MEEKS: Taking off our masks

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, --

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee form tortured souls arise.

We sing, but on the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the Mask!

-- Paul Laurence Dunbar

These words of Paul Laurence Dunbar continue to ring true for African-Americans as we continue to travel the path of seeking to be accepted as full members of American society without having to have any commentaries or qualifiers offered on our behalf. The recent events on several college campuses in the past few days speak very loudly to this issue. The recent massacre in Charleston, the commentaries around reports of excessive force of the police and the killing of unarmed young black people speak of this.

There continues to be an unwillingness on the part of many whites to see African-Americans as we truly are and that is the cause of much unrest and oftentimes great expressions of rage on the part of young African-Americans who are tired of the necessity to wear a mask for the sake of acceptance.

What can one do with the desire to be the person that one imagines oneself to be in a world that does not wish to make the space for that to occur? Langston Hughes and others have talked about the ways in which the rage that is created from the mandate to wear a mask can be detrimental to the well-being of the person and can lead to the withering of the soul or to explosion.

I understand this dynamic very well because I have spent many years of hard therapeutic and soul healing work to make sure that I did not get caught in mask wearing or the debilitating rage that comes from not being able to be my fully functioning self. It is worth the effort to find the path to inner peace and stability in order to continue to confront the systems of oppression that are so firmly entrenched in our culture.

To my delight I have another example of how a person can make the effort to rise above the mask wearing and tap into their inner resources. My oldest son, Mbye, has done this in a remarkable manner and it has led him to creating a wonderful tool that can help many young and old people alike. Some of you have probably read about his Legal Equalizer App and how it can help change the conversation between the police and the community.

This wonderful creation arose out of his own experience with being profiled by the police last year and though he was filled with rage about the way he was treated, he chose not to cover it up and wear a mask of acceptance or to be consumed by it and end up exploding at some point. He chose to turn that energy of rage into creativity and has developed this tool that can help him and many others.

Anger, rage and creativity are all forms of energy and we can make choices about what we do with that energy. We can try to cover it up and wear masks so that we appear one way when something else is true or we can allow it to be transformative and to push us forward into creativity.

Our country needs us to take off the masks and to use all of our energy to help create a new world of peace and freedom.

This column by Catherine Meeks, Ph.D., appears twice monthly. Meeks is also a contributing writer for the Huffington Post. Email her at kayma53@att.net.