This week, the forces for white supremacy were besides themselves with indignant rage at cancel culture at work in eliminating the gender from Potato Head and the casual racism of Dr. Seuss.
The same week, I participated in a Lunch and Learn about Intercultural Communication where the instructor taught that if we ever faltered in how to handle microaggressions, we were to just think of them as sexual assault and handle them that way. The perpetrator was to be banished. The victim was to be believed and supported. End of story.
As a white person who freely admits that I have been steeped in and shaped by white supremacist culture, I know that I have been guilty of casual racism, implicit bias, subtle acts of exclusion, and unjustifiable ignorance. I acknowledge that I must work to stay awake, stay aware, learning and growing and listening.
And I do not believe that microaggressions are only perpetrated by white people. If you accept intersectionality of power and oppression, you acknowledge that it's a one-up, one-down game in all directions and at all levels.
And if you accept that, then you must know that despite all our best efforts, mistakes and slip-ups and gaps in knowledge, skill, and grace are inevitable. And "punishment" for microaggressions is not just short-sighted but woefully inadequate for the ocean of water that we all have to carry to get from where we are to a world in which we resolve conflicts with peaceful resolution. What's peaceful about treating a microaggressor as a perpetrator of sexual assault?
I am a Universalist Unitarian, and the first part of my faith history is a heretical belief - at the time but also now - that every human being is worthy of salvation. That we are all redeemable. As Ruby Sales put it in her interview with Kristen Tippet in the podcast On Being:
This whole business of demonization, I’ve been deeply concerned about it, because it does not locate the good in people. It gives up on people. And you see that most especially in the right and the left. I have been very concerned about the demonization that comes out of right-wing communities and also the demonization that I’ve heard on the left. And it comes from the same source of displaced whiteness. So I think that there is, at the heart of this business of finding something good in people and not giving up on anyone and not writing anyone’s obituary until they no longer have breath in their bodies, is very problematic today. And I have had deep problems with the anger, the vitriolic rage that has come out of the right and the left — and I never thought I would say this — and the only safe landing space seems to be in the middle. [laughs] And I think we should really think about that. I do believe that we’re witnessing something that we need to pay real attention to.
She entreats us to ask "Where does it hurt?" when people are acting poorly, acknowledging that bad choices are born of pain, hurting, feeling like no other option is available. She alludes to white grievance feeling like white culture is under attack, that to be white is to be racist, to be irredeemable, to be flawed, to be bad.
To say that white supremacy culture leads white people to walk around harming others by denying their own cultural centers is not to say that whiteness is bad. It is to say that white supremacy is bad. And that actions and words and inaction and silence that reinforces white supremacy is bad. The difference between guilt - I have done a bad thing - and shame - I am bad.
But to let go of shame is to let go of the excuse that because I cannot shed whiteness, I have no way of doing better. And those who support and defend white centered culture want no part of any path that would hold them to doing better.
But the admonition that anyone who perpetrates a microaggression is akin to a rapist also narrows the paths toward reconciliation. Where is the island big enough for all the misfit toys? Hint: It's all the continents of the world.
And so if we say that all people are made up of intersectional identities, and each is connected to cultures, we must also say that because we are constantly communicating across cultures, miscommunication is to be expected and mistakes large and small will be commonplace. And therefore our work to be in right relationship, in Beloved Community of acceptance and celebration, must be the work of openness to learning and affirming and repair and reconciliation when harm occurs.
(Is my feeling of urgency to get to learning skills of conflict resolution and reconciliation and repair a way of skipping past the acknowledgment of the need to learn and do better? Or, rather, is it side-stepping the instinct to not do better until I "learn enough" - a trap of inaction because there is an never-ending amount to learn?)
I want a "how to have hard conversations when you've screwed up" course. Or a "how to call in when someone's screwed up" workshop. I want more models of mama love - the image of a wolf nipping at her cubs when they get out of line but mostly letting them learn their own lessons through play with their littermates.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg gets at this new culture where mistake and repair is normalized and de-stigmatized when she offers this language, with a laugh, in an recent podcast with author Ijeoma Oluo, "You could just say: I did a racism, didn't I?" and then use the Jewish tradition of atonement as a model for how to get back into right relationship.
Rabbi Ruttenberg responds to Amy Cooper's sorry-not-sorry apology after calling the police on a black man when she broke the law:
She will not own that she DID a racism -- she could not possibly have DONE a racism, because that means she IS racist. ... Rather than, for example, saying something like, "I did something that was racist and I commit to educating myself to better understand why what I did was so harmful and to make better choices in the future." Something that would involve owning harm, working to change, and, I might add, offering amends of some sort to Christian Cooper. ... I don't believe that people cannot learn and grow and choose different actions. But that work demands taking full responsibility for the harm caused -- including amends and a real apology to the harmed parties -- and taking steps to become different (which could involve things like therapy, education, etc.)
Rather than acknowledging, eg, that we all live in a white supremacist society and that it takes a lot of work to fight the messages that we have all internalized.
I would offer that a full apology to the person harmed is Plan A. But I'm remembering a sermon on forgiveness by the Rev. Angela Herrera in which an apology is perhaps more necessary to oneself. A moment of reflection and reckoning and re-orientation to be in right relationship with one's own values and a re-commitment to do better (and do what doing better will require, including therapy, education, etc.). Forgiveness involves 2 people but only requires 1 to act.
And the reflection part includes Ruby Sales' question: Where is it hurting? What made you say or do or think or act or not say or not do or not think? (Seeing the water in which you swim. Reasserting your values. Re-orientation. Re-commitment.)
And the larger question of how to be in relationship with others, to be in community? It's a longer timeframe and more than 1:1 interactions. We should not only be focused on the success or failure of individual interactions and the quality of apology and atonement for 1 microaggression. The microaggressor may not be the right person to help heal the harm they caused, which is not to say that they shouldn't apologize, but rather to say that we all have a role in repair. That many hands make light work. That some harm can only be healed in community and over generations in the progress we make in dismantling systems of oppression. Which is not to let anyone off the hook for the responsibility to learn more so that we can individually do better, or to learn better how to apologize and repair/atone when we don't always do better.
This is both/and. Individual interactions and the long arc of justice. The resilience of a tree, turning to grow in a new direction when the light is blocked from one side, as poet Jane Hirschfield writes in the poem "Optimism." Or, as Ruby Sales said, cultivating and embracing the love borne of redemptive anger ... that moves you to transformation and human up-building." (And fortifies you to hold others to account for their missteps.)
I'm thinking here of the usefulness of the wave/particle metaphor - that light acts both as a wave and a particle, depending on how you set up your equipment to study it. Our interactions are this way - a lesson at the level of 1:1 interactions as individual particles and on systemic levels when we look at interactions among intercultural communities and across generations. Both are true. Both are useful depending on the level you're working on. (Ah, William James, you so-and-so, teaching us that what's useful is what's true! I see you!)
"We are incomplete without knowing each other." Ruby Sales says. And because of our intersectional identities, there is an infinite web of cultures to know.
"Our job is to take care of one another. To fight for a world where everyone is safe, is free, is whole. All of us. In this together. That's it. That's the work. Don't ever forget it." - Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
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