Facebook Publication Date: 12/25/2020 17:12
Merry Christmas.
NO REACTS.
COMMENTS ONLY.
NORMS APPLY.
This is a provocative piece, and not something that I would normally share on Christmas.
That said, I think it’s worth a deep look.
Who we decide we are going to be in the year 2021, both individually and collectively is of paramount importance.
This last year, when we have all been sequestered in our homes … oh wait, that’s not quite true.
Not all of us have been sequestered in our home. More than half of us, those already marginalized, have been forced to work in the front lines, or have had their jobs Stripped Away.
This is not a judgment, this Collective exploitation of an entire cohort of people for the benefit, with large and brutal consequences for another cohort is not new. I too live it out.
What it is, as we live in these past 10 months oh, is that we must acknowledge what it is is no longer deniable.
I remember people saying not even 5 years ago, derisively, that people who work in jobs now deemed essential, those who deliver our groceries, who run around wearing adult diapers in fulfillment centers oh, those who do are driving for us, those who take care of our loved ones in nursing homes, a particularly prescient cohort for me, as my mother is right now in one of them slowly dying choose the lives they lived, and their exploitation is justifiable. They may not say it in quite those bald terms, but the fact that we have and live in a society poor people are expendable and disposable highlights this fact.
This is now, or could be, a time to press the reset button and become the people that Americans swear on thick leather bound Bibles that we actually are, but who in fact we have collectively never been.
That is a hard fact to swallow.
It is hard, but necessary, to see the daylight between who we purport to be and what we do and have done in our names.
The only problem I have with this article is that it does let non-americans off the hook, their brutality is no less fetid because they tend to Offshore it.
But I am here to speak to America particularly.
We can talk about the deceptive and disingenuous PR of Europeans on another day.
As we throw away our wrapping paper and try to figure out the instructions on all these electronics that were built with child labor and slave labor embedded into them, we have to ask ourselves at the end of the day are we going to be the same people going forward?
It has been an interesting exercise forming and now shepherding a community for 3 years now, that focuses on the relational and on the absolute obliteration of white supremacy.
I’ve learned much. I’ve learned much about America as a whole, and I have learned very much about white people, again, as the article details, not about Maga hat wearing white people, but liberals and progressives, live and die by the Optics, but who, at the end of the day blow up, shut down, and run away at the prospect of actual and sustainable change and exterior Praxis.
There was a tweet that I shared both on my personal page and on lace on race but basically said that Americans in general and white people in particular, and white women in very particular rather like racism.
We can extrapolate that out to say we Americans like income inequality, we Americans like stratification by education and zip code, we Americans like the entire part and parcel of a dominant American society and a society that serves this dominant American society, and that’s true no matter how one places oneself ethnically or racially, but it’s particularly poignant when we speak to white Americans, who despite income and societal games made by non-white people still dominate the national discourse, still dominate the halls of the academy and Industry and government.
This is an opportunity never seen in my 57 years on this Earth, to truly imagine and then implement the world that we all swear so hard that we want.
That is why at Lace on Race we focus on the relational and the internal because the way that white people have done it for the last 65 years since Brown V board of education has simply not worked.
Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s worked entirely too well.
Focusing on action that they expect other people to do for them, even as they push back on it because they know it will cost them.
When people ask me what I do I say that it’s something of a bait and switch. I bring them in on race, but I hope to keep them there with the idea that as they become both more loving of themselves as well as more demanding of themselves that real change will occur with durability add with authenticity.
And this we have not seen in the liberal Progressive cohorts, including my liberal and Progressive Church, parachurch, and clergy friends. And then these three years of virtually no support from this very particular cohort, I feel this deeply and I’m deeply deeply disappointed.
So this is the charge that I leave you all on Christmas Day.
As we yet again remember a birth that should mean something, but that now means you get a gift certificate to the Apple Store.
I read something recently that starting from the day of or the day after Christmas that this is, or can be, an extended Lenten season if we allow it to be.
Christmas is about promise, by contrast Lent is about anticipation, lament, contemplation, and introspection.
If we choose it to be.
I am writing these words after an amazing season about which I feel more than a little bit of survivor’s guilt.
This time last year lace on race was about to shut its doors. That is not true this year. The work that I felt called to do three years ago is no less crucial.
And, thankfully, there have been enough people who walk with me, to allow me to continue this work.
I will say this without Rancor but with absolute direct candor.
*Almost none of them are people I consider friends either in real life or on Facebook.*
The people who have chosen to walk with me on this work were strangers when I began this work.
As it’s gotten harder most of those people have cycled in and out, some have fallen away.
But there has been a dedicated and resilient and relentlessly reliable cohort. In 2021, my only focus will be my North Star: lessening and mitigating the harm endured by black and brown people perpetuated by white people and white supremacy.
One would think that my friends, some of whom have been in relationship with me for years, even decades, would follow me and support this work. For the most part, they have not.
So then I have to acknowledge that, and live with the pivot and be grateful for those that have, who are no longer strangers but friends on the journey.
My Progressive and liberal friends, both religious and secular, I leave you with this charge.
Who are you going to exhort your congregations to be?
Who are you and going to exhort your governmental leaders to be?
What are you going to demand that your workplace becomes?
How do you Shepard your families?
How will this past year change you?
There will be a day when we can all take off our masks and hug each other, and tell each other how good your Froyo is and offer each other a bite.
It cannot end there.
So I offer this both in a secular way and in a religious way to those who claim to follow something higher than themselves, how are you going to live out the charge that we can never go back to where we were, because where we were was rotten to the Core.
Who are we going to be now?
Because I am a churched woman, words like repentance, reconciliation, conviction come easily to me but I hesitate to use them because that turns off my secular friends.
But don’t worry, based upon how the church has comported itself in the last 65 years, they don’t believe it either.
So we can use other words. *Or we can take these words back*.
Reimagine them without any hint of disingenuousness or ambivalence.
A story. Two years ago I fell at the County Complex oh, I’m still feeling the effects now to this day.
My supervisor spent so much time assigning blame to me for being stupid enough to fall, offering no support. I was sent to workers compensation where they handed me an ice bag and told me to move my mouse to the left side. Kaiser didn’t want me, because the county said it was my fault. The county didn’t want me because they said I fell on my break.Two years later, I no longer use a cane, and I have limited functionality in my left arm, but it cost me personally thousands of dollars because institutions that were there to support me and keep their promises to me looked the other way.
It is a small leap to extrapolate the story to those who are vulnerable and marginalized.
Now, I am retired from a place where I served for 25 years. I am a different woman, that I was in 1994 when I started, I have struggled to refuse to be bitter or resentful of my time spent there.
Good things happened. But most of the time they didn’t happen as I plied my spreadsheets.
They happened in the lunchroom when people would tell me about being devalued and dehumanized and even humiliated sometimes. They happened on the way to the bathroom when a woman holding back tears would fall into my arms. They happened in the white spaces of work. And that is for Life happens.
In the liminal spaces between our lives.
Who will we be? Have these 10 months been in vain?
If, when this is all over, or at least lessened, will we all just throw away our masks and revert back to January 2020?
Or will we choose to admit to ourselves that the lives that we have lived individually and collectively have not worked.
And will we expend every ounce of ourselves to create the world we say we want, to become the people we say we are.
I know I only have one choice, and I will walk with you as you make your own choices and do your own deep work.
But I will no longer support walking that truly isn’t, or conviction that is intermittent and provisional and ultimately impotent.
This is not your traditional Christmas message. But it is a message that speaks of promise, and believe it or not, there is generosity and optimism and hope at the core of this message. I believe we are capable individually and collectively of more than we think we are. We just need to let it out. Particularly to my cohorts who are people of faith, we need to lead. We need to stop worrying about how much our congregations and parachurch cohorts and constituents can handle, and have the courage to exhort them to courage
All of these words. All of these words. And all we really need is The Magnificat. Enjoy your mulled cider. Enjoy your Zoom calls. And then tomorrow pivot and get to work.
My thanks to Ingrid Shepard and Danielle Holcombe for the share. Edited to correct a typo.
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