Masked Legacy

#FirstCoffeeThoughts

People have asked me about the project I am doing about my father, especially people who have followed me for many years online. They wonder why I am doing so much for a man who abused me terribly. This seems like an odd and dysregulated question because logically my father as a “person” and my father as a “father” are not related to each other. They are two separate roles entirely; masks primarily worn for other people and for specific reasons unrelated to each other

If you think all your “heroes” are saints – including people like Martin Luther King or JFK – then you’re extremely delusional.

There are no heroes … there are only people and people are multi-dimensional and ultimately, extremely weak.

You have no idea of the whole truth of anyone … you only know what you have been told about historical figures by an oppressive, selective, often racist and dysregulated group that determines what you should and shouldn’t learn about people.

That is not truth.

You know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about any of these people you worship, follow, obsess over, or read about.

I speak the truth of my experiences with my father because they are my lived reality. People who came to my father’s memorial spoke their lived reality with him as well. All the men I have spoken to about him have a perception of him and his value to them that is 2000% the opposite of mine … but that doesn’t make my reality invalid any more than it makes theirs false.

My father had been doing extraordinary work in the world long before he adopted children.
In fact, I think that was a whole problem …

Some people – most people – should not have children.

Some people – most people – should not make themselves responsible for the life of another.

Some people – most people – should not be in charge of the raising, educating, and guiding of another.

There is not enough training, support, education, or laws to protect children from broken, dysfunctional, dysregulated, traumatized, angry, psychotic people who want to have them.

Therefore, all we have are cycles of generational abuse.

My father, like many parents of that generation, was abused and raised with an iron fist … but he never had anything bad to say about his parents.

He cared for them, he took care of them, he took care of the community he grew up in, the families that were a part of that community … he became someone with a STRONG sense of social justice, a STRONG sense of leadership, and in his mind everything he experienced made him into a better person.

So why not do the same for his own children?

The whole “look what happened to me and I turned out fine” idea of how to raise children is a staple of both the Silent and the Boomer generations. My father is of the Silent generation.

Many parents of the Silent generation were often neglectful and also very abusive … especially in African American culture given the amount of abuse their parents suffered generations before.

My father’s generation had lives dominated by war, the remnants of the great depression, extreme racism, limited opportunities, fear and trauma … and whose own parents were only TWO GENERATIONS from SLAVERY.

My parents were angry, severely traumatized people.

They were also absolutely ABYSMAL parents with absolutely NO PARENTING SKILLS or real understanding of what they were doing, what they needed to do, or even why they were doing it.

I don’t believe for one minute that either one of my parents truly WANTED children. I think they believed they were SUPPOSED TO WANT children and that it was “normal” to have children, even going so far as to adopt children when my mother (or father, who knows now) couldn’t have any. But I seriously DOUBT my mother was growing up wishing to become a mother. She barely SURVIVED growing up in 1940s deep south.

I mean come on …

It took me DECADES to become what I have become. It took work, therapy, education, reading, writing, talking, learning, and growing … I had the ability, the resources, the wherewithal, and THE PRIVILEGE to know that I needed all those things to grow and to be able to get them for myself. I also had the great Stoic masters to guide me from the time I was 11 years old.

My parents didn’t have any of that. They didn’t have the luxuries of therapy, understanding, over-education and leisure time for navel gazing … they were too busy surviving.

I don’t know much about my father. He never spoke of himself to me and rarely shared anything of his life. Even when I was interviewing him in the years before his cancer, he felt he’d summed up his life in the first video we did. He was surprised I wanted to film more. He was like … what more is there?

There is always a lot more. But it came down to only what he was willing to tell me and what he was willing to get into himself.

He was quiet, humble, and most of what he truly accomplished in his life he never told anyone about and my brother and I are only just discovering details of many things now after he has passed away.

If there is one thing I learned in the decades of trying to become the person I wanted, it’s that there is always more to discover, to discuss, to excavate, to understand, and to examine about yourself and your life.

The truths of who you are are often buried beneath the lies you tell yourself and the lies other people convince you of about yourself to control and oppress you for their own needs.

You have to be willing to dig deep and for a long time – to never stop – if you want to ascend and move beyond those lies and that control to be your own person.

The website I am building is about the truth of what my father survived, what he built, what he accomplished, and what all of that means for the history of his family as African Americans that survived extraordinary odds, surpassed expectations, and did things Black folks were barely allowed to do, not expected to do, and were actively hindered from doing for generations.

Surviving, thriving, and leaving a historical legacy that benefited thousands against all odds is absolutely worth documenting.

The site is about what he was to many people who grew up hearing stories about what a Black man from a public housing project could truly do. It’s about the inspiration he provided showing that it was possible to go to college, succeed, and how to give back to your community and never forget where you came from despite hardships, setbacks, and a system designed to kill you and leech all hope from you. (It’s the same one we are living in now).

The Life In Remembrance site is not about my relationship with him or my opinions of him as a father. It has nothing to do with any of that and shouldn’t.

History is nothing but a series of agreed upon LIES that is dictated by those who stand to gain the most from convincing as many people as possible. If you believe otherwise then you have learned absolutely nothing about how the world works.

There is no true history.
There are only stories that you have been told, more than half of which are lies.

Multiple perspectives exist in the same way my father’s story does.

If people want a more complete picture of my dad they can find it. My blog exists and will continue to do so. If anyone cares to read about my experiences with him they can. It’s no secret and it won’t be hidden or censored or scrubbed away for other people’s comfort.

I write about my childhood, my pain, my trauma, ALL THE TIME here, but my opinion and experiences are not a reason to NOT document ALL the OTHER truths and facts about my father. Reducing someone’s life story to only the worst things they ever did isn’t honesty … it’s just trauma disguised as “truth” and an indication that the storyteller needs extensive therapy.

My father did a tremendous amount of good; too much to just ignore or let disappear because of the oppression and circumstances that gave his generation forced humility and trauma that they inevitably passed on.

What the great Stoic masters, writers, and teachers taught me was that the sole purpose of growth is to be the best you can be for the sake of others – community and the global reality you reside in – not just for yourself.

What I promised myself as a child was to become 100 times better than what was done to me. To rise above expectations, trauma, anger, and dysregulation and become someone who did what was right even if it was the hardest or most unsupported thing in the world.

But this isn’t hard. Telling this truth is easy.

As easy as telling my own story and using my experiences and survival as a way of teaching, empowering, and giving space and strength to others to tell their own.

There are more positive opinions of my father than negative to my knowledge … but that doesn’t invalidate my experience. I have already documented my experience and it’s not for other people to believe … it’s for me and for others who need to gain strength and wisdom from it.

Despite what kind of parent he was, it has little to do with what he accomplished in his time on earth and how much he did for countless other people, his community, his culture, and even OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.

I’ve made tons of mistakes. I’ve hurt people. I’ve devalued myself. I’ve had success and failures alike. I achieved a lot of extraordinary things given the emotional, psychological, and physical abuse that I experienced in my earliest and most formative years.

My father and I aren’t that dissimilar … but he did far more good than I ever will.

I’m the last person worthy enough to document his accomplishments but no one else is going to and his work, his life, and his legacy deserve acknowledgement.