Tonight I am grateful for who I am, not from an egocentric perspective of “I am wonderful, who wouldn’t be grateful to be me,” but from a social, cultural, familial, and spiritual perspective. I am definitely a product of my African American heritage, middle class socioeconomic status, higher educational attainment, Catholic/Christian upbringing, Midwestern roots, family birth order, life dramas, traumas, and accomplishments, and countless other circumstances and influences that have imprinted themselves onto the fabric of my life, or rather are the threads with which the tapestry of my life is woven. I am grateful for the myriad micro and macro influences, the transformational, iron-forging moments that have shaped me into the person I am today.
I am proud to be African American. That has almost always been true, but it has never been easy or simple. I come from strong stock, from women and men who, though they came from having very little, worked with what they had and made it better for themselves and for their families. Like many African Americans in this country, I can trace my family line back to slavery on both of my parents’ sides of the family. But even in slavery and in the first years after emancipation, my grandfather’s grandparents were entrepreneurial and politically active. The passion for freedom and equality for all people runs strong through my father’s family line in particular; it was strong in him and my mother and they passed it on to their six children, and I can see strong threads of it running through my children and my siblings’ children.
I am grateful for all the marching and fighting and working and speaking of many African Americans (and their allies) who made it possible for me to achieve all that I’ve been able to do. We are a beautiful, strong, resilient people and yet we also continue to struggle as targets of hatred, prejudice, discrimination and the crushing weight of our own internalized racism and oppression that are flourishing in this country in 2012 in ways reminiscent of what we experienced decades ago. In spite of the struggles and challenges, I am grateful for my brown skin and all that has come along with it. Like I said, it’s never been easy or simple, but it is a core piece of who I am and how I walk in the world.
For the majority of my working life I have engaged in the work of pushing colleges and universities to welcome and embrace the human diversity present on and around their campuses and to create environments in which all people feel included and vital parts of the campus community. When I first started working on this back in the early 1980s it was really about building a critical mass of students of color and providing them support to help ensure their success. It was slow, frustrating work and while we helped many students be successful, I also saw a whole lot of them fail, having gotten chewed up and spit out by a system that at that time cared more about the numbers of “minority” students who were admitted to campus than whether or not those same students survived through to graduation. Many, many times over the past 29 years of doing this work I have wanted to quit–burned out, frustrated, angry, exhausted by all the opposition and obstacles to doing the critically important work of achieving equity and inclusion.
But whenever I’ve wanted to quit and return to the career goal of being a farmer that I’ve held since I was a child, something has happened. Sometimes, a former student who has gone on to do great work in her/his life will contact me and say, “I really thank you for the support you gave me back then. Because of you I am doing what I love and am making a difference in the world.” Whenever that happens, I am immediately reconnected with why I do what I do. Or sometimes, I look back at my parents or other people I admire who have labored long and hard for the causes of equality and social justice and I am inspired to keep going. They didn’t quit, and for now at least, neither can I.
One of these days I’m going to write a book–probably more than one–about this journey I’ve been on these many years. I am grateful for the lessons, even the most excruciatingly painful ones, because they are what has brought me to where I am today and will continue to move me forward. I will leave you with a poem that I wrote in 2002 titled, “The Fire that Forges My Iron.” I am grateful to be all of who I am and celebrate who I am becoming. Selah.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Fire That Forges My IronI look and listen while you speak
and I wonder about what lies beneath
beneath the surface, behind the mask
What white-hot fires have you been smelted, forged in?
What forces have hammered you into what you are now?
What shock of cold water, hissing steam solidified
you into what you are at this moment?
And what kind of new fires may forge you into something else?
I look at you, and for a moment I see me.
But when I look again more closely I see
That your iron was forged in different fires than mine.
I have been forged in the white-hot fires
of my unique circumstance.
I have been bent and shaped.
Hammered and flattened against the anvils
of time and history
of birth order and family circumstance
of genetics and biology and geography
Formed both in darkness and light
in dead silence and clamorous din.
And though your fires have burned as hot
And the hammer blows as brutal and loud
The fire that forges my iron is for me and me alone.
We may both be swords or shields or helms
and are wielded, brandished, or worn the same
Yet we each carry our own weight and uniquely
fit the bearer, the wearer, the brandisher.
I look around at other faces, now familiar
and recognize the scorch marks
the indentation of the smith’s tongs
and unmistakable signs of fire.
Molded, formed, wrought, shaped, pressed, fired, thrown, glazed.
Whether earthen or metal, each of us has come through fire.
“I know that I am fearfully and wonderfully made…I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth…”
To be continued….
