamer than it can ever say about the ones we lost.
In drafting these remarks, I had to be honest with myself and with you and acknowledge the way history and memory function in the lives of my one beating, grieving, hopeful heart. The two - History and Memory - are like a blood pressure dance between the systolic and diastolic, striving to find a sustainable level of exertion in relation to the walls of society and family that define what it means to be fully human.
The systolic blood pressure measures the force of blood against our artery walls while our ventricles push blood out to the rest of our bodies. The diastolic blood pressure indicates how much pressure our blood exerts while the heart is at rest between beats.
There is a curious relationship between blood pressure and arterial walls: the higher the pressure the greater the stress on the artery. And yet even when the blood pressure is within the range of normal, the artery can still have fundamental, structural flaws that make it weak and vulnerable to collapse or rupture. Arterial walls can thicken, thin, become inflamed, calcify, and rupture in response to injuries brought on or aggravated by neglect or carelessness as we sustain the body as a whole.
Society has similar needs for nurturance. Societies that habitually fail to care for the beating hearts within them, eventually develop an atherosclerosis that not only debilitates the individual hearts but also the society as a whole. History is the systolic measure of how our forebears strove to make their lives in the context of the society in which they found themselves. It is a measure of both the force of the exertion and the inflexibility of the social constructs. Memory is the diastolic measure of those moments of pause and recovery, however fleeting and confined.
Lifestyle changes - like eating more fish oil, fresh fruit and veggies, reducing intake of empty carbs and sugars, and managing our weight can help restore elasticity to our blood vessels. Similarly, acknowledging painful history, remembering the losses, discovering overlooked innovation, and understanding the continued impacts of them all, are necessary societal changes that improve the arterial health of the heart of our society.
If he had to die - as I know we all must - at least Uncle Henry’s heart beat its last on Valentine’s Day during Black History Month. His love was complicated and not always easy to discern. But his love of our family, of our country, of our Black American History and of telling that history was absolute. Despite the systolic pressure from navigating racism in South Carolina, the Midwest, and his tours in Korea to eventually become one of the first black customer engineers at IBM and a seasoned entrepreneur, he reveled in the diastolic memory of family helping family navigate the changes in society’s walls.
During our last call, two weeks before he passed, he sounded like a young man, remembering with reverence the resilience of our family during one of our nation’s cruelest periods. He wasn’t bitter. He was inspired and in turn, he inspired me.
I believe Black History Month is an invitation to practice an ethic of care and remembrance on a broader scale. It invites us to prioritize healing the systolic damage caused by the struggle against the calcified cruelties of racism, segregation, and discrimination. It invites us to explore the diastolic calm when our hearts rest, our minds remember, and our communities honor the persistence of dreams, perseverance and resilience that can inspire us all.
