— by Claire Ramsey
As the calendar page flipped to January 1 2020 I started thinking about ideas I had and things I learned in the past 12 months or so about undermining racism, and picking out a few to broadcast to the Lace on Race community. This group means a lot to me. I’m thankful for all of you and for Lace – for her courage, her brains, her wits, her life force. My vision for myself (and for you too if you accept the challenge) is to get into more trouble this year. You might wonder why. Keep reading!
What’s rattling around in my brain today? First, the amount of reflection required of white women so we stop creating havoc and harm in the world. Second, the myths we are expected to swallow, uphold, and recite about the history of the US. And third, the need to step out and get ourselves in “good trouble,” taking as a model Representative John Lewis’s long courageous life of activism and how he talks about it. If you’re short on time, here’s the punch line: my wish and my goal for the next 12 months is to speak and act up in my own environment. I am going to say to anyone who shows me that she needs to reflect more, “You need to reflect on what you say, on the consequences of what you say, on the mis-information you are spreading. Your patterns of thinking may not look like patterns to you, but they are.” When I hear a myth, I am going to say, “I wonder why you believe that, because it is a myth, and if you look for the facts you will see that it is a dangerous myth – there are no individual great men, there was rampant resistance among enslaved people, white supremacy is woven into the entire history of the US.”
I am preparing myself to say these things and to back them up. I know the difference between my own inner feelings and values, and facts and reality outside myself. My goal is to respond with clear facts. This business is going to get me into good trouble sometimes, I imagine. And it goes against the grain, because I often get into it with people, and then give up because I have very limited patience in the face of foolery, ignorance, lack of curiosity. I aim to keep going this year, especially face to face. No backing out. And I aim to look for opportunities to be civilly disobedient. Good trouble is on my horizon.
I extrapolated these thoughts from stuff that came across in my real, un-internetty life.
Recently I had breakfast with a good friend who is Mexican and has spent most of her life living in France. Sometimes I ask her about things I don’t get about French people. Sometimes she asks me about Americans. The other day she asked me about American individualism. We have talked about it before, and it’s not that she doesn’t know what American individualism is – she does. She asks about it repeatedly because she can just barely believe that Americans organize so much of our lives around individualism when it is so obviously a delusion. We – Americans, all of us – really have no idea how bizarre, rude, inhuman, and unnatural we look to the rest of the world, sunk in this belief system. More of us need to stop and reflect on the ridiculousness of believing that our individuality matters.
Then, the other day I read a response from a small group of academic historians to the NY Times #1619 Project (see below for links), a series of articles and a curriculum for setting the record straight about the US dependence upon enslaved people – since the beginning and up to the present – for economic and political development. I imagine that the articles and their view of US history surprised some readers. Placing the business of trapping, buying, selling, and exploiting enslaved human beings at the center of our history changes the story. It especially dislodges one of the conventional narratives – that a few “great men” put the country on the path to unending progress, that the genuine history of the US is the story of continual betterment and progress. This version, of course, does not have room for phenomena like enslaved people and centuries of injustice, and systems of resource distribution designed to keep non-white people from their rightful place. Some academic historians were unhappy about the NY Times series, which was conceived of and written by Black journalists. They hinted that it was “rewriting history” and objected to the facts that emerge when the myths get closely examined. But it was plain that their primary discomfort was the challenge to the narrative of progress on which the American myth has rested. Again, it is time to call a myth what it is. A myth. A legend. A fantasy. A delusion. A falsehood.
In 2020 I am turning 70. I want to take as many chances as I can to get into “good trouble.” I will have to look for them. It will require action from me. I’ll know them when I see them, and I’m going in.
I learned one other small tidbit that made me stop in my tracks. It takes less brain-work to accept what we are told than it does to inquire, to ask why, to think it through, to get more information, to conduct analysis. . . that makes sense. But it explains why so much obvious misinformation gets passed around and repeated until it seems true. We all hear loads of BS every day, we read it, we get splashed with it. It’s almost the middle of February, and 2020 has already been a year of lies and hot gas. Even more reason to commit to doing the harder brain work – ask/examine/disagree/commit to living our values.
Stay resilient and keep walking.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/
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Reflect on Whiteness, Reject the Myths, Engage in “Good Trouble”
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Reflect on Whiteness, Reject the Myths, Engage in “Good Trouble”
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