The tenet we are going to speak about now, Grow In, is an important element; it’s in what could be a tagline, right next to our North Star.
It’s crucial. It is what differentiates Lace on Race from other spaces. Our insistence that interior work is a linchpin of an authentic and durable racial justice practice, is so often something that people, at least at first, nod to vigorously.
They nod, until they really come to the realization of what we are asking for. Or, more accurately, they nod until they come to the realization that this tenet isn’t only about ‘all of the others’– that it applies to them too.
As always, I get it.
Those of us who have, to whatever degree, bought into a praxis of racial justice often feel that we are ahead of the game. We have the worn sneaker rubber and the sunburned backs from marching 5k to show for it; we know the names of all of of our legislators, *and* their phone numbers; we have shown up and stood up at work (or at least we thought about it, or at the very least we sidled up to someone who actually did in the empty hallway and murmured our support). We have a ‘Black Lives Matter’ flag planted in our yard or apartment window (or at least we honk in solidarity when we see one–maybe); we now know the actual date of Juneteenth, we have read all, or some, or at least two books (one of which is not even Robin DiAngelo).
We have given funds on Facebook at least once, we know all the lingo and slang and words that have suffered from mission drift for their overuse, and more concerning, from their misuse.
We have made tentative approaches to people of color in our workplaces, the stores we frequent, our houses of worship, our neighborhoods–when we can find a person of color to approach. We have wondered why the dearth, at least for a moment, before moving on.
Maybe five years ago, just after that fateful election, we bought a pack of bright shiny safety pins, using exactly one, getting annoyed at the hole it left in our good blouse, before discarding.
And now, when we contemplate those five years since most of us became interested in sustained racial justice praxis–or maybe it was barely a year ago, when George Floyd and Brionna Taylor captured national attention and collective consciousness and conscience– we wonder about the lack of gains; about the issues and oppressions that stay extant, about what can seem to be the futility and wasted efforts of the last months and years.
And we look for something, someone, anything and anyone to blame.
Compassion fatigue which led to donor fatigue. Unbending governments. Resistant corporations. Family and friends and neighbors and coworkers; all still in deep slumber. Entrenched logical fallacies which stunt dialog and can reinforce biases and errors.
The tyranny of tradition: this one is good, and worth highlighting. It is hard to reverse course when something ‘is as it has always been’.
And the deep ambivalence which surrounds and informs and imbues (and can infect) durable and authentic change. The world, or, more accurately, a significant minority of the world, for whom the status quo has brought great benefit is ‘simply not ready’ for the world it says it wants.
Welp.
Sound familiar?
All of the hindrances and barriers to effective and durable change displaced onto external forces: systems and institutions; bad actors, historical inertia, which leads to ennui, and even despair, are true for us too.
The many initiatives for change which we have seen, as long as 67 years ago with Brown vs. Board, and as recently as last year with the so-called ‘Black Spring’, have absolutely not resulted in deep and durable transformation.
So it is with us.
In the article in Vox Magazine from last summer, I talked about the Stages of Change, which is, for our purposes, all about gestation.
We like to see showy shoots and even grander leaves. We prefer our gardens straining with the weight of perfect plum tomatoes; our trees to be heavy laden. We want our flowers in full bloom.
All in veritable blink. No effort needed. We want ‘mature’ landscaping; pleasing to the eye. We don’t buy seeds, we get plants already on their way. We hire others to do the planting.
We are once removed. We are overseers, not workers. Our hands remain clean and soft–but, what a view!
We want Optics.
Mystic and Courage, though, much prefer below ground.
Let me stop here, just for a second, because what comes next could well seem to be a contradiction of what I have said earlier in this series–that we needed skin in the game, that we needed to ‘put our backs into it’, that we need calluses and sweaty brows and holy overalls.
That’s still true. We need all those things.
But as Mystic and Courage would both gently (Courage, welp– not so gently) insist, we need to look to the interior, even as we do the work.
Let me tell you about Mystic first. A woman of the perfect grey-blonde bob, and of the most gentle eyes I have ever seen outside of North Carolina and Cathy DeBose. They are two sides of the same coin, actually. They are all about the doing–but they have long known that who they are as they do their crucial work of healing the world is always more important than what they do or accomplish.
Mystic has lived. Vermont; Montana; Texas–and now here, not 15 minutes away from me, close enough for coffee and pizza, close enough to gaze unwaveringly at me in our shared worship space, close enough for tangible love, and for modeling interior praxis.
Mystic knows pain. Mystic knows loss. Mystic has succored many. She has also lost many. She has shown me that grief is not ever a carveout. And yes, grief is indeed an affliction. Her gentle eyes hold multitudes, so when she counsels me, I know that her words come from a deep reservoir. And that they do not come easily.
Mystic has gone interior; has gone underground. Not at the expense of exterior praxis, oh no. She has gone into the interior in order to do her external work well. Growing in, as I contemplate Mystic, growing in means tending to her soil. Means nurturing what she cannot see. Means pruning what is gone to make way for new.
It means reimagining Self, even in the midst of unwavering conviction and call. It means, as she stays in the loamy soil, knowing what are weeds and what are nascent shoots. It means giving each new shoot a name, even as she gives them space to grow with her tending.
Mystic plants many things. Some will bloom only to wither. Some will feed for a while and then die. Some, she will never know, because the gestation and the young plants will come to fruition only after Mystic is no longer physically in the garden. Still. She plants without care for payoff and outcome. She tends without care for approbation or recognition.
Moving away from only metaphor for a moment, I know Mystic; know the tending she does for her children and grandchildren, and for people she may only see once, if at all. She holds their faces with her soiled hands, and her love sinks in. Hard won love. Quietly fearless love. Hesed love in a perfect bob.
If Mystic is quiet, Courage is a whirlwind!
In she comes, bangle bracelets jangling, curly hair windswept, full of life and love and stories which would curl your hair, and a truckload of good compost she dumps right by her tree, and then yours, and then yours. She also came to me from a map of the Americas; first Wisconsin, then Hawaii, now, again 15 minutes away (and so close to Mystic!! La Mesa/San Carlos grows good mentors. I am grateful.)
‘You all need the good shit!’ she says as she gets down to her knees and kneads and kneads the soil with the compost.
You need the shit.
I am well aware that we want this work to be stainless, free of the smelly, even bloodless.
Not with Courage around.
Courage has known pain. Not just the pain acquired from adulthood, but deep scars from decades past. Which she has faced, is facing now, and will face still more. Always compost to be mixed in.
I want to be careful, so careful, with this metaphor here. A lot of people make me cringe when they speak of adversity and people ‘overcoming’ it; what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, they say.
Bollocks. That is not it at all.
This demands a word study on strength as a virtue in and of itself.
Strength, full bore, without amending, is less than neutral; it is not automatically an attribute.
Strength is almost always in answer to deep pain.
So Strength, by itself, can become infected with self absorption. Worse, strength, left alone, can make for lack of empathy–’If I Did and am Doing The Thing, what’s your problem??’ Strength can lead to hard and cold hearts; for our purposes, it can lead to brute force.
So the query must be made–Strength yes, but in service to what? Strength with a cold brittle heart, or with a pliable and vulnerable heart of flesh?
Strength to hold and to heal, or to aggrandize toxic exterior forces?
People who, as they say in the world of sports, people who, like Mystic and Courage, ‘play hurt’, people who are wounded healers, people like me–and hopefully, people like you–need to hold two things in one hand.
Dualities; seeming contradictions–that every outward action demands concomitant inward depth. And one cannot ever be sacrificed to the other.
I have already said, and I do so hope that you agree, that exterior action without authentic and relentless interior work is neither genuine nor durable–nor ultimately effective.
Interior work, as much as I love it and exhort you to it, also has its sirens. Self absorption, yes, but also paralysis. And timidity.
You need to break bread with both Mystic and Courage.
It takes courage to do interior work well. It takes a sense of something greater than ourselves to begin and maintain the Hero’s Quest into the interior, to find and root out the weeds of ambivalence, of passivity; of arrogance (and of its cousin, false humility).
All of this, all of this, is why we simply cannot do this work alone.
Oh my I can certainly find myself in nodding vigorously before internalizing what leaning in truly means, both in this space and in this work. Lace describes the tentativeness of growing, the displacement, and externalization here so well and I have exhibited every bit of it. Who I am and how I do who I am is more important that the outcome of what I do and that can only come from growing in. It takes a marriage of leaning into the pain of that pruning process and hope that things can and will be different through it. Makes me think of Dr. Cornell West from the MLK series talking about the filth and stench and labor pains with which we’re born married exactly with the miraculous beauty of birth, all those robust AND’s in service to the North Star.
The birth metaphor makes me think about the relationship to parenting. I follow a lot of folks in the gentle / positive parenting communities and some of them talk about “re-parenting,” which basically means re-teaching yourself things that you were taught by your parents, but they taught you them in toxic ways. I think “growing in” and doing the internal work is similar. Instead of it just being what our parents taught us – although that’s definitely part of it – we’re having to re-parent what society has taught us about race and racism. We’re having to root out these really deep assumptions and frameworks and replace them. There are plenty of resources to do so, but the actual work of it requires a lot of vulnerability and effort, just as teasing out those things that happened in our childhood does.
What a perfect metaphor and I like how it ties into our most intimate relationship with ourselves and closest kin. It’s easy to dismiss and distance from so much of the soup of white supremacy I grew up in as being ‘back then’ when in all reality if I’m not digging in and taking a hard look at that stuff what I’m doing is perpetuating it.
I am drawn to this metaphor as well. As a parent I find myself working to at outwardly with courage while consistently doing the inner work to keep myself grounded and present. So it is with this relational work. Trying to stay grounded and present and aware of my own racism while consistently making active choices to mitigate harm to brown and black people.
I feel all of this swirling journey towards growing in and trying not to get lost on the inside and also as Lace said, “ Not at the expense of exterior praxis”. Doing the interior work continually definitely takes courage and sustained commitment. The line, “It takes a sense of something greater than ourselves to begin and maintain the Hero’s Quest into the interior, to find and root out the weeds of ambivalence, of passivity; of arrogance (and of its cousin, false humility).” Really sums it up for me. Having the ethos of lessening and mitigating the harm perpetuated to Black and brown people by white people and white supremacy helps me to remain focused and committed. Having the ethos of lessening and mitigating the harm perpetuated to Black and brown people by white people and white supremacy helps me to remain focused and committed. Knowing I’ll have to fend off paralysis again lets me see it as expected and not something to blame myself over but something to meet eye to eye within myself. Working as a community keeps me accountable to keep moving forward both inward and outward.
thank you for that counter balance about not getting lost inside. I have to lean in, but not stay there or use internal work as an excuse not to do the external engagement and action work. It has to be simultaneous, not getting lost in or’s, or ‘i’m not ready’s’.
Thanks for this point about expecting paralysis, as self-blame can become unproductive and self-absorbed as well…I think it will be helpful in teasing out the differences between that and actual interior work and watching out for known patterns of white person behaviour in myself.
I certainly have made the error of jumping into action before doing the internal work, many times. I have also had the nerve of questioning a mixed-race person about their lived experience at one point at least.
I am grateful that I am not still at that point. I am especially grateful to Lace for initiating that.
That said, I own the racism I have exhibited. I also own the responsibility of changing my thoughts, attitudes, and actions, one lasting step at a time. The Lace on Race North Star, Western Star, and more give me not only reading material, but ammunition to change myself, to the benefit of at least most people within this country.
I know many Asians, Central and South Americans, Africans and African-Americans, Europeans, Native people, Atlantic and Pacific islanders, and Australians and New Zealanders to at least some degree. However, until and unless I not only increase my awareness of racism, but my personal involvement in it, I cannot and will not be useful in the fight against it.
I can locate myself in this too. My antiracism journey began with me doing things externally – in my words, my actions, my studies, etc. I had to learn to confront my own racism, to acknowledge my own white privilege and white supremacy – that was where the Growing In for me began. I had to dig my hands into the compost and mix it in. I’m still doing that, and will be every day for the rest of my life. I need to continue to do my interior work, to continue growing in a praxis and way of life focused on our Northstar, lessening and mitigating the harm endured by Black and brown people perpetuated by me and my white supremacy. When I do that interior work, the healthy seeds in the garden will be planted, they will become more than seeds and begin to bear fruit. Who I in my interior self, is who I am.
I can see how very much my unexamined interior made my external praxis weak, inconsistent, and dangerous. I’m a strong believer in function over aesthetics; Lace’s challenge and guidance revealed how much I was violating that principle by ignoring all the white supremacy structures inside myself, my identity, my beliefs. (Conversely, my white supremacy was functioning strongly and didn’t care about the antiracist aesthetics I was presenting.) Now I consciously hold a racial awareness spotlight to my interior, and work on strengthening it as well as on repairing what it reveals to me.
That function vs. aesthetics distinction is so important – especially the fact that we often want to pretend that one is the other. Lace linked to the Vox interview when she talked about the black square thing and how harmful it was and I think that’s definitely a time when something was an aesthetic and many people convinced themselves that it was functional.
I am thinking about strength grown from adversity but “with a pliable and vulnerable heart of flesh”. I think white people like to attribute absolute value to things, absolute meaning it is always a good quality or always a bad quality and what is done with it or how it is done is irrelevant to the goodness or badness of it. I am reminded of the tendency in schools and in childhood to teach about a person overcoming and end it there. We learn about Helen Keller “overcoming” being deaf and blind, but nothing about what she did with the rest of her life and in doing that we silence her voice. As Lace discusses, not all strength is the same or used to accomplish goals that serve the north star. I realize now that before Lace on Race for me, strength was something I was trying to sort out. As we talk about here, who we spend our time with and expose ourselves to greatly influences who we are and in terms of strength, I saw a lot of words and actions that seemed strong, but that when I tried to emulate them always seemed to turn out badly and looking back I understand now that they were losing strategies. They were not strength with a pliable and vulnerable heart of flesh. Finding strength is a process of ongoing inner and outer work.
I can definitely understand the lure of living in internal work and sheltering there because it’s safe. Balancing it with the Courage to grow up and grow out….to take it outside in action is necessary to lessen and mitigate harm. Internal work can lead to naval gazing and paralysis.
On the flip side, action without internal work can he dangerous and harmful. It can lead to finger pointing and othering. It can lead to punching down and tearing others down and inflicting damage. If I never hold up a mirror, I will be resistant to direction and correction and will blow up, shut down, and run away when confronted and being called in.
This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Clare Steward.
This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Clare Steward.
I think the traps of self-absorption, paralysis and timidity are more likely to be my issues in this work. I can’t tell how much I’m motivated by “wanting to be a better (white) person” vs. being motivated by the North Star, or actually wanting to achieve the world I say I want. I guess that’s part of the power of doing this in community, to be able to reach out to one another if there are concerns about that. Another issue with that mindset is that if I’m doing this for personal development, then I’m ultimately the person who will benefit from my own development and therefore get to set the pace, whereas focusing externally on the issues of racism and white supremacy by working in community and taking external action means being accountable to others and contributing alongside others. I will look for follow-up actions when reading or doing inner work so that I do not become stationary and detached.
I also appreciate the point about Mystic planting without knowing what will wither and what will grow – exercising agency over my/one’s own behaviour and accepting the outcomes. Kind candour for everyone.
—-And we look for something, someone, anything and anyone to blame.—
Ooof, yes. This is why I always laugh and then flinch at the memes poking at conservatives. Even if they’re true, they feel like they’re passing the buck – “look at *those* people – they’re so ridiculous about what *they* believe and it’s *their* fault.” I really, really want to be able to just laugh and move on. But this space has made me stop and think about where the blame is being placed and if that’s both true and actually points towards our North Star.
—- All of the hindrances and barriers to effective and durable change displaced onto external forces: systems and institutions; bad actors, historical inertia, which leads to ennui, and even despair, are true for us too.—-
Whenever I feel tired with dealing with social justice issues, I try to think about the people who don’t have the privilege of being tired with them – that the racism and discrimination is there whether they are tired or not – especially those who deal with multiple marganilizations like Black women. It doesn’t lessen my tiredness, but it does point me towards that North Star again.
— They are all about the doing–but they have long known that who they are as they do their crucial work of healing the world is always more important than what they do or accomplish.—
I remember reading a book in high school (won’t mention the book both because it’s a truly terrible one and the whole “not recommendation” rules), but there was a character who ran a charity and was obsessed with people’s approval of her work. Because she never felt like she had enough credit or respect, she was bitter and miserable. When I read it, I realized it was going to be very, very easy for me to become this person if I wasn’t careful. I recognized that I could end up wrapped up in basing my self-worth on the judgment of others – and so orienting my work towards that instead of the real needs of others.
Not doing the interior work can be so dangerous – both because of burnout but also because of white people’s tendency to slip into saviourism. Without the interior work, white people in particular move towards what we already know through our experiences – which is often rooted in racism and actively harmful to Black people. We have to constantly do the internal work so we can turn towards people to listen to them, to cultivate that curiosity and respect.
Clare Steward.
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