God’s Gonna Trouble the Water
One of the many reasons I started to write was to practice putting my thoughts into words. You see, often my thoughts aren’t words but rather they are pictures or parables. My thoughts could be songs or quotes. Even, memories or visions of things I’ve long forgotten or things I have yet to experience. Sometimes, these things don’t always make sense to me and when they do putting words to describe them is a challenge. This post is one of those instances where I will try to put into words the conversation in my head. Here goes…
A few weeks ago, the Black American spiritual, “Wade in the Water” came to mind. Now, many things come to my mind and go but this stayed with me. Honestly, I was irritated because this isn’t a song I’d particularly liked. As a matter of fact, when I’d hear it growing up I erroneously assumed this song was a passive act of acceptance of slavery and that enslaved people had resigned to waiting for the afterlife for peace and justice. I never really thought about the song over many years, and because of this, my initial view of it remained unchallenged and unchanged.
Until now.
This song kept just poking me. That is the best word I can use to describe how this song stayed with me. Now that I’ve grown to understand some things about myself, and about the world I live (both what is tangible and what is not). I know enough to know that when something seemingly random comes to me and sticks with me, there is a message, and I’d do well to pay attention.
I started to do some googling on the significance of the song, “Wade in the Water”. What I learned was that this was not a song about passivity at all. This song, though it has many versions was used to protect and warn enslaved individuals who were fleeing to freedom. The one line that really stuck with me was “God is gonna trouble the waters”. On the surface, I was like, wait a minute! Y’all want me to get in the water and God is going to come and make the waters roar and “trouble it” with me in it? No, thank you! But that isn’t the message at all.
Spirit moves in mysterious ways, because when something is dropped into my mind like this, I sometimes will get external confirmation. It makes these random events not seem random at all. There is, I believe, a connection some of us have who are walking the path towards liberation. Those of us who know that we cannot continue to hold on to patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, racism, etc. These things are cancer. But still there are those who will hold on to these cancers with their entire being. So, when I got an email from the folks at the National Equity Project with the subject, “Wade in the Water: Leading in Turbulent Times”, I knew.
I knew.
The email, links to a post on their website. A portion of the post reads:
the word “wade” underscores and amplifies the meaning and power this song holds. Rather than floating or swimming — which seems to be how the word is often used colloquially — to wade is actually, “to walk with effort through water or any substance that offers resistance to movement to make one’s way slowly or laboriously; to go forward with effort or difficulty.” To wade, it turns out, is to resist in the face of a powerful force.
— National Equity Project
And with this, I knew some more.
Funny that this song would come to me just a few days prior to being told that a “senior leader” admonished something I wrote about equity saying wasn’t “data-driven” enough. I centered the voices and work of those who are advancing equity, many of them are part of communities that have been historically marginalized, underinvested and made vulnerable. The criticism was more about the people and leaders that I centered were not “enough” because we only think that good ideas and thinking comes from white cis-gendered males with advanced degrees from Ivy schools. Some people never consider that lived experience is expertise and some people never believe that non-white males are credible. The criticism I received illuminates why we need to continue to center voices who continually are pushed to the margins. I will bring the margins to the center every single time. Everything I wrote, I wrote with intentionality and deliberate design. So, this criticism is not surprising, I knew what I wrote would ruffle the feathers of those who have not done their own internal work to confront and mitigate their own biases. My work is about exposing and ripping out the root causes of inequity — and the closer you get to the wound the more it hurts. Unfortunately, many organizations who continue the performance of doing equity because it looks good in their annual reports and on social media, will stop short of anything that will bring about structural change.
I understand now the message I was receiving was to telling me to keep going, to wade in the water…to resist in the face of a powerful force. Pathways will be opened and not by some mysterious being in the sky but by the collective of people who form a vast community who stand up for what is equitable, by those of us doing the transformative work of equity and liberation.
Doing equity work, doing liberatory work, goes against the very fabric of American society. Inequity, is woven into everything, it is in the water we drink and the air we breathe. Going against this is an uphill battle. Equity is anti-status quo. And when you challenge the status quo, you better be ready for what comes.
