[Lace Watkins]

https://laceonrace.com/2021/11/30/hanukkah-reflections-2021/

Hanukkah Reflections, 2021

Discussion

[Rebecca McClinton]

I’m thinking how dedication and rededication are a moment to moment thing in this work, how one moment I can have full Hesed heart and the next be totally self-centered. I still have pauses and hesitations that are too big and must continue to push that time to narrow. Appreciative of this space to pause and reflect.

[Kelsi Watters]

àRebecca I can identify with this. I also feel there are times when I am fully dedicated, and at other times I have not fully lived out the values I say I am committed to – and then I have to renew my commitment. I agree with you that dedication and rededication are moment by moment, day by day. White supremacy is a chronic condition and state of the world we live in, so my commitment and renewed commitment needs to be constant. I appreciate this community, how we hold one another accountable and encourage each other to keep walking.

[Rebecca McClinton]

I have to remind myself a lot that getting it perfect isn’t the point, that focusing on trying to do it perfectly can be a distraction from leaning in and getting it real, right where I’m at with what I’m doing today in this moment.

[Jessie Lee]

Rebecca, your reflection gives me a bit of hope and energy. The moment to moment oscillations remind me that I have the capacity to have either a full Hesed heart or to be self-centered and full of supremacist motivations. That’s a humble place to be, I think— aware of our constant potentials both to be healing corrective experiences or violent secondary traumas. Kelsi, I like your description of white supremacy as chronic. Makes me think of medical conditions that must be managed day to day.

[Dee (Dalina) Weinfurtner]

It seems to me that white supremacy is great at teaching passiveness. I see examples of this in the white-centered conservative Christian theology and even in the white-centered “wellness/spirituality” community. Love is a feeling, specifically a good feeling and its a lot of wishing “loving kindness” or the infamous “thoughts and prayers”. For a lot of my life I felt like “love” really drove my actions. I felt connected to “agape” love and maybe it kept me from falling too deep into traps that many others fall into as I was growing up in white supremacist soup. Yet, I was missing something and I think it could be that love is not the feel good driver of just being a kind person, but rather love is the outcome of living out justice, self- sacrifice and actions that serve the greater good but often are much deeper than what feels good in the moment. Sarah Hurwitz explains in this essay that Hanukkah is a reminder that love and justice are deeper than just doing a thing, especially when it sometimes doesn’t feel good. This essay and Lace’s commentary on these jewish values on the 8 nights of Hanukkah really help me to see alternatives to white centered cultural values that seem hallow and not quite effective even in the best of “intentions”. I really do think Lace has modeled Hesed in the midst of this year, and modeled being who she says she wants to be and has encouraged me to become more of who I say I want to be and who I envision I am capable of being. I appreciate this time of rededication, it is during a time of huge transition for me and it is my hope that the combination of rededication along with the overhaul of what my day to day life looks like will make for a stronger praxis and more reliability, in service to the North Star.

[Kelsi Watters]

Being part of this community has allowed me to practice and bear witness to Hesed love as a central component of Northstar values. I think that white supremacy, and white culture, teaches us the passive kind of love that is lip service without taking action or getting too close when we feel uncomfortable. Hesed love is authentic, tangible, muscular, and difficult and uncomfortable at times.

[Jessie Lee]

“But you have never seen me waver from North Star. Have never seen me malign others. Have never seen me fail to meet your eyes.”

What a beautiful self-assessment. I’m thinking about how rarely can the average person say that they have not wavered from the single value they say they hold most dear. And I’m reminded of how we are not average; we are new people doing new things in new ways. Through daily and sometimes hourly rededication, we are becoming people who are shaking loose the shackles of white supremacy by engaging differently with each other. By abiding with each other in Hesed and working together to build a beloved community where people thrive and white supremacy loses its power and grip. This Hanukkah, I am rededicating myself to transformation… to showing up as I am, without concealing parts of my praxis that require the most weeding to maintain.

[Emily Holzknecht]

Here are my Hanukkah reflections: Recently I was in the Reno airport with my brother. We had been through several airports in two days on our medical trip to a specialist in Nevada, and we had seen various forms of price gouging of airport sodas. I have been told since then though I haven’t looked it up myself yet that cities often sell vending rights at airports to a monopoly, which allows that monopoly to set prices consistently high across vendors in the airport. I am not a soda drinker myself, and my body is able to pump oxygen up to my brain reliably even if I am forced to be upright all day as one is when traveling through airports and on planes. Also if I needed some caffeine to help my brain function, I could pay $5 for a Coke without cringing about the dent that is putting in my finances.

The McDonalds at Reno airport, however, had large sodas for only $2.09, less than have the $5 sodas we had seen the day before, so we were standing in line to order when the person in front of us who appeared to be a white man started in on the cashier who appeared to be Latina. The McDonalds menu had digital signs that changed what was being advertised. One advertisement screen shared that at McDonalds all fountain drinks, any size are always $1. At the same time the pricing screen for sodas listed prices for small, medium and large fountain drinks, all costing more than $1. The white man was outraged that he was being charge $2.09 for a large soda when the advertisement had said that all sizes of drinks are $1. The cashier was telling him that she can’t do anything about it, indicating the button on the register that she can push to ring up a large soda. Then he threatened her with a lawsuit, claiming he is a case action lawyer (which seemed super doubtful to me just looking at him and also considering how he was approaching this situation).

I stepped in between him and the cashier and what I managed to say in the moment was to keep repeating over and over, “It’s not her.” He kept saying things like “She has to tell her manager to change it” as if somehow it is in the paygrade of a McDonalds cashier to fix the system. Then another person who appeared to be a white man who had been standing there looking at the menu the whole time said “All of this over a $2 soda!” and then the “class action lawyer” turned around and had it out with him for a while and I apologized to her several times saying “I’m sorry that happened to you” and ordered and paid.

The “lawyer” left after a bit and the white man who had been having it out with him ordered and then thanked me for saying something. I don’t think he would have done anything if it had just been the lawyer arguing with the cashier, unless he was being held up because of it. He made a comment and took the “lawyer” on because when I stepped between the “lawyer” and the cashier, the “lawyer’s” aggression was pointed at me instead of at the cashier. Also this “lawyer” fella, yes he was white and probably a man, but he had no other characteristics about how he presented himself that are idolized under white supremacy. He was thoroughly unappealing which makes it easier to “turn against him”.

I have been thinking a lot about this encounter. I am glad that I didn’t hesitate long. I think I could be even faster in the future. I have thought about how “it’s not her” is not eloquent or some clever manifesto, but it was effective enough in the moment and if I had managed to come up with a clever monologue in that moment, who would that have been for? Most likely it would have been for me, centering me, therefore the three words that I did manage were better. I have been thinking about what mitigation could have looked like since I only engaged in lessening harm, but harm was already done and that cashier had to carry the stress from that experience with her the rest of the day and longer really. I would have carried it longer than a day if I had been the cashier. And she has to come back to work knowing that the flippin menu still says both that all drinks are $1 and at the same time that each size drink costs more than $1 so it is likely another white “lawyer” will come along and use that as an excuse to treat her badly.

I have also been thinking about how when I was younger, I would have been that “lawyer”, at least inside. I don’t think I would have felt empowered enough to take it out on the cashier, but I would have seen the taking down hypocrisy and corporation as the only justice to consider in that situation and that the cashier was not of enough value to consider, reasonable collateral damage for the greater cause of… stopping false advertisement, making sure a corporation followed the rules. My star then was the rules, justice was in service to the rules. Rules made by white supremacist capitalists. I agree that it is not okay for drinks to cost more in airports where people need them more and have no other option than to be gouged. I am not a fan of McDonalds. I think we need a ton more protections against corporations and capitalism. And false advertisement still irritates me. If that unappealing self proclaimed lawyer goes through with his lawsuit and wins against McDonalds, I’m all for that, but the value of the human being working the cash register at McDonalds in the Reno airport has to come first. Lessening and mitigating harm endured by Black and brown people perpetuated by white people like me and by white supremacy has to be at the center of justice, not the rules.

[Author]

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