This Amerikan Moment

I spell Amerika this way to honor the KKK as used by the one and only Ice Cube and many others. I spell it this way to remind myself and others that this country was founded upon the traumatization, abuse, and profiteering of the slave trade, to say nothing of the genocide of our Indigenous peoples. 

Many of us choose to avoid the continuous trauma of racism and bigotry in general. We avoid it in our therapists’ offices, in our creative works, and often even in our deepest personal relationships. For People of Color, the unrelenting assault of systemic racism is as ubiquitous as air and light and many of them are tired. For white people who have done their own internal work, we may feel guilt and frustration that cause us to avoid hate. For white people who don’t dare look at their introjected beliefs, they certainly avoid the elephant in the middle of our lives. 

And yet when I work with folks who challenge the paradigm and dig deep into themselves with courage and curiosity, writing manuscripts that challenge, interrogate, and give voice to the many forms of Amerikan bigotry, these works and the experience of writing them prove to be shudderingly powerful—and, often, necessary for the authors. 

About ten years ago, I was in a creative writing residency at an inner-city Seattle high school. I was awash in rich cultures and inspired by delightful (and harrowing) stories from many countries and many zip codes. These kids kept me sharp and genuine because anything less would bore them, would feel too much like all the other English or Composition or Language Arts courses they’ve had to sit through. 

In a multi-windowed classroom, the seasons cartwheeled by as we wrote and revised and shared essays about identity, trauma, grief, and family.  I could pick from a dozen students from that time, but one particularly striking kid always comes to mind. He had started the semester claiming he couldn’t write anything creative and that he had mistakenly been placed in the course; sometimes he chomped his nails to the quick, as if panicked by where he found himself. But after a few months, he told me he did have something to say. It was a shaky start, but through one-on-one sessions after school, email correspondence, and a lot of red ink, his nervousness transformed into something that looked like a quiet excitement. 

I could see, however, that on the last day, his nerves were back—and whirring. This diminutive, quiet, inscrutable young man stood up shakily when it was his turn to share his final piece (which of course I had multiple previews of) in which he slowly led the reader through spirals of declarations about who he was, was becoming, and then ended with his most protected truth: I am a gay boy.

He kept his gaze lifted at the class, despite flushing red as a beefsteak tomato.  I, too, watched. To his immense relief, and to my immense pride, the other students broke into applause and whoops. One popular, athletic, sharply dressed, tall young man (the last person that many would have guessed) walked slowly to the front of the room, holding the author’s gaze, and embraced him for a long moment. 

I didn’t need any thanks from the author; my reward was lavish already.

I hope to share many more such lavish rewards with various authors that I have the privilege to work with.

Become one of them today by scheduling your free consultation.