[Lace Watkins]

Hi! This is Laura, on 7.1.2021, on behalf of Lace. Today is a beautiful day. Lace is abiding with Aunt Cathy right now, and it is Aunt Cathy’s birthday!

Please join me in cherishing this incredible woman. Lace has written about how much Aunt Cathy means to her, and the good she has done in the world.

You can learn about or refresh your memory on Everyday Hero Catherine Debose at Lace’s post below, and join us in the Bistro to raise a glass and grab a slice of cake in her honor!

https://laceonrace.com/2021/02/28/everyday-hero-catherine-debose/

Everyday Hero Catherine DeBose

Discussion

[Danielle Holcombe]

This is beautiful Lace! I long to know Aunt Cathy (and I hear she lives about 45 min away from me ).

This made me think about the opportunities I missed (to be an Aunt Cathy in another’s life) but also gave me a real sense of longing – to hold and be held.

In the simple everyday

I’m really sitting with the part where you said y’all didn’t really talk about trauma.

I battle. I battle and attack everything. So even in relationship, I’m looking to conquer. Not necessarily the Other, but absolutely their struggles.

And in my battle stance, I lose the person and see only a struggle. And that doesn’t look like love, as I reflect on it that way.

I’ll hold the image of Aunt Cathy in my mind as I walk.

[Megan Parmar]

This piece truly is a beautiful love letter and a beautiful person to emulate. I also focus on the fixing and connecting that sometimes I forget to just listen. Especially listen so I can be what the other needs me to be. So much of this space is about not centering ourselves and Aunt Cathy is a wonderful daily reflection on how to serve the North Star.

[Shara Cody]

I see myself in trying to fix and not just listening and being present too @Meganparmar

I’ve been working on replacing my behavior of telling/making suggestions with asking questions instead so that I listen more. It’s helping me be more empathetic and respond with what the person asks for or needs which will make me less harmful to Black and brown people.

[Rebecca McClinton]

I’ve been thinking on those strategies you mention here, too, @shar , and another one I’ve been working on is not being the first to speak (eg: in a group meeting), but waiting, holding back, and even going last.

[Konstanze Weltersbach]

I try to keep in mind the difference between „do you need someone to listen“ and „do you need brainstorming and suggestions“.

The first one is not easy for me, I am too „solution-oriented“ in my reflexes.

[Christin Spoolstra]

I love what you say here about asking questions instead of making suggestions. In using that to pivot to race, I’m thinking about white folk in antiracism work and how our default is the value of “getting our hands dirty” but we often dive in before we understand and/or get so focused on contributing that we insert ourselves into leadership. Recently Lace shared a Robert Downing Jr song where she liked to “correct” the lyrics. I have one of those songs myself, the line is “Keep my eyes to serve and my hands to learn.” I always wanted to flip those to keep my service more active. But my eyes need to serve. Just like Aunt Cathy’s ears do.

[Jessie Lee]

Cross posted from website:

I love this so much.

Walking eye to eye and pouring into another can be so powerful. I think of M’s poem about holding another well. How we relate to each other is at the core of how we dismantle white supremacy.

I’m so glad you had an Aunt Cathy to pour into you, and I wonder the direction your path would’ve taken if not for her role in your life. Lace on Race may not even exist. We often talk about impact in relation to harm, but I don’t give enough consideration to if I’m impacting people as a corrective experience, and if I’m holding them well enough that they may go on to hold another well, as your Aunt Cathy did for you and now you do for the members of this community.

This part landed beautifully for me: “Then and now, I am amazed at her eyes that always held what I would later know as ‘unconditional positive regard’; channeling Rogers before I even knew who the psychologist even was. I was always a pleasant surprise. Always worth putting down the paper, or the mixing spoon; always ready with coffee, and always an ear for the chatter of a girl, then, later, a young woman who thrived. Everyone deserves a Cathy DeBose in their lives, even for only a while.” On first reading, I thought immediately: your Aunt Cathy is my Ginny Grandma; my Ginny Grandma is your Aunt Cathy and reminisced about how I’ve been poured into in this way. On second reading, my focus shifts to my responsibility to love on and pour into another.

[Emily Holzknecht]

I thought of my Aunt Sharon. I did not need much from her, but when I did, she poured into me despite all of her own challenges. And I know she was Aunt Cathy for others. I know she took in a friend of one of her sons and he lived with her until adulthood in the sort of unofficial adoption that happens in Black communities.

[Christina Sonas]

I take away from this final, personal hero, Ms. DeBose, that all of us have the capacity to be a hero to someone. All of the celebrated heroes we’ve explored, they all started out very much like us: unique people born into their community and the world, each with something of themselves that could be shared. And I can see the layer of white supremacy that tells white people like me that we don’t have to share, and that drives us to become takers rather than givers more often than not. We’re, I’m, certainly takers in relationship with Black and brown people.

That’s really all it takes to be a hero: the giving of ourselves to community. Some people have highly visible things to give, like the theology and oratory of Dr. King; some end up being highly visible because of where or how they give, like Ms. Johnson, Ms. Jackson, and Ms. Vaughan, or Dr. Bethune. But it’s not the visibility that’s important; it’s the gift, and the where and the how.

[Jessie Lee]

Christina- thanks for this pivot to race, which I was missing in my first comment, and which is helping me connect the dots. Specifically between my anti hero behavior of withdrawing from community and the supremacy baked into that choice.

As you say, all it takes to be an Aunt Cathy to someone is to give of myself to community. To see and let myself be seen. I can’t do that when I’m looking up (putting people on pedestals), or down (holding myself above and apart in contempt). I can’t do that if I’m just coming here to consume, or if I’m just coming here as long as it feels good for me and *I’m* getting something out of it.

As Lace said in one video, the lipstick is not for me. At least, it’s not only for me. Whatever personal growth, learning, and enjoyment I experience here are great, but/and ancillary.

Becoming new people doing new things in new ways means rejecting this supremacist way of always taking, which means unlearning my colonizer’s entitlement to extract whatever is of use to me. Here, I do that when I lurk- when I know I only have enough time to read but not comment, and I take Laces labor anyway. That’s not seeing Lace’s humanity; it’s seeing her in terms of what she can offer me. That’s supremacist AF, and a sign that I have a lot of unpacking, unlearning, uncentering, and realigning to North Star to do.

Thank you for giving of yourself so freely to this community, and modeling that for me. So I can, and do, model it for another.

[Catherine Seaver]

Jessie and Christina, I really appreciate this focus on giving to community and in the giving we emulate the kind of walking we’ve seen in the heroes this month.

Jessie, your words: “my anti hero behavior of withdrawing from community and the supremacy baked into that choice” are really making me think. This is totally the flip side isn’t it? Consuming and justifying the one-sided behavior because of our “weakness”… when really it’s our whiteness. I’ve got a lot more to think about here.

[Shara Cody]

The idea of not sharing reminds me of the messages growing up not to get mixed up in someone else’s business and not to talk about your own business. It’s basically telling kids and young people not to listen and not to share which prevents community, upholds white supremacy, and as you said makes white people takers.

And calling it “visibility” feels like a good name for the difference between the everyday versus high profile or famous. I need to look for the everyday heroes around me to acknowledge and emulate and live out my praxis everyday.

[Laura Berwick]

Middle March by George Eliot isn’t really one of my very favorite books, but I’ve read it, and one part of it, one theme, did touch me very deeply. One of the main characters is a passionate young woman who wants to do something striking in service to Changing The World In A Big Way(TM). She learns that it can be just as important and rewarding to change the world in a small way, for one person, or just a few people. I never had big ambitions, but changing the world, making it better, for the people who know me, that felt like something I could do.

And that sounds like exactly the sort of hero Aunt Cathy has been, to you, Lace, but to many others as well. And then those benefits ripple out. From her to you, from you to us, from us to… our corners of our world and from there the world? That’s my hope, and that seems to be the best way of honoring, every day, the people who are heroes every day. I remain committed to my walk here being a front-and-center way in which I can be and spread change. Please thank Aunt Cathy for me when you talk to her next!

[Catherine Seaver]

Yes, that’s it! Lace, please thank Aunt Cathy for me too. That’s what struck me deeply.. the ripples and impact of her love. I am so grateful.

[Rebecca McClinton]

“Everyone needs a different kind of love”. Love that, and appreciate the highlighting here how when approaching each moment as an opportunity to pour forth, you never know where those moments might lead in someone else’s life. Sometimes, as Lace mentioned here, the meaningful thing I do might be who I introduce someone to who then becomes that person for the other. I read a book many years ago that was a story based on small moments, the butterfly effect, as I think it’s called, how small moments of connection compile to a narrative of love. This makes me think of racial justice work in that way…each moment, conversation, action, internal/external piece of work compiling that narrative together. And thank you, Aunt Cathy…you leave a most beautiful legacy!

[Catherine Seaver]

What a deep and beautiful love letter to Catherine DeBose, Aunt Cathy.

Once again I am struck by the ripples of this kind of love, how Aunt Cathy’s love and consistent reliability made it possible for you Lace to also choose to live it out in creating this space.

It leaves me thinking about who I am pouring my love into – as I type this, I’m actually cradling my sleepy 6-year-old who just woke up – but I’m thinking about the ways to make my engagement in our community at school more personal. As you say, there are policy and effective programs… and I’m all for setting those up and making them happen… but there is nothing that takes the place of BEING with a child, of seeing them grow and loving them in all they are and have the capacity to be.

This is a profound reminder of choosing to be that person in others’ lives. I’ll come back to this again, but I’m just at this moment so deeply grateful for the impact of Catherine DeBose in your life Lace – and now in my life. I keep walking, with you and this community that is here because of her love.

[Christina Sonas]

One thing I’m mulling is about a white person becoming an everyday hero to a Black or brown person, esp. a child; there are lots of programs that promote this sort of interaction. It feels very consumptive and white-savior to me, and it’s always inter-community. I need to support Black and brown people in ways that counteract the white supremacy that depletes their resources for being heroes in their own communities. They become heroes despite white supremacy; I can do my part all the same.

[Rebecca McClinton]

@christina I’m just finishing listening to an audiobook by a Black adoptive mother and learned about “Black adoption” that happens of it’s own accord without state agency involvement (and the lack of trust understandably involved there), in which other relatives or friends wrap around and raise kiddos not their own. Don’t know how one would go about finding and supporting those individuals, but it was helpful learning more about it. Certainly agree that programs that support kiddos can be very consumptive and white-savior-y.

[Konstanze Weltersbach]

It’s a difference if it’s a program or a relationship, isn’t it? I have to be aware about my reasons and my ways to support (Black and brown) children and if it’s about them or myself.

Being a safe place for children can be consumptive if they’re welcome for the wrong reason (we just took one of our children out of an after school program because of the damaging and racist white-saviour-attitude of one of the care takers towards our child), but if they are welcome for themselves and supported how they need it, it can also be just that – safe(ish).

[Emily Holzknecht]

I’ve been thinking about the difference between programs and Aunt Cathy too and where white saviorism lies. As a preschool teacher, I was pouring myself into children and also turning a blind eye to missing tuition checks or paying part of the tuition of some children myself when I knew their families couldn’t pay and the state wouldn’t pay for them either. But the pouring in was occupation-based, and so most of it happened during specific hours (although often work with parents happened outside those hours) and it ended after the child was no longer enrolled and I was being compensated (a little) for doing it.

I am thinking also of how people’s white supremacy came out so much in the progressive program I ran when it came to “fairness”. For example when a child had responses in the classroom that were based in past trauma, so many white families and white student teachers would be concerned with the fairness to the other children. That the child with trauma is taking away valuable learning time for the other children because that child needs so much teacher attention. Or it’s unfair for the other children to have to hear so much screaming and crying. The concern was never about how unfair it was that a child who is only four years old has clearly experienced significant trauma. It was never about how unfair it is that the racism that the white families and white student teachers and I benefit from has contributed significantly to the reality that so many of these very young children with trauma are Black and brown. The conversations with families about “what is fairness and maybe it doesn’t look like what you think it looks like (and what white supremacy has told you it looks like” have become very familiar to me.

[Shara Cody]

Such a beautiful tribute to a beautiful person who made a difference in Lace’s life and the lives of many others. Everyday moments have big impacts on children and people. This includes being present and making time for others with openness and encouragement as Aunt Cathy did just by looking at Lace with ‘unconditional positive regard’. This everyday being is what Lace is guiding us to in order have an impact one person at a time and help create the Beloved Community. I’ll continue rooting out white supremacy within me and learning better ways of relating to lessen harm to Black and brown people by me so that I can act in this way anywhere, anytime, and all the time.

[Julia Tayler]

The part about everyday occurrences struck me too. What impact are we having that we don’t even know about?

[Clare Steward]

**cross posted from the website and fb**

What a beautiful, moving and powerful tribute to your Aunt Cathy, Lace. Thank you for sharing this with us reminding us that every day heroes deserve recognition and thanks. Your love and respect for your Aunt Cathy and the inspiration that she gave you is evident in every single word.

“…resilience is a skill that can be honed, but that it can rarely be honed absent community”

The more I am in community here, the more I realize that this is absolutely true. The relationships we form with people and the ability to bring our authentic selves to the work and to communicate with honesty and see each other eye to eye is what has kept me in the car when toxic shame wants to creep in and tempts me to blow up, shut down and run away…abandoning the work of anti-racism. I trust those with whom I am in community to call me in when I am wrong and I know it is out of an authentic effort to help me course correct and reaffirm my path towards our North Star of lessening and mitigating harm. This work can only be done if I am willing to be seen and known and I am willing to see and know others. True change can not happen if I approach with guards, walls and shields.

“Harm befalls Black and brown children, by virtue of their breathing and refusal to die, be it literally or metaphorically. It is a given. We can acknowledge it now; we can quantify it in tables and graphs and stats; we can give papers and hold conferences. But then the abstracts are read, the conferences are finished, and the lives of marginalized children stay exactly the same. “

This is so extremely powerful. The work done here is not for my personal growth, although it is definitely a residual benefit. The work done here is to lessen and mitigate the harm endured Black and Brown children and Black and Brown people, as perpetuated by wp and white supremacy, so that we can move beyond recognizing the harm and trauma and work towards tangible changes and policy reform and equity. Aunt Cathy “embodied, lived out, was and is, the original North Star.” I am galvanized by your words and by Aunt Cathy’s way of being and am committed to working hard to live out and become a person who is in full alignment with the NS. As you say, I want to get the knowledge in AND make the continual steps towards living it out….every day and in every action reflexively and without wavering.

[Emily Holzknecht]

Thank you, Lace, for sharing Aunt Cathy with us. And thank you Aunt Cathy for being an everyday hero and for pouring into Lace!

I feel like inside of me my humanity and my white supremacy are always warring with one another. My humanity is saying YES! Of course I will! There’s always enough to share! Yes! Yes! Yes! And my white supremacy says “But what if..?” “But what about…? “There’s not enough.” “Protect yourself.” “Boundaries.” “Later.” “Less.” “No.”

I can see walking with Lace on Race that the humanity side is getting stronger and the white supremacy side is getting weaker. I have to keep chipping away though. Chipping and digging.

[Emily Holzknecht]

I started thinking about our discussion about Ralph David Abernathy and the fact that white supremacy culture wants us to see people like MLK as stand alone heroes when they were actually the face for a larger network of people doing behind the scenes work and holding them up. Ralph David Abernathy did that holding up while MLK was doing the work that we know him for, but Aunt Cathy illustrates how the behind the scenes person is not necessarily doing their work in the present. In Aunt Cathy’s case, she did the most significant part of her supporting Lace and Lace’s work long before Lace began doing her work, long before we knew Lace. White supremacy not only wants us to see stand alone figures, it also wants us to devalue the caring of children. In fact we often value the an adult’s accomplishment of persevering and overcome an adverse childhood. But we rarely seek to give credit and value those like Aunt Cathy who were there to get children through those adverse childhoods, to water them so that they could grow into adults who overcame. White supremacy does not value nurturers. I am reminded of Lace’s question in the Abernathy discussion: “Is it worth doing the work if no one knows your name?” And of course we look at Lace and say, yes, of course, Aunt Cathy’s work was worth it.

[Rhonda Freeman]

Thinking about how Aunt Cathy loved Lace. Thinking about how much she supported others that we don’t know about. Pivoting to race, I am reminded that it is not my job to know who I affect or how or to keep a record. It is my role to keep my eye on the North Star. To listen, to keep my eye out for where I can support: financially, emotionally, with my hands and heart where and when I am asked.

[Julia Tayler]

I think I need to remember to listen too. Listen to what people really need. Not what I think they want.

[Julia Tayler]

Thank you Lace for sharing your Cathy with us. Everyone deserves a Cathy. What really stood out to me was the ripple effect of her love. Without her there probably wouldn’t be a Lace on Race. Thank you Cathy. It also resonates that my interaction with people can mean a lot to them. And me.

[Christin Spoolstra]

Happy Birthday, Aunt Cathy! The power of seeing and seeking to understand someone – especially a child – is transformative. Aunt Cathy modeled the eye-to-eye hesed that we all practice here and bring to our antiracism work. Thank you for pouring into Lace so she could create this space where we all pour into one another. Though you do not know me, you have changed me. Thank you.

[Shara Cody]

Wishing you a wonderful birthday, Aunt Cathy! Lace models the Hesed love you show her with everything she says and does and I hope to model it back to Lace and out into my life to help shape the world to the North Star. It’s incredible the way that Aunt Cathy didn’t “talk” with Lace about the hard things but taught the important lessons by living it out. How often I find myself searching for words or wishing I had prepared what to say when really living it out will have the greatest impact and with doing it will come the words. The words won’t be perfect but they’ll be real and they’ll grow with me.

[Julia Tayler]

Happy Birthday Aunt Cathy! What a great gift to spend time with loved ones. Your love and attention is amazing and we are all fortunate to be learning those lessons through Lace. Thank you for your care and love.

[isa hopkins]

I’m so struck by Lace’s reference to the generosity of parents, who understand that they alone cannot meet all the needs of their children… and how resistant white parenting seems to be, to this basic reality.

I am not a parent. I am very deeply involved in the care of my niece and nephew, however; and my sister-in-law is often told how lucky she is, to have me around. How other white moms wish they had someone they could trust like that. In another online anti-racist community I am a member of, there was a discussion of online mom groups, and the white supremacy so many of them embody. Other members explained the appeal of such groups to those of us who aren’t parents: that white motherhood is a profoundly isolating experience, and that the desperate desire for community, combined with a desperate competition for “what’s best for my child,” often combine to form deeply toxic environments. Emily commented above, on her experience as a preschool teacher, about how this competition manifests as a desire for “fairness” — not care, not compassion, not coming together; just an individualized idea of “fairness.”

One thing I thought of often during the pandemic was a childhood neighbor of mine. We’d just moved back to the street where I was born, but to a different house, and the neighbors were a couple in their late twenties. She worked part-time as a nurse and spent a lot of time in her back garden, separated from ours by two fences: a short chain-link one around our yard, and a taller wooden one around theirs. If I stood on top of the chain-link I could just poke my head over the wooden fence and chat. And the first summer there, that’s what I did: my mother was in the hospital with cancer and my father was in the middle of a mental health crisis and I was this semi-feral eight-year-old with little adult supervision.

And my neighbor knew that, and she chose generosity. She took me out to lunch. She talked to me about whatever I had to say. She found materials for me to do art projects. She filled a role that I badly needed. We are still in touch.

And I think that’s a rare thing, in whiteness. The assumption is always that the nuclear family should be enough; that community isn’t really needed. The relentless individualism starts so early. And as others mentioned above, the idea of this sort of community and mentorship does exist within whiteness, but always as white saviorism: let me go into this poor Black or brown child’s life and “help.” Which calls to mind Baldwin’s words, that white folks do not need to accept Black people, because Black folks need no acceptance whatsoever from white people; rather, white folks need to accept *one another.* Because truly, how ridiculous is it that those of us who know nothing other than choosing ourselves or our nuclear families might ever somehow fashion ourselves a “mentor” to folks from communities so resilient that they have survived generations of (our own) attempted genocide?!

We must learn with each other, and pour into each other. Exactly as Lace urges us to do here in this space.

[Nicole Larson]

This is a beautiful letter.

Lace, your Aunt Cathy is a role model not only for you and other Black and brown people, but for white people like me too. The fact that she *saw* you in full as you are says so much, as does your description of how too many people, especially white people, look through and past you and other Black and brown people.

I see not only the beautiful faces of everyone here and on the Facebook page, but the way each of us communicate, learn, and/or advise and instruct with and from each other. I look forward to getting more deeply acquainted and developing deeper, heart-level relationships with at least many in the community, including you, Lace.

I know from personal experience how crucial the difference between verbal love and true love–like that of Christ–is, especially for children and for those who did not receive it in their formative years. I want to grow in this, and especially as I follow the North Star: Lessening and mitigating the harm endured by Black and brown people, perpetuated by white people and white supremacy.

[Author]

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