Facebook Publication Date: 11/18/2018 20:11

We have had a robust, and necessary conversation about the ethics of direct action. Rather than post in the subthread, I have created a new post here with an addendum that details my position. I look forward to continuing engagement and dialog.

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Lace on Race sez:

My letter to the Editors of The Atlantic about that unfortunate article. Let’s see if it prints. At the minimum, I am sure the author will read it. Article in comments.

***Edited to add additional commentary. There has been robust conversation at Lace on Race, and on my personal page, as to the appropriateness and the efficacy of uncomfortable direct action. Below you will find my response, as an addendum to the letter submitted to The Atlantic.

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Dear Editors:

It is deeply unsavory, and yes, uncivil, for those who benefit and profit from this current system (and that includes writing about from a safe ‘moral’, emotional, and physical distance) dictating the terms of what constitutes civil discourse and how one should or should not engage with powers, institutions, and systems that negatively and violently impact lives–and that includes those who pull the levers, and run the spreadsheets and attempt to make the most immoral and harmful policies palatable by speech or by written word.

As a woman of color who runs a community that deals with race, we face this question daily. Of the 4000 people who engage with Lace on Race, there are 4000 different answers as to what their own convictions, morality, and personal circumstances lead them to do.

What we are careful and diligent to avoid, however, is making those calls for others in the community.

There are memes going around these last two years which basically suggest that whatever one might have done in 1930’s Germany is what you are doing now. I agree with the thrust of that–and I hope that if I were in the same cafe as a person conducting Nazi business, that I would have had the courage to speak up–maybe in studied discourse–but more probably with emotional exhortation and admonition.

No, wait, I would not have.

I am a Black woman. I would have been one of the first killed. And no one would have dumped water on anybody’s head to protest my broken body.

***Addendum: additional commentary***

Our bodies and souls are brutalized and vandalized every day.

Every day.

No one can ever convince me of the ethics of property trumping the well being and the lives of the marginalized. Yet, when there are are concerns about negative consequences for oppressors, passive and active, that is exactly what is being said.

I reject that utterly.

Be more concerned about Flint still not having clean water than about an official’s house being egged.

Be more concerned about the latest Black or Brown person killed for being heroic, or for just existing, than someone whose explicit policies made this ongoing phenomenon more probable for my brothers and sisters–for me–being confronted and run out of a restaurant.

Be more concerned about how many Black women have died because of systemic medical racism and classism than you do about a highway being blocked.

Ok. Real Talk.

I live in multiple intersections, as we all do. In some intersections, I am the oppressed. In some intersections I profit from and or collude with institutions and systems that oppress.

I have to confront and acknowledge that. I have to own that some of my own privilege and comfort come at the expense of others.

I have to confront and acknowledge that I enjoy the fruits of a rotten tree, a tree that shakes off lifegiving fruit for some, and rotten cores for others. I have to admit all of this– even as I fight to expose and dismantle it in favor of fruit that is nourishing for all.

I have to acknowledge that if someone on the margins sees me, or anyone as a stand in for systems and institutions and then calls me out on the ways in which I stand with oppression, by my job, by my social standing as a homeowner on stolen land, by my participation in a financial system that is meant to break and to keep down so very many, and so if that person stands at the gate of my property and shouts truth to power I benefit from; if they pour water on my head in a cafe in La Jolla, if they ask me what dafuq I am doing in La Jolla in the first place, if they assume from my carefully curated appearance and assume that I stand with those who would harm them before I stand up for them,

Welp.

I have to confront the fact that because of my life circumstances (sound mind, skills that are valued enough to be paid for, a body that looks less broken than it is, a face that is not that hard to look at) and yes–also my life choices, that they are not entirely wrong.

I can choose to see them as instigators, as vandals, as threats, and in so doing, I can dismiss their real points and the pain that undergirds them. I can criminalize them before I indict the system that renders them mostly mute in a society that only sees them when they want to humiliate and punish them. I can judge them more harshly than those who leverage an apparatus made to create an entire, and entirely cruel system, on their backs.

Or I can see them as prophets. Prophets are never ever recognized for who they are in the moment. Prophets talk over people. They make people uncomfortable. They turn over tables in temples. They point fingers. They takes sides. They howl “NO!”

And they do not do it in ways we who profit would have them do.

When Marsha threw the brick at Stonewall, she vandalized. For me. For us.

When Mitch McConnell was confronted in a cafe, it was because the odds were nil that the person doing the truthtelling would ever get an audience in his office.

For these reasons and more, I am loath to tell any marginalized person how to go about the work of their liberation, even when, especially when, that liberation will cause discomfort for me, either in the experiencing or in the witnessing.

In some ways, I stand outside the gates, shouting truth to power, in my sensible shoes with arch supports, waiting to get into my car with heat and a good sound system with which to hear protest songs. In some ways I am in the Court of the King. And in some ways I am Esther, feeling the call to tell the truth, even as I endeavor to hold on to the spoils of power adjacency. I need to acknowledge all of this.

The souls and hearts, the very lives of people will, for me, always come before the status quo–even as I cringe as I acknowledge that, in many ways I *am* the very definition of status quo.

I need to thank the prophets and step up my game. I need to feel the weight of the brick that shatters oppression–even if that brick shatters an actual or a metaphorical window. I need to take off my Clarks and cut my feet on the stones. I need to march with people singing protest songs off key, and I need to remember that my respectability can often come at the cost of their lives.

In short, I need to confront this nice society. I need to use the fish fork at the perfectly set table to poke at the society that has as many ways to oppress as the number of cutlery at the fancy table in the cafe in La Jolla, or Manhattan, or the Westside.

I have to remember that I have been allowed inside the gates as a double agent. Or am I just another sycophant at the King’s table?

_____

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