CAPACITY

While I Do "Have A Deep Capacity", It's Not Today

Note: I wrote this on when it was very fresh in my spirit. I decided to post after sitting with it.

These days I often don’t have the capacity to have conversations with some of the few white friends I still communicate with about what we are living through in this country right now. Why? What the conversations often reveal is how much they do NOT witness about their comfortability with their whiteness - and all that it affords them. I brought this up to my friend in Paris the other day regarding a text I received from a mutual friend.

The mutual friend is a white, middle-aged Protestant minister from my Midwest hometown. We have remained friends all these years. He was reaching out to me to “catch up.” But it was the language of his text that pissed me off. Actually, it triggered some deep rage in me.

He asked if we could do a phone call to “catch up”- which we often do every couple of months or so. He said that he was “a bit overwhelmed” right now and “what a mess” the state of things are in this country and “so much you were aware of” months ago. Uhm, why wasn’t he aware? What allowed him to move about his life and NOT be fully aware of what was to come in this country after the 2024 election?

This is what my French friend and I were discussing after I shared the text with her. She said: “this is incredible! Why was he not aware? I learned about Project 2025 and recognized the danger for the U.S. and I’m in France!” I had shared Project 2025 with my Parisian friend well before the 2024 election. She took it upon herself to research, learn more and to share it.

Black people in America learned and sounded the alarm about Project 2025, too. It was on the Internet for all to read. There were condensed break downs and articles written about it. In my opinion, it was a choice by many white people to not “be aware”. Many – not all - white people did not believe this could happen “in America.”

But they have not LIVED in the America Black people have had to exist under. We know and have survived slavery, Reconstruction, Slave Patrols, Black Codes, Jim Crow and more. We recognized and called out the coming danger.

The minister and I have been friends since middle school. Don’t get me wrong, he is a good human being. But “good people” are also being called to account in this current reckoning in America. James Baldwin wrote about this. Dr. King spoke on it.

This morning, I stopped at my favorite diner after my early morning eye appointment, where my eyes were dilated. I was squinting to see as I went through my messages. I stopped at the text from my minister friend that I had still not answered.

After deciding to wait to have a conversation with him, I sent my Parisian friend a message saying that I had not yet responded to our mutual friend. I shared that I did not have the capacity at this moment. The news was breaking about the racist online post depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as apes and the gutting of journalists at The Washington Post. It was more chaos and uncertainty stressing my nervous system.

Add to that this past week was also the anniversaries of BOTH my mother’s and brother’s deaths. So no, I didn’t have the capacity to hear the minister talk about what he was or was not asking his church flock to put on the line.

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Then I opened the Substack app and boom! There was a note posted by Khalia Ii, PhD, exhorting us to trust our “capacity to hold you in these times.” There it was – “capacity.” The Universe was letting me know. I could see clearly now that I did not have the capacity right now to have this conversation with my friend.

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I decided to at least respond to my friend’s text to say exactly that. But something didn’t let me stop there. I went IN, which is probably why I initially knew to stay silent.

I asked when were more white people going to stop being comfortable in their whiteness? I said: “We TOLD you this was going to happen and y’all thought: ‘this is America it can’t happen here.’” Yeah, it sure is America. Ask Black people.

Then I said to challenge the mostly white people he leads. Tell them to stop thinking the atrocities happening in this country were only happening to “others.” I said what was happening to “others” will come to their doors, too.

He responded somewhat defensively, saying he had acknowledged my “insights” and that he has “not been passive.” MY “insights”! Mothafucka, (there’s my rage rearing up) Project 2025 was not MY “insights.” It was a plan decades in the making put out there for ALL to read and share.

He missed my point. It was also HIS responsibility to read the damn thing and understand that the coming threat was REAL. I text back to say that I my intent was to point to all white people in general. I said that I hoped he understood why I did not have the capacity to talk right now. He replied he understood.

I don’t have the capacity. Nope. Not today.