SOMEONE WILL GET THAT

A few years ago lightning struck a tree a few houses down from me and a fairly sizable chunk of the tree ended up in the street. 

I lived in the hills back then, the roads were narrow and winding. The section of the fallen tree only blocked one side of the road so you could swerve around it. The first time I saw and drove around the tree in the street I was certain it would be gone by the time I got home later that day. Surely someone would pull it off to the side of the road or call someone to remove it. But it was still there when I got back. It was still there the next day. And the following day. Each time I drove by it I thought “Someone will get that.” And after a week and a half went by… somebody did.
 
I’m haunted by my refrain: Someone will get that. Who was this magical ‘someone’ I was certain would be swooping in to deal with this situation? But more pressingly: Why had I exempted myself from being the one to either move the tree or call the city to have it removed? 
 
A friend of mine recently said something that pinned me to the back of my chair: “I am deeply passionate about many issues that I am entirely expecting other people to fix.” She mentioned climate change as the first example but we both agreed that systemic racism is another one of those issues. We recognize it as a grievous social ill yet somehow we’ve historically ceded the stage to others to fight the battle while we ourselves have remained largely silent and inactive. 
 
Someone will get that.

A young child in a healthy home is largely insulated from the ills of the world, their needs met in a seemingly magical manner. Someone does indeed ‘get that’ and they’re called parents. Hopefully we grow up and out of this mindset as we get older. But when it comes to the big societal wounds that continue to plague us so many of us want someone else to do the work, to feel the feelings, to put their lives on the line. Anyone but us.

Last summer I was invited to a small dinner hosted by SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) They were meeting with people to raise awareness about the importance of passing ballot Measure R in California, which proposed to ensure that “accountability, transparency, and fairness is brought back to L.A.’s criminal justice system.” (It passed in a landslide btw!) At the start of the night they asked us to introduce ourselves and invited us each to share about the individual anti-racism work we were doing. I froze in horror. Because I wasn’t doing any anti-racism work. My being there that night was about it. “Trying to be a good person” didn’t seem like it would be admissible.
 
I fumbled my way through an answer (I can’t quite remember what I said) but as I’ve been reflecting recently along with much of the rest of the country on white privilege, white supremacy, racism and anti-racism, police brutality, and a host of other issues, that night jumped out at me. How I thought that racism was ‘other people’s problem,’ best hashed out between the racists (i.e. not me) and those oppressed by racism. I am horrified that I thought this. But then I wonder if I even thought it. I wasn’t thinking about any of it. My attention was simply elsewhere. Being a well-intentioned, politically progressive, kind person was, I thought, enough.
 
One of the features of a white supremacist culture is that it convinces those with outsized privilege that their success and status within that culture is entirely merit-based. To suggest that there are structural barriers based on race is to play the ‘race card.’ We’ve convinced ourselves it’s un-American to defy our beloved pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps Horatio Alger national narrative. “If only people would work harder, they could get ahead….” 
 

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I’ve learned so much in the last few weeks and I’m grateful for this re-education. Layla Saad’s “Me & White Supremacy” workbook, which I’m going through with two friends, has been particularly illuminating. In it she writes: “People with white privilege often do not want to look directly at their privilege because of what it brings up for them—discomfort, shame, and frustration. But not looking at something does not mean it does not exist. And in fact, it is an expression of white privilege itself to choose not to look at it.”

Robin D’Angelo, the author of “White Fragility,” has said that it’s very difficult to begin to unpack white privilege both individually and collectively because white people are comfortable in a white supremacist society. And part of that comfort involves averting our eyes and closing our hearts. So for me to participate in the process of awakening to and dismantling the massive systemic racism in this culture means that I am volunteering to be made extremely uncomfortable.
 
But any discomfort white people might feel about their own silence, complicity, or ignorance about race is nothing compared to the fear, rage, despair, and exhaustion Black people in this country have been forced to feel and carry for four hundred years.

I’ve written a lot in this space about spiritual unity. I don’t wish to deny or denigrate those earlier musings because on one level, they’re unimpeachably true. But we cannot bypass the hurt, heartache, ugliness, and desperation in the world of duality because we’d rather dwell in the harmonious nirvana of unity. To get anywhere close to a true unity we have to first journey through the brutality of separation and confront what it has wrought. Magical thinking is an ineffective antidote to racism. As Carl Jung reminds us: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” 
 
My intention was to say a few words about the current situation in the U.S. and then cede the stage to voices far more eloquent and knowledgeable than my own on these matters (which I still intend to do.) But then I thought there was value in letting people in on my fumbling occasionally embarrassing process. White people have to do some deep and uncomfortable soul-searching and take action if this horrifying script is ever going to be rewritten. Much like how it’s up to billionaires to advocate for sane tax policy, white people have to acknowledge what Black people have known for years: that we live in a racist society that was designed to serve white advancement at the expense of Black people. The seeds of this sin are foundational to our country. To deny this is to engage in a lethal kind of ignorance.
 
I’ve often been hesitant to be vocal about these sorts of things because I didn’t want to say the wrong thing or be accused of virtue-signaling (or get the classic “shut up and stick to acting.”) But this is too urgent a moment to sit on the sidelines. Those of us with an audience – and really, isn’t that everybody today? – have a responsibility to align ourselves with the oppressed, raise awareness about inequality, and amplify wise and marginalized voices.

We’re all bullied by our own points-of-view, thinking our reality is the only reality. My hope is that we can all expand our hearts and empathetic imaginations. That those who are grieving, angry, and afraid today find some comfort and peace. And that we all do the necessary work to bring about what Charles Eisenstein calls “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.”

Two visual artists I'm flipping for at the moment are Victoria Cassinova (she did the piece above) and Nikkolas Smith (who did the first piece at the top to commemorate three trans lives that were taken: RemMie, Tony, & Riah) Please check out and support their work.

I learned of Victoria Cassinova from the gorgeous documentary Invisible Portraits which you can watch on Vimeo. "(In)Visible Portraits shatters the too-often invisible otherizing of Black women in America and reclaims the true narrative as told in their own words." Highly recommended.

This piece by Clint Smith is a heartbreaker: Becoming a Parent in the Age of Black Lives Matter: When the Movement for Black Lives began, I did not have children. Now the fight means more to me—coupled with fears that are even deeper.

And this by Imani Perry on Black joy is a must-read: Racism Is Terrible. Blackness Is Not. So many people taught us to be more than the hatred heaped upon us.

I always hated the world view espoused in William Goldman's "Lord of The Flies," that human beings in our natural state were brutish, self-interested creatures. These two stories in The Guardian put that myth to rest: The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months & Sione Filipe Totau, known as Mano, was one of six Tongan boys who spent 15 months marooned on a Pacific island. Suddenly the world wants to hear his story.

'13th' is an enraging and essential documentary by Ava DuVernay about mass incarceration. Not to be missed.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder of The Equal Justice Initiative. The film "Just Mercy" is based on his book of the same title and is very much worth a watch. This is a great interview he did with Isaac Chotiner in the New Yorker: Bryan Stevenson on the Frustration Behind the George Floyd Protests.

97 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

This is stunning: You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument

If you haven't seen "8:46," Dave Chappelle's glorious howl of rage, you must remedy that.

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is Hopeful: The author of Between the World and Me on why this isn’t 1968, the Colin Kaepernick test, police abolition, nonviolence and the state, and more.

This is Why Colin Kaepernick Took A Knee.

A shorter clip of this went viral but it's worth watching the whole 6:46: Kimberly Jones: How Can We Win.

An essential piece by Michelle Alexander: America. This Is Your Chance: We must get it right this time or risk losing our democracy forever.

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And finally, two extraordinary poems: "George Floyd" by Terrance Hayes & "Say Thank You Say I'm Sorry" by Jericho Brown. 

Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry

 
I don’t know whose side you’re on,
But I am here for the people
Who work in grocery stores that glow in the morning
And close down for deep cleaning at night
Right up the street and in cities I mispronounce,
In towns too tiny for my big black
Car to quit, and in every wide corner
Of Kansas where going to school means
At least one field trip
To a slaughterhouse. I want so little: another leather bound
Book, a gimlet with a lavender gin, bread
So good when I taste it I can tell you
How it’s made. I’d like us to rethink
What it is to be a nation. I’m in a mood about America
Today. I have PTSD
About the Lord. God save the people who work
In grocery stores. They know a bit of glamour
Is a lot of glamour. They know how much
It costs for the eldest of us to eat. Save
My loves and not my sentences. Before I see them,
I draw a mole near my left dimple,
Add flair to the smile they can’t see
Behind my mask. I grin or lie or maybe
I wear the mouth of a beast. I eat wild animals
While some of us grow up knowing
What gnocchi is. The people who work at the grocery don’t care.
They say, Thank you. They say, Sorry,
We don’t sell motor oil anymore with a grief so thick
You could touch it. Go on. Touch it.
It is early. It is late. They have washed their hands.
They have washed their hands for you.
And they take the bus home.
 

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