This is an update of a piece from my occasional series that I write for my Facebook friends, “Dear my people/Hello good people/Dear my white people.” It is a longish read. Settle in, reflect, ponder, respond.
Dear my people, especially my Gen X and Boomer white women people,
I find this a useful entry point to assessing how open we are to being “called in” to do the hard work of liberation on behalf of others:
If one’s first response to accountability is a sense of loss of autonomy, that’s the voice of privilege.
It’s essential to learn to identify for ourselves when that is what is happening, because while it’s evident to more marginalized people, it’s our work to do. Join me below in exploring this.
I start with the premise that you, good reader, like me, are liberal/progressive or radical in outlook, in congregations, social groups, and political organizing movements, and that you are in favor of equity and justice and opposed to racism, homophobia, transphobia and other hate and control based social and political problems.
I want to make an invitational point relative to a defensive practice I’ve seen among us a lot, especially on the internet.
If one’s reaction to being invited to correct an action that is based in an oppressive structure is to deflect or defer to the past, that’s defensiveness. If, instead of clearly naming and immediately countering white supremacy culture, homophobia, and transantagonism our reaction includes the lines
“In my day…”
and/or
“We simply warned and protected each other from the worst of them,” [predatory bosses or men with power]
and/or
“We sucked it up [when men/straight people behaved badly to us,]”
and/or
“It took decades to get liberals to stop calling God ‘He,’ be more patient and stop pushing us“
and/or
“We still don’t have the ERA,”
the only thing that really tells the rest of us is that there is a pecking order to liberation.
Much like the grad school professor who expected students to study 18 hours a day and suffer mightily to pass her class/their thesis or dissertation because she had lived for days on end on cans of sardines smuggled into the far corner of the library to make it through the nightmare of being one of the earliest women in the field, this suggests that liberation only comes after doubled down suffering. That wandering for 40 days and nights in wilderness is a requirement for freedom.
Reactions like this suggest that we’re not quite there, that our sense of justice is more based on our own suffering than ameliorating the suffering of others, and indicates that we are not as far in justice making as we think we are or want to be. Our ideas of equity and justice have not yet included enough clear examination of our own power, privilege, and responsibility. These above caveats offered in response to calls for justice (whether we deliver them in writing or in our mind) suggest that we’re not doing the work, ready to do the work, or maybe even prepared to recognize how much work is yet to be done.
Almost all of us bear identities and experiences that are a complex mixture of privilege, marginalization, and oppression. None of us get a pass from working on our privilege and dismantling systems of oppression that benefit us simply because we have spent so long bowed down beneath the oppression and marginalization we ourselves bear and which we have
already been opposing. And none of us, including myself, are free from the kneejerk reactions.
I’m addressing all of you who have or want to have the commitment to wholehearted justice for all.
It’s hard work. It is painful. It often involves unfamiliar pain of new learning or even pain that touches on some old shame that ought not to have been ours in the first place and becomes all muddled together. There may be a particular challenge for people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s who fought literal, philosophical, and activist wars for justice only to find out now how short we have fallen.
We share neural pathways of belief in the fundamental fairness of most everything that are decades deep. From elementary school through the end of our schooling, from churches and politics and the media, we have been trained to perceive and believe that except where we notice we are oppressed, everything else is relatively fair. But where our privilege used to be something we did not have to notice, it’s now becoming unmistakable.
And often jarring.
It used to be that we might or might not choose to pick up the liberation ‘zines and pamphlets on the street or coffee shop, or history and social policy books, or newspapers. We could easily go years with only what Time and Newsweek and Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley offered us. Or maybe something was delivered to us in one sermon a week, or a documentary we chose to watch, neither of which usually had built-in structures for reflection and processing. We could go years without being meaningfully faced with our participation in systems of oppression. Now, because of newer media where people are now making these calls to do the work to dismantle systems, it’s impossible to miss. It shows up in our online magazines. It shows up in our social media. Every day.
When I notice responses to these invitations to do the work of dismantling oppressive systems in ourselves and our society that say things like, “Be patient,” or “Don’t you understand how far we’ve come?” or, “I got called Miss and girly and patted on the ass by my supervisor for two decades, you can deal with being misgendered or a racial microaggression or whatever, now and then,” I can’t help but wonder if we are leading with our discomfort rather than our curiosity and commitment.
I don’t know that people are identifying privilege any more than they used to. Really, how could I measure that? I do think a big difference is that invitations for repentance and repair did not used to get delivered to us on a daily if not hourly basis in our social media feeds on devices we hold in one hand while stirring the spaghetti sauce with the other.
So what used to be pretty easy for us to remain ignorant of relative to our privilege, how our USAmerican/Western cultural roots created a structure within which we were pre-designed to be biased and bigoted, pre-designed to perceive the world in a way that would be to our benefit, we can’t miss it anymore.
So it feels as though people are bombarding us personally with calls to action.
And we have feelings about that.
But here’s my invitation. We already know how to do this work, my Xers and Baby Boomers, we simply have to decide to bear the weight.
- If one is a woman who ever expected a man to learn to use inclusive language for people and God, to learn not to say stewardess anymore; that person can now learn and practice new pronouns and meaningfully apologize and correct when they are mistaken.
- If one is a white person who ever explained to another white person that they should stop using black as a euphemism for evil; they can now acknowledge that idea as but the tip of our inherited cultural iceberg that is white supremacy and unpack it further.
- If one ever expected a wealthy person to not try to split the restaurant check four equal ways because their social rule of not talking about money was more important than equitable distribution; they can now start to recognize that reparations for slavery and native genocide must be part of a justice movement forward.
It is part of the role of cultural conditioning to make us believe this conditioning isn’t real, or isn’t as powerful as it is. Extra points if the culture that has formed us and defined our values, beliefs, ethics, and framed our perceptions makes us prize individuality, a powerful defense against the idea that a white supremacy culture could impact us so much. This internal resistance is built into the code.
Our white supremacist, colonialist, patriarchal cultural heritage means we have been designed to believe our ancestors were heroic defenders of democracy for all, to bristle at the idea that many of our ancestors were pretty monstrous, and outright reject the idea that this cultural and economic heritage means we ourselves are saturated by and participatory in it today.
But our ethical and religious commitments call us to notice that internal resistance, to turn away from it, and face reality.
My favorite short-lived TV series is Firefly. Its culminating movie, Serenity, has a special place in my heart. There’s a point in the movie when the captain of the renegade band that has been trying to stay under the radar of the oppressive government announces, after facing the reality that the government is more evil than they knew, that there will be “No more running. I aim to misbehave.”
Although I have an engaged in justice work my entire adult life, there was a turning point when I turned 50 when I doubled down. I put those words on my arms – literally. No more turning away from my responsibility. No more avoiding the impact of what has been done to or for me, acknowledging that both are unacceptable. No more shirking from the responsibility that our government represents me and makes decisions that benefit me and others of my race. Regardless of who I actually voted for. I don’t get a pass.
No more evading the truth that most of the ancestor people who I was taught in school were brave heroes may well have been brave, but they were not heroic. No more running from the wrong words that come out of my mouth, or their impact; from not only the ways I experience marginalization and oppression in our society but the ways I bear privilege. Every single time these things appear in front of me.
There are two things true at one time.
Point one: Those of us who are older have neural pathways in our brains that are set and rooted and automatic. That’s actually a thing.
Point two: We can simultaneously acknowledge point one as a true state and accept our responsibility to create new pathways, to perceive what others are desperately trying to get us to perceive. We can accept responsibility to learn and do less of that which perpetuates the status quo and more of that which creates justice. We can not only acknowledge the ways we bear privilege, but to start dismantling the structures that create it.
It’s hard work. It’s much slower than people want it to be. It’s not solved with a single two-hour workshop. It’s an ongoing intervention, part of facing a spiritual crisis of recognizing that a fully embodied liberation must be embodied for all of us, and it can’t be when so many people’s bodies are not safe and whole. It can’t be avoided by making our ethical path into something insular, looking out for our own. It can’t be avoided by retreating into a desire for individual spirituality as a reaction to our feelings when we are faced with the hard reality that part of bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice includes acknowledging we are not as awesome as we thought we were. As we wish we were.
But we can do it. Our cultural heritage and programming make it painful, and our religious or ethical commitments make it necessary. This is not unlike our experience of working on many other social, cultural, and family issues.
We all have choices about how to turn our attention. We can turn our attention in a way that amplifies our own pain, or in a way that lessens others.
We can focus on how personally painful it is to face the realities of our lives within this system, and suffer trying to deny, avoid, or dull that pain, or we can recognize that pain for what it is — the dying of white supremacy culture as we dismantle it within ourselves and the world around us. Like chemo for cancer, the cure is painful, but that’s no reason not to do the work.
We start where we are. We can simply start each day by saying, “No more running. I aim to misbehave,“ or “No more resistance. I aim to misbehave,” and then see how much misbehavior we can fit into a day.
My Gen X and Boomer white women and adjacent others can acknowledge and celebrate the noticing and correction of mistakes instead of expecting oppressed people to suffer as much as you did in the early days of feminism or the nascent gay rights movement.
We can follow people on social media and buy books by those who write critically about race and gender and sexuality. We can follow people who are leaders in movements for justice and learn from their words without arguing back at them. When we notice that we resist or reject an idea they put forward, we can ask ourselves, “If this were true, what would it mean for me and my life?“ and follow that thought process wherever it takes us. Instead of expecting people to suck it up as we did, or to stop pushing so hard, we can choose to make that path better. To make their days and nights wandering in the desert fewer.
Because we don’t actually believe that the people who should bear all the burden of dismantling oppression are those who are oppressed, do we? When we don’t do the work, we guarantee that that work remains on the shoulders of people who are marginalized and oppressed.
We can choose to right size the load we carry. We can choose to be brave and be heroes.
Come, misbehave with me.
Love, me
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