*By Lumumba Shabazz (Head men’s soccer coach/Kalamazoo College)
You wanna know a secret? Whenever I get stressed, I work. I work a lot. As a soldier during the first Gulf War, I volunteered to literally burn shit in huge drums of kerosene because it was the only duty that I could do that would allow me the freedom and time to ease the stresses on my brain in a wartime environment. I am sitting now, after a day of running on the trails, mowing the yard, fixing the mower, and cooking dinner, and all of this was done to avoid having to think about what was going on in Minneapolis as well as the rest of the country. You wanna know another secret? I was a choir boy growing up in Brooklyn, New York, literally and figuratively so. I was that kid that every mother loved; the kind she openly wanted her son to be: kind, compassionate, brilliant student and athlete, and a real nerd for history, arts, and culture. I never smoked, never drank, and never got in trouble for anything. I was a dope ass kid. However, not everyone liked me and for that, I had to learn to run.
This morning as I was preparing to head out to the trails near my house, my 14-year-old daughter followed me around as I was getting dressed and asked why I couldn’t exercise in the backyard. This was unusual because she never really expressed any interest in my workout habits. I was fully prepared to ignore her but then she started crying — I mean, really crying. I was taken aback and through her anguished cries, she blurted out that she was terrified of me going out because she was scared that the prevailing mood in the country meant that I could be in serious danger. Her fears shook me to my very core and in that moment, I resented everything about this country for making me have to comfort my daughter so.
14, after all, is still an age of innocence. From what I remember, it is a time of budding rebellion from the chains of parental control. A time of discovering a way past your own awkward interpretation of self into a world of teenage angst, new awakenings, and what pretends to be love. I am so angry that she is not being afforded that opportunity, and it is not like my wife and I haven’t tried to shelter from the ugliness of the world. We have worked really hard at it but despite our best efforts, we keep falling short of the mark. We fell short when we could not protect her from being called a monkey in school, or being told by a middle school classmate on the school bus that his grandfather would have owned her grandfather. We fell short when we could not prevent her from the “Nigger Whispers”, which is apparently something that white middle schoolers do when they want you to hear their contempt for your presence, but can still feign ignorance and pretend that they were addressing someone else when challenged. We fell short when we couldn’t prevent her from hearing the sick jokes like “What do Black people and apples have in common?” The middle school answer: “They both look good hanging on trees.” I hate that my daughter is being forced to grow up too quickly and that she has to defend her existence every single second of the day. I resent being powerless to stop what is already here, and the troubles yet to come.
I left the house this morning in full agreement with my women that I would check in every half hour or so if just to ease their minds. After all, running outdoors is quite a new thing for me. The pandemic has meant that I can no longer go to the gym and the virus of eating every time I walk past the refrigerator means that I need to get up and get active. So off I go, I run…
I run from the IHOP where I worked on Ralph and Avenue K in Brooklyn every single summer night in high school because not running would mean a serious beat down from the idle white boys who sat outside the pizza shop waiting on me to pass on my way home. I would sprint 30 minutes nonstop from there to Kings Plaza Shopping Center dodging bottles, garbage cans, baseball bats, and a torrential downfall of “Nigger this and Nigger that” just to make it home safely. And then, I would immediately worry about having to navigate those same streets again the next day. This was a year or two before Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black teen, who had gone to inquire about a used car, was chased and murdered by a white mob in Bensonhurst. Already, my mother had warned me about going alone into Canarsie, Brighton Beach, Bay Ridge, and Sheepshead Bay, but somehow, she forgot to mention Ralph and K.
Every night they would wait for me and every time I escaped, they seemed to grow angrier.
Read the complete article at https://medium.com/@lshabazz/i-am-done-running-5ab3f29ee509