By Zhailon Levingston
After hours of laughing, snacking, Netflix binging and spurts of forgetting what was happening outside, my chosen NYC based quarantine family and I dropped into a conversation about the recent murder of Ahmaud Arbery. The switch in mood was prompted by a phone call my friend received from his mother earlier in the day. We turned the television down and listened to our brother recount how his mother sobbed on the phone for ten whole minutes. For Arbery, yes, but also for the fear she has for her only son, whom she must hold the worry of two additional pandemics: white fear and white rage.
After seeing a few videos of the #iRunwithAhmaud challenge, a virtual call to action that invites folks to run or walk 2.23 miles in dedication of Arbery, the once comfy couch that we fell back into with joy only moments before, all of a sudden felt hard, cold and sad. I didn’t feel like running—so instead, I began to offer up words of hope, as if words could adequately hold our feelings.
I began to talk about the ideas of Black liberation theology developed by the late Dr. James Cohn. In the interpretation of the Jesus story, Dr. Cohn’s theology centers the experience of Black people in America. In his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree Dr. Cohn states, “If you can’t see the correlation between Jesus being crucified on calvary and Black folks being lynched in America you’ll never understand the cross.”
Jesus was murdered because he refused to call Caesar king. He believed in the power of the local fisherman over the tax collector, and he stood in solidarity with the outsiders of his time to live in a way that runs contrary to state power threatening the security of the Roman Empire. This is mirrored in the story of Black people in America. We are a group of marginalized people living in an empire that has had the powers of the government, religious establishment, and society at large play a hand in our persecution and crucifixion all because we dare to live without their approval.
We dare to make due out of the scraps given to us by creating new things out of the old, salvaging things that seem lost, bringing life to spaces where death once reigned, rolling away the proverbial stone and resurrecting. It is only through the story of Black people in this country that Christianity has an American relevance at all.
Did Ahmaud die? Yes. But did Ahmaud die? No. Both things are true, because whenever the empire crucifies a Black person hoping that our death will at last be final, we as a community roll away the stone of the tomb and remind the world that our lives aren’t only physical. That the spirit of those who die don’t just float up and disappear into the clouds. They visit us in whispers that drag us out into the streets to protest. They inspire our hands to write new chapters in the story that is America. They haunt our critical institutions, from the creation of the Black church, to revolutionary artistic expressions like Jazz and Hip Hop. I said all this to my friends on the couch hoping it would bring them hope.
One of them, a Black woman, just looked at me. She rested her eyes on me with a knowing look that basically implied: Nigga its 2020, we already know Black people are gods. She then let out a breath and said, “Yeah, but I’m just so weary.” I was fearing this response.
This is because it functioned as a mirror of my own thoughts and feelings. I too was so weary. I wanted to get back to laughing, not strategize about how to roll away yet another stone. It’s one thing to “carry your cross,” meaning your own personal burden. It’s quite another thing entirely to watch people who look like you die carrying the cross of someone else. Some white someone else who doesn’t know where else to place their fear, their jealousy, their own self hatred, so decide to lay it on you.
It’s one thing to know you have the power to overcome death, but it’s quite another thing entirely when you start to realize that to live in the empire that is America, the streets, like open tombs, will always be resting grounds for Black saviors. Quite another thing to know that the communities we come from, despite many limited resources, will organize movements to roll the stone of death away so often it will tow the line of redundancy. Black people in America are like Jesus dying on the cross, but there is no Jesus in America without Black people resurrecting over and over and over again. Sometimes I wish I could say to Dr Cohn, “We made Jazz. It’s here. We did it. Can people stop dying now?” Every stone we roll away gets heavier and heavier and heavier.
If I had a bit more courage in the moment, instead of pretending language could hold space for grief or that cynicism is pointless, I might have cut the theological shit and just embraced the vulnerability of weariness and said, “I don’t want to run for Ahmaud.”
I want white people to run for him. I want them to take to the streets in large groups (it’s not like they would get arrested), and I want them to run in their masks for him. Run until they run out of breath. Run until they say they can’t breathe. Run until they all collapse. And as they lay on the ground panting, sweating and at a loss for words, I want to eat rotel dip and do hoodrat shit with my friends. And I want to walk. I want to walk as slowly as possible to anywhere I want because I woke up tired and I woke up weary and I woke up not wanting to participate in any movement at all. So yeah, no, I don’t want to run for Ahmaud. I want to get back to laughing.
I can’t tell if that makes me a bad Christian or a bad Black person.
There are some lyrics that I used to hear spoken across the pulpit growing up in Louisiana. I would see it give the grown folks around me something to hold on to. The preacher man would quote, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” There’s a way of looking at the word “may” to be synonymous with the word “might,” but to be a Black person in America you already know that weeping is sure to come—so we start to make peace with that fact.
We start to look at the word “may” as a word synonymous with “allow.” I think looking at it that way offers possibly a more radical understanding. Weeping is allowed to endure for a night, for however long you need, for however long the night lasts. And when the morning comes, I may run or I may not. But for now, I will scoot over on the couch and make a little more room for my weeping, and sit in silence until laughter comes again, until the cackling commences.
