Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 80

I wake up with another memory. It’s from that conference I mentioned back on Day 75. The one where I was the only non-Black participant out of about forty higher education professionals.

We gathered at a retreat centre in the Santa Cruz mountains. We were surrounded by deep, dark, tall, dignified redwood trees. They held us as we imagined a radically different way of educating Black and Brown young people.

We were studying excerpts from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a text I was familiar with from my college days. I remember loving it then, even though I’d forgotten a lot of the details of the story by the time I found myself studying at the conference.

We were in small groups looking at this passage:

“In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. and all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.”

I listened deeply as each person in my group shared their responses to the passage. They were full of anger, anguish, hope, despair, gratitude and grace.

I sat there silently saying nothing until they all turned, looked at me, and asked me what I thought and felt about it. There I was, the only non-Black person in the group. A light-skinned woman being asked what I thought and felt about white hatred and violence towards Black bodies.

I froze. I was so afraid of saying the wrong thing and offending my colleagues that I froze. And then I said something woefully inadequate. I said something about being a woman. And that as a woman I could understand and empathise, with what Toni Morrison was getting at here.

Because our bodies are also objectified and commodified and on the receiving of physical and sexual violence.

I remember their faces as the words spilled from my mouth. I remember my heart sinking knowing that for all my ideas about what it means to be an ally to the Black community, and all my attempts to demonstrate my knowledge and understanding of the issues, I could not in that moment feel much of anything besides my own deep discomfort with whiteness.

I reached for an easy out and in doing so managed to belittle the harsh, brutal, unimaginable reality for thousands of Black bodies who lived and died as enslaved people in America. I also erased the experience of their descendants.

An experience that I will never, ever be able to fully understand. Their experience of what it’s like to walk in the world, this world, our world with Black skin and be hated for it. Be hated simply for the colour of their skin.

I’ve reflected many times over the years about what happened to me in that moment. The discomfort I felt was all about me. It was about a self-consciousness in me. Self-conscious about the privilege I carry around with me simply because of the lightness of my skin.

The reality was that I had never let myself acknowledge or feel into that discomfort. Instead I had covered it up. Pasted over it with all my concepts, ideas, opinions, and theories. Whitewashed it with desperate attempts to show how “woke” I am, how “down” for the cause.

So in that moment, asked what I thought and felt, I became completely numb. The unknownness of my deep discomfort and the fear I felt in the face of it made me a deer in headlights.

And in that moment, I could not show up fully, in a real, authentic way. I was cut off, from myself, from the group, and from a live encounter with the unknown.

For a long time I’ve made it my practice to familiarise myself with discomfort, resistance, fear, apathy, laziness, anxiety, overwhelm, anger, and all the other banished, unwanted emotions that come with living in a human body in an imperfect world.

And what I have found is that through familiarization I must contend with the parts of myself that I’d rather not know about. For example, the fact that I live in a world built off the backs of oppressed people and that I, for the most part, am not among the oppressed.

I have incredible privilege and that privilege has come to me not through the merits of my karmic predecessors, but through the systems that were built before I came along and that I unwittingly benefit from, whether I like it or not.

So I have a choice. I can simply keep reaping those benefits, convincing myself that it has nothing to do with me, or I make a commitment to challenging injustices when I see them, am aware of them, using my privilege to interrupt systemic racism.

I could throw up my hands and convince myself that one person can’t make a difference, or I could acknowledge that in an interconnected world that has been pulled apart by the lies of separation and supremacy, what I choose to think and say and do makes all the difference, especially for those closest to me.

I have a location in this world. And it’s complicated. Second generation immigrant, socialized female, queer. I know what discrimination feels like. I know how suffocating it can be.

But it also isn’t the same as racism. It is not the same.

And in trying to claim some sort of parallel I do myself and those I strive to stand in solidarity with a grave disservice.

I keep thinking about the phrase “dig deeper.” That we each need to dig deeper. Go beyond the discomfort and the fear and the shame, see through the self-serving guilt and excuses and blame.

We need to dig deep enough to unearth the humility of acknowledging our complicity, all the ways we haven’t yet examined our unearned privilege and how the assumptions we make about how to show up will continue to be flawed until we find the truth at the core of ourselves.

I can’t tell you what happens next. I haven’t gotten there myself, and maybe I never will. Maybe it’s impossible to completely dismantle the conditioning of white dominance. But I’m willing to try. I’m in process.

A work in progress.

What I can tell you is what I wish I had said that day at that conference in that group reading together that beautiful, heart-breaking passage from Toni Morrison.

I wish I had appreciated the beauty of the prose and the radicalness of the call to love your body when the whole of society hates it.

I wish I had admitted how much I still needed to learn about the plight of enslaved Black people, and that I was still at the beginning of my journey to understanding the connections between then and now.

I wish I had said I’m sorry, I’m sorry that this happened to your ancestors and I’m sorry that it’s very likely my ancestors had something to do with it.

I wish I had said I love you.