Three Fifths Magazine three year anniversary edition, April 2024,  features contributors “Speaking In Clear Voice: Articulately, Accurately, and Unashamed.” We reflect on becoming racial justice seekers and finding our unique voice. If this were an audio recording, I’d insert spit-take here!  My first use of the English language sounded like, 

“A all jus toll mayie weez gawhnbeun BAYEG trubbuh”

I couldn’t help but blurt out a belly laugh about this month’s theme! Articulate, Accurate and Unashamed may be “how it’s going” but, OMG, “how it started.”

Imagine me in the backwoods of 1960s Mississippi – a barefoot mini-redneck in summer cut-offs with little tanned legs colored dusty from walking a gravel road. The same as any other sweltering summer day in these red clay hills, this day’s sweaty eternity diffused the stench of cow pastures and chicken houses. I roamed, free-range, with any other “do-nuthins” who happened to be out. Most of these days were numbingly uneventful. One of these days became unforgettable. Scared, I ran back home to warn my parents. Barely past the front door, frantic, out of breath, I yelled out what the little redneck boy gang had threatened when I unknowingly had violated a rule of segregation. 

“A all jus toll mayie weez gawhnbeun BAYEG trubbuh!”

“They all just told me we are going to be in big trouble.”

Mother and Daddy were home grown civil rights workers. (Many civil rights workers were “imported” from across the nation, most of whom felt disgust by the sickening degradation they were seeing on their televisions as CBS Anchor Walter Cronkite signed off, “And That’s The Way It Is.”) Mother and Daddy didn’t practice segregation in our home. Osmosis failed to teach me how to comply with segregation out in public with these white people – the kind of white people who wanted to protect “our way of life” from the “whore beast antichrist Catholic Church” embodied in Jack Kennedy “threatnen” us down “he-uh with Sergeant Shriver’s Head Start tryna stir up our ‘Nigras’.” 

Our 1960s way of life became a cinema history crime drama Oscar-nominated for Best Picture a generation later. In December of 1988, noted film critic Roger Ebert referenced the best movies made that year: “Mississippi Burning is the best American film of 1988 and a likely candidate for the Academy Award as the year’s best picture.” Since I grew up 17 miles from the murder site at the heart of the screenplay, I could have advised several changes to make the movie a more authentic portrayal. Still, I agree with Ebert: “What “Mississippi Burning” evokes more clearly than anything else is how recently in our past those rights were routinely and legally denied to Blacks, particularly in the South.”

I was born into this Yoknapatawpha forty weeks after the Kennedy inauguration. If you do the gestation math, you can understand why I started telling people I was a Kennedy baby, years later, when I figured it out. I told Daddy, and he said, “Boy! You better git on way from here.” Southerners will know that means “correct, but don’t go around saying that.” My parents “celebrated” the good times of the advent of Camelot (a retroactive imagining of the Kennedy Administration after his assassination) quite differently than most of Mississippi. I would grow up with a pidgin in my mouth, a cake of red dirt on summer legs, and near illiterate rednecks to play with, but Mother and Daddy welcomed the glamour and glory of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan White House . . . integration and civil rights, Peace Corps, Head Start, and even the defeat of Soviet aggression compressed into NASA’s race to the moon. 

Far from fiction, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, although technically a fictional mythos, captured with incisive precision a place in time that gnarled a lugubrious entanglement of the human condition, local but universal, and  fraught with his predecessor’s “slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune.” In Requiem For A Nun, he concluded “the past is never dead.  It’s not even past.” 

In my book, Twelve Steps for White America: for a United States of America, I write about this as the “stifling inching of Mississippi time.” My indomitable parents could hold out for Camelot, but perhaps I was born weak. A “haint” kept tagging my soul from the other side. I felt trapped in a gravity of death always lurking in my periphery. When my defiance could rear its head, I would swear I would get away from that hellhole. 

Parents working for civil rights struggle to keep a job when the KKK and White Citizens Councils are the “job creators.” By the time I got sober at age 25, Daddy (who never finished high school) tried 23 different attempts at making a living. Before I was old enough for them to leave me home alone, Mother woke me weekdays at 4:30 a.m.,  and put me in the wrecked Impala’s back seat in a blanket to drive Daddy to work at the chicken plant. She drove me back home until it was time for me to get on the school bus and for her to drive to her job at the weekly Scott County Times, where whites only appeared on the “society page” – a “Bobby Lee Thornton, III Marries Betty Lou Townsend” kind of thing. A “William Watson Marries James Ball” kind of thing would have been laughable and lethal. 

I remember on one summer Friday Mother had come home from work and the hot afternoon sun shafted dust speckled light onto her bed. There, she had opened up the envelope that held her paycheck. I remember seeing that the week’s pay was about $75 dollars – a little more than minimum wage. She later worked as a bookkeeper for WMAG-AM, WQST-FM Country Music Radio Station. She helped me get a job on-air in the evenings during high school. (By then I could mimic standard English to introduce Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, Merle Haggard and my favorite, Emmylou Harris).  

Mother managed to keep us above water most of the time, but I do remember a time when we went to some government office in town to get a block of USDA “pasteurized process American cheese.” I am certain that the shame of poverty lingers long after the poverty has passed. To this day, when I come home from the grocery store, my prayer marvels that I can just go get any groceries I want whenever I want. (No wonder that as a higher ed administrator, I worked with others to ensure a food pantry was on site for students and others in the community.)

Given the limited opportunity and the racialized challenges my parents’ braved, my prosecution of their parenting, especially as I have now become their age then, has long since dropped all charges! I count the exceptional blessing that at great risk to their lives, they refused to collude with white supremacy. 

We all get “here” from different starting gates. Finding my voice of clarity only creams to the top after something sounding like a “pidgin” was my first language, poverty shamed and stifled me, white supremacists threatened to kill me, and alcoholism put me in a mental hospital during my first semester in college. Since then, for the last 37 years, every day is an extra day to which I never feel entitled. 

Sober, I thrive in a bonus life once thought a ridiculous fantasy. After a career as a psychotherapist and then working for 20 years as a higher education administrator in California (with a Critical Race Theory informed doctorate earned in San Francisco), I faced an overwhelming sense of calling very early in 2020. It was then I decided that I would leave a C-Suite position to risk the unknown for a destined but undetermined third act. 

Just after I entered the unknown, Covid crossed the globe. The two were intertwined for me. Not only had I uprooted my career, but I was also overwhelmed in an isolated fascist-encroaching dystopia lonely and scared with everybody else. In this global crucible, we all witnessed the horrific display of the USA’s modern day slave patrol murdering Mr. George Floyd in a public execution – a recurring inevitability of the plantation white entitlement, “Presumption of Whereabouts Authority” (as I have identified it in Twelve Steps for White America). 

The horror was nothing new, as all of Black America knows. But there was something about our stilled isolation that enabled us to both behold this horror with undivided attention and wince to digest its sickening depravity. It was so depraved that even white eyes, usually blinded by whiteness, could not help but see. Like so many times in the past, the first police report could have been titled, “Nothing To See Here, Folks” that is,  until Darnella Frazier’s video went viral. There was something to see and we could never unsee it for the rest of our lives.  Aghast at what “White America” including white Americans, could see, throngs took to the streets. This was an outrage at home and abroad. 

I had just completed something of a spiritual retreat in my isolation. I reread (for the third time) The Jewel of Abundance by Yogacharya Ellen Grace O’Brian. Her guru, Roy Eugene Davis, learned directly from Paramahansa Yogananda, known to me later in my life when I read his Autobiography of a Yogi, a book read by millions around the world. I not only read Yogacharya’s  The Jewel of Abundance three times, I also listened to the audiobook multiple times. In pandemic stillness, unsure if we would survive with Covid death all around us, I dove “last chance” deep toward my soul’s purpose. I even created my own study guide workbook companion to support my study of this accessible and beautiful introduction to Sanatana Dharma, the Vedic teachings that provide “how to live” guidance. The “abundance” referenced in the title, is one of the four universal goals (Parushartha) of human life: Artha is the prosperity that can produce the consciousness and skill to attract what is needed to fulfill our dharma, our higher purpose. My freshly plowed soul was broken open for Mr. Floyd and his family.

In our collective outrage how could we tolerate Mr. Floyd’s murder! Many clamored to do something. Three Fifths Magazine emerged from this groundswell. My emergence included founding Waterbrook, LLC in July 2020 –  a USA democracy project that works for peace and prosperity through justice THEN liberty (what I define as the sustainable order of democracy.) 

I also knew that I had something to say about race in America, but that felt presumptuous. Hasn’t everything already been said? I have studied luminous, powerful and impactful voices of clarity. Still, as clearly as if someone sat next to me and said it out loud, that still inner voice yelled, 

“Here we are … still. The absolute best that anyone, anywhere, in our history ever accomplished has left us with whiteness on the neck of George Floyd.” 

Still, I wrestled. Like Jacob wrestling the angel through the night to receive his  name Israel and the blessing “You are capable” (Genesis 32:22–32), I protested. “What about that book, that theory, those organizations, and this pantheon of icons all greater than me?” 

I finally concluded the following: of course the icons are great, but 

that doesn’t abdicate my soul’s responsibility to itself to maximize the authenticity of my particular experience, expertise and education, which, in combination, is like no other person past or present.

This wrestling honed clarity for me that if I were to venture to write a book it must come from a place so personal that another person could not write it. What could over 30 years of spiritual progress sufficient to sustain sobriety offer the world? What medicine could a Mississippi redneck with 20 years of California higher education equity experience produce? What could my history of poverty and marginalization, later supplanted by gratitude for abundant living, afford to those whose hope is at least thwarted and, too often, coopted by exploitation? Could it matter what a hopeless redneck nobody did with a second chance? How could that spiritual awakening inform a treatment plan for democracy? 

While all that got me to a yes, I still didn’t have a book outlined. I had never attempted such a thing. I knew a memoir-manifesto was in me, but I had to venture forth with faith. I had to rely on the promise of my recent spiritual quest, the theme of which was prosperity – “artha” that kind of prosperity that can produce the consciousness and skill to attract what is needed to fulfill our dharma, our higher purpose. That venture in faith paid off. 

I completed a book concept and signed a publishing contract in six months. From that seed grew this opportunity to contribute to Three Fifths. I feel blessed to be among a multiethnic collaboration of contributors who have found their superpower to dismantle systemic racism in clear voice.  To be associated with them, I have had to embrace it all. Alcoholics promised me I would, “neither regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.” Shame, poverty, alcoholism and even a voice that many have mocked, I embrace it and I am filled with gratitude for my wonderful life.  

The great America Ferrera touched me deeply in her April 2019 TED Talk. Leading to a standing ovation, she spoke to an edge-of-their-seats audience saying, 

“I for one am ready to stop resisting who I am and start existing as my full and authentic self. If I could go back and say anything to that nine year old dancing in the den dreaming her dreams, I would say, 

“My identity is not my obstacle.    My identity is my superpower.”

I am at my America Ferrera superpower best when I remember that my life is not my own, but a gift of opportunity in this Earth School to learn, to grow, to redeem and transcend. May this transcendent vision shine forth in my work to realize a United States of America where race no longer predicts outcomes. 

Democracy has not failed as much as we have yet to try it.

What if we did try it? Who could we be? What beacon could we then shine across a global majority who increasingly finds our inferior supremacy irrelevant? What could such an investment produce with that now squandered talent and energy and prosperity lost to unsustainable oppressions? 

Even as we all hurtle in this race to the fascist bottom for the few whose wealth and power are already rigged, I remember a song from days of dusty legs, and I  know 

“a change gon come.”

I remember a preacher’s call and response, 

“How long? Not long!”