Hello, Black Lens community and family. My name is Derek Wilson. I was born and raised in the heart of old Spokane’s East Central neighborhood. My work is about representation and serves as a testament that we not only exist, but that we thrive, no matter where we are born.
“How can we rest” when, most of the time, what’s holding our people down is our own selves? We always seem like we have something to prove, something to reclaim, something to take back, like there’s something to gain, as if something was stolen from us.
How do I know? Because we’re quick to be at war with someone who looks just like us. What happened to us? What happened to us? We shoot one another in the back but run from the police. There’s no need to wonder why Rosa Parks chose to sit at the front of the bus.
So let us not be at war with one another. Rather, let us uplift and heal one another. Let us be real with one another for the sake of our sisters, our brothers, and our kinfolk who came before us.
“How can we rest” when every time there’s another Black-on-Black crime in the City of Rain, guess who’s sitting back laughing, teaching their children the truth of how to properly gain and sustain? Just look around. Tell me what you see. Do you see the 400 years of pain buried deep inside my brothers’ eyes, hardened by centuries of systemic oppression, illicit money, and white lies? Or are you blind, sleepwalking through these troubling times?
“How can we rest” when every time we go to pay our rent, we wonder how long it will be until our landlord raises the fee? We’re trapped in what is now gentrification because too many of the families in my community are living with these circumstances, feeling hopeless for a shot at what the world calls success. So we take our chances at a life we know best.
“How can we rest” when the mentality of going back to what we know best keeps tearing us down and everything in our path? It’s like every time we try to get up and leave, something keeps pulling us back, holding us down like we’re under attack, leaving our little Black and Brown babies to mourn and fend for themselves because Mommy and Daddy couldn’t get out of the way of themselves.
“How can we rest” when we’re young and we see the tears in our mothers’ eyes from broken promises and bold lies? From the father who swore, who said he’d never leave our side. But we don’t need a definition of disappear to understand that he was never here.
So maybe the answer to “How can we rest?” is that we begin to live for one another instead of living only for ourselves.