So this post is incredibly late and after the fact. However, we recently adopted a puppy… hence the picture… and my life has consisted of the puppy, grad school, and not much else. As I work to reassemble my currently unrecognizable life, I would like to post this piece I wrote after Charlottesville.
A list.
- Five-year-old white girls in the south are not the minority at their ballet studio, or country club, or all girls’ school.
- I am not the only white woman at my trendy workout class.
- I did not grow up watching Friends, Gilmore Girls, or Full House, wondering why so few people on TV looked like me.
- No one crosses the street anxiously while avoiding eye contact when they see me walking towards them.
- I have always trusted that the police are on my side.
- I had the luxury or choosing whether or not I wanted to think about racism when I woke up today.
I was motivated to make this list after listening to a talk given by the incredible and inspiring Brené Brown. I highly recommend clicking this link https://www.facebook.com/brenebrown/videos/1778878652127236/ to hear her eloquent thoughts on Charlottesville. I share this list of a few ways in which I am privileged not to minimalize the struggles that white women encounter, but instead to draw attention to just a few of the ways in which our country’s painful history preferentially placed the wind at my back as soon as I popped out of my mother’s womb. The thing about having the wind at your back is you often don’t feel it unless it changes direction and begins pounding you in the face, instantly making your run ten times harder than it was at the outset. You can still usually keep going, but you’d be kind of pissed off if a fellow runner smiled cheerily as she headed in the opposite direction, failing to notice her environmental advantage but happy to offer condescending advice on the benefits of cross-training for improving speed.
I am fully aware that I have often failed to notice the ways in which the world has subtly, and at other times brazenly, worked with me and against others because of something as silly as my skin color. While I am powerless to directly alter events like the one in Charlottesville, there is one arena—my own life—in which I am perfectly positioned to effect change. Raging at white supremacists fixes nothing. Anger, while a valid and useful emotion, is not the antidote to hate. However, if we use Charlottesville as an opportunity to be a little more honest with ourselves about the privileges and implicit biases that may have infiltrated our own behaviors, we begin to fix the problem from the inside out.
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “If you have a gun, you can shoot one, two, three, five people; but if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions.” I think that the tendency of our society to classify things as black or white, true or untrue is extraordinarily dangerous. I fall prey to this temptation over and over again. It is simply so much more comforting and less anxiety provoking to place an experience or idea in one category, dust off my hands, and return to my day’s activities. But every time I give in to the pull of the black vs. white mentality, I miss the growth that is really only really present in the grey.
Perhaps one reason why it’s scary to stay open to another’s point of view is we fear that true consideration of a different opinion, even for a second, suggests we have abandoned our long-held ideals. When the debate focuses on who is right or wrong in a situation, our teenage egos rush to the stage and frantically oscillate between the offensive and defensive, desperate to defend what we interpret as a personal attack. But maybe the truth of a situation isn’t as relevant to the conversations we need to be having as we think it is. After all, every person’s story is vividly real for them, even if it does not ring true for us. What if we instead suspended the right vs. wrong debate, accepted that our ideals are not everyone’s, and instead listened for the ways in which a certain situation is incredibly real for the other person. I don’t know how to heal the problems that keep surfacing all over the nation. I do however believe that massive, nation-wide change is a bottom-up process that is dependent upon individual citizens turning their attention first inward, and then outward.
On a personal level, it’s my intention to bring more awareness to the underlying goal that’s driving the way I communicate during difficult conversations. All too often I’m not entirely honest with myself about how much I really want the satisfaction of being right… obviously a sentiment that is not conducive to reflection, respect, and open consideration of another’s perspective. Instead, when I sense that my words have been hijacked by my fear of being wrong, I hope to pause and remember the advice a truly amazing therapist gave me once. He told me that the goal of challenging conversations should be to emerge on the other side with a better understanding of the other person. This advice has revolutionized the way that I think about arguments, even if it hasn’t yet had the same effect on the way that I argue :). That may be a longer process…
This is a tough time. Too many tragedies have happened in the past few months. We have to take care of each other and ourselves. Sometimes this looks like big acts of generosity and empathy, and other times it just looks like a warm smile to the person at the checkout counter. A lot of the time it may be puppy snuggles in bed to recharge our own batteries. I pray that we all work through these tragedies in the best way we know how, so that we can move forward with a heart that has been broken open to others, not wired shut.