After racist hijacking of Zoom meeting, I pray our leaders find courage to legislate for justice.

As a writer, it’s important for me to find places of solitude so I can hear words trying to make their way to me. Throughout my life, I’ve had the privilege to seek out places to go to get quiet. I come from a Black family with a legacy of land ownership. We were once a farming family. On my mother’s side, my great-great grandfather, Spencer, formerly enslaved, passed as a white man and purchased 89 acres of land in Paducah. On my father’s side, there are at least 63 acres in the same area. I grew up on that Western Kentucky land. As a child, I spent time in brooks and streams. A particular brook had sand on its banks. My brothers and cousins and I claimed it as our own private beach. We would get lost for hours in the woods during the day. At night we’d catch lightning bugs under a blanket of stars. My biggest worries at that time were about the surprise slithering snake or stumbling upon a hornet’s nest or a nasty encounter with a snapping turtle. I felt safe on this land. I have memories of a Kentucky that felt like home to me. But what I didn’t know was how hard my parents and my family were working to shield us from a Kentucky that did not feel the same way about us.

For me as a Black person, hearing the n-word thrown around like confetti is nothing new. I am not talking about the way some of us say it to one another as a sign of kinship and reclamation. I am talking about the way it has been hurled at me and others to demean, threaten, and silence us. Like it was said and written over and over again in front of a dazed and confused majority white and heterosexual city council in Lexington last week. I am talking about the way it felt to see the only 2 Black people on our council, members Angela Evans and James Brown, sit for hours and be forced listen to such hate. Not only did they have to listen, but many of us in virtual attendance watched in horror as they listened with no aid from their colleagues who sat wincing and frozen. They sat as if they were shocked into immobility and powerlessness. As a Black LGBTQ woman, I don’t have the luxury of such shock and immobility. The powerlessness I feel has been created by design and yet, I still muster strength to act on most days. I come from people who muster strength in the face of denial, grief, angst and despair. I come from people who push on in spite of our collective trauma and lack of equitable resources. Many of us do it with no solitude. We do it because our leaders rarely listen. We do it because even though many deny and try to distract us, we know our Black lives matter. Our value has never been affirmed by those who hold power and so we have no other choice than to do it for ourselves.

I have not felt the freedom to roam about Kentucky’s landscape as I did for a brief moment in my childhood. My parents and my family shielded me for as long as they could. Now when I need solitude to write I hunker down in my home. I only go where I am invited. There are creeks, streams, rivers, lakes and waterfalls I have not seen in my Kentucky home. I have not gone to these places for solitude because I don’t have the privilege of only seeing and hearing the n-word or homophobic slurs or being called monkey alongside threats of hangings and bombings and murder on a Zoom meeting. I live the fact that racism, homophobia, and white supremacy are entrenched in our public and private discourse, policies, and laws. But I also live in acceptance that it doesn’t have to be this way.

My hope is that leaders in Lexington and across the Commonwealth will not ignore what they witnessed in that Zoom last week. I pray they do the work to come out of deadly denial. I pray they find their voices and courage to legislate for the sake of life and for justice. I pray I never again witness leaders freeze in the cold and callous face of racism. May they take actions knowing this hatred is real and it is just as much a part of Lexington and our Commonwealth as I have been told is the solitude of its beautiful landscapes and waterways.

Western Kentucky native LeTonia Jones is a social justice entrepreneur and writer in search of deeper truths about love and what is required to live fully human and be at peace.