Into the Light

On secondhand oppression.

I don’t quite remember when I caught the thrifting/secondhand/your-trash-is-my-treasure bug. I grew up lugging trash bags of hand-me-downs home from church, passed from one of the “rich” girls. Never once did I feel ashamed. Only lucky. My family got by just fine. Most of the time, we had a television and a phone. We tasted our good fortune in saltines spread with frosting.

I was accustomed to secondhand things, I just wasn’t taught to decorate with them. My parents were (and are) practical people. We didn’t fuss about the way our home looked. Maybe my hobby has something to do with my best friend’s dad, Larry, who made art of scavenged things. I didn’t appreciate it enough at the time, but isn’t that the thing about art, beauty, and darker things? They sneak past us in broad daylight. They climb under our skin.

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Back when we lived on the farm, I visited a local auction house a few times. On one of those trips I paid a dollar, maybe two, for an aluminum tin with a lid, painted in vibrant colors. I brought it home and put it on my kitchen counter. I tucked loose ends inside it and capped it with the lid. A junk drawer, but cuter.

When we packed up that farm, it made the trip with us. I remember boxing up the dishes, the refrigerator magnets, the spice jars, the rolling pin. It takes so much to make life hum, or that’s what we tell ourselves.

That was the beginning of everything. A crack in the dark. A door opening to who-knows-what. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” we read, but we didn’t know our neighbor. “Uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.” We would! But we needed to find them, first.

And so, it began.

We unpacked our boxes in a different kitchen, where out past the windows, families struggled in a way I had never seen up close. I pulled out the pretty tin and christened it to its new home, on a new counter, partially hidden but still serving its function. The colors worked even better here.

We brought home our fourth child, not from a hospital or an airport, but from the county jail. Robert, both lion and lamb. Robert, who tiptoed out of the house each morning before dawn in his steel-toed boots, trying not to wake us up. Robert, whose very presence began to change our minds and our hearts over thousands of ordinary moments.

Cory became the chaplain of the jail. We were loved by more of our neighbors. We mutually bridged the language gap between us and the family next door by passing paper plates of tamales, and once, a random bouquet of grocery store tulips I thought I was buying for myself. (Giving flowers away is even more fun than keeping them.)

I watched the students at the Title I elementary school my kids attended. I watched them grow into middle-schoolers, and I watched how there came to be less patience for some of them, only the dregs of grace, if their skin was a certain hue.

I learned about microaggressions and remembered the days when I muttered things to myself like, “Everything has become too P.C.!” (Did I even know what that meant? Did I know I was allowed to push back?)

I remembered being ten and then twenty, moving from thinking Black people were almost mythical (I didn’t know any) to believing they might take something that I deserved more. An education that leads with the lie of slave-owners treating their slaves with Christian kindness grows into a smiling woman with seeds of White Supremacy in her heart. The seeds exist there, straining toward the sunlight of affirmation, whether she knows it or not, whether she admits it or not.

I was always polite. I was taught to be kind. I sang about Jesus loving all the colors of the world, and I meant it. It took me until full-blown adulthood to wonder why that song had to be written in the first place, and why it was so popular in white churches like the ones I knew.

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In 2020, exactly one year ago, probably in a fit of New Year deep-cleaning, I considered the tin still sitting on my counter. For years, only the lid was visible. I knew what remained unseen. But it had become part of the white noise of my daily life. I didn’t think about it much at all.

It was coated with the thin grime customary in kitchens the world over. Dust and grease, combined with the neglect that allows it to build, unnoticed. I pulled it out from its little alcove on the counter. Its image, altogether familiar, made my stomach tumble.

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Another year has passed since that discovery and the world hasn’t brightened. We learned about Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. There was Casey Goodson. Aiden Ellison. Jonathan Price. Sleeping. Jogging. Walking. Returning home from the dentist. Protecting someone else. So many names. So many hashtags.

Some of us are listening. Some of us are learning. Some of us are afraid for our own sons and daughters, our spouses. Ourselves.

Here’s what I’ve been trying to avoid telling you for at least a solid year: I have been on a long, slow journey to listen and learn. I have been a life-long Christian who would have sworn up and down that there “isn’t a racist bone in my body.” (This line will always be a red flag for me, by the way.)

I knew in my head and my heart that God loves us all the same. But, for over ten years, I kept an emblem of White Supremacy on my kitchen counter as decoration. It even made its way into a magazine spread. And those were my enlightened year. I did not see the problem with Southern plantations, or even with an illustration that depicts white people dancing in ballroom attire, one metal seam away from an enslaved Black woman cooking their dinner.

February is Black History Month and this is my confession.

We are never more dangerous than when we exist in an echo chamber, culling facts about one another from the news or the sports page.

We are never more dangerous than when we say one thing with our mouths but our bodies continue to move along the same, old paths.

We are never more dangerous than when we say, “It was a different time,” or, “They didn’t mean it that way,” or, “I don’t see color,” or, “Not everything has to be about race.”

We are never more dangerous than when we believe we are not part of the problem.

We are never more dangerous than when we settle into the privilege of opting out of being part of the solution.

For the rest of February, and for the rest of my life, I will be sharing what I’m learning. I’ll be doing what I can to pull everything out of the shadows.

We can’t address what we are unwilling to see. (Lord, drag us into the light.)

This is me going first.

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Aunt Jemima’s name and branding have officially been changed!

This short essay, The Creature Comfort of Aunt Jemima by Adia Victoria is powerful. “For too many white Americans, against their better judgement, the trappings of white supremacy simply taste good. And feeding these good feelings was the Aunt Jemima brand. They could pour their taste for Black subjugation right over their pancakes.”

Know their names. (A living list of Black lives lost.)

The Buried Truths podcast about the murder of Ahmaud Arbery was deeply revealing.

I just finished So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo and it was fantastic.

“We don’t call crime that happens in white communities “white-on-white” crime, even though the majority of crimes against white people are perpetrated by other white people. Crime is a problem within communities. And communities with higher poverty, fewer jobs, and less infrastructure are going to have higher crime, regardless of race.” - So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

“People of color do need and desperately want an effective police force to keep their communities safe. And in order for a police force to be effective, it has to earn the trust of its people…what we need is different policing. Policing not steeped from root to flower in the need to control people of color.” - So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

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Reading fiction by authors of color is an excellent way to learn, self-reflect, build empathy, and ultimately, work harder in the fight for anti-racism. Some recent favorites:

Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson (this is intended for middle-grade readers but I loved it, too!)

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (loved The Mothers, too!)

I’m sharing a ton about Black joy and Black history over on my Instagram page. Join me!

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We’ve had some gritty conversation in our house lately about the Anti-Asian racism which continues to thrive, mostly unnoticed. This week some horrific events unfolded. I hope you’ll watch this short video and do what you can to support your AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) friends and neighbors.

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There’s no good transition for this, but the contract for my next book was officially announced this week, and I wanted you to hear it from me, first!

“I’m excited to be linking arms with Revell. At the heart of this book is the quiet belief that faith is meant to be more than daily quiet time and regular church attendance. It’s personal to a degree, yes. But it’s not private. I want to invite readers to consider the Kingdom of God, the connection we all share, in all its vibrancy, complexity, and surprise. We are a garden and we all belong to one another.” - Moi (read the whole press release here. And stay tuned! It’s a long road ahead, but you’ll be the first to hear updates as I have them.)

(me, for the foreseeable future)

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Thank you, as always, for being with me here, committed to growth especially when it costs us something.

Until next month*, may February deliver perfectly fluffy snow while you sleep, and may you wake to sunny skies and cleared streets. (My favorite February mood.) May the soup stay warm and the toast, crunchy. May you notice the lengthening light of these late-winter days and may you never stop dreaming of spring.

Love,

Shannan

PS - This is the first email I’ve ever sent without a photo. I took some perfectly lovely photos of the tin, some which showed the woman and some which showed only the plantation on the front. As I wrote and reflected, I started to worry that even sharing those images was, in itself, perpetuating the problem by contributing to our desensitization of harmful images. I consulted my friend Deidra (a WoC.) She felt the images were unnecessary and perhaps unhelpful, but ended with, “trust your gut and we will have your back.” I’m wowed by her kindness and good faith, but I am learning to trust the gut of PoC far more than my own, when it comes to matters of race.

PPS - In case you’re wondering, I trashed the tin. But I kept the lid, because I don’t even want to forget that there will always be work left to do and things within me, maybe even invisible things hiding under a pretty lid, that need to be examined.