Facebook Publication Date: 43964.920138889

On Chrissy and Alison

***REQUIRED READING***
***REQUIRED COMMENT***
***NO REACTS/EMOJIS***

To you all.

This is an addendum to the conversation about Alison and Crissy that garnered great conversation.

An aspect was left untouched however, that I did respond to on the threat itself but I am breaking out here because it’s so important.

White women I want you to think long and hard about your response. I want you to dig deep and find ways that what you’re going to read is true.

Women of color, this may be triggering and/or activating, and I hold you in that. If it’s too much for you to read you don’t have to.

If, and only if, you have the spoons, leave a comment as to how the dynamic has affected you in the past and present. But again I am not about creating secondary trauma for you. Only if you have the spoons and the capacity.

I want everyone to comment and as per our new custom, also respond to at least two others.

I want at least 100 comments on this thread which means I want at least 300 responses to those comments

absolutely no reacts.

_________
To all of you:

When I read that reply from Chrissy I was checking in on my body feelings and what I felt deep fatigue.

I think that is what informed her comment that she ‘just wanted it to be over’.

As a black woman who has gotten her butt kicked by white women a lot these few months oh, it is fatiguing.

It is emotionally weathering.

Particularly when it comes from friends.

Small F friends big F friends it doesn’t matter.

No matter how small the trust and intimacy invested in a person might be even if you’re just someone who blows air kisses at each other at a garden party.

But more often it’s deeper than that so when a relational fissure occurs there is deep psychic fatigue.

Oh my God one more.

Thinking of someone who is lost about a friend every other day for the past 4 months or so- including tonight, I can attest to the fact that it has a deep impact on one’s willingness and ability and even capacity to engage in intimate relationships with other people from the same cohort.

You all need to know just what courage and risk it takes to enter into a relationship with you.

The onus of repair is always on the less powerful person; that is almost always a person of color.

This weekend that happened to me twice it happened again tonight.

So when encountering the next person it’s not a question of ‘if’ there will be relational fissure but ‘when’ and ‘how badly and deeply’ and will I have the emotional spoons to round the circle from connection to disconnection back to repair because the white woman will never ever do it.

Now do you see why a Bang the Drum so hard for relational ethics and white women learning how to hold onto themselves?

I have yet to meet a white person even who am I am in deep relationship with who initiates the repair process.

That’s power. So I want you to think about exactly what it cost Chrissy no matter how shallow the relationship might have been, and how much it cost her to have to ‘be the bigger person’.

Which is the shity position that we are always forced into.

What would it look like if white women assumed the same amount of responsibility for maintaining good relational positioning and for initiating repair when inevitable relationship tears happen?

At core this was a public case study in relationships with white women.

I’m going to make another comment here and ask everybody to Pivot, and hard.

Everyone is externalizing like crazy.

But I want you to think of the times when you were Alison.

And I can guarantee you that if you were ever in relationship with the person of color you were an Allison.

How did you handle yourself?

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