Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup. Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins. Don’t even sew on a button. Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch. Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome. Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything matches, at all. Except one word to another. Or a thought. Pursue the authentic-decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart. Your heart, that place you don’t even think of cleaning out. That closet stuffed with savage mementos. Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything at all that breaks. Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life and talk to the dead who drift in through the screened windows, who collect patiently on the tops of food jars and books. Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you call necessity.
Ok, I'll say it. Republicans are NOT just acting out of loyalty to one man. They are choosing a means to an end. Trump and Trumpism are the means. The big lie justifies "voter reform" bills that ensure voter disenfranchisement, removing tools of leverage and power for people of color and their allies, and ultimately shoring up white control of government.
They don't BELIEVE the big lie; they believe in its power to cover their actions and justify their egregious, anti-democratic, racist actions. Policies that will disproportionately and negatively impact communities of color are racist policies. This is a racist lie; racist strategy; and racist outcome.
Let's not miss the big picture here. Loyalty only begins to explain it. Trump doesn't just happen to be racist. He's the chosen leader of racists.
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Lie back daughter, let your head be tipped back in the cup of my hand. Gently, and I will hold you. Spread your arms wide, lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls. A dead- man's float is face down. You will dive and swim soon enough where this tidewater ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe me, when you tire on the long thrash to your island, lie up, and survive. As you float now, where I held you and let go, remember when fear cramps your heart what I told you: lie gently and wide to the light-year stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.
Let me tell you about my marvelous god, how he hides in the hexagons of the bees, how the drought that wrings its leather hands above the world is of his making, as well as the rain in the quiet minutes that leave only thoughts of rain. An atom is working and working, an atom is working in deepest night, then bursting like the farthest star; it is far smaller than a pinprick, far smaller than a zero and it has no will, no will toward us. This is why the heart has paced and paced, will pace and pace across the field where yarrow was and now is dust. A leaf catches in a bone. The burrow’s shut by a tumbled clod and the roots, upturned, are hot to the touch. How my god is a feathered and whirling thing; you will singe your arm when you pluck him from the air, when you pluck him from that sky where grieving swirls, and you will burn again throwing him back.
and remote, and useful, if only to itself. Take the fly, angel of the ordinary house, laying its bright eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out delicately along a crust of buttered toast. Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest dump where other flies have gathered, singing over stained newsprint and reeking fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate ballet above the clashing pirouettes of heavy machinery. They hum with life. While inside rumpled sacks pure white maggots writhe and spiral from a rip, a tear-shaped hole that drools and drips a living froth onto the buried earth. The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch, rats manage the crevices, feral cats abandon their litters for a morsel of torn fur, stranded dogs roam open fields, sniff the fragrant edges, a tossed lacework of bones and shredded flesh. And the maggots tumble at the center, ripening, husks membrane-thin, embryos darkening and shifting within, wings curled and wet, the open air pungent and ready to receive them in their fecund iridescence. And so, of our homely hosts, a bag of jewels is born again into the world. Come, lost children of the sun-drenched kitchen, your parents soundly sleep along the windowsill, content, wings at rest, nestled in against the warm glass. Everywhere the good life oozes from the useless waste we make when we create—our streets teem with human young, rafts of pigeons streaming over the squirrel-burdened trees. If there is a purpose, maybe there are too many of us to see it, though we can, from a distance, hear the dull thrum of generation's industry, feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us, pushing the world forward toward its ragged edge, rushing like a swollen river into multitude and rank disorder. Such abundance. We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous.
If you're Black You always remember things like living in Woodlawn With no inside toilet And if you become famous or something They never talk about how happy you were to have Your mother All to yourself and How good the water felt when you got your bath From one of those Big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in And somehow when you talk about home It never gets across how much you Understood their feelings As the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale And even though you remember Your biographers never understand Your father's pain as he sells his stock And another dream goes And though you're poor it isn't poverty that Concerns you And though they fought a lot It isn't your father's drinking that makes any difference But only that everybody is together and you And your sister have happy birthdays and very good Christmases And I really hope no white person ever has cause To write about me Because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and they'll Probably talk about my hard childhood And never understand that All the while I was quite happy
The Rev. Bob LaVallee says there are only 5 prayers, which are also types of religious experiences:
Wow
Thanks
I'm sorry
Help me
Help someone else
Remember to take a moment when we feel these things to give them space, a breath, to center ourselves in that feeling and branch out, reach out, send out to others, and connect with the "something more" of which we are a part but do not control.
Because being grounded does not mean being more in control, just more gracious and flexible and resilient and loving.
what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.
I believe 3 things are needed to sail through this to that, as Lucille Clifton wishes for us.
1) That we cultivate bold, just goals of equity in process and then ongoing equality in outcomes.
2) That we, at all levels, continually look for and root out the constraints and the causes of all the practices and institutions and systems that stand between us and the embracing and achieving of our shared goals.
3) That we individually do the work to build skills of valuing difference and negotiating conflict, unlearn implicit bias, root out prejudice, leverage privilege, cultivate compassion, and celebrate and share joy in community.
It is not enough to espouse our intentions. We know that impact is a better measure of justice.
Strategic planning has taught us not just to find our vision but ask what stands in the way of that vision. If we all want justice, what is it that stops us from attaining it?
On a macro scale, it's easier to point to the GOP's blatant racism in the policies that would disproportionately benefit white communities and undermine communities of color.
It's harder, on an individual scale, to find the barriers that keep me from having a diverse set of friends. Or why my beloved liberal faith, which professes the dignity of each individual and celebrates diversity as a source for life meaning and wisdom, is overwhelmingly white.
And the answer, of course, is institutional racism scaffolding around white supremacy culture. And to achieve equality for all and diversity that we can celebrate? Dismantling systems of oppression in our church culture and in our personal interactions with those who are different from ourselves.
And how to do that? To give up the privilege of comfort of white people as the norm. To accept the stress and the challenge and the adventure of being a traveler among other cultures - to learn from them, to interact with humility and curiosity and respect, to be very aware of the cultural identities that we bring into each interaction. To accept that diversity is to be the new norm, to give up the idea of the "universal experience" and instead be ok with the relativity of multiculturalism and intersectionality of identity. To learn how to see difference and not be afraid or offended. To experience offense and be brave enough and mature enough to say so in nonviolent terms. To ask for what you want in positive terms. (John Gottman's got this one nailed when it comes to the best relationships - anger is ok but say what HAPPENED that you didn't like and what you WANT TO HAPPEN instead, not criticizing or belittling or, in the case of a one community member to another, giving up on them altogether.)
This is the anti-racism that Ibram X. Kendi describes, as opposed to segregationist or assimilationist urges of the past. Again, easier for me to see at the national scale. Harder to see at the level of my church, my life, when I make decisions on what is "relaxing" and "refreshing" on a weekend.
Although Kendi advocates "zero tolerance" on microagressions, my Unitarian Universalist faith means I cannot give up on someone - not that I have to embrace them or not hold them accountable - but following Ruby Sales, I cannot give up on anyone or write anyone’s obituary "until they no longer have breath in their bodies."
"It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed." - Ruby Sales in On Being
Dr. Yaba Blay on Brene Brown's Unlocking Us talked about identity as three components, "the meeting of
who you are,
who you believe yourself to be, and
who others tell you that you are."
I think we’re all trying to navigate that space to come to understand who we are. Because we can’t act like other people’s definitions of us or other people’s projections onto us don’t impact us. A lot of us are constantly massaging our identities to fit in a variety of spaces and places. And I think it’s healthy to do so. But I’m sure over the course of our lives, we’re constantly revisiting the question of, “Who am I?” That’s constantly changing based upon the experiences that we have, and for better or for worse, some of us might define ourselves according to our experiences, or some of us might try to meet an identity that is projected on to us.
And the responsibility for our identity when it includes our street race, and perhaps how we land on others, even acknowledging, maybe especially acknowledging that implicit bias, stereotypes, and prejudice are real and present in almost every interaction, means that we must get better at being multicultural and intercultural to minimize the stress and associated negative health effects that come with it.
The way Brene and Dr. Blay talk about codeswitching as stressful but unavoidable in the podcast link above is what I think white people need to accept. We are leaving/dismantling a world built for white comfort and instead building a world where we all must get more comfortable being uncomfortable, staying on our growing edge, growing our awareness and skill of using our bodies as antenna to notice when we or others have crossed a cultural line and offended or hurt someone, and getting much better - bolder - braver - more skillful - in asking for, hearing, and acting on feedback and then resolving conflict, repairing the relationship, and building trust again - one marble into the jar at a time (as Brene's daughter explained trust with her friends). Snowflakes? What a joke! This is the hardest work there is. Scorched earth is a white colonists solution to all conflict. Knitting? Weaving? Forgiving? Building community across difference? What fortitude! What wisdom! What maturity and dexterity and skill is needed!
And so I have dreams of anti-racism trainings that just drill offense, feedback, apology, repair. And eventually, you move to difference, (internal fear, deep breath, cultivating curiosity about an individual), laughter and/or questions, listening, stories, asking for what you want, discussing different values and needs, and brainstorming/working together on how to get everyone a little more of what they want and need.
may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
We, bearers of the dream, affirm that a new vision of hope is emerging. We pledge to work for that community in which justice will be actively present. We affirm that there is struggle yet ahead. Yet we know that in the struggle is the hope for the future. We affirm that we are co-creators of the future, not passive pawns. And we stand united in affirmation of our hope and vision of a just and inclusive society. We affirm the unity of all persons: We affirm brotherhood and sisterhood that allows us to touch upon each other’s humanity. We affirm a unity that opens our eyes, ears, and hearts to see the different but common forms of oppression, suffering, and pain. Yet we are one in the image of God, and we celebrate our hopes for human unity. Within ourselves and within the gathered community, we will discover the strength not to hide in indifference. Affirming that hope, publicly expressed, energizes and enables us to move forward. Together we pledge action to transcend barriers — be they racial, political, economic, social, or religious. We pledge to make our tomorrows become our todays.
of her is a scum on the surface, she would like to look at herself. Should I have a memory? she wonders. Of mother washing my frogskin in muddy water? I do not have that memory. My near-transparent frogskin? Mother washing it with mud to keep it visible? I do not have that memory, almost, almost. Warmblooded though she knows for a fact, and spontaneously generated from the sun on stone, and 100 vertebrae in every wave of the lake, as 100 vertebrae in every wave of her. All of her meat blue rare blue rare, a spot on her neck that would drive her wild if anyone ever touched it, and the tip of her tail ends with -ness and -less. So far all she knows of the alphabet is signs that say NOSWIMMING. So far all she knows is her whereabouts. Has great HATRED for the parochial, does the liver of the lake. Would like to go to universe … al … ity? She has heard there is a good one in Germany. They stay up all night drinking some black sludge, and grow long beards rather than look at them- selves, and do thought experiments like: if I am not in Scotland, does Scotland even exist? What do I look like when no one is looking? She would listen to them just as hard as she could with the mud-sucking holes in her head – and they, she thinks, would listen back, with their ears so regularly described as seashell. The half of her that is underwater would like to be under a desk, the head of her that is underwater would like to be fully immersed. I will be different there, she thinks, with a powerful wake ahead of me. When will the thinkers come for me. Visited only here by believers. Is so deep-sea-sick of believers. When will the thinkers come for me here, where the green stretches out before me, and I am my own front lawn. The green is a reflective green, a green in the juicy shadows of leaves – a bosky even green – a word I will learn to use, and use without self- consciousness, when at last I go to Germany. I have holed myself away here, sometimes I am not here at all, and I feel like the nice clean hole in the leaf and the magnifying glass above me. She looks to the believers on the shore. A picture it would last longer! shouts Nessie. Does NOT believe photography can rise to the level of art, no matter how much rain falls in it, as levels of the lake they rose to art when Nessie dipped her body in it. Nessie wants to watch herself doing it. Doing what, I don’t know, being alive. The lake bought one Nessie and brought her home. She almost died of loneliness until it gave her a mirror. The lake could be a mirror, thinks Nessie. Would be perfectly still if I weren’t in it.
A sip of liquor from a creek. Saturday syndicated Good Times, bare legs, colors draped like an afterthought. We bright enough to blind you. Dear anyone, dear high-heel metronome, white noise, hush us, shhhhh, hush us. We’re artisinal crafts, rare gems, bed of leafy bush you call us superfood. Jeweled lips, we’re rich We’re everyone. We have ideas and vaginas, history and clothes and a mother. Portrait-ready American blues. Palm trees and back issues of JET, pink lotion, gin on ice, zebras, fig lipstick. One day we learned to migrate. One day we studied Mamma making her face. Bright new brown, scent of Nana and cinnamon. Shadows of husbands and vineyards, records curated to our allure, incense, unconcern. Champagne is how the Xanax goes down, royal blue reigning. We’re begging anyone not to forget we’re turned on with control. We better homes and gardens. We real grown. We garden of soiled panties. We low hum of satisfaction. We is is is is is is is is touch, touch, shine, a little taste. You’re gonna give us the love we need.
At the risk of going a bit down the road of making a colorblind racist argument, I'm thinking more and more about how the crux of the ongoing issues around race centers around our lack of skill dealing with and successfully navigating through and negotiating conflict.
I remember when I was interviewing for a scholarship before beginning college, and someone asked me if I had hope that men and women would ever resolve their differences. I remember saying that it's a miracle that any of us can relate to anyone else, and gender differences just complicate things further. 30 years later, I would just add that race, class, urban/rural, liberal/conservative, democrat/republican, formally educated/life educated, and on and on add to the complexity and potential for miscommunication, misunderstanding, false assumptions, implicit bias, discrimination, prejudice and on and on.
A common trope is to say the life skill that should be taught from kindergarten up. Taking turns? Check. Saying sorry when you make a mistake? Check. But what about examining why you make mistakes more often when someone seems different from you? Not so much. Maybe Sesame Street? But only in a "we're all different, and that's ok!" kind of way. Not "You're different from me, and my first instinct is fear, but I need to lean into that and realize I just have something to learn - and you have something to each me!" And please, lord, teach us early and often how to work through conflict using nonviolent communication: "When you [observable behavior], I felt [real emotion, not a phrase beginning with "that"]. In the future, I would prefer [action the person can take or not take]."
I made the off-hand comment to a friend that no one likes conflict. We all avoid it. And that's clearly not true. The worst bullies among us LOVE picking fights. And every Karen among us thinks she has every right to make anyone else feel uncomfortable if she's got any want, need, or complaint. But most of us are in the not-so-sweet spot between the poles of "I have every right to ask for anything I want/need" (i.e. entitled arrogance / arrogant entitlement) and "I have no right to ask for anything I want or need" (i.e. no self esteem / underfunctioning / invisibility).And we're terrified to say anything out loud lest we be asking too much. Am I worth it? What if they say no? Is the request worth the conflict?
Instead of this win/lose polarity, we need healthy boundaries and ... ugh ... balance. Like the new thing people use as ground rule at meetings: Take space / Make space (the adjustment to replace the less inclusive "Move up / move back"). This comes with 2 acronyms to think about:
W.A.I.T. = Why Am ITalking?
S.P.E.A.K. = Share Perspectives / Engage Another Knowledge-base
There are 3 stickies on my desk that I stare at all day long:
What does it mean to undo harm?
What would being silent exacerbate?
Diversity does not equal racial justice
What would my life be like if I asked myself (and everyone else did the same) these questions in every interaction when we notice difference (and we should continually be learning to notice difference more) interfering with our communication and/or relationships?
Watched Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar talk with Katie Couric about their new book: You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey.
Amber said she feels no compunction to teach white people why what they just said is hurtful and ignorant. Lacey, as an HR representative and one of the only people of color in her company and in Omaha, takes responsibility for teaching the history lesson, when she can.
This makes me think even more about the sermon Forgiveness by the Rev. Angela Herrera, which is worth watching (daily!) in its entirety.
The key points are transcribed (poorly) below:
5:05
To forgive is to let the debt go, is to release a claim you
have against somebody. It is to say we are no longer bound to each other by
what happened and by what remains unresolved. I release it. And in doing so, I release
myself.
Sometimes people speak of forgiveness as a gift to the
person who is being forgiven, and it certainly can be. It can be an underserved
gift, which is to say, something that you could not be entitled to, the other
person couldn’t do anything to be entitled to be forgiven.
Of course, If you revel in how undeserving the other person
is, you’ve probably undone some of the goodness in that. But if you do it well,
you can forgive somebody in such a way that doesn’t involve any sense superiority
but leaves you that a burden has just been lifted from you – the burden of
being angry. Where forgiving with a sense of condescension or superiority
leaves you with a new negative way of thinking, forgiving freely is liberating
and it helps us to be at peace and well in ourselves.
That feeling works even if the person never knows they have
been forgiven…. It opens up more space in us for gratitude, love, awe, joy.
Releasing our claims against the past allows us to become more present to now
and to what goodness is still unfolding.
8:36
Hindu teaching – Bhagavad Gita
“If you want to see the
brave, look for those who return love for hatred; if you want to see the heroic,
look to those who can forgive.”
12:32 – start with curiosity. Compassion questions.
Forgiveness does often begin with cultivating compassion in
ourselves. Even Just a tiny bit….
Compassion might begin with a little curiosity. How did this
person come to do what they did?
Have they been broken by something larger than themselves?
What does their behavior or their way of being cost them?
Are they happy? Are they caught up in larger systems of oppression and
violence? Do I have any personal experience with that kind of mindset? … Is it
possible that on some terrible level, they are doing the best they can? …
It’s not actually necessary to believe that the person
deserves to be forgiven. It’s more important to believe that you deserve to be
free of anger, resentment, and the desire for revenge. …
Anne LaMott –
"Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and
then waiting for the rat to die."
13:55
Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. It does not
require speaking to the other party… or being ok with what happened.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean letting someone continue to do someone to harm. It’s
not weakness. We can forgive and still find it best to end the relationship. Forgiveness
does not mean liking or agreeing with bad or even evil behavior. It does not
mean becoming friends from someone who would continue to hurt you… We can
forgive and we still expect the offender to face reasonable consequences, whatever
those might be.
15:00
To forgive is to say outloud or in our hearts: I’m not going
to be angry anymore. It’s saying: even though what you’ve done is bad, and it would
be perfectly acceptable. It’s too late to have a better past, it’s not too late
to be present to what is and to experience liberation
When you forgive another person, you release the power their
action has over you, the tension of that debt pulling on you is released, and
you can get back to yourself, back to some peace because the chains between you
and that other person have been broken or removed.
17:50
The message of our Universalist faith is that Every one of
us is forgivable. Everyone is lovable.
Goodness and discernment are big things to fail at. Yet the
trees stirring around her remind her that she came into the word to go easy, to
be filled with light, and to shine. My hope for each of you, for all of us, is
that we’ll experience forgiveness however we need it. May you receive it and
give it as often as needed, even an inch at a time. May it be so. Amen.
When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
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
I spent two years not looking Into the mirror in his office. Talking, instead, into my hands Or a pillow in my lap. Glancing up Occasionally to let out a laugh. Gradually it felt like a date with a friend, Which meant it was time to end.
Two years later, I saw him walking Up Jay Street into the sun. No jacket, His face a little chapped from wind. He looked like an ordinary man carrying Shirts home from the laundry, smiling About something his daughter had said Earlier that morning. Back before
You existed to me, you were a theory. Now I know everything: the words you hate. Where you itch at night. In our hallway, There are five photos of your dead wife. This is what we mean by sharing a life. Still, From time to time, I think of him watching me From over the top of his glasses, or eating candy
From a jar. I remember thanking him each time The session was done. But mostly what I see Is a human hand reaching down to lift A pebble from my tongue.
In this time of transition from anger, despair, and loneliness to one of hope and possibility, we pause to consider the ways that we have been hurt in the past year, the ways we were injured by witnessing things that we know to be wrong. As we consider what we have lost, may we acknowledge our wounds and take the time needed to heal. May we honor that process of becoming whole again, and from that return to our commitments to build a world of love and kindness.
May we pause to notice the ways that the world is beautiful. May we breathe in the possibilities of life and growth and laughter.
We give thanks for the gifts that we receive, large and small. Let us not consider whether we deserve them or not but simply bask in the grace of being here, being on earth, being together.
There are lots of ways to stay alive. You can wear soft clothes and focus on brushing your teeth and hydrating. You can ask yourself what you need and not be mad when you don’t have an answer, only a shrug. You can breathe in. And then, with care, you can also breathe out. Taking the thing one single breath at a time.
You can give yourself a chance. Remember not only your mistakes, but also all the ways that you matter. From eyelash to shoelace, you matter. You matter when you are sad, when the world is heavy like wet laundry, dragging from your arms. You matter when you are angry and you use your teeth like welded prison bars to keep the words that might cause harm from escaping past your lips.
There are many ways to stay alive.
You can come, heart wrapped in several layers of foil, mashed into a plastic box with an ill-fitting lid, to a place where people say your name like it is good news.
You can fight your way toward freedom.
I recommend that you decline the option of struggling by yourself. The point is to get your life. There was this wise ruler who said once that by ourselves we are unprotected, but two people together can face the worst: [the failure, the heartbreak, the upending of worlds we hold in our hearts, and the secret shame that we will shed like the skin of a smooth snake, though it will take some time.] And with three people, you being one of them, you may find that eventually, all will be well.
Just as he fell in love with the dinosaurs, just as he would fall in love with the moon— no women in the world yet, he was only ten years old. A ten-year-old is made of time, the world had forever to learn about Egypt. He entered encyclopedias and looted every fact of them and when he had finished looting there he broke into the Bible. He snuck into his mother’s room and drew thick lines around his eyes and those were the borders of Egypt. He carefully wrote in stiff small birds, he carefully wrote in coiled snakes, he carefully wrote in flatfooted humans. The ten-year-old world needed so much privacy, he learned to draw the door-bolt glyph and learned to make the sound it made. I am an old white British man, decided the ten-year-old world, I wear a round lens on my right eye, the Day, and see only a blur with my left eye, the Night. When the sun shone on him it shone on Egypt, all the dark for a while was the dark in the Pyramids, the left lung of his body was the shape of Africa and one single square breath in it Egypt. They never found all the tombs, he knew. Anyone might be buried in Egypt, thought the ten-year-old world in love with it, I will send my wind down into my valley, and my wind will uncover the doors to the tombs, and I will go down myself inside them, and shine light on all the faces, and light on the rooms full of gold, and light on even the littlest pets, on the mice and the beetles of the ten-year-old kings, and shine light on even their littlest names.
"The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It's all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a fucking act of will."
"I want to say and re-say to anyone who ask me, I do believe in gratitude ("flowers") as a kind of discipline, an energizing and catalyzing, and potential collectivizing discipline. What I mean is that, when I'm thinking of gratitude, or the gratitude I'm thinking of, is the ways we make each other possible. And that gratitude makes me more interested in making people possible, myself included.
...
(14:28)
If there's anything that's interesting to me about the poems, it's that they are motivated by precisely the desire to reach across, which is exactly what metaphor means, after all. Have you seen the moving trucks in Greece emblazoned with the word metaphores? My poems would be stupid little things to me, if they didn't reach your way. Who has the time?
...
(24:39)
I'm resisting your question about resistance, looks like. But I'm not really resisting; truth is, I'm making an argument. I'm making my argument with my body and the ground, about our bodies and the ground.
...
(28:30)
How you see or what you see depends on the ground. You cannot engrave, in other words, you cannot cannot dig, in other words, you cannot prepare the earth for your body, without a proper and true ground. Maybe this book of flowers is a preparation for the ground I wish to enter.
...
(28:55)
... I'm talking about the ground, what holds us, what we walk on, what we fall onto, what we leap from, what holds us, the ground.
Or in a painting that against which the marks are made in a Franz Kline painting, the big industrial swipes of black arguing with or emerging from or even resisting the creamy surfaces, gestures legible because of the ground, dependent upon the ground, or better yet a Glen Ligon painting, the Zora Neale Hurston quote ad black text on a white surface: "I feel most colored when I'm thrown against a sharp white background."
...
(28:34)
I'm really curious about the ground of our imaginations and the ground that it is implied or assumed by the word resistance in the context of your question... about this book. "What are you resisting in your book about flowers, black man?"
...
(30:00)
What I hope I'm doing actually is imagining a ground different than the one the question presumes. Because the ground that question presumes is something I refuse to abide. On that ground, which is simply descriptive of an America, which is for the record, like everything fleeting. Let's call it an American ground, in which, for which, upon which black people are not actually people. And sometimes it feels that if an America grants that if we are people, that it also imagines that our natural condition is pain, is suffering, is turmoil, is indignity, is death. It's big business, our suffering, our death.
...
(30:55)
Sometimes it seems to me that a black person becomes more legible in this particular American ground the closer they are to being dead. ...
(31:09)
That is the ground. I hear myself say it among friends, so I'll say it to you right now, that they would like us to believe it. They would like us to believe, I sometimes believe, watching Walter Scott being shot again and again on the news, when any child can see... watching Tamir Rice be murdered again and again that our natural state, our natural condition, our ground is pain, if not death. ...
(31:54)
Let's call that an American imaginative ground. ... A foundational American imaginative ground. ... I don't believe in it as a ground. And consequently I don't believe in it as something to be resisted. I just believe it's a persistent and abhorrent disruption to the actual ground, the actual ground being what I hope my book, a black man's book of flowers might look at. ...
(32:36)
I'm a flower in your garden being planted around your garden, a fervent and raucous mint.
So what's the ground? Our necessary lives or our lives necessary. And in our lives are so many things -- loss, sorrow, violence, pain, yes, but also delight, silliness, raucous laughter, care, care, as I see it, above all. Love, as I see it, above all. A thousand, thousand undocumented instances in my life alone of how I've been loved and cared for, lives that have seen my life and thereby made it possible. Lives, life, which has made our lives possible.
Celebration, exultation, praise, gratitude, and the rigorous practice, the rigorous public practice of those things is one of the ways we remind ourselves that our lives are the ground, that living is the ground. Those things remind us that being murdered and fucked over and terrorized is an aberration and to announce to the state or our shared consciousness or a broken American imagination by hollering with the light at our utterly necessary lives, our beautiful, beautiful necessary lives, that we are in fact meant to live.
So ... this book about flowers by a black man ... was both utterly conscious -- I knew what I was and wasn't saying -- and what, perhaps, I'm expected to be saying -- and it was just me minding my business, talking about my life, my life."
Building on Resmaa’s framing, I have been also thinking about power. It seems that power can show up as clean or dirty, as well. For example, when we believe that you having power or voice means that mine is silenced or that power is a zero-sum game, I think we are acting from dirty power.
But, when we see that power can grow across communities, that it can be a source of community transformation and well-being, and that we are all stronger when we see, hear, and find solidarity with each other, I believe we are acting into clean power.
Podcast - University of Arizona, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Center for Compassion Studies
Resmaa: There’s a white spoken word artist that I heard the other day, and he said something else that made my brain kinda go ‘click!’ and go ‘yeah, that's it!’ One of the things that he says is that when it comes to white people, and he’s talking about his own people, when it comes to white people, it’s important to realize that white body supremacy is the water, not the shark.
And many times progressives are always looking for the Trump shark, or the KKK shark, or the Mike Pence shark, right, they're looking for the shark, right, but not the fact that they are steeped in the water. And when white progressives put themselves on this continuum of, you got Trump’s over there and you got ‘good’ white people over here, what is happening is they forget that that continuum that they're on, the one that says they’re a good one is actually a sliding continuum.
It is not a fixed continuum. It slides. And when white progressives...this is something that Jim White has been saying lately, is that progressive white supremacy is as damaging as devout white supremacy. What I mean by devout white supremacy is that those who are so dedicated and devout to the destruction of people of color. Those are the devout ones, right? But the progressive ones, that insidious type of white body supremacy...that even though they say they don’t believe in white body supremacy, they are steeped in white body supremacy and those notions of who black people are in relation to who they are is still steeped in white body supremacy.
And if that goes unexamined, they continue to wound people of color, and then feign...and then won’t take responsibility for that wounding. So part of it for me is that when it comes to healing this thing about white body supremacy, white bodies have to begin to get together to figure out how they’re gonna create a container, a cultural container by which they can begin to develop culture to begin to actually attack it.
White body supremacy...the abolishment of white body supremacy, currently as it stands...white people have no notion how to begin to deal with that culturally. They have a notion around segregation. They have a notion around assimilation. They have no notion around abolishing white body supremacy, or racism, or anti-racist things. They have strategy around it, but not culture.
The KKK, the devout racists, have a culture. They have symbols, they have colors, they have music, they have dance, ways of speaking, ways of standing, ways of being, all that different type of stuff. What does the white liberal have other than strategy and a racial resume, right? And if I’m a fourteen year-old white boy, having music and symbols and a shared historical understanding, even if I know that the shared historical understanding is abhorrent, I still have something that speaks to me more so than picketing, and sitting around, you know, something that I’m protesting. That does not sustain culture. And until white liberals begin to actually develop a culture around anti-racist, abolishing, somatically abolishing white body supremacy, until they begin to think about this as a culture and less about this as a strategy, they will continue to re-wound people of color.
