Racialized terror against black lives has been unleashed to defeat a black/liberated/conscious leadership and development in this country. For the twenty-first century the freedom of the black mind from a mental condition of slavery is a freedom from perceiving oneself or others in dark skin as an inferior life. A black/liberated/conscious leadership was manifested with the election of President Barack Obama despite whether he performs to your liking or not. The placement of a visually black-skinned family as a monarchy in the United States of America was never digested by those we feel whiteness is pure and supreme.

As many spiritual teachers, philosophers, and prophets have said, a consciousness of liberation first among those physically held down is exactly the true nature of a relevant and absolute revolution. In the wake of so much loss of black lives, freedom from what we all think and feel is blackness has evolved and must continue to evolve without our thinking it into something else. In the black deaths, there is black life flowering before us. Blackness is being re-shaped by those young, compassionate, wise and energetic enough to live their lives openly. Young black lives, who so far have remained alive, are waking up and walking in the world as who they are. They are less afraid. And this audaciousness to feel equal, not inferior, has unleashed racialized terror against them. There is a collective mind and heart among them for ending the fear of black presence and power. A liberated black life, as in every life, is a life inherited from those who have lived before. It is an inheritance we are meant to use in walking the streets in our own skin without having to be subjected to fear, investigation, and annihilation.

Racialized terror cannot be met only with theory, religion, biology, or even history. It is to be met boldly with the force of our lives. When I wear my Zen robes amid a sea of white faces, I stand tall at the door of the meditation hall and let them gawk, shrink in fear, or smile in joy. It doesn’t matter as long as I am experiencing the awareness of the true presence of this life. Although we may lose our lives in doing such, let’s join black youth in their audaciousness and willingness to talk back, to walk in their true nature and deny inferior placement in the world, consciously, physically, emotionally or spiritually. Join them in focusing light and energy inward filling ourselves up until all our light leaks out into the shadows where danger may be.

May we go into the darkest season of winter and return with the mystery of the recent murders of black lives having been revealed. May the winter bring the laying down of arms against all people.