The Great Pause

Say Their Names

Last year at this time I was planning on sailing the South Pacific with a dozen women to study plastics in the ocean. I anticipated that the journey would launch a new path for me, connecting me to women globally seeking solutions for the plastic crisis. The Corona virus blindsided me, as did the long overdue reckoning with racial injustice that’s intertwined with every policy. Not only was my personal world upside down, with having to navigate work with virtual school and keeping my son active, but plastic was suddenly emerging as the hero of the pandemic and the racist side of many conservation ideas were being exposed. 2020 was the year that forced me to pause, listen, and unlearn. When I could, I took my son, and even my niece who was born January of this year, along.

The night the city of Raleigh removed the statue of Stonewall Jackson and his horse, my eight-year-old son and I wore face masks on a late night walk. We were in Raleigh to pick up the Golden Retriever puppy I’d put on a deposit after my son had announced home shelter with the only the two of us was lonely. We walked downtown to look at the art and mural in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd. We saw the police barricade the park and if we squinted we could see the block of stone where the statue once stood. We watched for a few minutes. I explained to my son why they were taking the statue down. “Even the horse?” he asked.

I told him yes as we turned to walk away from the park, by boarded up storefronts, most tagged with spray paint. Tobin and I had seen the murals in our hometown of Asheville, but most of this art was different, less polished; grittier.

Tobin asked, “What are we supposed to focus on— the 2020 pandemic or Black Lives Matter or plastics in the sea?”

I was caught off guard by the way he phrased that, wondering where he’d heard the phrase “the 2020 pandemic.” I was impressed that he was still thinking about plastics in the sea from my sailing trip. I could feel his gaze on me, waiting for an answer.

I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like so much, it had for a while, but I knew there was nothing we could turn away from.“ We need to care about it all. It’s interrelated,” I said.  

“That seems hard,” he said.

I nodded and paused. I was just beginning to see my own privilege and question how I could use it in a positive way. Having these conversations with my son often overwhelmed me, but I also knew that a moms raising Black boys couldn’t avoid these tough talks because their sons faced violence every time they walked out of the front door.

When he asked again, “Mama, what do we do?”

I said what I knew. We can love the people and the planet. We can do it a little bit at a time. And if it feels there’s no action we can take, love. Feel it in your heart. Then I added that I was still learning, too. 

Let’s keep asking. Let’s keep listening. Let’s figure out how to be different kind of white people.