Tag: justice

On forgiveness

Ridiculous. Infuriating. Asinine. Callous. Those are some of the feelings as I read an op-ed by Michael Eric Dyson spinning Desmond Tutu’s death and legacy as an alternative to the current calls for racial justice and the reckoning of the genocide across US history and the colonization of North America by European immigrants [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/opinion/desmond-tutu-america-justice.html].

I want to jump to and, who is the audience for this editorial? Because why M.E. Dyson writes is preposterous.

I find the processing of whiteness — white guilt about white supremacy and whitewashing to pretend that the record is not as sordid as it is — that passes as civics and domestic politics within this nation state to be depleting and by that I mean exhausting and energy-sapping and life-taking to meet callousness with compassion, to forgive when they willfully forget and perpetuate and perpetrate new lies.

I am not a close student of Desmond Tutu’s public speeches and statements, leadership and political moves and public stances. I’ve done some reading about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the end of apartheid but we are far from being in a place where white America will tell their truths.

I want to ridicule Dyson by pointing out the absurdity of being a tenured professor at Vanderbilt University writing about the merits of making it work out. I find it difficult to read because this is more naive than Democratic legislators trying to negotiate with Republican peers who do not accept women and people of color as equals.

I once believed a myth that Black people in the United States could save the rest of the citizenry. But I don’t but much faith in such savior roles or racial dogma at this juncture in my life. I want to judge my younger self for harboring such foolish naïveté, as I did about all the shovel-ready-projects that were supposed to lubricate the stimulus package in 2009. But all that grandiose policy amounted to little of what was promised. It was futile for the president and members of Congress to promise about an 21st century energy grid or rapid transit trains spanning from Florida to the Northeast to California when they could not guarantee governing majorities for years on end. Instead, they made multi-year promises when they rose to committee chairs then were sidelined into minority party status by November 2010.

There’s something similarly amiss when Black Lives Matter is being conflated with cancel culture and then blamed for the inhospitable and dysfunctional and violent state of affairs between races in the United States.

Dyson doesn’t say “turn the other cheek” but he suggests that the well of indigenous and Black redemption of reckless white Americans is a renewable resource. To highlight the forgiveness of family members of the Charleston 9 is unfortunate, if not perverse. To have to hold and accommodate a man who pretended to be coming for prayer group is a tremendous and horrendous burden. Maybe redemption and forgiveness can be infinite but at this stage in my life, they do not feel sufficient for the illness and ailments that plague this society.

Maybe the timeless aspect of the oppressed’s forgiveness is that we are all humans and ultimately, there will/must be some balancing amongst the humans but it is hard to feel that when most of what I see is ignorance and defiance among people who have been accustomed to others suffering being coupled with their indulgence. Even as they learn of their impact, they don’t want to rein their excesses in. They want to continue to be violent and genocidal in their supremacist belief systems.

What’s the point of taking the moral ground when the ground is being seized and taken or plundered? Rather than prescribe maybe he could acknowledge the anguish and disgust that people of color feel. The pain that more whites acknowledge and empathize with and can acknowledge rather than argue or avoid. But there’s no reconciliation without going through the agony and saddling the burden of that leadership on people of color and other oppressed majorities is not how we rectify the brokenness of the powerful.

Questioning patriarchy with Morgan Parker

I wanted to quote these two sentences from Morgan Parker:

When I wake up, I have fantasies about doing whatever. I’m not lazy, I just understand the relationship between time and money.

http://weird-sister.com/2015/03/09/my-dreams-of-being-a-feminist-housewife/

But, it is actually this one that stirs some things within:

Can I at once work to break down a heteronormative capitalist system while reaping its benefits: money, time, freedom, leisure, and peace of mind?

http://weird-sister.com/2015/03/09/my-dreams-of-being-a-feminist-housewife/

All we can do is utilize this current system and operation to foment the next system even when that new era may be decades or hundreds of years away. Even when finding alternatives to the dominant cultural ways, I participate in this current system while still being an example of something different than the current.

I believe that we can use privilege and powers bestowed by an unjust and imbalanced system to contribute to its destruction. That is a timeless inquiry for men and boys, for citizens, for owning class people to see that the position that they/we are in is untenable and rather than continue to benefit from it, we can confront it and aim to transform if NOC destroy it.

12 definitions of decolonization from Yvette Mutumba

Pablo Larios interviews Yvette Mutumba about decolonization and she rattled off a list of twelve with the most fabulous prelude that I’ve ever read:

What follows only begins to touch on a matter of decades of thinking, working, experiencing, talking and growing.

As for the 12 definitions of decolonization:

> that I will not do the job of those sitting inside institutions and organizations that are predominantly white

> conversations which create serious exchange, but also discomfort, maybe even pain, on the other side of the table.

> having to sit with that discomfort.

> understanding that decolonization is not a matter of ‘us’ and ‘them’, but concerns all of us.

> acknowledging that this is not a current moment or trend.

> not necessarily being political, but no choice to not be political.

> admitting that having grown up in a racist structure is no excuse.

> transparency from the institutional side.

> re-centering

> stepping back and making space.

> creating safe spaces.

> changing structures as much as building new structures

Baboon Patriarchy

In 1975, Ursula K. Le Guin named the pitiful norms and dominance of othering, blind cultural superiority of men writing science fiction books in an essay called American SF and The Other (pages 93-96 in The Language of the Night).

It’s amazing how pervasive and entrenched this white male complex is:

In general, American SF has asssunmee a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.

Such notions of self and character development enable rape, belittling, disgust, and false senses of supremacy.

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate or deity it; but in either case you have denied it’s spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And this you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.

These last two sentences are intriguing because they distill what happens when men orient by wanting or having power over. It is a position to prohibits us from getting reciprocity or being able to benefit from learning, and prohibits us from being able to benefit from the experience, wisdom or wealth of others since the experiences and knowledge and resources of others are not seen or seen as only serving some pre-conceived idea of how others will be KF service.

When facing racism, undercut and expose

I wrote an email on Wednesday with a subject of: “About Black hair & portrayals of Blackness” to the mother of another child in the 3 and 4 year old class. What propelled, if not compelled, me to do so was having read a helpful article on microagressions by Ruth Terry in the October 2019 YES magazine a few weeks prior. In it, Terry describes how Derald Wong Sue responds to microaggressions with:

 By “naming” a microaggression, a concept Sue borrows from Paulo Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we are able to undercut its power and expose metacommunication behind it.

I’ve had mixed feelings about microaggressions for years, yet the article provided me with some new perspectives of how to name what happens with ignorant interactions and how to deal with them, leading me to conclude that this was an opportunity to practice confronting the petty bullshit that white people spew and do in the faces and over the days and lives of people of color.

Simultaneously, I have been doing work this year where a big piece in the group dynamics work is to “name the thing.” Having to practice what I am preaching, I sent the “portrayals of Blackness” email in order for me to name to one white mother how whites — in her family and in the world — need to figure out how to talk about and tell stories about whiteness, family histories, and experiences with race. And when I say race that is shorthand for racism and racial differences and race-based consequences be they in school, in workplaces, or in society.

I had to name the thing for myself because to not do so would be to placate and accommodate ignorant, hurtful conduct. I was deliberate about writing how this other parent’s behavior was racist as well as name some of the larger implications of racism and the heft of what it is to be Black in the United States; though, I could have said Black in the world, but that would have been a bit too meta and likely abstract for a white person that I had never had a conversation about race before Wednesday’s email.

I made a clear request for corrective action and also asked that they let me know of their choice. I made that request not assuming that they would definitely respond or even acknowledge my missive. On Thursday, I did get a response from the husband saying two things: that the corrective action had been done and that I should not (maybe it said never) contact them again.

I was not looking to make friends with the other parent. If anything, I was undercutting power by exposing what was already in the internet. And I was practicing for my own liberation. And for the liberation of my descendants, both blood and chosen.

living history through primary sources

There have been some incredible pieces of historical documents written and distributed in the last month. Three that jump to the forefront of my mind are:

 

 

when deemed less than human

I am not surprised. This is symbolic of a court system and a set of values that do not consider a 17 year old boy being equal to a human. He is deemed to be less than human.
Part of my shaping of not surprised might be my patina of masculinity, to shield my fragile and sensitive being from the dehumanizing brutality of how humans treat one another.
Grieve. Feel your rage, disgust and disillusionment. And rise tomorrow to live for another day. Dedicate yourself to work towards a life of significance, to make a living, giving life, stoking hope and inspiration, appreciating the beauty and love in the Black people, Brown people, Red people and even the white people too, who surround us.

Turn off the television. MSNBC, CNN, the local news and Fox are all channels who’s coverage is to disgust, despair and disempower you. Each hour that you are mired on a channel — from ABC to HBO to Spike — is another instant that you won’t have back or get back. Instead, dedicate your life to activities that advance social justice and humanity, dignity and democracy. This means more time with real people, less time in television. And time with yourself. If you are so despondent or rudderless about what this means at this moment in history, remember that adage of Frederick Douglass that “power never concedes anything without a demand. It never has, and never will.”
50 years after the March on Washington and the delusion, smoke and mirrors that we were all equal (and propelled some to purport to being in a post-racial era), let this remind us — show us, instill in us — that many institutions and people do not see us as human. I do not know if they care to quantify us as more than 3/5ths of a human or less than three-fifths, but in our impaired nation, we are deemed less than human.

Let us not isolate ourselves from the other people of color who are other test subjects in a maniacal experiment of racial domination. For the last 12 years, Muslims, South Asians and Sikhs and others have been caught under the heel of Uncle Sam’s strange and trembling empire while Latinos/as, immigrants and people of color have become the next wave of men, women and children to fill the jails, prisons, detention centers, private prisons, parole offices, cells of solitary confinement, tent camps and extraordinary rendition as the Global War on Terror has come home to roost.
And, let us remember that most of the white people in this country, and the vast majority of people in the world, long for justice and democracy and to live in a country that adheres to tenets of justice, liberty, equality and dignity.

multiple choice: defining transformative social justice

dictionary.com defines change as:

verb (used without object)
9. to become different:
10. to become altered or modified:
11. to become transformed or converted (usually followed by into):
12. to pass gradually into (usually followed by to  or into):
13. to make a change or an exchange:

Different. Altered. Modified. I will add a few of my own choice vocabulary verbs: pivot. alter. release and incorporate new.

in the spirit of wordplay, using multiple choice:
(a) A school of thought that integrates how an individual cultivates their inner spirit simultaneous to the wisely engaging in efforts to impact public life.
(b) The cultivation of one’s inner spirit that symbiotically affects how they affect public movements for justice.
(c) Choosing to alter one’s practices that focus on their body, mind and soul while altering political, social and economic systems.
(d) Altering one’s practices within collective efforts to alter society.
(e) When an individual alters their internal state congruent to the alterations of public systems.

Love, compassion and empathy are emotional breeding grounds for systemic change.

synchronicity: in hope, anger, books, twitter

wow. this is the kind of shit that makes me glad to ask questions.
and therefore, ask more questions.

i feel like i’ve acessed a treasure trove of links. data and stories. data and stories.
dude, there’s no judgement, i have profound combo of feelings: amazement, delight, respect.

in part synchronicity, in part magic. i say synchronicity for a few reasons:
1. the Marshall Ganz article in Sojourners magazine is brilliant, laden with deep learnings. thus, will require slow digestion, and repetition in reading it.
in fact, i was just requesting Marshall Ganz’ newest book, Why David Sometimes Wins, off of paperbackswap.com earlier today. i’ve had 3 books requested from me in the last 24 hours. and someday, hopefully i will get those credits translating into Ganz‘ recent book, When David Sometimes Win, or the books by bad-ass farmer in southern Virginia, Joel Salatin.

2. also, i was just thinking of needin to locate that Malcolm Gladwell article. though it sounds like there are severe misgivings in the points he argues, it serves a tremendous purpose. as a writer, he puts his thoughts down on paper and into magazines that reach an audience of millions. inevitably, such an article — as a moment in time — offers a hook, or door ajar, to discuss concepts of society, technology, what moves and motivates people, and justice. and forces us to have to consider the story that we tell, the point that we are trying to make. by incorporating the new data that he puts forth. or determining that there is no merit in giving verbiage by responding to a Gladwellesque social thinker/critic.

3. and then, synchronicity. cuz in getting to glance at your links on pyramids of engagement, and that alchemyofchange response. which now that i’ve read it, is saying something similar to what i’ve said. in fewer paragraphs. and using  less pretty words.

on Foucault, for the first time

This is brilliant:

“The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”

I gleaned it from the wikpedia entry on Michel Foucault. (h/t to brotha Scott for the lead)

It resonates with some of my writing from two weeks ago:

i don’t seek understanding, to be understood by my people. i’ve been exhausted by judgment from others, and my own self-judgment and my judging others. i’ve reigned in some of that judgment, less consumed with burning my energy in that drain/waste. it detracts from channeling it elsewhere.