So late last year, the Admin team here at Lace on Race decided that we would do a year end summary of sorts about our dreams and hopes–and also to let all of you know how much this space means to us.
We asked a Community Member, Radha L. if she would be willing to write a quick jot. What we received was something else entirely.
I, and the rest of the Admin team read her offering several times, each time marveling at her melding of the personal and the political; her resolutions and her resistance, her self-described gratitude and grumpiness as she has faithfully walked alongside us in the moors of Lumpy Crossings.
I won’t divulge the gist of the essay; that is for you to discover and savor. But those of you who have been privy to her insights and her risk-taking truths she has undertaken in this space on all of our behalf know of the wisdom we will glean as we enter into her wise words. Not an easy saunter, this.
No, Radha, in her kind and candid way, speaks of feet sometimes leaden; sometimes grudging, but always faithful.
It is this. This is no testimonial like ones you might otherwise see, where all is always well, and there is uninterrupted upward trajectory. Hear this: this is the gift. It is in the internal struggle that Ms. L. describes so well.
And it rings so true in this space. Here in the land of Lumpy Crossings, learning to walk even as we learn to become more and more the place of comfort where those we choose to stand with and walk with can trust in your strength; your willingness, capacity, and agency on days when their feet are sore. This is no small thing. To become a place, to choose daily, sometimes hourly to become a place of succor where people can stand is huge.
To trust that others can and will hold you is doubly miraculous: in the fact that there are people who invite you to rest in and on them; and the concomitant miracle that you can learn to trust and to lean in and know that your sore feet can rest in other’s safe-ish places.
So read, reflect, comment. And be sure to thank Radha for her gracious contribution to our community. We would be a lesser space absent her voice and her witness.
-Lace
One of the battles I keep fighting in my psyche, including in the context of therapy is: why do people need constant education about boundaries and justice? My therapist says both things can be true at once: a) that we have to reaffirm boundaries all the time with the same people; and b) people who are intimately involved in our lives need to start behaving in a way that shows they can be trusted. We throw these ideas back and forth like an annoying “whap whap” tennis ball sound, till I don’t know what my value system is anymore, and I am briefly amused by the mental image of the ball whapping him on the head. Just enough to glance off it. Just enough to make me chuckle. It’s my way of coping with the helpless rage I feel, knowing that systemic injustice cannot be wiped out by self care and personal character building, yet we have to survive so we can be witness to the struggle.
Why should his two-part ethos bother me so much? Over time I’ve come to see that it’s because, in the interstices between the two ideas, people slither into spaces that marginalized people have worked hard to create and protect, and they colonize those spaces, then gaslight the creators into giving up power.
So if I must constantly defend my right to a way of being, I am saying that it is okay to subject my dignity and survival to debate. How horrifying. And if I wish people to behave in those unwaveringly trustworthy ways, then it stands to reason that I must be part of their education. The very idea of ‘parenting’ someone endlessly this way so that they won’t erase my identity is what I find appalling.
This is the work that I see Lace on Race taking on. Since I began reading and participating, and trying to be shifted by her words, I have been pondering what it means to shape myself into a person that black people can count on. But how do I do that without them always having to relive painful memories, and recount just enough horrifying data so that I will believe them? Without centering myself and saying “I can relate because one day I, as a person of color, had a similar experience…”?
Reading this page has been an exercise in noticing: That racial justice in this country isn’t possible without whiteness being reshaped. But racial supremacy has that toxic way of getting stuck—stuck on the anger of being called out; stuck on the growth and reshaping part; stuck on the delight of being centered in the work; stuck on how delicious it is to dwell in fragility. Stuck in the space between a) needing and expecting constant education, and b) showing trustworthiness. Remaining stuck is wonderful. Black America cannot afford to stop mentoring us, so we never have to be existentially alone. And every time a moment comes when we might truly demonstrate our allyship, we can retreat to “I am a work in progress.”
I’m not white, but I might as well be. One of the first things a fellow Indian immigrant said to me about living in an American city was, “If a black person walks near you, hold onto your handbag.” I see so many examples of how we are supposed to ally with whiteness. Call out whiteness when it damages us, as it tends to do, but never seek to drop the hand of whiteness. I think it’s crucial to work on this issue, and am wary of doing so. My fragility is so tiresome.
Focusing on the work is what I want to do better in 2020. We all have ways in which our marginalized identities may intersect with racial justice, but as people who pose a threat to black wellbeing, I think it’s important not to let it all bleed together.
Recently, my husband lost his wallet, and had to cancel our credit cards. I was late on every sustaining payment I made that month, and felt so ashamed, I considered messaging Lace to explain the delay. Before I could act on that thought, I remembered that she had once written about how readers would write to her saying they wished they could contribute, but they had financial troubles of various sorts. What was Lace supposed to do with these confessions? Write back and say it’s okay, extract my labor for free? So I didn’t reach out, but I sat with why I wanted to, and it wasn’t fun.
So often, as a parent of special needs children, I read things posted by Lace and I “pivot to disability.” Is it wrong to do so? Somehow, fundamentally, I believe that our instinct to do this stuff can be harmful. It certainly hampers disability justice, the idea that until something is personal, we don’t show up, take action. I want to think more deeply about how to be practical in my self education, knowing that some aspect of it has to be personal or I won’t learn, but also reflecting on how that can detract from, and delay, justice for people I claim to care about.
The hardest part for me, as an immigrant, is not conflating white and black America. Because we do it. Not just in an “I don’t see race” way, but in contexts of, say, what American religious identity might look like to those of us who aren’t from monotheistic backgrounds. How uncomfortable,say, it is to call out the appropriation of yoga. It’s easy to speak out when white people are making money off our practices, and erasing us from them. I can express how toxic I find it. How much I do not care whether, while being yogis, they are still worried about being pristine in their Abrahamic values. How largely uninterested they appear to be in being so disrespectful to our beliefs, or how invested they are in wanting us to reframe it as respect. How often I have been told that their Hindu or Buddhist friend So and So said it was okay, so why am I withholding my blessing.
But when it’s about the increasing value of yoga in the lives of black women, I tend to stop talking. Not because it doesn’t make me uncomfortable, it does, but because I would not wish to be the ally who overlooks the succor of yoga, the healing it can provide, to people fighting for survival, who benefit greatly from the movement of breath, the support of the earth. Lace and I talked briefly about this, but to be honest, I ran away from it. I hope not to run in future. South Asians pilfer from black American art and culture all the time, without offering any sort of truthful reckoning. I believe we should, and am glad that it’s been happening.
A very different vision of America is emerging for me, after I have begun this learning. I am both grateful and grumpy about it. But if I want to eschew a colonizer vision of what it means to live here and be counted on, this is the work. So I am thanking Lace and also whining at her in my head. Both things are true.
Radha.
Please visit the Discussion Forum for this post
Sitting in Liminal Spaces
Hope and Vision Series Links:
A Quilt of Vision: Abiding in Community
Reflect on Whiteness, Reject the Myths, Engage in “Good Trouble”
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