You Suits: Finding the Zipper

When I was a teenager, I had a terrible time dressing myself. Terrible taste. Tactile sensory defensiveness. A mom who couldn’t appreciate how important the color of your Levi’s tag was — it kind of had to be orange. Am I right? No, really, am I right? I could never keep up. Top it off with my severe ADHD, and you get a kid who couldn’t pay attention long enough to brush her teeth let alone blow-dry her hair into a swiss-roll of a face frame. And make-up . . . are you kidding me?

So, when I watched John Amaechi discuss identity on the Facing History & Ourselves website, I saw myself in my You Suit, an idea he speaks about, that describes how we try to fit in no matter how exhausting that effort might be, especially teen-aged people.

I, myself, still do this by beating everybody to the punch in understanding who I am. I tell people how odd I am, how disorganized I am, how dyslexic and ADD I am, how clumsy I am, how selfish I can be, how much of an old lady I am becoming, and so on. For many years, I’ve learned to cultivate a You Suit that tells people that I know how they see me, and I don’t want them to be uncomfortable for seeing me that way. I just never had the skills to cultivate a suit that actually helps me fit in. At my age, I kind of don’t have the desire either.

All that being said, I’m not sure my current You Suit is any more comfortable or helpful than my failed attempts at fitting myself into the one I needed if I wanted to be cool in high school. It’s just easier to maintain.

Was that a long digression, dressed in an Intro Suit? Good question.

What John Amaechi‘s talk made me think about though was how I can help students find the zippers of their You Suits and climb out of them in a once-a-week, two-hour Religious School class. This is the great puzzle I’ve wrestled with ever since I started teaching in the mid-90s. For students to feel safe enough to really open into growth and learning, they have to loosen their suits; and for a teacher to help them do that requires a culture of safety.

Building a culture of anything in a classroom requires time, repetition, room to test the hypothesis that the culture is reliable, and so on. Teachers spend consecutive days, if not weeks, building this culture, returning to enrich it throughout the year. I don’t have that kind of time. All I have, I think, is my personality and my reputation. That is often enough for some students because they see me for years before they arrive in my classroom; I have a big, outgoing, goofy personality; or they are younger siblings and they’ve heard about me. Also, our school tries to make our aspirations clear: We want young Jewish people to feel safe enough at our school to go on this spiritual adventure with us and come back enriched.

I’m thinking about building some sort of exercise for class that might help students loosen up their You Suits at will rather than just because I have used my own superpowers to coax them out. There is a classic exercise: the You Box, in which students decorate the outside of their box with things that represent what the outside world sees and the inside with what they hide or can’t show to the outside world. It’s a cool exercise, but most students do it in some other learning environment. And it’s not necessarily an active process; it doesn’t necessitate loosening the suit.

My first step will be to show the video to younger folks. A lot of my old students and other folks I knew when they were teenagers will be around for the holidays. I think I’ll start with them. I also think I’ll show the video to my current seventh graders and see what they have to say about it. I might just ask them to help me build an exercise for next year’s class.

I’ll report back, I imagine.

You could report back too. Watch the video (the link, above, will take you there) and tell me how it strikes you.

“So Gay”: Not Just for Jerks Anymore

So, I’m walking into a b’mitzvah party, and some of my religious school students are right there at the entrance, talking intensely. One of them says “Everybody at my school is gay.” No one bats an eye. Except me. I bat my eyes so much that I might have lost a few eyelashes.

“Everyone?” I ask, thinking this kid is going through something terrible at school. This isn’t like him. I’m trying to weigh his emotional affect, remember some of our conversations over the last few weeks, smell his breath for alcohol and check his pupils for dilation . . . or is it when they are pinpricks that you have to worry about drugs . . . how could this happen? He’s a nice kid, as are all of the kids standing around listening.

I was a nice kid too, when I was that age; and I certainly used that word to describe people I thought were effeminate and confused. I didn’t think I was using it as a weapon or an insult, but I learned later that I was . . . but I digress.

“Well, not everyone is gay. But everyone in my Latin class is definitely gay; that class is so gay” he says, trying to clarify things.

Didn’t work.

“Are you okay with this?” I ask a queer kid who is listening.

“Are all of you okay with this?” I ask all of the kids because queer kids aren’t the only kids who might be as upset as I am.

“All the kids in my Latin class are gay too,” says this particular queer kid.

Turns out, gay doesn’t mean what I think it means. It means what it means: it means that my student is having trouble finding a girl who is interested in going out with him because a lot of the girls he’s interested in are only interested in going out with other girls. He’s not judging the girls, just clarifying why he can’t find a girl to go out with him. And he’s not terribly upset about this, just confused about how he’s going to find a girl who wants to go out with him. He is in 7th grade, after all; the issue is probably about who to take to a dance not who will fulfill his destiny.

Stunning! I’m still struggling with the word queer being exactly the right word to describe a large group of folks who choose romantic partners, gender identities, or sexual identities that used to seem exotic, at best. One person, a college student, told me that her mom had to sit down with her and her friends to talk about how they were making some of her friends feel left out because they weren’t queer.

This is where we want to be. Not where we want to land, by any means. There’s a lot farther to go before people stop assigning value and worth to someone based on inherent traits. But, this is a win when it comes to allowing people to embody their true selves without fear.

I’m not convinced this success has real legs. There’s a lot of hate out there, just waiting for us to trip over it. The shooting at Club Q bears witness to a world bathed in hate. For now, though, I’m reveling in how slow I am to catch up to these kids.

Up in Flames: Dave Chappelle’s Monologue

I watched Dave Chappelle’s Saturday Night Live monologue from November 12 after reading about its antisemitic content. I like a good social commentary, I like to face hard truths, I like stand up. I am willing to entertain the possibility that some people see antisemitism where there is none. That was not the case in that monologue.

I don’t know whether it was the non-stop tropes or the suggestion that they were true but we’re a protected species or Chappelle’s interjections of earnest bewilderment about decency that gave me the chills at first. But the combination was teeth-chatteringly chilling by the end of the monologue.

Dave Chappelle is an artist, of course. Artists often produce work that inflames us, and the light of those flames can help us see more clearly.

That said, flames can also flicker in a way that distort a clear view; and they can, also, just burn everything down.

I don’t want to throw cold water on artists. I crave the challenges they pose. Yet, sometimes it’s not art; sometimes it’s ‘yelling fire in a movie theater’ and laughing at the chaos. (Or yelling ‘stolen elections’ at a rally down the street from the Capitol . . . but I digress . . .)

Chappelle’s monologue made me laugh, at first. As it went on, I became more and more uncomfortable and then filled with dread. He was ‘punching up,’ which stops being funny pretty quickly to people who rarely see ourselves as ‘up for long.’

In fact, ‘up’ has never been a safe place for us, Jews. Raised by a father who didn’t want anyone to know he was Jewish because it might be dangerous or, worse, offensive; living most of my life in the South where folks grieved for my soul; watching the news; ‘up’ is a terrifying place for a Jewish person to be.

And what the heck is ‘up’ anyway. I get what it means to some communities who have been brutalized by racism or xenophobia: Dave Chappelle, who is currently as ‘up’ as Steven Spielberg, certainly speaks from the experience of ‘not up and not likely to ever be if white people have their way, which they usually do,’ but how in the freaking world do cis white men get to punch ‘up’ at anyone? They do. This is the strategy of white nationalism. Good grief, Chappelle, you’re taking a page from the freaking Proud Boys handbook. But I digress . . .

When Chappelle and Ye and Kyrie Irving punch up, it’s easy to get caught up in a lot of controversies about the shadow of cancel culture, about the light of a partnership born of common cause, about the ash-gray line between comedy and violence. But it’s important to name antisemitic content when we see it. I’ll be wrestling with all of this for a long time to come.

In the case of Chappelle’s monologue last Saturday, there is no warmth for me by the fire he built, only dread.

Ruining Crushes

Many of my friends know that I get crushes on people. I’m about to be 61 years old. I’m married to a wonderful partner. I have more children than I expected to have, and they’re all adults now.

I recently told a younger woman that I had a crush on her, out loud, in public, while we working on a cool, important political organizing project together. It was not a declaration, not an announcement, though it was not a whispered secret. I said it like another person might say I love your nails! Where did you get them done? I want someone to paint a picture of a Tardis on my nails? I explained that I didn’t mean ‘romantic,’ just that I thought she’d be good company over coffee.

And a few minutes later, driving away, I realized how creepy that probably was. This person doesn’t know me outside of the work we do together. Probably, she can either understand what I said in the context of her experience or remain bewildered about why I said it and patiently wait for more information.

I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with that individual situation. Maybe I’ll just trust her to get to know me better and learn what most of my friends and loved ones know: I use language in odd ways sometimes. I find precision in language important and, at times, elusive.

With this in mind, I’m going to try to do a series of essays about words that feel imprecise or quite precise or too precise for the way we use them. I hope to write about my own personal understanding of precise words, but I also hope to do some writing about the language that allows us to say we aren’t racist when we don’t fight to dismantle institutional racism, that allows us to say we are a particular religion when we don’t adhere to the sacred texts of those religions, that allows us to separate ourselves from the impact of our actions when we wish we had made a different impact.

For now, I’m going to talk about the word crush and play with what it can mean.

NOTE: I can’t believe I haven’t digressed yet! I mean, I usually can’t get through the first graf without digressing like the path of a person with vertigo. I had vertigo last week, by the way, it was that benign vestibular paroxysmal something or other and it didn’t feel so benign, but . . . ah there it is . . . I digress. Phew.

Different Types of Crushes

When I was a kid and young adult, I got crushes all the time. Three kinds, probably more kinds, but for now I’ll focus on these three.

One was the kind where I knew I was supposed to like boys because my friends did; and, so, I looked for a boy to like, and I liked him. It was a relief, in some ways, to discover I could still fit in with my friends this way, which makes me sad for my friends who had to pretend harder than I did because there were no templates, at the time, of liking anyone who wasn’t physically built for making babies with you. When I think of the way well-intentioned, straight, cis, binary people, like me, trampled the flowers that grew in the gardens of my queer friends, I . . . but I digress, again . . . jeez, I thought something was wrong with me, but I’m digressing just fine, I guess . . . moving on . . .

Another crush I got was the kind where I actually couldn’t function in the presence of some guy. I would sit in class and get lost in the maze of blond curls on the back of a particular guy’s head, for example. I would giggle in the presence of some guy, even on stage during an absurdly serious scene. I would dream about Ralph Fiennes for hours. Honestly, it was physically painful to be in the presence of some of these guys. Meanwhile, I had a reputation for not actually being interested, and my mom thought I was a lesbian. I wasn’t, I’m not, and I’m not going to co-opt that identity with any ambiguity.

Another kind of crush I got was the kind where I admired someone so much that I wanted to be with them, I mean between one foot and six feet away from them, forever. I had dear, dear friends like that — and I’ve had friends I didn’t have a crush on, too. I had Girl Scout camp counselors like that. I felt that way about people who I later lost that feeling for and some of those crushes have persisted. And I still get those crushes today.

I’m pretty sure I’d feel that way about Elizabeth Warren, if I met her. Chadwick Boseman comes to mind, though I just wanted to look at him as much as anything . . . oh Chadwick Boseman, why didn’t I get to have coffee with you, a lot? But not Robin Williams, who feels like a twin brother from another mother. Not Chris Rock, though I would like to have coffee with him because he’s funny and challenging at the same time. Pretty sure, Barack Obama, especially if he’ll intersperse some singing with the discussion of policy, but not Michelle, though I’m free for coffee, Michelle, anytime you want to talk and teach. Jodie Foster, yes. David Tennant, yes; Michael Sheen, no. I’m going to stop now.

I think there may be an aesthetic to this list, but this aesthetic isn’t the heart of the crush. It’s almost like a fascination more than a physical attraction.

Maybe fascination is a more precise word for this idea of admirable with an aesthetically pleasing aura concept. I wonder if there’s a better word than that. One of my sons said fascination sounds like I want to do scientific experiments, though, so maybe that’s a bad choice too.

The End of the Crush

In the meantime, I’m going to stop saying I have crushes on people, for a few reasons.

First, in some relationships, the power dynamic isn’t clear, and it’s not fair to use a word like that when it may be unclear what I mean by it.

Second, like I said earlier, I don’t want to co-opt another person’s experience. I think I need to reserve the word crush for romantic attraction. Maybe I use the word to relive my younger days, too, and I don’t need to do that. I’m glad to be turning 61. I wouldn’t go back to the days of physically painful crushes for all the money in the world. But there are days when the weather is just right and a song comes on from my playlist, and I can almost see the lake where my friends and I went to drink beer, listen to music, talk philosophy, and stare at the people we had crushes on . . . is that a digression?

Third, the word crush may feel precise to me, but that doesn’t make it precise. I want language that is clear to the listener, not just to me.

Which is why I hope to write another essay about another word soon. Maybe it will be the word ‘digress.’

It’s Like a Game, Only Different

A friend on Facebook asked what could be taught about the U.S. Constitution this morning, and I said we should probably teach about what the Constitution can do and what it can’t do.

The U.S. Constitution is a document that can inform us, but it can’t actually do anything. It can’t enforce anything. It can’t protect anything — not us, not itself. It can’t bend or grow or break or spontaneously combust. If we move away from it, it can’t chase us. If we step on it, it can’t cry out nor can it move out of the way before we step on it again. It can’t turn the other cheek nor blow a raspberry, though, honestly, wouldn’t that be fun.

Its power lies in our agreement to be informed and guided by it as we engage in governing ourselves.

We, the people, on the other hand, can do a lot. Guided by principles in the Constitution, we can govern justly, protect each other, and grow. We can distribute power unfairly, oppress each other, and batter our society. In fact, we do both, of course.

The U.S. Constitution is like the rules of a game, and we play at a table where we have agreed to abide by these rules as long as they support the game. Sometimes, we create house rules that make the game work better for our table; but those house rules don’t break the game. Sometimes, we buy expansions that make the game richer and better; but those expansions don’t break the game. Sometimes, when an element of the game turns out to be ‘over-powered,’ we ‘nerf’ it, downgrading the element so it can’t do as much damage because that makes the game work better for everyone; but ‘nerfing’ something doesn’t break the game. The rules and the adaptations make the game work. So most of us usually don’t cheat.

I’m not saying none of us cheat, ever. I remember my brothers stealing from the bank in Monopoly, and I probably did too, which is why I hate that game . . . but I digress.

The rules establish a system through which the resources and obstacles in a game make the accomplishment of the win condition possible without making it a ‘done deal.’ And we agree to those rules, understanding that sometimes we will win a given iteration of the game, sometimes not; sometimes we will have the worst luck and sometimes the best; sometimes our focus will be better, our skills better honed, and our memories more acute and sometimes we just can’t summon our personal resources to play our best game. The rules are there to make the full experience of playing the game, time after time, worthwhile.

I would argue that the best games have rules that make the game fun even when you lose, but maybe I digress . . . and maybe I don’t.

I have played a lot of games in my time, and the one rule that most people follow that isn’t written in any set of instructions is this one: DON’T SLAM YOUR FIST ON THE TABLE AND SCATTER THE GAME TO THE FLOOR. We don’t need this in the game instructions; it’s part of the process of playing any game.

This is because it’s intimidating, and we don’t like intimidation in a civil game. This is because it is nearly impossible to reconstruct the game state, so the game is over with neither a winner nor a satisfactory conclusion. This is because we often lose pieces under the stove. Plus, a flying game piece could put someone’s eye out. Raging at the game sucks, honestly. It just sucks.

And that’s what happened yesterday. A mob slammed their collective fist on the table and tried to scatter the game of civil discourse to the floor. And if that’s all that happened, it would be bad enough. But what also happened is this: Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, etc., etc., spent months telling people — most significantly, Donald Trump — that if they don’t like the rules they should slam their fists on the table and scatter the pieces.

And . . . AND . . . and this is what really makes me want to kick them out of the game store . . . they haven’t apologized. They made lovely speeches about how they can no longer be part of this challenge now that they see how flying game pieces could put THEIR eyes out.

It’s shameful, and they make indignant speeches about things going too far. We deserve an apology.

I hope we can find all the pieces, re-agree to the rules, and keep playing. I love this game.

Whose Pain is it Anyway?

This starts with a conversation with a dear friend, who is a healer through many modes. She is engaged with a study group, exploring racial justice, and she was wrestling with the idea that trying to ease someone’s pain is a function of privilege. My words to describe her wrestling match are problematic in so many ways, so it’s important that you understand that this is what I walked away with, not that this is what she is working with. That’s important for all of us to understand in any relationship . . . but I digress . . ..

This issue of other people’s pain has come to rest for a brief moment with a conversation, just last night, in a breakout room of a racial justice workshop for Jewish educators at our synagogue. One of my colleagues talked about how sad she is, how painful it has been to measure how racist she is using the assessments provided in the materials we read before the workshop. She feels so bad about how racist she is.

Now there are people I know who probably need to be smacked in the head a couple of hundred times in the next few years if we are going to make any meaningful progress in dismantling racism. I’m pretty sure that I’m one of those people – though I’m also pretty sure progress can be made without me, individually, as long as I stay the heck out of the way . . . but I digress, again . . . so many things to work on!

And there are people I know who need to feel the pain of others in order to believe that pain exists – they gotta’ walk that mile in another man’s shoes, as it were. I wish that weren’t true because, honestly, we don’t have time for those folks to walk all the miles in all the shoes they need to walk in. And . . . gross . . . keep your feet out of other people’s shoes . . . third digression is the charm . . ..

But there’s another group of people, with whom I more readily identify, who are compassionate enough to batter themselves with their guilt over their past behavior. I certainly do that, but it can be paralyzing. And I learned that my self-flagellation came off as a plea for relief rather than an offer to help. I also learned that if I was going to get any relief from my guilt, it was going to come from my own efforts to behave better, to refuse to stand idly by when people shore up racism as an institution, and to offer my physical resources to the cause of dismantling racism.

So, I wanted to help my colleague understand that the important thing was seeing the issue and moving forward in constructive ways. Another colleague did that beautifully, reminding us that we, Jews, have a terrific Talmudic text about how we aren’t obliged to finish the work, but we aren’t allowed to stop, either. I have a poem about that.

And I wanted my colleague to stop suffering.

And I think I wanted my colleague to stop suffering because it was making me suffer.

And I think I have to stop trying to stop someone else’s suffering because it suggests that I know how others should feel about the experiences they are having. Which, by the way is the best fertilizer available for racism. Even better than hatred, even better than segregation, even better than any political ideology you can come up with, the best way to feed a crop of racism is for people to assume that they know how other people should feel about their experiences.

So, my next step is to step back, not away, just back, when someone is struggling with pain. Maybe address my own pain for a moment and leave room for them to address theirs. Maybe offer encouragement in the work, maybe let them know they’re not alone. But definitely don’t tell them how to be in relationship with their experience.

This is tricky because it defies a lot of things that I think are fundamentally true: people need to feel heard, people need to know that they’re not alone, and people don’t like people who don’t care about how they feel. That last one is really important because I need to be ‘liked.’

So, I guess I’ll be trying to learn new meanings for what it means to ‘hear’ someone, what it means to be ‘with’ someone, and what to do if someone thinks I don’t care. But that’s my problem. I don’t have to fix it, I just have to keep trying.

The Work of the Flood

Rabbi Tarfon said: It is not up to you to finish the work nor are you permitted to cease doing it.

It is up to my ears at times,
not up to my ankles, at times.

to you, it might be different. To me, it tempts me
to finish with my hands up, on my knees. I want to know

the work isn’t this flood of hatred,
nor are the broken bits, left behind, the aim of the flood’s work. I remember

you permitted swimming for a tree, heavily laden with fruit, and I would hate
to cease

doing it.

Law and Order

Law and Order should serve justice not power, 

fairness not greed.

Law and Order should protect 

peaceful protesters before protecting property. 

Law and Order should show deference to those fighting for civil rights

over those fighting for personal privileges. 

Law and Order should stand up to bullies, 

look down on vigilantes, 

and join with the people 

who grow our food, 

prepare our meals, 

sew our clothes, 

maintain our roads, 

clean our workplaces, 

tend our wounds, 

teach our children, 

look after our parents, 

build our shelters, 

and do so many other things for which 

they are paid so very much less than 

so many of the people 

who speak the words 

Law and Order 

while invoking the values of 

Tyranny and Oppression.

[NOTE: I went looking for a quote from Donald Trump about Law and Order, and all I got on his campaign site was a form to contribute money and a popup to require me to finish my donation and no link to anything else about his platform. Um, no.]

Trying to be an Anti-Racist

STILL WORKING ON THIS . . . which was meant to indicate that I had posted then deleted the post so I could edit it, but even as I post again, I realize that this is the right way to start . . . always still working on this . . . this piece is about finding my place.

I am trying to be an anti-racist. My heart is in it, my head is in it, and I’m trying to put my body into it. It should be easy: I want to be a good person, I understand what people tell me, and I’ve found a few volunteer projects that seem to be directed at core issues. You can find them too by checking out local chapters of Fight for 15, the Poor People’s Campaign, Carolina Jews for Justice or a similar movement in your state.

Still, it’s hard to do what an anti-racist needs to do. Not the kind of hard that calls for sympathy or cheerleading. This hard work is required of us if we want to call ourselves human. It shouldn’t be seen as above and beyond or extraordinary. Still, this work is hard in the same way that it’s hard to make yourself bring the trashcan back from the curb on a cold day or swallow bitter medicine again and again or break a really bad habit that has been serving you well for most of your life. It’s just like that last one. Just like it.

So, I’m wrestling with why it’s so hard to do the work. What’s getting in my way? With my body, I’m working at a food distribution and political education event every other Friday, also working our precinct, and trying to spread information. With my mind, I’ve found great people to learn from and so many more keep raising their voices. With my heart, I’ve always been guided by a belief that anything I want for myself I should want for others. It doesn’t seem like it should be so hard.

And maybe it isn’t actually so hard. Maybe it just looks so hard because I have no patience. Maybe . . . but I digress.

DO I HAVE A PLACE IN THIS FIGHT?

One of the things that’s particularly difficult is finding my place in the process.

At a recent political education discussion through a coalition of agencies, including Fed Up, Fight for 15, Carolina Jews for Justice, and The Poor People’s Campaign, we looked at this text from “Questions Must Be Raised”: Who Are the Poor? Why Are We Poor? by Willie Baptist and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis,

And given the current economic and political direction of society, this position of the poor anticipates the position of the mass of the population. Poverty is devastating me today. It can hit you tomorrow.

A powerful, powerful text. We were asked how we feel when we read that quote. In a small breakout group, I listened to others talk about how it felt to them. For most of them, if not everyone, but me, the feeling was familiar and real. They were either being devastated by poverty even as we were studying together or they could see that very tomorrow that Baptist and Theoharis could see, looming large. What I heard was concern and devotion to the cause of improving the lives of poor people, like them.

I felt odd, out of place. I do not see that threat of poverty, looming large over me. For me that text is enlightening and effective because it makes clearer the fact that much of our society lives in the shadow of poverty, if not directly in poverty. It makes clear the immense proportions of the problem. But, I can only connect with that fear from a distance, as if I am watching a play, opening my heart to something that I can forget any time I want to, something I might forget even when I don’t want to. Does that dilute my connection? Does that devalue my connection?

I’m not asking you, by the way, though I’m glad to hear others’ responses. I’m kind of asking myself. Because, for me, a strong connection keeps me actively involved. A strong connection feeds my craving to be meaningful in the world. A strong connection is part of my transactional way of living in the world: It’s rewarding to be strongly and tangibly connected to something I might, otherwise, simply believe in. It’s the difference between working on a show you love and watching it. Given the choice, I prefer working. And I’m learning how much I prefer to be working backstage, but, again, I digress.

In response to the quote by Baptist and Theoharis, someone shared a quote, attributed to Lilla Watson:

If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

Another powerful, powerful quote and equally powerful because Watson has, apparently, said that she wasn’t comfortable being given credit for it because it was born of a collective process. [NOTE: this information comes from Wikipedia, and at least one of the citing links is no longer active.] She sees her place and insists on others seeing it too, specifically to elevate all of the people who should be seen. She attributes this quote to “Aboriginal activist group, Queensland, 1970s.”

Both quotes, though, appear to be saying this problem is a problem for everyone because we’re all living with the threat of poverty — a threat I can’t feel. And the Queensland quote seems to suggest that those of us who are not feeling that threat should stay home.

I don’t think that’s truly the intent of these two texts. I think, anyone who can help out should help out, though learning to elevate the voices of others is very important. Still, my gut heard something else: maybe I’m not poor enough to be truly engaged in the fight, and maybe I’m just getting in the way. Maybe my place is elsewhere.

And, maybe, just maybe, that’s an excuse to stay in bed on Friday morning instead of heading to the food distribution project I participate in. Maybe, just maybe, that’s a rationalization for not canvassing in low-income neighborhoods where I feel like an outsider. It could be an excuse for not doing more.

For now, I won’t let it be.

I CAN FIND MY PLACE

These two texts raise vital questions for me personally, which all boil down to this: Am I in this for the right reason?

The Queensland text gives me my answer, too. If I can see my liberation bound up with the liberation of others in this fight, then this is, indeed, my fight.

To see my liberation bound up with anyone, I have to see how I am imprisoned. I have to metabolise that profound truth that no one is free when anyone is enslaved, that no one is safe when anyone is persecuted, that no one thrives when anyone is impoverished.

That is why I have a place in this fight: not because I see myself as a day away from poverty, not because I want to help, not even because I owe it to others, rather because I need a better world as badly as the next person. My liberation from hopelessness is bound up in your liberation. I’m here to work.

Despite the Whiteness: Slavery Talk

The other day, someone told me that she and her family had visited Savannah, Georgia, as part of their summer vacation. As part of their trip, they visited Mickve Israel, the synagogue of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the United States; and they visited a very old Baptist church. At the Baptist church, because these visitors identified themselves as Jews, they were told that the Jews of the area, who held slaves, treated their slaves better than the non-Jews.

The person telling me about this visit mitigated the absurdity of the tour guide’s statement by saying that, of course, slavery is terrible, but at least our people weren’t as cruel as some others. Phew, what a relief! We weren’t as bad as those other slave owners.

I can’t remember my response, it was just two days ago, but it was such a muddy response; and it wasn’t what I should have said. It was about how it makes sense that we were less harsh because of the teachings of our ancestors. I also said something about how, maybe, we were coming up with ways to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. We tell the story that we weren’t as bad as others were, so maybe we deserve to sleep better at night.

Like Northerners (I’m one of them) who reject any responsibility for the horrors of slavery because we didn’t own slaves. Like Southerners, (my father’s side of the family are Southerners), who say our fight was for States’ Rights, so we can’t be condemned for our role. Like everyone who knows that slavery was an abomination before God and humanity, we try to minimize our mental suffering by saying that we weren’t as bad as other people who benefitted from the slave-fueled economy.

The whole country fed on the fruits of slavery and still does. The United States’ power is rooted in the soil that was tilled by slaves, bloody soil, sown with the limbs and skins of a people set apart by the color of their limbs and skin and the place their ancestors were kidnapped from. On this soil, there is no kinder or crueler. Once you partake of the fruits of slave labor, you have crossed a line that leaves moral spectrums beyond the horizon.

I should have said that anyone who willingly participates in an economy built on the backs of slaves is due an equal amount of shame, guilt, and responsibility. I wish I had. I just didn’t want that person to feel bad — that person being myself as much as the person standing in front of me.

At a Q&A after a production of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, a young white woman asked what she could do to help without imposing her whiteness on the work of people of color. The answer: Teach white people. So, while I’m not really qualified to teach anyone else how to do anything better when it comes to dismantling racism, I am well willing to report what I’m learning. I hope my words will do some good for someone besides myself.