Missing the Mark

Day 16 of Fun-a-Day. I missed a day, but am still committed!
-----------

In seminary, when I took one long drawn out non-intensive biblical Hebrew course over the span of my last year of my M. Div., I learned that one of the words for sin was less about participating in evil, and more about making a wrong turn, or aiming poorly in one's actions. The results, though certainly not motivated by evil, end up being, well, wrong. And the consequences of these missed marks, as the arrow of intention hits some far off, unintended target, can be evil.

I bring this up because I am thinking a lot about something I learned, and re-learned, and learned again in a workshop about diversity, inclusion, and privilege. The Beyond Diversity 101 workshops, started and led by Niyonu Spann, have been powerful spaces of healing, challenge and growth for me over the years. Most recently, I had the opportunity to participate as an intern this past fall in Chester, CT, at the Guest House Retreat Center.

I learned about, and experienced really clearly, something that is really imbedded in the sinfulness of white privilege. We talked a

lot about the difference between intention and impact. The main point being that regardless of the intention of an action, communication, structure, if the impact is racist, then it is, in fact racist. One of the things that I witnessed, and participated in, was that of hearing someone's story of experiencing racism as a black person, and then a white person telling a story right on the heels of it that may have had the same emotional quality, but completely missed the mark of what was being said-- therefore recapitulating the racism. We miss the truth when it is crowded, and the story is re-centered to the next person who speaks.

One aspect of whatI see racism doing is the work of invisible-izing. And a part of white privilege is centering all story, all sharing, all truth around one's own story. The myth and reality of white people's tears is that they can change everything-- from stopping white folks from being held accountable to motivating lynch mobs. Telling a personal story on top of a witness about racism, though a small thing, is the seed of these larger evils.

Luckily for me, in the context of the workshop, I (and others) got the chance to stop and really listen to being confronted with the problem of doing this. I was able to really get that regardless of my conscious intention to connect, my unconscious discomfort with the truth of racism and the impact of making it invisible and more comfortable for white folks is sinful.

I cried a lot at this workshop, as I mourned the loss of my baby, and got deep into the sense of my own brokenness. And I recognized in myself the difference between this authentic mourning, and the tears (or jokes, or intellectualism) born of discomfort and some fantasy of my importance in the work I witnessed.

I am not saying that I am unimportant in a cosmic sense, or even in terms of my need to ante up and change my behaviors, my heart, my life. What is unimportant is my feelings about the experience of racism, as the locus of healing. There needs to be so much SPACE made for healing and growth, and white folks need to get themselves out of the way of this work.

And not by leaving. White flight is another aspect of white privilege. We can contribute to creating the space by witnessing, by listening, and by not trying to have answers. This list of 8 Ways Not to Be an Ally is really spot on, and I am grateful I found it. The time I spent in this workshop felt like a further step in showing up and getting out of the way.

There are a number of really great posts elsewhere about these issues, as well. Here are two:
It's Not All About Feelings
White Women's Tears

As a progressive/radical leaning person, I think I have always been willing to believe in systemic evil, meaning I could get my mind around it, accept it as real. In seminary, I was part of a group of four folks who wrote theses on structural evil. Katie Cannon sat in on a panel presentation we gave and it is one of the highlights from that time. But this personal level of work, looking through the lens of our identities, has helped me to see the evil and sinfulness in my life, and helps me know these connection to the sick systems I seek to resist. It has taken me many years to get here. I am grateful I have gotten here, and grateful for the many teachers that I have met and will meet on this journey.

Romance

I had the opportunity to listen to Tink Tinker speak in dialogue with Friends this past week at the FGC Annual Gathering in Greeley, Colorado. Dr. Tinker is a member of the Osage Nation and the Clifford Baldridge Professor of American Indian Cultures 
and Religious Traditions at Illif School of Theology in Denver.

He came as part of a dialogue with Friends gathered and Dr. Vincent Harding (link to his Veteran of Hope Project), elder in the freedom movement and religious and social change leader. In a room of almost 1000, these two men attempted to converse with Friends about the truth of the history of this country, and the growing edges of faith that call us to seek a more perfect union with those who have been on the losing side of USA imperialism—both overseas and on this continent.

It was a very extensive conversation, with a lot of pieces to it, and I can’t do it justice. I hope someone else does. What I want to write about is something Tink Tinker said in response to a question about the project to carve an image of Crazy Horse into a mountainside.

A woman stood up and asked him to speak to the project, and to the legacy of Crazy Horse. Tink Tinker said—and I paraphrase here—that the project of the Crazy Horse Memorial was something a group of white people are trying to do to compete with Mt. Rushmore, and that for Native Peoples, both of these projects are defacements of the inherent rightness, the sacredness of the mountains themselves.

And then he said something that has been sticking with me for days. He said something like “You white people, you are always making things romantic! Always romanticizing things.” And he went on to honor Crazy Horse as a powerful icon and hero of the struggle for Native freedom from European destruction.  

This has just stuck with me, echoed in me every damn day, as I have been driving, visiting, driving, and driving some more, back to the east coast. We white people, we are a romantic bunch. What is this about? 

When I think about this specific type of romance with ‘the other,’ the native, the war hero, I think about fetish. Not so much the sexual type, but the magical type, the special something we want to keep close to us for its properties, the something it gives to us by being in our possession, something we fixate on or give almost unnatural power to. This feels like a piece of the romantic relationship that Tink Tinker is referencing.

But there’s more. The romance of white folk with just about everything from our forebears, is everywhere. In our pop art, in our fashion shoots, in our incomplete history lessons, in our new age seeking, in our critical consciousness work. A friend enjoys the joke about how we name our streets, our housing developments, our sports teams, after things that we killed in order to build them.  

What motivates this flattening, this fetishizing? Is it a cloying sense that our whiteness has expunged any depth or value? Is it guilt? Is it fear? What makes white folks so afraid to really see, with wide eyes, what is? 

I think about authentic vision these days. I think a lot about the need to not idealize the life I am living, the decisions I am making, the work I am doing. In a previous post I wrote about excrement, and the need to really see where the shit is. Shit is useful. And it can be deadly if it is not dealt with well and with integrity with the land. 

I am thinking that I, as a white person, am swimming in a sea of shit. The history I have benefited from could drown me, and I can't spray perfume on it anymore. The excrement of my forebears has made the privilege and opportunity I experience now. I cannot divorce myself from this privilege. But why would I front about this-- deny its existence? Or, conversely, why would I want to lose my own sense of power and authority in the face of this excrement? Both sides of this coin are wrong. 

I know, the desire to flee pain is large. I know, the desire to self-flog in some Catholic sense is strong—at least in me. I also know that the truth is much stronger than any fantasy or fetish I can fabricate. 

As I plan to start farming in Vermont, I encounter folks who are both fascinated and repulsed by this plan. Some folks think it is an impossible task, others express envy. Both of these responses are incomplete, and flat. There is nothing impossible about farming, and there is nothing easy about it. When I was first learning about farming, I confronted the actual work involved with bringing food out from the wild. It was not pretty, and it still isn’t. But it’s real. 

And as I sit with this notion of romance as a limitation of my heritage, I ask myself, what else will I let go of idealizing, fetishizing? What can I do to truly know the shit of my ancestors, as well as the well tended compost, and fruitful fields? 

For me, I need to learn more about this land we are moving to, who has lived there, what it has carried. For me, I need to stop idealizing my ancestors, my mentors, the cool kids with the jobs and the nice lifestyles. For me, I need to stand on the land, feel its movement, be humbled in the years long task of learning to listen, again. Then, maybe I’ll know something more. 

Without romance. And without its opposite, shame.