Note: This was delivered at the CDF Proctor-Hall Child Advocacy Institute in July 2024. Click here for video.

Greetings Earthlings,

I like referring to groups of people like this because it’s a gender-neutral way to talk to everyone in the room. Each of our traditions has some way to account for how we got here. And so many of our creation stories include the Earth. So here is an ask—As you spend your time here, we invite you to honor this land. If you see trash, please pick it up. Even if it isn’t yours. Try to reuse cups or make use of your water bottle rather than wasting them. The Earth is our colleague here at the farm, so let’s make sure she’s not burnt out at the end of this week, amen? You don’t want Sis. Earth to be a disgruntled employee.

I invite you to go into space with me.

I have always wondered why so many children go through a phase of being obsessed with space. What is it about space that makes us dream and wonder and imagine? I recall solar system models and mnemonic devices to remember the order of the planets: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.

Mae Jemison, National Woman’s History Museum.

For me, it was Mae Jemison. As the first Black woman in outer space, she was my go-to Black History Month figure. Any time I could do a report on a chosen historical figure, it was Mae Jemison. I was captivated by her smile. In her official NASA photo, she smiled so hard that her eyes nearly disappeared. This was a Black woman excited about the future. For possibility. I gravitated towards her photo because I could sense this was someone who was able to do the thing her heart desires. She seemed so happy.

It wasn’t until I became an adult that I learned Mae Jemison was assaulted by police just a few short years after her return to Earth.

The LA Times wrote this about her experience:

A Nassau Bay, Texas, police officer was suspended after a former astronaut accused him of twisting her wrist and slamming her to the ground during a traffic stop. Mae Jemison, stopped for making an illegal turn, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for failing to pay an old speeding ticket. She complained about the arrest in a letter to the Nassau Bay Police Chief Robert Holden. “There is absolutely no justification for an officer to treat the people he is sworn to protect in this highhanded and abusive manner,” she wrote. Jemison, who flew in shuttle Endeavour’s 1992 mission, was the first black woman to fly in space.

What must it have been like to go all the way to space, to look down on this tiny spinning rock and see no borders, no walls, no lines of demarcation? To be in space and be one of the few to have a full sense of just how insignificant existence is in the scheme of things? To have a perspective that only God and ancestors could witness, just to come back to Earth and be reminded of this nation's cruelty. To be reminded of what you mean to the world. To be violated. To have your orbit interrupted.

I wonder if she wished she’d stayed in space.

It’s so important to sit with our feelings. To name them. Confront them. Question them. Sit on the couch with them and share popcorn. I want to put something in the room about how I feel.

Project 2025 does scare me. I am a queer Black femme in their thirties. I have a mouth. I have read the reports and its directives. It is some scary stuff. But I’m challenged because there are people in our communities right now stacked up in prison cells. There are book bans happening now. There is gun violence now. Our taxes fund genocides and foreign government intervention right now. If I’m honest, I’m scared for things to get worse because they’re so horrible right now. I want to thank our colleagues who shared this earlier this morning. We have to be more invitational, more relational, more principled in our organizing and less judgy and fingerwaggy. But even more, we have to be truthful about the foundation and history of this nation.

Alice Walker wrote an essay called “Don’t Despair.” It was published in the morning after the 2016 presidential election and without hyperbole, I am sure that it saved my life. She writes,

“How to survive dictatorship. That is what much of the rest of the world has had to learn. Our country has imposed this condition on so many places and peoples around the globe it is naive to imagine we would avoid it. Besides, do Native Americans and African American descendents of enslaved people not realize they have never lived in anything but a dictatorship?”

Can we just say, we are scared? You are invited to pause. To think but also feel. To resist the temptation of the reactionary knee-jerk thing. Sometimes anxiety manifests as trying to fix everything everyone else is doing. Ask me how my Capricorn eldest daughter preachers’ kid self is doing with that. Pray for me. (Grammarly wants to correct that to “preacher’s.” Both of my parents are pastors. The Man’s software cannot conceptualize two pastors raising children. Funny.)

Before we rush to the answers and fixing things and putting on our Olivia pope hat, can we just say “I’m scared,” and “I don’t like this?” The evil of white supremacy is that it robs us of our ability and our space to say how we feel. We intellectualize everything. Again, I am telling you what I know. I’m a Capricorn who hates feelings.

Back to Mae Jemison. I think about Mae Jemison because each of us is an astronaut to someone in our lives. Your children, your students, your loved ones may see you as out of this world. Otherworldly. I hope there is someone looking at your photograph, lovingly doting on your smile, happy to see you when you walk into the room. Genuinely thankful for your experience and your witness. Somebody loves you, baby. Here, gathered on this land, are people who explore the galaxies of food justice, of abortion rights, of storytelling, political theory. You are all astronauts to somebody.

But when you come back to Earth after exploring all that you have? Perhaps you have been met with your own horrors. Bills still due. Eviction notices. Lights cut off. The person who promised you forever musta lost their watch and their mind and forgot about the vows made. New diagnoses from the doctor that frighten you. Legal battles. An impossible tuition bill. Suicidal ideation. Impossible deadlines. Cruel workplaces. You have to eat sleep for dinner.

Or perhaps you are lucky. And none of this has happened to you. And I truly hope it hasn’t. But even if you have not been touched by what my people would call “the vicissitudes of life”, or life’s hardships, perhaps you are crestfallen by all the news in the world. Entire bloodlines in Gaza have been wiped out. Congo is in crisis and Apple wants us to buy new iPhones. The first free Black nation, which was freed through revolution, Haiti, continues to be punished by colonial logics. Texas lost power. An election season approaches. Wildfire season approaches. New strains of COVID-19 threaten the long-term health of everyone alive right now.

We, in this ark, are also in a spaceship. We are going to the outer limits of what’s possible. We are learning from our comrade’s joys and sorrows. We are getting the perspective that even God herself might marvel in. And we must come back to Earth. I share in that disorientation. It is hard to take time off, come to the Farm, and go back to life with people who didn’t learn what you learned this week.

Trayvon Martin wanted to go to the stars. His beautiful, sweet face haunts me in his Aviation Space camp gear. His suit was on display at the Smithsonian in DC as part of an Afrofuturist exhibit.

Trayvon Martin’s Spacesuit, The National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Afrofuturism asks us, “what kind of world would Trayvon Martin have needed us to build so that his name was famous for traveling into the stars? What if we knew him because he was the youngest space explorer? What institutions and norms and customs and policies and projects and histories would have had to be destroyed and abolished in order for us to know his name this way?”

Earthlings. Astronauts. We heard a beautiful postlude from our organist. For those who may not have known what words attached those melodies, I’m going to share my favorite verse. In addition to Dr. Omar Dickenson’s incredible rendition There’s a reason why so many people were moved by this song.

Summer and winter and springtime and harvest

Sun moon and stars in their courses above

Join with all nature in manifold witness

To thy great faithfulness mercy and love.

What magic and majesty to witness the Creator’s love, right alongside the sun moon and stars and mushroom and mosquitos and bears and geese, turtles, ducks, sunflowers and sequoia trees.

So Earthlings, let us continue to be in awe. To feel the depth of our curiosity in our bones. And to never take for granted a quiet night sky full of stars.

Amen.

Hi Earthlings! They’re baaaaaack! If you were helped by this reflection, share a line at https://www.fishsandwichheaven.com/contact . I look forward to hearing from you. Teach me something! A special note of thanks to Dr. Kelly Roberts. We met at the Alex Haley Farm this week, and she encouraged me to share this reflection here. Look out for more reflections because you KNOW I’m a certified yapper.

Astronauts to Somebody