This is EXCELLENT. POWERFUL. PROFOUND in its wisdom and truth. Please consider reading and sharing as though all of our lives depend on our human capacity to absorb and act upon the truths held here. Because they do. — Molly
Don’t be surprised it’s this close. Don’t be shocked. Don’t be amazed. Let in, all the way in, that there’s a serious fundamental foundational issue at play. It’s not bad people. It’s not even hate actually, although that’s a thing in some cases. It’s a cultural norm so pervasive it’s running through blood, it’s sitting easy in the bones. It’s believing so much that this is “just the way it is” that millions of people aren’t just feeling it, they’re defending it, and that the experience of folks of European descent walking through life without the complication of response to their skin tone is a norm that anyone can have—if they work hard enough to unite on an ethos of economics that says hard work will get you everywhere if you stick to it. It doesn’t matter that statistically this doesn’t hold to be remotely true or that many of these same folks are often struggling to make ends meet. What matters is there’s a norm inhabited and perpetuated by folks of European descent and some folks of color who’ve internalized this premise and added to it the notion that success is a sign of divine approval and good character, and that “good” people that subscribe to this philosophy are inherently better, more trustworthy, reliable and blessed. That any violence, rancor, hostility folks may display isn’t hate or prejudice or bias favoring their perspective or preserving their position but a defense against another way of life—one that seems dangerous, maladaptive, self-serving, immoral and out of alignment with “how things work” according to this singular program.
This thing is so deep and so pervasive and so widely held as “normal” because it preserves several fantasies: 1) that the economic system and success we have was not after all founded on free labor of enslaved people and genocide of the country’s original people, 2) that this premise for America somehow does not inform the way the laws that govern labor and resources work even today, 3) that identifying with self-preservation and economic security at the expense of someone else’s access to clean water, safe shelter or freedom to move without damage or injury is not inherently immoral and problematic, 4) that failing to understand those connections is an example of parallel thinking of the kind that’s essential in the propagation of cults and genocidal philosophies that become homicidal realities at first in the specific and then in the politic of whole as the practice of harm becomes an expected norm. I could go on, but these are just a few to start.
All of this is critical because today, the morning after an undecided election, they point to a fifth fantasy, which is that the will of individual people who care can override and overcome an internalized culture that negates and undermines caring on an unconscious level. What am I saying? The issue is not that there aren’t enough people who care to behave or think differently personally. It is that those same people have not yet created a CULTURE that runs counter to this kind of pervasive harm and those of us who feel this way have still failed to understand that this is not about getting more individual people to get with a program of equity, inclusion, caring. It’s about creating cultures of care, concern, mutual aid, consent, accountability, empathy. It’s about undermining the power and influence and efficacy of the current culture that thinks the only way it can survive is to remain dominant and in charge of everyone else.
It’s about acknowledging that this is actually what whiteness is: stepping into a dream of prosperity and security where you will not be called into account for who you are or what you did to secure that insulated untouchable freedom. It’s about maintaining the gap in that parallel thinking that says you can still be a good person and be okay if you have more security, independence and comfort than someone else. It’s about thinking what you’ve achieved is divorced from the systems that handed you invisible ideal conditions. It’s about maintaining the disconnect between using the same ‘power over’ mindset to help someone else as long as you still retain control and inoculation from the forces of privilege that are complicating the lives of everyone else who hasn’t yet been helped. It’s about being able to feel good about what you’re personally doing or bad about what you’re not doing without being in total breakdown over the weight of what we have collectively unconsciously and automatically preserved for decades before we read books that made us consider any of this.
Here’s the thing: it matters deeply today who wins the election, but what matters more is if millions of us who say we want a different world decide to actively betray the whiteness we were raised in. What matters more is if we organize the way mothers and grandmothers did around women’s rights—to learn together in groups how to actively disrupt the transfer of this culture in our families and communities. What matters is if we take active responsibility for how our families perpetuated these fantasies and name the ways we have cooperated and colluded. What matters is if we stop doing that no matter what it takes. What matters is if we reject the economic standards and ideals that favor individual families over everyone’s children.
Black, brown and indigenous people have been trying to explain to us for forever that this is our work but it’s been easier to think this is about changing our ideas, beliefs, ideologies and political viewpoints than it is to change the very fabric of how we live.
To take this journey is harrowing really. Because it’s going to disrupt the way our nervous systems understand security—which is as connected and preserved by advantage and power. But *not* doing this work aggressively and actively means that whiteness as we have known has no other place to grow than aggressive deep denial and delusion—the kind that justifies the right to be and thrive at the expense of anyone and everyone not exactly aligned with its most impossible and narrow definition of self.
Let’s do this work beloveds. Let’s feel every feeling it surfaces and wail every storm of grief and sorrow it raises. Let’s do it. Let’s say enough is enough. No more means no more. And let’s wreck ourselves on every definition of safety that means it’s normal for millions of our fellow white Americans to think the way it is is absolutely the way it should be. These are the things that only we can do, no matter who holds the Oval Office. These are the things that will isolate whiteness as we have always known it until it’s named for what it is—a historical, emotional, spiritual force undermining our humanity, the integrity of the country and the wellbeing of the planet. And this is what it will continue to do until we decide it’s over. Until we create ways of living and being together that make it completely and wholly mean something else.
No comments:
Post a Comment