In November of 2016 after attending the American Society for Criminology Conference, I spent my last day in New Orleans admiring the history and beauty of the Mississippi river, stocking up on pralines, stopping by Kermit Ruffins’ place on Claiborne to get his autograph, and visiting the Children of Whitney. The former Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, is now a museum dedicated to the lives of enslaved children. One of the first stops on the plantation is the Antioch Baptist Church which was built by emancipated slaves in 1870. Inside the church, hand carved crosses adorn the walls and life size clay statues of enslaved children stand in the aisles and sit on the wooden pews. The church, donated to the Whitney Plantation Museum in 1999, provides a surreal canvass for commissioned artist Woodrow Nash to give life to his precisely sculpted embodiments of enslaved children who lived and died on the plantation.
Quietly sitting among the children on a pew, I could almost hear their tiny voices singing along with the elders. I wondered how, if given the chance, they might have sung the same hymns that their mothers, grandmothers, or aunties may have hummed while washing their faces, platting their hair, ironing their clothes, darning their socks, and ensuring they had a little nourishment in their bellies before walking to church in the hot sun. I wondered what were the hopes, dreams and promises they never had a chance to realize.
Outside, I took in the vastness of the plantation. I found myself at once beguiled by the serenity of its shallow gullies and pained by the penetrating whispers of its trees with roots stained by the blood of strange fruit. A wall with the names of hundreds of those who died stands as a memorial on the plantation as witness to the bounty of potential buried with them. The Field of Angels is host to the plantation’s most poignant sculpture, a majestic angel with an unforgettable face as she looks upon the body of a child who has died. The angel’s expression of solemn agony as she gazes at the lifeless body of an infant in her arms mesmerized me, and although I could feel my heart breaking into a million pieces, I could not turn away; the Power of Truth, captivated me. The memory of her kneeling down on one bended knee with breasts bare in respect for the abundant potential in the life lost remains excruciating to my core. The angel depicts what it must be like when we are willing to clearly see and feel the sacredness of life and open our eyes and hearts to the truth that every ‘body’ is precious. Being woke is more than being alert to injustice. Being woke is the individual and collective will to feel the loss of potential to society due to injustice and to seek to heal through restorative and transformative spaces.
‘Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.’ This African proverb reminds us that distinguishing truth from history requires a willingness to be awake to multiple and often competing perspectives. Being woke is a willingness to see and feel relationally, to open our eyes, ears, and hearts to messages about ourselves, each other, and our individual and collective potential.
Being woke to the tales of the hunt from the perspective of the lion (the hunted, the subjugated, the oppressed) is a critical yet insufficient step in the process of transforming injustice. Essential to restorative justice is an intellectual commitment to being alert to the dignity and worth oneself and others and to the need to embed existing systems with equity-minded structures that promote equal outcomes. Ultimately, a transformative step in the awakening process would include the collective intention to restructure, reform, and reclaim narratives and the related interactions, processes, policies, systems and norms they create in ways that glorify neither the lion nor the hunter. Fundamental to this transformative step in the awakening process is the individual and collective will to feel unbridled pain.
Feeling uncomfortable is not enough to be woke. Being woke is feeling the unbearably intense mindboggling, heart wrenching, soul crushing pain that results from the loss of reverence for the unmet potential within every life and within our society as a whole, due to injustice. Wokeness that restores and transforms intentionally seeks to create spaces to reconcile the harms, recognize and celebrate our interdependencies, and heal together as individuals and as a society. Public restorative and transformative spaces exist, and one example is the Whitney Plantation Museum in Louisiana.
The Whitney Plantation Museum stands as a witness to the truth about slavery in America and the historically disparate treatment of the bodies of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the form of interpersonal, institutional and structural race-based prejudice, exploitation, discrimination and violence. The truth is events happened. The selling, buying, kidnapping, torturing, enslaving, exploiting, killing, and burying of Black bodies, including those of children, happened. These events created wealth for the dominant class and an underclass, sanctioned by laws and institutional practices, that continue to impact race-based outcomes today. These are facts that should not be rewritten, ignored as nonevents, or coopted to numb the pain. That the Whitney Plantation Museum is the only one of its kind to provide a glimpse into the experience of slavery from the perspective of the children is perhaps the most telling truth about the need to wake up to the lion’s story and to reframe and restructure spaces for mutual healing. The museum by providing a unique restorative and transformative space to see, feel, and heal helps us to awaken to the purity and Power of Truth which, as distinguished from history, depends on a willingness to continually and increasingly see and feel relationally.
Plantations, reservations, internment camps, redlined communities, and sites of mass incarceration in America, as well as the subjugated bodies within them and our collective lost potential as a result, are a part of a history that to heal requires us to be woke and willing to feel. May we awaken our hearts to the principles and practices of restorative and transformative justice to help us heal, learn, and live together. May we open our eyes to our individual and collective potential and alert our ears to the voices of the children and the whispers of the earth.