Tess

On Being Black, Female, Terrified, & Hopeful in 2020

November 2, 2020 by Tess Leave a Comment

I’m pretty anxious about the upcoming election. That’s both the understatement of the century and an accurate description of my current state of being. I spend my day ping ponging between nausea-laced despair and regular despair — despair zero: all of the flavor without any of the pesky calories. If I’m awake, I’m worrying about a few hundred things at once, each one enormous, the cacophony beating along the inside of my skull.

And, yet, I still feel hopeful for some reason.

This is despite being a Black woman at this moment in America.

This is despite all evidence to the contrary.

In fact, let’s take a handful of seconds to go through some of that evidence, and then I’ll make my case for why we should keep on trucking in the direction of the light I’m looking forward to finding one day at the end of this long, strange, narrow tunnel.

After limping through the last four years of an incompetent megalomaniac occupying the White House (when he’s not occupying various golf courses, that is), there appears to be nothing to look forward to, no reprieve, no magic bullet, no hope of any kind. We’re living through a global pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 people in this country and sickened many more, kept us away from family and friends, turned our economy upside down, and financially destroyed millions of American families. Even before the pandemic bulldozed its way across the country, we lived in a state of perpetual dread at what irresponsible, bigoted, and/or outrageous thing the so-called leader of the free world would do next. Racism isn’t new, but Trump sure has managed to make it great again, hasn’t he? Ditto for sexism. And homophobia. And transphobia. And Islamophobia. And xenophobia. You get the point, right? It’s a truckload of isms and phobias. Not to mention the courts are packed to the rafters with conservative judges, we’re not doing one goddamned thing about climate change, and we’re the butt of every joke on the international stage.

But, here I am, hopeful. Nauseous as I maniacally check every election related metric imaginable, but still hopeful.

Part of this hope is directly related to what I do for a living. Back in 2016, as I watched the political train careen off the track and into the canyon below, I had absolutely no way to influence the process past my vote. Don’t get me wrong. One person’s vote is important. But back then I believed voting was all an American needed to do in order to claim engagement in the process.

I learned how wrong I was the hard way.

I felt hopeless and scared the morning after Election Day, and when that despair turned to anger, I didn’t really know what to do about it. By the middle of November, I’d found my people — other pissed off folks (mostly women) that hadn’t been involved before but wanted to fix that lack of engagement in a hurry — and that started me on a path I’m still traveling to this day.

Another reason I’m hopeful is that I finally understand the full extent of my power now, how it’s amplified when I stand shoulder to shoulder with other people like me who want things to be different, fairer, better. Not just a return to the pre-Trump era, but a reimagining of what we could be as a country if only we eradicated racist and sexist systems that have been in place since the nation’s founding.

Every time we lose a fight or take a hit that should leave us down for the count, I feel that abiding, stubborn flicker of hope intensify, and we get back up again. If you’d told me 4 years ago about this persistent little flame, I’d have waved you off, disbelieving. How could such a thing exist, I’d ask, given everything that’s wrong? But now I think it only exists because of what’s wrong. The fixing is fuel, and there’s so much that’s broken.

So, what about this election?

I voted weeks ago, and we’re shortly running out of work that can be done that might influence the direction of this election. But I’m going to keep pushing. I plan to leave it all on the field this year.

Before getting sucked into the world of politics, I’d never experienced the feeling of helping to shape history. Of being part of a movement that could bend the arc of the moral universe a little further towards justice. I feel that now. We’re making history, all of us, together. And we’re a few short days away from the fruits of our labor. I really believe that. I have to. That little flame demands it.

And after Election Day?

We keep going, fighting, pushing to create the country as it should be. There’s so much damned work to do, but I’m grateful to be able to do a small part of it, and I’m even more grateful for the people that are doing the work right along with me.

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The 19th Amendment: 100+ Years of Black Women on Their Own

August 30, 2020 by Tess Leave a Comment

First, let’s set the table.

Yes, I am that person that interjects with white women whenever someone mentions that it’s been 100 years since women gained the ability to vote. And if I don’t interject, I’m definitely thinking it. That might cause some folks to roll their eyes, but that doesn’t make my clarification any less true. We can celebrate an achievement while also pointing out how that same achievement fell well short of enfranchising the diverse range of women that lived in America in 1920.

History is a funny thing, isn’t it? Especially in this country. Instead of learning from it, we stubbornly choose to sand down its rough edges in order to draw our collective gaze to the loveliest smoothed over parts, completely avoiding the dry rot underneath that just keeps spreading. Maybe it’s because human beings are the kinds of creatures that crave rich narratives with beginnings, middles, and (happy) ends. Sweeping tales of heroes and heroines, all white, with the occasional person of color in a supporting role. The movement for women’s suffrage is no different.

Growing up, the story I learned about women’s long fought battle for what would become the 19th Amendment was fully housed in towering white champions like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. My small eyes scanned pictures of women in flowing white dresses and sashes, marching and demanding equal access to the ballot box, not a Black or brown person among them. No one mentioned Black women, who absolutely did not get the right to vote, despite their contributions to the movement. No one mentioned indigenous or Asian women either, who weren’t even allowed to be U.S. citizens at the time. Latinas were also left completely out of this victory for all women, as we’re taught to celebrate it today. This was a movement powered by white women, my history books assured me, without ever explicitly stating it. But you’ll be a woman one day, and so this was your victory too. Cool, right? I didn’t question this narrative, because what kid does? We ingest what we’re fed, until we’re old enough to realize that some crucial ingredients have been left out of the stew.

Throughout the month of August, folks have been talking about the 19th Amendment, leaning heavily into the Stanton-Anthony industrial complex, as they’ve always done. So I suppose it’s no surprise that this centennial of white women gaining the ability to vote has me lowkey annoyed, an undercurrent of unrest that buzzes directly behind my eyes. All month, I’ve been thinking about feminism’s historical inability to negotiate the intersection of race and gender. And this unwillingness to embrace intersectionality persists to this day, carried forth by generation after generation of women. I left a rather famous women’s organization in 2017 because of the blatant racism and toxic white feminism I saw and experienced there, a suffocatingly clique-ish environment dressed up as ‘sisterhood’. It was okay to have Black women and other women of color toiling for the organization and peppered into group photos, but it wasn’t okay for them to be in leadership roles or to ever point out racism within the ranks. In that way, it was very similar to the movement for women’s suffrage.

The betrayal of Black women by their so-called white suffragist ‘sisters’ caused a fissure in the feminist movement that’s still a gaping hole to this day. It always seems a little too easy for the concerns of Black women and other women of color to get indefinitely delayed or outright ignored so the group can focus on more pressing matters. Pressing always means what’s deemed important by the white women in charge.

When we learn about the battle for women’s suffrage in school, we never hear about the deep seated racism of its white leaders. We don’t hear about the tokenization of Asian and indigenous women, or the erasure of Latinas. We don’t hear about how it was just fine for Black women to do the work, but unacceptable for them to expect a seat at the table. Back in the day, ladies like Stanton were enraged at the thought of Black men getting the right to vote before white women. This is despite the fact that Frederick Douglass was an avid and vocal supporter of women’s rights, even showing up at the convention at Seneca Falls.

Racism was in the DNA of this movement. That much was evidenced by the racist rhetoric of its leaders. And the scope of the movement was narrow: push just enough to enfranchise white women, then stop. In the same way that Black men weren’t magically able to practice the voting rights set forth for them in the 15th Amendment until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black women also weren’t able to access their right to vote after the passage of the 19th Amendment. But did newly enfranchised white women continue to fight for them? Of course not. Because this was never about the rights of all women. Black, Latina, indigenous, and Asian women were on their own, despite how hard they’d labored to make the ratification of the 19th Amendment possible.

The 19th Amendment didn’t do anything about the intimidation, poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence Black women faced when they tried to register to vote, just like the 15th Amendment didn’t protect Black men from such treatment. But Black folks had to figure this out alone. No help arrived from white suffragists. And, years later, these same white women would be lauded as heroines that contributed to the great American story while the suffragists of color were fully erased from my history books.

As so often happens in my adult life, I feel terribly cheated out of learning crucial parts of the American story during my first twelve years of education. It wasn’t until I was in college that I learned about Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and so many others. I lived nearly two decades without understanding the crucial role Black women played in a battle for equality that I’d been led to believe was fought only by white women. American history is a story of white achievement, and all but a few people of color are erased by the centuries of white folks that have carefully constructed that narrative, from the ships arriving on Plymouth Rock to the present day.

Racism played a central role in the movement for women’s suffrage, and I’m not here to celebrate that. What I celebrate are the thousands of Black women and men that never stopped fighting for voting rights until they were signed into law in 1965. I celebrate the folks still fighting for these rights to this day, because the suppression never stops, it just takes another form: purging of the voter rolls, voter ID laws, polling locations closed without notice, etc. This month, I celebrate the perseverance of Black women, the way they keep rising, no matter how hard this country shoves them down or erases them from its history. We have a long way to go, but we’ve also come so far. I celebrate that too.

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A Black Woman’s Guide to July 4th

July 4, 2020 by Tess Leave a Comment

In 1776, a group of wealthy white men officially declared independence from a tyrannical monarchy. This collective of learned individuals stated boldly:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness.

More than 200 years later, many of us are still waiting for the full realization of this cherished ideal, our ears straining to hear freedom ringing from sea to shining sea. The great American fairy tale — that we were all in chains until the Declaration of Independence and the triumphant end of the Revolutionary War, which solidified the creation of this nation — always fails to mention that the United States was constructed to exclude most people from this pursuit of life, liberty, etcetera. Black people remained slaves. Indigenous people had no place in white society. All women were excluded, and only select white women could benefit from the power wielded by their landowning husbands or fathers. At the birth of our nation, very few people living within its borders were actually free.

And now?

I am a Black woman. I have a job I love that earns me a good living. I have a family and friends and live in a sleepy suburb along the coast. My life would have been unimaginable to the Black folks that toiled, enslaved, on plantations and in the homes of rich masters. But they are part of the American story too, integral characters that too often fade into the background. They built this country. They yearned and dreamed and pushed for freedom. They fought to bring the nation closer to what its founding documents claimed this land already was: a place where life and liberty were to be cherished above all else. A place where all men were created equal.

The relationship Black people have with this country is complicated. But we don’t learn about the depths of this complication in school. We learn that slavery happened, though we aren’t made to look closely at its abject cruelty. It was just a thing that occurred a long time ago and was absolved by Abraham Lincoln. We don’t learn that he was no great champion of Black people. We only learn about the Emancipation Proclamation, and not even that it only freed slaves in the confederate states. And after that? We aren’t taught about Reconstruction’s shivering crescendo and how, sparkling with promise that wouldn’t be rekindled until the 1960’s, it ended with abrupt finality, plunging Black folks into the dark ages of Jim Crow. All of this is glossed over as we join our teachers in leapfrogging from colonial times — the British are coming! — to the end of slavery — let freedom ring! — to the Civil Rights Movement — I have a dream, y’all! And now, here we are, living in an entirely civilized, post-racial America — we’re so great that we don’t see color anymore!

I was raised in a military family, and a fierce love of this country was the undergirding of my entire childhood. I still feel that love today, though not as pure as it was when I was a child waving a flag at airshows, because I see the object of my affection much more clearly now. This is my country, though the Founding Fathers never meant it to be mine. It is imperfect, unequal, and unwelcoming to anyone that doesn’t fit the description of the Founding Fathers themselves: white, male, rich. I’ve been told that if I don’t love this country, I should go back to Africa. I’ve been told that slavery was a long time ago and I should get over it. I’ve been told racism no longer exists in this country — BECAUSE OBAMA — and that I am the one who seems to be practicing the dark arts of reverse racism. I have watched as Black men and women are killed in the streets or in their own apartments by police officers whose sole job is to protect and serve the community. And why? Because Black people were never supposed to be members of the community. We could live in America — actually, it was compulsory — but we couldn’t be Americans. The founding documents weren’t talking about us, though the success of the nascent nation depended on us: our labor, our sweat, our tears, our babies, our blood.

Today, 244 years after an Independence Day that did not include people that looked like me, I assert my own independence, and I claim this country as mine. I stand on the backs of giants, the generations of Black folks that toiled and fought and stretched their fingers towards a freedom that still lies on the distant horizon for me, hundreds of years later. But I’m closer than they ever were, because of them, and the next generation will be closer than I am, because of me. That is America. This striving to be better, freer, more truthful about who and what we are. That is the spirit I celebrate today, and it’s what I honor in the work that I do, creating change that will make this country closer to what it claimed to be in 1776.

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…

We aren’t there yet, not even close. But I celebrate us — those that were never supposed to be part of that so-called perfect union. I honor those that made it possible for me, a Black woman, to be sitting in my own dining room, tapping away on a computer while my dog snores beside me. The people who looked like me are mostly hidden in our history, but nothing we celebrate today would have been possible without their invisible labor, their struggle, their thirst for freedom that I still feel at the back of my own throat, an itch that never goes away. Tonight, while I watch fireworks explode in the distance, I will think of them, running towards the North with only the stars to guide them.

That is the America I celebrate.

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No Justice. No Peace. No Words.

June 13, 2020 by Tess Leave a Comment

Words come easily for me. They always have. No matter what’s happening in my life, no matter how upset, furious, or forlorn I am, if I sit down in front of the computer or a sheet of blank paper, the words come. And there’s release in that flow of words, a siphoning off of pressure, of pent up emotion, that has comforted me since I was a young girl scribbling in my journal. This release of words makes gathering my thoughts possible. I can sharpen them into a point and then attack whatever’s ultimately upsetting me. Or I can turn them into a lullaby sweet enough to neutralize the chaos in my head and usher in blessed peace. But the last few weeks have been a struggle, y’all, and it’s been hard to find the words, to urge them out, to pin them to the page so I can start making some sense of everything that’s going on.

We watched another black man repeatedly tell police he couldn’t breathe right before he was murdered. This was after watching a black man out for an evening jog get brutally killed by white men who would have gone without punishment (and still might, ultimately) if not for sustained public outcry. Right after learning a black woman, sleeping in her own bed, was shot and killed in the middle of the night by police executing a faulty warrant. This is on top of a global pandemic that’s killing disproportionately more black people due to generations of purposefully poor healthcare infrastructure in our communities together with the racism inherent in the medical profession itself, as recently evidenced by a doctor (and elected official) asking in a public forum if black folks are getting infected at a higher rate because they just don’t wash their hands. Add to that a sprinkle of watching yet another privileged white woman call the cops on a man that had the audacity to bird watch while black in a public space. The hits just keep coming.

This last month has been trying as hell for us black folks. But, if we’re being real, it’s been a trying four centuries.

Being black in this country means constantly trying to square America’s promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with the horrors you experience in your daily life. You watch another black life taken in HD. The loss is sensationalized, and you can’t get away from it, leaving you feeling frustrated, furious, and helpless. You look at your children, and you wonder if things will ever get better, if they will know true equality in this so-called land of the free. Or will they still be learning the names of black men and women murdered by police and white vigilantes? Will they have to take to the streets, marching for justice that remains on the horizon, ever elusive? Will they be able to breathe? Or will the country keep a knee on their necks, slowly suffocating them as it has you?

As I poked at the stubborn words clustered in the back of my skull, trying to coax them out into the light where they could be of some use, I found myself wondering how we’re supposed to give our black children something we’ve never experienced ourselves: peace, freedom, true equality? What does that even feel like? What could it mean for their futures, their well being, if the color of their skin was no longer a liability? And how do we make sure it’s real, not the switcheroo that keeps being perpetrated on black communities from the end of the Civil War, to the crushing finale of Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights era? Two steps forward only to get shoved three steps back.

And yet, I feel hope. How can such a thing exist, in light of what’s happening? In light of what’s always happened?

There are folks marching in the streets, demanding change, accountability, and equal protection under the law. Not just the same tired lip service, but actual equality. An end to racist institutions. A true reckoning such as this country has never seen, not even when soldiers took up arms against their former fellow countrymen over the abolition of slavery.

This is different. I can feel it.

But that doesn’t mean a happy ending is waiting at the end of this nightmarish 400 year long fairy tale. It just means there’s more work to be done.

For those of us working in the advocacy and political space, the amplification of this moment feels like a resuscitation, smelling salts broken beneath our noses that get us even more focused on the path forward and the critical work ahead. We knew racism was the binding agent undergirding every aspect of American society, but it’s in sharper relief now, more visible and undeniable. Unaffected folks are suddenly seeing it — really seeing it — for the first time. Given the work I do, I find myself almost compelled to believe this will make some difference. I cup the flickering flame of hope in my hands, protecting it against high winds that would snuff it out for good.

In retrospect, maybe the words weren’t the stubborn part of this operation after all. Maybe it was me all along, burying myself into the work I find so important, the work I believe could deliver some of these sorely needed changes. Because my response to stress and turmoil has always been to keep busy, to run hard and fast, to collapse into bed at the end of the night, exhausted and unable to think of anything besides blessed sleep. Because the reality of what this country has been and currently is for black folks will crush us if we don’t keep moving, working, hustling, and pushing for change. To stop, even for a moment, is to risk obliteration beneath the weight of centuries of people, policies, and precedent, all working together to make sure anyone that looks like us never succeeds.

So I’m going to keep running in the direction of what I hope waits for us on the horizon. I’m going to keep taking this frustration, anger, sadness, and helplessness and turn it into something useful: words, actions, plans, policies. All the while, I’m going to keep Maya Angelou’s words at the front of my mind.

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

And I’m going to rise. We all are.

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On Loving Dogs and Letting Go

April 28, 2020 by Tess Leave a Comment

*Carly in her element. Lizards and squirrels beware.*

A few days ago, I stood above my 14 year old rat terrier Carly as we waited on the veterinarian to come with the series of syringes that would end her life. While she looked up at me with absolute trust, completely oblivious to what was to come, I struggled to reconcile my love for her with the sense of deep betrayal I felt running parallel to that love, because I knew what was about to happen, and I had chosen it. She had no way of knowing why we’d left the house to take a short drive to the emergency vet, less than two miles away. She trusted me, because in our long history together, I’d never done anything to hurt her. But this was the best thing, I told myself repeatedly, even as I feared it might not be. She was in pain. She wasn’t going to get better. This was the right thing. The only humane option. But was it really? What if…?

But that was the end. The beginning was different. Better.

My mother had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy. We were all living in a constant state of terror, though we never spoke of it, lest we summon some additional looming misfortune into the precarious balance of our lives. A coworker of my father’s had a rat terrier that had just given birth. We went to visit those puppies when they were several weeks old. Carly had a perfect circle on her back, and she was the runt. It was love at first sight.

She came home many weeks later in a cardboard box to keep her from roaming free in the car. We named her after both Carly Simon and Carly Corinthos, a character from General Hospital, my Mom’s favorite soap opera. Our shared amusement over this plucky new dog got us through the dark wilderness of my mom’s cancer treatment. I took her to obedience classes — she passed with flying colors, though she was truly an unbossed and take-no-shit kind of K9 — and had her picture taken with Santa for her first Christmas. She became the center of our small universe, and her gravitational pull was undeniable.

In between the day she came home in that box and the day I rode in the backseat with her up to the emergency vet, her time with us running desperately short, there were many years of memories that will likely make me smile in the months to come, though they cause tears now. For the first several years of her life, you couldn’t leave a pen or pencil sitting out without her chewing it beyond recognition. She’d climb onto a side table to steal your food if you were careless enough to leave it sitting unattended, even if only for a few seconds. She used to play with empty soda bottles, chasing them around the house and growling like a tiny tasmanian devil. She was a world class hellraiser. When she had puppies herself, she was a tender, attentive mother…until she wasn’t, and then her mostly grown pups could fend for their damned selves and stay the hell out of her way, which they did, even as recently as last week.

*Carly en famille with her littles: Amelie, Lilly, and Stitch.*

We had a cancer scare with her last fall, but the vet was able to remove the tumor, and we breathed a sigh of relief that ultimately proved to be premature. A few weeks later, I found a lump on her opposite leg and, this time, the vet declined to operate, citing her age and the likelihood that it would cause the cancer to metastasize. But it did that anyway, and it happened much faster than any of us were prepared for.

I spent the last few weeks as Carly’s condition worsened wondering if I’d know when the time had come. In the last two weeks of her life, we had to increase her pain medication just to keep her comfortable. The tumor grew, making it harder for her to walk. She cried in the night, unable to sleep. It became too much. But when I set her next to me and rubbed her back, she would rest easily. I convinced myself that this was okay. But it wasn’t. None of it was.

At the vet, I wanted to ask if this was the right thing to do, or if we should take her home to let her live a little bit more of her life. It didn’t feel right to choose this, after so many years of nourishing and loving her, of making sure she was safe, happy, and healthy. But I couldn’t muster the words. What if they said we’d waited too long to bring her in? That she’d suffered unnecessarily because of our selfishness? What if they accused us of bringing her in too soon, of just wanting to get rid of her? It all felt right and wrong at the same time. I leaned to kiss Carly and she licked my face. It felt like I was betraying her, but also like I was doing the right thing by letting her go.

Dogs are like special guests in the running, sometimes banal drama of our lives. They play the heartwarming supporting role to our unwilling protagonist, the much needed comedic relief to our maudlin, self-centered narratives. But, eventually, they are written out of the series, and we have no choice but to soldier on, because there are still scenes as yet unwritten, though we miss their companionship, and the show is never quite the same without them.

I know that time softens the sharp edges of grief and that we’re better for having loved these silly, snuggly, loyal little creatures. But the pain of losing them changes us, and the uncertainty over their final moments can make us question ourselves long after they are gone.

Was it the right time to say goodbye? Could I have held on longer? Should I have held on longer? Why are we given such a heavy responsibility in the first place? It doesn’t seem right, that we should choose for them. Who the hell are we, in the grand scheme of things?

Fourteen years is a long time to love someone. But it’s also the blink of an eye.

I said goodbye to my sweet, sassy Carly. I held her until it was over. I told her I loved her, and that I was sorry. In the end, just as in the beginning, we were together.