The Silencing

The Expansive White Unknown of Black Sympathy

The Silence of the Lands [Advertisement of white selling Indigenous Land in 1911 out from under their native feet, often while they were still on it]

The sick and poisoned souls are the ones doing the silencing. They view themselves as the powerful, imposing the silencing so long that I grew up not hearing the voices underneath it, the ones who were expressing sympathy for the repressed. I had no idea until now.

We could not hear them as they had no allies to amplify their discomfort with the oppressed elsewhere. Only now, with the voices of a new wave of immigrants on America, ironically arriving in significant numbers after 9/11, is the unheard sympathy able to attach to those immigrants, together seeming to create a force that needs hearing.

I was driving down one of the main highways in Houston yesterday when I saw it, a billboard, giant: Save Gaza. That’s what I recall it said, only two words, but I couldn’t recall exactly, only the Gaza and sympathy towards the suffering there was clear, the oppressed humanity of those living in a slim cage, a strip of land caught between the ever pressing force of the Israeli government seeking building on it, since the 1920s, the 1947 war and such, and today, as more settlements are built from stolen land in the West Bank.

My whole life in the Northeast it seemed the Jews, separate in America from the white WASPs, they had to build their own country club near my home, from the whites only one nearby. I…