Facebook Publication Date: 2/12/2022 15:02

The Accusation of Cultdom
By Laura

Someone recently posted on our Facebook page with no intention of working against racial inequity. He came to disrupt and to disparage. He came with contempt for what we do here under Lace’s leadership. And, with a complete dearth of originality, he called Lace on Race a cult, and Lace a cult leader. This is not a new accusation. But it’s one I have yet to really understand.

So over the past few days, I’ve been putting some extra time into turning this “cult” accusation thing over and over in my brain to see if I can dissolve it enough to get my head around it. There are three things I think each person who has come here and tossed around that cult designation have used as evidence “against” us here. First, that no one ever talks back to Lace; we just all sit around agreeing with her and each other. Second, all of us just repeat the same phrases over and over again. Finally, maybe most insidious of all, Lace wants to CHANGE us.

Well, okay. I want to talk about this.

All right. First off, let’s talk about this part where we all just sit around agreeing with Lace and each other. I know I have a different perspective on this than the majority of walkers. For those of you who don’t know, I’m on admin staff, and I’m on the board of our newly minted nonprofit (w00t!!!). You might call me the unofficial Chief Technology Officer, if business parlance helps. A big reason I haven’t been engaging on Facebook or even the website as much as I used to and I’d like to be, is that this more… responsible?… practically committed to daily service towards the nuts and bolts?… type of engagement?… I’m not sure how to say what I’m trying to say, but I have more duties now than just interacting with the posts. This takes up a lot of my engagement hours. I want to get better at balancing that; I know I’m absolutely not exempt from engagement here with all of you. But right now it’s definitely still a work in progress.

This is all just a rambling prologue to preface that… I don’t just sit around agreeing with Lace on everything. At all. I often suggest or encourage or urge for different directions or strategies or actions with regard to our website than Lace proposes or expects. Now, to be fair, It’s not exactly disagreement. When it comes to the website, I don’t consider myself a complete expert, but I’m our resident expert. Lace shares what she wants to accomplish, and she follows my lead as to how we can get there. That’s a boring, every day, behind the scenes dynamic that not everyone is going to be witness to, so I’m happy to surface it here. Lace can affirm, I do NOT just go along with what she says all the time. I don’t defer to her on everything. And amazingly enough, that’s okay. No one appears to be kicking me out of the cult over it. I face no reprisals. In fact… I’m valued. I am not exactly silent about the different views that I bring to our flat round table, and I am completely and absolutely valued for them.

Now, when it comes to race, racism, racialized aspects of my society… you’re damn right I defer to Lace.

I am a white woman. I am absolutely not the expert. I have never experienced racialized violence, racialized microaggressions, or any of the harms of racism that lie on the other end of my participation in the structures of white supremacy, which on the whole benefit me more than not. But Lace, as a Black woman, is absolutely the expert on racial inequity: what it looks like, what it feels like, what it does, where it lies. As a Black woman and as a leader in the fight against racial inequity, Lace lives her life in the eye of it. When she speaks out against these evils, there are always people like Daniel Werner who lock and load.

Daniel Werner has, by his own admission, basically been stalking Lace and lurking our community, for… I don’t recall the time frame he has stipulated… but at least months?… for the soul purpose of finding fault and sewing disparagement. That he considers this a service he is rendering us deluded sycophants speaks volumes to the position white supremacy has taught him he deserves to inhabit, the role he deserves to play. Is white saviorism what we would call a thing when the white person is trying to save white people from Black people? I don’t know. But his attempts to triangulate our members against Lace and each other is a play straight out of the white supremacist playbook.

Learning to recognize those plays, those flexes of white supremacy, is something I’ve learned here. And I’ve learned this not just from Lace, but from the experts whose thoughts and ideas she brings to bear in the instruction she provides on relational ethics as an anti-racism tool. Many of these people are also Black scholars and thinkers, and I also implicitly accept their expertise on racism. So, yes, I stipulate unconditionally that I consider Black people and people of color as completely and implicitly the experts on racism and racial inequity. They are the people who most continuously and intimately experience the harm and danger imposed by white supremacy. You better believe I will be listening to them, listening to Lace, not to refute but to learn. Period.

At the same time, while the dangers these structures impose on Black people and people of color are far more extensive, the dangers they impose on white people like me are not nothing. I’m reading Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” via audiobook, and this morning I reached a chapter where she surfaces findings that the behaviors and mindsets we white people are led to inculcate as a result of our immersion in white supremacy are not at no cost to ourselves. When confronted with even something as innocuous as yearbook photos of Black people, our adrenaline and cortisol levels can be elevated within literally the time it takes for our eyes to blink. Before we can consciously think ourselves out of it, our bodies can have a fear reaction. If we look longer, think about who we’re seeing, considering the human attributes of the person we’re looking at, the reaction recedes.

Now, to me, this speaks directly to that second thing we’re castigated as cult members for: our repetition of the same words and phrases over and over again. Yes, we say, a lot, that we are committed to “lessening and mitigating the harm experienced by Black and brown people, perpetuated by white people and white supremacy.” Or we use the short-hand version, and call this our “North Star.” Or we talk about believing Black people and black women. We talk about the slosh we mind in our buckets. Yup, we definitely repeat certain phrases over and over again. So… what is the last skill you mastered without practice and repetition? What ideas have you internalized perfectly at your very first introduction to them?

Me, I need practice. I need reminders. I need repetition to make new behaviors habitual, to make new ways of thinking immediately spring to mind, not just when I’m reading a post by Lace, but when I’m caught by surprise out in the world by a situation that I react to in ways that could overwhelm and drown out the person I want to be. Reminding myself to “mind my slosh” is a quick and easy thought. If I practice that thought, it can become instinctive enough to prevent me from letting the negative reactions that are products of my training and trauma roil up and harm those around me.

All of these things we say aloud or maybe “type aloud”, over and over… The typing out of these things, the expressing them overtly, is all practice for getting them into the “muscle memory” of my mind. If I hadn’t worked hard at this, if I don’t keep working at it, my instinctive responses to Black and brown people will always be the ones I learned from white supremacy. They will cause me fear and stress in those instances before I consciously reflect. I care about that. My blood pressure isn’t what it used to be, and I lost my dad in his early fifties to a heart attack. So I take that shit seriously. I take the harm I can cause others seriously, and I take seriously the damage I can do myself if I do not repeatedly practice ways of speaking and thinking that lessen and mitigate the harm of white supremacy to myself, and the greater, more extensive harm white people like me and white supremacy inflict on Black and brown people.

The ways I am inculcated in and act out the structures and scripts of white supremacy is something I want to change about myself, and I know I need practice. And it goes farther. I want us ALL to change this about ourselves. I want the world to change this aspect of itself, and I want to be part of the change. And Lace absolutely wants us to change in this way. That’s why she is doing what she’s doing. To change us and to help change the world. For an absolutely f%$*ing worthwhile reason. So there it is. That third “proof” of our cultishness. That we are trying to be new people doing new things in new ways, that we have this goal we work towards by doing internal work in ourselves, by engaging here about the work we’re doing, and that Lace exhorts us to “take it outside” into the world.

Look.

That. Does. Not. Make. Us. A. Cult.

What it demonstrably DOES is make Lace on Race an effective method of deprogramming from the cult of white supremacy I know I grew up in. This not only reduces the harm I cause to Black and brown people, it apparently reduces the harm that the fears and stresses ingrained in me as a white woman within the structures of white supremacy will do to me myself. If I can reduce my instinctive perception of most of the humans on this planet as harmful (and most of my fellow humans are not white!), then I reduce the fear I live in of people who are different from me. What I’ve learned here at Lace on Race, and what Lace as my leader here encourages me to continuously work on, is to eliminate within myself any vestige of contempt and fear I might feel for people who have a different history, a different experience of moving in the world, and most immediately, a different skin color from myself. And, now that I think of it, isn’t that the exact opposite of what cults do? Don’t cults want to keep their members isolated from the world through judgment and contempt? Aren’t… aren’t the people who call Lace a cult leader inviting us to judge her and hold her in contempt, as they do?

These are just my thoughts so far. I look forward to diving more into this concept of “cult” as Lace presents her research and experience with its use, and especially the racialized aspects of its use as a word-weapon. Because… I really, really don’t understand why it keeps getting lobbed here. To me it’s just so palpably, demonstrably false. I’m not a cult-member, I’m a board member? But, yeah. Being a new person doing new things in new ways here at Lace on Race HAS changed me. I can attest to the journey I’ve taken. And I’m still here. Because I can absolutely can see the ways it has made me less harmful to Black and brown people, and SO much more resilient in countering the harm caused around me.

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