Mirror Mirror
This piece came about through some internal dialogue with myself one day. When I sat down to journal, my intention was to write about love. Here is how it went…
I don't want to write about love right now.
What do you mean by that? Why don't you? Are you not ready? Do you not feel emotionally capable?
I don't know.
Maybe I'm tired of talking about love. Maybe love feels too soft for the moment we're living in. Maybe there is too much happening in the world that makes talking about love feel almost unserious.
I used to not understand why evil exists.
Like, I used to get so emotional thinking about the atrocities in this world: war, genocide, child abuse, sexual violence. It made me sad to think about it and angry at the people who commit such heinous acts. Especially gun violence. Oh my gosh. It happens so much in this country, and rather than doing something about easy access to guns, folx spend millions lobbying against legislation intended to prevent more loss of life. We have somehow gotten comfortable discussing human lives as acceptable collateral damage. That's evil to me.
But it's not just violence itself. It's the rhetoric that makes violence easier to accept. The hatred. The way we talk about other human beings as if we can explain away their suffering. For a while, I was desensitized to it. I felt like evil kept winning.
I'm from the South, so I grew up knowing and experiencing explicit racism. When you are raised in an environment like that, though, some things simply become normal. Not right. Normal.
‘That's racist.’ ‘They're racist.’ ‘They say racist shit because they believe racist shit.’
You learn early how to identify it and, if you come from a family like mine, how to stand up for yourself when it happens. We didn't shy away from calling racism out, especially Mom. I remember watching her give white folx the business many times.
So I knew racism existed. What I didn't understand was why.
Why would someone hate another person because they're Black? Why would anyone believe themselves superior because they're white? Why would human beings enslave other human beings and then construct laws, exploit religions, rewrite histories, and create social orders to justify their systematic cruelty?
Even as a child, something about the way slavery was taught in school didn't make sense. Enslaved people wanted to be enslaved? Like, be so serious. It's a good thing I had a mom who made sure we understood what was real and what was revisionist history because I grew up questioning those kinds of explanations. I knew, even as a little girl, that nobody wanted someone else to own their body, control their labor, separate them from their family, beat them, sexually violate them, sell them, or steal their lives from this earth. And yet people justify it. Some turn around and invoke Jesus, as if it was God’s will. Like...what? That contradiction stays with me.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I encountered a different kind of normal. LA is a melting pot of cultures, languages, traditions, identities, histories, and communities from across the world. More than that, the richness of Black and Brown communities challenged so much of what I learned about race and culture in my K-12 education. For a girl coming from the Deep South, where racism was not only tolerated but often expected, talk about culture shock. And in the best way.
LA, for all its faults, showed me more of what the world actually looks like. I was no longer in a place where I constantly felt I had to choose between smiling and grinning to keep the peace or fighting what felt like a losing battle. That was part of why I moved across the country in the first place.
Lo and behold, I found what I was looking for and so much more.
Professionally, I began working predominantly with Brown students from across the diaspora, immigrants and citizens alike. It was a very new experience for me because, at that point, I spent most of my life around Black and white people. So it wasn't just a job. It was an opportunity to learn. I didn't want to waste it. Those years of my career reinforced what I began learning from an early age: there is so much misunderstanding in this world.
I knew what it was like to feel misunderstood. I felt it as a little Black girl by teachers, classmates, and, sometimes, even my own family. With teachers, that feeling often came through what we were taught and how it was taught. What we learn helps shape what we believe. What we believe influences what we are willing to accept. What we accept influences what we justify. And eventually, what we justify shows up in the choices we make. That's why historical revisionism is not harmless.
If you teach generations of people that slavery really wasn't that bad, or that enslaved people somehow benefited from their enslavement, you aren't simply teaching an inaccurate historical fact. You're teaching lies. You're teaching people how much suffering counts and whose suffering counts. You are teaching whose version of history is believable and whose humanity gets negotiated. Those lies become the foundation for other lies, which then fuel racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and every other justification we create for treating another person as less worthy of dignity than ourselves.
Hatred is taught. I deeply believe that. I do not believe we enter this world hating people. Our natural inclination is to love. And yes, that belief is theological for me.
I believe God is love, and I believe we are made in God's image. That doesn't mean we're perfect.
Clearly.
It means we have a vision to hold onto. Love isn't merely sentimental to me; it's part of how I understand myself and others. But being made in God's image doesn't mean every choice we make reflects God. We have agency, and that's where free will comes in. It’s where what we learn, the people we listen to, the fears we nurture, the lies we accept, the wounds we carry, and the beliefs we refuse to interrogate begin to matter.
Proverbs 4:23 tells us, “Keep your heart with all diligence; for out of it spring the issues of life” (NKJV).
I've heard people talk about guarding your heart as though it means building a wall around yourself so nothing can ever hurt you. That's not how I understand this verse, though. The heart is where mind and soul meet. Keeping my heart means paying attention to what I allow to shape it.
What am I learning? What do I believe about what I am learning? What stories am I accepting about other people? What am I doing with the pain I've experienced? What am I allowing to be true simply because I've heard it enough times? And what choices are growing from these beliefs? I think about that when I consider where we were a decade ago. 2016.
Hateful rhetoric against Black and Brown people became a central part of our national political discourse. It hurt me because I could see how it hurt my students, colleagues, and communities around me. There has always been hateful rhetoric about Black people in my worldview. But something felt different about watching it become so blatant, audacious, and publicly rewarded. I couldn't understand it. I couldn't understand how people could hear someone repeatedly demean entire groups of people and decide, Yes. That's who I want to represent me.
When Donald Trump won the presidency, even after everything he said and did, I genuinely struggled to comprehend it, especially as the hatred got bolder and louder during his first term. Every time we turned on the news, his words, actions, and beliefs were on display. Black people. Brown people. Immigrants. Then COVID-19 happened, and we watched anti-Asian hatred become increasingly more visible too. What I grew up with often felt covert. An ole nasty southern jab. Subtle enough that someone could insult you and then convince you that you misunderstood what they meant. Microaggressions and dog-whistling.
This was different, and it was a lot to take. After the 2020 election, I felt like I could breathe again. The first week of November 2020, I was on pins and needles waiting for the official election results. When it was finally called that Saturday morning, I remember feeling like so many of us collectively exhaled. I was still questioning why evil existed, though—why people could be so hateful. Why would anyone consciously choose hatred? But, at least for a while, I thought maybe hatred wouldn't be at the center of our daily dose of news anymore.
Don't ever say God doesn't have a sense of humor, friends. He does, and it’s a big one.
While I was busy asking why other people could choose hate, God took me through a season where I could have chosen hatred myself. Through evolving friendships, career politics, financial stress, heartbreak, loss, loneliness, disappointment, God put me through my paces, okay? And somewhere in all of that, I finally answered the question I was asking for years: why is there so much evil?
Because that’s what some people choose.
Yes, hatred is taught. Some people are introduced to it before they have language for what they're learning. Some people inherit beliefs from their families, communities, churches, schools, histories, and cultures. Some people carry their own wounds. Human behavior is complex, and circumstances shape how people understand themselves and the world. But eventually, we have choices. We choose what we keep believing. We can choose to question what we were taught or accept it as gospel. We have choices about what we do with hurt and what we release into the world.
I could choose hate. With all the ways this country has treated my ancestors–Black enslavement, brutalizing Black bodies, exploiting Black labor, denying Black humanity, and then constructing stories to justify all of it—I could choose hate. With the ways I felt unsupported as a child, misunderstood in classrooms, harmed educationally, disappointed professionally, betrayed personally, and exhausted by the world around me, I could choose bitterness.
I could be a bitch. Some may even say I am. But God gave me a choice: love or hate.
I choose who I know I am, who my mother raised me to be. I choose the person I have worked too damn hard to become. And it's a good thing too because that man is back. Donald Trump and his cronies are back in the White House, but this time I'm not interested in the shock and awe that consumes every headline. That’s what he wants: to distract, divide, and dismantle. I'm not interested in letting a constant barrage of social media posts determine my days and capacity to care.
I'm different now. I'm paying attention to the choices we're making.
Who we give power to is a choice. What rhetoric we excuse is a choice. Whose humanity we defend is a choice. What we are willing to overlook because someone promises us something we want is a choice. What beliefs we carry into a voting booth are choices. As we move toward another election, we still have time to choose differently. I'm not saying hate is going anywhere. It isn't. I'm not naive enough to believe we're going to wake up one morning and racism, misogyny, transphobia, violence, cruelty, and every other expression of human brokenness will have disappeared. They won't. But hate’s existence in this world does not mean I have to accept it. Someone else's cruelty does not determine the condition of my heart. And someone else's choices don't absolve me of my own responsibilities.
“Keep your heart.” Pay attention. Pay attention to what you're learning and what you believe to be true. Pay attention to the people you are taught to fear and the behaviors you are encouraged to excuse. Pay attention to what happens inside you when someone else's suffering is easy to dismiss.
“For out of it spring the issues of life.” Eventually what's in there comes out in our words and our relationships; in our classrooms and in our churches; in our policies and in our communities. In our votes.
Maybe the question was never, Why is there so much evil? The better question is what we do once we know we have a choice. I know what I choose. Now you have to make your choice. Whether you're in a small Southern town with no stoplights or a big, boisterous, diverse city, the question is the same: what are you going to put into the world?
What will you allow to take root in your heart? What are you going to choose?
Love or hate?
*You can find a live reading of this piece in 'A Work in Progress.'
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