Facebook Publication Date: 8/31/2019 17:08
From Julie Conason:
Hi Lace and community. I’m thinking a lot both about the situation at the border and in my state, a place nearer the northern border but one which relies on migrant labor. Simultaneously, I’m thinking about what I’ve been reading here in the Lace on Race space about reacts and the stark lack of compliance in this space with this request, which enrages me but frankly it’s not my place to take my fellow white people to task because truthfully, wherever someone is on the continuum of their social justice evolution, I’ve probably been there. In all honesty, I have no trouble with this request — except when something hits my feed from this page and I have a knee-jerk reaction and start to hit “like” or “angry” or “love” or whatever. Usually in that situation I catch myself before I hit, realizing that it’s a post from Lace. On a couple of occasions, I’ve hit the emoji and then immediately retracted it, truly a “mistake.” Mostly I have no trouble with it. But I wanted to dig down about why I even have the reaction to want to react with a react, so to speak. I think it’s because the reacts are a way of giving as little attention to the matter as possible, when there are so many things clamoring for attention. So it’s kind of like “I’ll be a good person and show for a second how enraged I am about people in concentration camps” and then I’ve done my deed and can go on to the barbecue or washing out my trash can liner or whatever other important things I had planned. Because if I really slow down and feel this for longer than it takes me to hit a react button, I’m going to have a tsunami break over me, the tsunami that asks me why I get to go to a barbecue or wash out a garbage can or rearrange my closet when other people, people who were just trying to live, are dead or dying or incarcerated or separated from everyone they love? When Black people in this country are treated like chattel slaves by a prison industrial complex, killed in the streets by cops, treated every single day like lower-caste citizens by everyone from their children’s school principal to the clerk at Walmart asking for 4 kinds of ID? Why do I get to go through the checkout line and never have to THINK about that? Fortunately, thanks to Lace on Race and my other Black women and Black non-men teachers, I do think about it. I think about it all the time now. And that’s a good thing. I can’t unsee what I have seen. Every day, I try to do a little more. Paying reparations, and paying Black women and non-men who are my teachers (which is DIFFERENT from reparations) is now habitual, part of the budget, and demands only that I try to stretch with that some more each month. I’m now really active in organizations where I’m able to do some concrete anti-racist work under the direction of Black people, through NAACP and BLM in my area. I’m now providing material aid and support to migrant workers in my own state (again under the direction of migrant justice organizational leadership) using my Spanish skills to provide rides and escorts to clinics and shopping places, help get drivers’ licenses, and maybe make some festive events and barbecues for people who don’t get a lot of down time and usually spend whatever downtime they have living in shadows and hoping not to be noticed. I’m on FB less because I’m doing more actual material aid in real time. And even with all this, I still am battling the reaction to want to react with a react. To want to get on with my day, get on with “my life” when the world is literally on fire. I’m starting to babble now, but in part it’s because I don’t always know what to do. I don’t know what to do other than keep making breakfast and dinner, keep looking for a paying job cause all of the volunteer work is giving me so much but I still need to pay the bills, keep cooking something everyone will like for the barbecue, keep washing the trashcan. I don’t know what “doing it right” looks like anymore. I don’t know what “balance” is anymore. I feel like I eat and breathe and sleep and dream social justice work. And it still feels like it’s not enough. It will never be enough until white supremacy and patriarchy are dismantled.
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