Bring a gift or something to share. Make small talk. Ask about the family but don’t dwell. Eat the food and extend compliments. Don’t overstay your welcome. 

I am hedging a guess that you were taught some of these house guest “rules,” overtly or learned. Social norms. Be friendly, don’t be known. If any information is shared, it certainly isn’t personal and amounts to gossip. As white people, we carry this reserved “politeness” into anti racism spaces, as well. 

However, instead of serving the vague ideals of good behavior, these patterns reinforce segregation. Remaining unknown, while refusing to know others. Avoiding deep discussions or challenging moments. Wanting to bring gifts but leaving early while there is still light in the sky.

Lace has used the metaphor before of this space (and other community spaces) being a home, a place of intimacy. All too often, the following scene plays out:

Thank you for inviting me to your home. The front porch is lovely. I think I shall swing here for some time. I hear some loud discussions happening in the house and I just don’t feel a part of the group yet. 

Oh! Dinner bell. I can’t wait to sit at the table and have a filling meal. Yes, I will take orangeade with my food. Oh no, I cannot participate in the conversation. I am here to fill my stomach, you see. The dining room is for eating. 

Ah, I think I will take a slice of pie to the living room. Thank you. Tea would be lovely. Two sugars, no cream.

No, no. I am resting now and eating my pie. I want to enjoy and appreciate the treat I’ve been given. Conversation? I must abstain. I don’t think you know me well enough to make a difference. 

I think I shall take my leave. I am clearly not helping this space. I am an unknown, and I just don’t think that the conversations you are holding here can actually affect change in this space. Goodnight.

How white of us to decide what spaces can and cannot do….what behaviors must and must not be addressed in those spheres. Where can we talk about anti racism and start learning how to have the relationships that will challenge our comfort?

Not at home, because that is where we find rest and spend time with our family.

Not at work, because that is where we do our occupation, influenced and structured by the system. 

Not online, where we can hide behind an old and discredited theory that communication is somehow inhibited simply because it is text based.

Where then?

In the cute book clubs where we consume the latest written words on racism, leaving the ink on the page instead of seared in our hearts and stained on our hands?

Amongst friends whose lives look strikingly similar, where we receive assurances that our savior profession or deep wanting of change is proof of a renewed root system?

In the church, where words of radical behavior are discussed academically but implementation stops at a sometimes remembered daily prayer?

Of course, there will be no change or discussion where we white people have decided we cannot go. The last hundreds of years prove that. 

And now that we can no longer stop the flow of discussion in public spaces, the knowledge that our racism has woven into every fiber of our culture….it is too much! *Presses hand on forehead* What are we to do? *Swoon* Shall we just become shells of beings and do nothing at all?

Newsflash. We already have. 

We are shells and have tried to fill up that emptiness with stolen goods. We refuse to learn how to hold the dissonance of that, to use that information to understand historically and presently how our actions sting and harm Black and brown people daily. 

Can I escape ALL the harm I do, through appropriation, goods acquired through slavery, accumulation of resources, etc.?….no. Harm is woven and it is woven deep.

But to use that to despair, give up, blow up, shut down, or run away is taking away all my agency for new steps. For using fictive imagination to understand how I make others less safe in all the spaces I exist in. 

Must I hold a perfect solution to be motivated to actually change? Seems like that is often the expectation of white people. We demand that discussing the embedded racism in the everyday result in something that could absolve us so we could live without the weight of what we have done, are doing, and will continue to do. 

What if we stopped needing a solution before we’ve truly listened and absorbed? What if we risked being misunderstood (or understood) and being known to engage with others and know them? 

What if we stayed a while, after eating our slice of pie, to understand the time, labor, and intellect that went into feeding us, so that next time we stop by, we venture into the kitchen to cook too. Perhaps, allow ourselves to be known. And, as we are known, radically changed.

The key point is we must stay, from start to finish. We must linger after to help clean up the messes made. To be frustrated and at odds, impolite even (which is NOT unkind), but still pushing through so that at the end of the evening hugs are shared, eye to eye, with no residue.

After all, “when we encounter another individual truly as a person, not as an object for use, we become fully human.” Martin Buber

Join us in The Bistro to engage and discuss.