and day by day, there were little fires everywhere
Artistic rendering of Pentecost, created by JESUS MAFA, hosted by http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48388
I started watching a miniseries on Hulu called “Little Fires Everywhere.” The whole cast acted their asses off, okay?!
Kerry Washington plays Mia, a Black artist and mother with a complicated past. Reese Witherspoon is a Post-it’s-on-the-color-coordinated-family-calendar-loving, holiday card-sending nice (TM) White lady named Elena. Except, she isn’t really nice. Throughout the miniseries (based on a book by Celest Ng), the audience is pricked with horror at everything Elena does. From lashing out towards her children, hosting racist baby showers, coddling nonsense and dropping evil one-liners with a pretty Colgate smile, Elena just really isn’t nice. The evil of the movie is that for much of it, all that Elena does can be defended by anyone who chooses to.
She lives in a world where she is both damsel and hero, fierce and dainty, competent and useless. She manipulates her cuteness, Whiteness, femininity and proximity to power to control her side of the world. As audience members, we’re left with this horrible question to ponder:
Why call it microaggressions, when ain’t shit micro about it?
This is the nature of our world. It happens like this, one action at a time. And those actions are all coordinated, structured and designed to create what we got now.
Yet, we are drawn to romantically grand notions of revolution. As if one day, all of us will simultaneously get an iCalendar notification that says, “it’s happening now.”
Related: NYC needs to find a better way to alert me about the curfew because my nerves TRULY cannot take.
Hot Take: End the curfew. It’s dangerously Anti-Black. The same people y’all was clapping for 3 weeks ago are getting beat and arrested on the way home.
Enter Pentecost.
Earlier this week, a friend of mine asked me to read Acts 2 for them. It was Pentecost, after all. As I read the text out loud, I heard phrases I’d never heard before.
“...a sound like the rush of a violent wind…”
“Indeed, these are not drunk...for it is only 9 am…”
“...your young shall see visions, and your old shall dream dreams…”
“...crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law.”
“...because it was impossible for him to be held in its power…”
“And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”
The entire passage is compelling. In your own study, feel free to explore Acts 2.
As a brief summary, basically what happened was, a bunch of people were gathered in somebody’s attic and WHOOSH, fires rested on everyone’s heads. The people gathered were from all over, and thus, spoke all kindsa languages. The people were able to understand each other as if they were at a UN General Assembly and a translator was whispering in their ears.
This is the passage that progressives often cite when they/we want to remind people that God not only doesn’t have favorites, but that God intentionally remembers the very people that society ignores.
God says “your sons and daughters shall prophesy,” thus disrupting norms of gender-based discrimination. Sons and daughters, of course, not imagining that there are only two genders. We know there are more genders than just the ones our census form offers. I’d like to believe that God says “sons and daughters” as an affirmation that our community is made up of more than “just sons.”
God says, “your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams,” thus disrupting norms of ageism. Again, we know people come in other ages than just “young” and “old.” And sometimes you might be too young to do one thing and too old to do another, all at the same damn time.
God says, “even upon my slaves,” thus disrupting economic exploitation and classism. For those who are incarcerated, those who are being surveilled, and still under State control through parole and probation.
And God disrupts the natural world, even saying “the Sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood.”
God disrupts the way things usually go, so much so that onlookers think the people are drunk.
This scripture slaps. I’d tattoo it on my forearm if I could settle on a font. I come to this text whenever I need to remind myself that I too can hear from the Divine. Whenever I needed to balance out the White/cis/het/dude (or all the above) flyer assaults to my eyeballs, Acts 2 was the text that held me and comforted me.
Well, that and Tina Turner’s Greatest Hits. Any time you feel low, Tina Turner will minister to you. I’m a witness.
And yet.
I’d never paid attention to the phrase, “day by day.” Not until my friend asked me to read this entire chapter.
I think God works day by day. And I think we should, too.
When I say, “day by day,” I don’t mean how Teach for America says “one day all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.” I’m actually not convinced that Ed Reformers like TFA n’em actually want to work themselves out of a job. I would tell you stories but I’ll just put links here.
When I say, “day by day,” I don’t mean how folks misread the power of our Afrofuturist ancestors who really believed and worked towards “We shall overcome someday.” We gon’ be alright.
When I say, “day by day,” I don’t mean how you might tell a child “one day we’ll go to the pool,” knowing good and well you don’t plan to organize yourself to go.
When I say “day by day,” I mean like this. Dean Emilie Townes says it this way:
…it’s what we do every day that shapes us and says more about us than those grand moments of righteous indignation
and action
the everydayness of listening closely when folks talk or don’t talk to hear what they are saying
the everydayness of taking some time, however short or long, to refresh ourselves through prayer or meditation
the everydayness of speaking to folks and actually meaning whatever it is that is coming out of our mouths
the everydayness of being a presence in people’s lives
the everydayness of designing a class session or lecture or reading or writing or thinking
the everydayness of sharing a meal
the everydayness of facing heartache and disappointment
the everydayness of joy and laughter
the everydayness of facing people who expect us to lead them somewhere or at least point them in the right direction
and walk with them
the everydayness of blending head and heart
it’s the everydayness of getting up and trying one more time to get our living right
it is in this everydayness that “we the people” are formed…
Or as Audre Lorde shared at an address at Harvard in 1982:
“Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses…”
Or as music teachers, coaches, dance teachers and choir directors across the globe tell students, “There is no magical formula. You get better by practicing.”
Day by day.
What we practice in our daily lives is more accurate of an assessment than the bios we design, the statements we make, hell, even the speeches that go viral.
Day by day.
But when used for the wrong purpose, this “day by day” thing can get sticky. It is for this reason that this parody image went VIRAL.
I have no clue who designed this parody statement, but I love it. Does it not expose a consistent chorus?
There are so many Black images with white font clogging my timeline. Postmates. Uber. Random Colleges. Bookstores. Arts groups. Churches. Divinity Schools. Fast food joints. Hair care subscription boxes. Makeup brands. Museums.
Hell, Amazon got a little banner up and this is all upsetting to me AND my homegirl.
And I feel like The Grinch for being underwhelmed and overstimulated. Noise, noise, noise.
But day by day.
I don’t expect perfection. I expect we will stumble and get it wrong. I expect that we will learn from our mistakes. I expect little fires everywhere. Burn the illusions. Burn the lies. Burn the falsehoods.
Don’t just tell me that you donated 10 million dollars to XYZ. Or whomever else. Don’t put rainbow flags on the church if you’re also going to police folks’ gender/clothes/names and disrespect their families.
Amazon and Co., tell me you reversed your policy on union-busting. Tell me you’re paying your workers a livable wage. Tell me you gave your employees a damn bathroom break. Tell me, at the very least, you paid TAXES on the ungodly amount of coin you made in a pandemic. That matters to me more than the statements.
Don’t paint the streets with yellow “Black Lives Matter” signs if you’re going to also add millions of dollars to the police budget. Keep the paint and labor costs if you’re also going to support the construction of a new jail. You missed the whole point, and we get to be underwhelmed. I’m as petty as the next bih, and I truly love the bright yellow painting on the concrete. It’s a compelling image. It brings me JOY. I love it. I love the idea that this is the image you see on Google Maps.
But, I also learned a phrase from my elders.
Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
To think about:
Why is it that we have been trained to praise official-ness but we demonize that same behavior when it comes from the People? What would have happened if, instead of the city painting the streets yellow, the People did? Why criminalize street-art (otherwise pejoratively called graffiti) that shares the same message?
My short answer? Because it’s not actually the same message.
Particularly for those of us who call ourselves Christians, we must always be skeptical of the Powers who parrot our words without being changed by them. We will come back to this another day, but the phrase “Jesus is Lord” and “in the beginning was the Word” originally meant something very different than Joel Osteen n’em would have you believe. We have, in our own history, examples of people who knew how to say the right thing all while doing the exact opposite. It’s political gaslighting. Or, in other words…
You can taste the dishonesty, it’s all over your breath.
We get to desire more. Had I accepted the pickle juice, I’d be drinking pickle juice right now, so said Onika Maraj ten years ago.
The eerie part about the Hulu miniseries was just how quotidian and casual Elena’s racist swindles were. They were simultaneously everyday and violent.
I expect little fires everywhere. I expect that you will surrender your 2nd and 3rd home to people who need a place to lay their heads. And since you jetted out of here to your actual home, I expect that you will surrender your empty apartment to someone who needs it here in the city. I expect that you will surrender your 2nd and 3rd car to people who need a way to get to and from work during an unethical curfew. I expect that you will take that $10 million dollar donation coin and fund several flexible positions for the same people you contract for free during Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and Pride Month. Remind me to tell you a story one day about how an organization asked me to do a panel on Black women’s vulnerability to Rape Culture For FREE, all while boasting a multimillion dollar endowment.
What we need is a community of people who can notice patterns. As Erica Caines argues in Hood Communist Blog, “instead of centering the forces responsible for these deaths by directly addressing over-policing, militarized policing and the politicians who love them, the public discourse has been squeezed into the narrow and individual analysis of cops who kill and subsequently their victims, but not the system of policing that allows for it to happen nor the root of that system.”
I encourage you to combat the nonsense with little fires everywhere. Notice what’s going on.
If electoral politics is your thing, put that link in your bio that generates emails to your local elected officials. But maybe it’s not. So then go ahead and swarm your college president’s email accounts with “Thank you for the email. So why are there no Black tenured professors here?” Tell the truth. Buy your food (or grow it) with the help of Black Farmers. Say “sorry” and mean it. Raise your voice against war and imperialism. Make art that honors the dignity of Black people so we can replace mugshots and last-moments screengrabs with beauty. Host free listening sessions so people can process their feels. Let people cry. Raise compassionate and thoughtful children. And Black People, give yourself space to rest. Turn the zooms and Livestreams and devices off. Give yourself permission to heal your body with the restorative gift of a good ole’ nap. You know, one of those naps where you sweat AND drool. Make music that helps people reflect on the absurdity of a police state all while shaking their ass.
You about to lose your job, get this dance!
That is the movement.
Do whatever it is that you’re actually good at. Don’t let people guilt you into doing what you’re not called to do.
And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.
Perhaps this is why the Spirit descended on each of them. Not one big fire on a stage with important speakers and guests in DC. The flames didn’t just rest on the ones who were cis, or went to That College All The Civil Rights Leaders Went To, or got the big office, or were listed in the 30 under 30 list. The flames didn’t just rest on the ones who were light-skinned, whose hair curled “the right way,” whose last names and organizational affiliations garnered respect.
The Spirit descended on everyone because the Spirit knew something that we still have yet to learn. Spirit knew that each of them had something to contribute to the Kin-dom. Each of them could do something worthwhile and beautiful, if they chose to accept the mission. Each of them were given the ability to understand others in their own language. No one had to change who they were to be heard or to speak. That was the miracle. Each of us can be collaborators in the project of building a more beautiful world.
As the text describes, onlookers at this miracle considered, “perhaps they are drunk?” Surely, all these people having connections to some Spirit at the same time was a mark of inebriation? Are they not suspicious? Should we call someone? Are they supposed to be doing that?
We’re not drunk.
It’s only 9 am. And we ain’t been to brunch in months.