For you, A thousand times over

“Knowing that they were losing “valuable product” due to their slaves’ propensity to swim, slave owners began taking drastic steps to protect their property. One of these steps was to instill a fear of the water by dunking disobedient slaves in water until they nearly drowned and by creating fear through stories of creatures living in the water. Thus it didn’t take long to excise or destroy the West African swimming tradition from African- American culture. The Jim Crow laws that were enacted after The Civil War prohibited blacks from the popular seaside resorts in places like Atlantic City, N.J. and Revere Beach, Mass. And by the 20th Century, as the swimming pool began to gain in popularity in the United States, the color line prohibited blacks from enjoying this pleasant recreational skill.

Such a long and consistent history of anti-Blackness and swimming. Long before police openly assaulted little black girls in McKinney, GoodWhitePeople™ were enforcing White Supremacy and segregating swimming pools.

Check out the full poem here:

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.

The end point is already at the beginning. That’s what we call the direct path. You don’t have to get to silence. You simply have to realize it’s there. You don’t have to get to openness. You simply need to realize it’s already there. You don’t need to get to freedom. You simply need to recognize that it’s already there. You don’t need to get to no-self. You just need to recognize that there isn’t one there to begin with. You don’t have to get to the divine. You simply have to recognize that it’s the only thing that’s going on already. That’s called the direct path. It’s a direct experiential introduction to the view. The key is that it’s got to be experiential.