I’m waking up this morning in Tennessee where I’ve been speaking with the brave people across the state who are pushing back against the far right.
First, they came for the Drag Queens.
Yesterday, the state legislature here passed a bill that limits “adult cabaret” performances that feature “topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or female impersonators.” Violating the new law will get you charged with a misdemeanor, or a felony for subsequent offenses. On the same day, the Tennessee legislature also passed a ban on gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.
Everyone I’ve spoken to here so far sees plainly what this is: an easy attack on some of the most vulnerable people in order to gin up the base of Republican voters. So, how are people here pushing back against this? They are speaking out, like Ms. Vidalia Anne Gentry, and finding common cause across identities that sometimes divide us. People living here, at least the ones I’ve been speaking to, understand the moment we’re in, and they are determined not to repeat the mistakes that German Lutheran Martin Niemöller memorialized in his famous post-WW2 poem, “First they came for the socialists, and I said nothing, because I was not a socialist.”
This is where “white work” comes in. We who are raised white cannot let this violence be done in our name. My friend Julia Rhodes Davis is doing the work and sent me her beautiful meditation, White Work, on what it means to divest from whiteness at this particular moment. With her permission, I’m going to share much of that piece here.
“It was during a phone call the day after George Floyd was murdered that a friend held a mirror up for me. When I asked my friend Angel how he was doing in the face of another case of police brutality, he encouraged me to ask that question of myself: How am I doing and why do I (and so many other white people) respond to anti-Black violence by compartmentalizing it and acting as if it only affects Black people? Up until that moment, I didn’t realize that as a white progressive, my conditioning was to see the work of racial justice as for other people with no regard for my own stake in the matter. I know I’m not alone – there are a lot of white progressives who see things this way and it’s critical that we shift our perspective because we have to hold power differently. Acts of charity depend upon the very culture of domination that justice requires we upend.”
This is such a crucial insight about compartmentalizing. I think our upbringing as white people teaches us this compartmentalization as a coping skill to be able to deal with our privileged position. It’s how my parents taught me. When I was growing up in South Texas, we drove into Mexico often. My parents, especially my dad, enjoyed the border towns, the completely different vibe from the U.S. and really admired and enjoyed being around Mexican people (this co-existed alongside all his other racism). On one of those trips when I was about 8 years old, my father, mother and I were walking along a street in Matamoros when we were approached by a frail older woman and what I assumed to be her granddaughter, about my age, begging for coins. My parents looked away from the woman and the young child, and told me to do the same. That’s compartmentalization. Don’t look at people in poverty, stay wrapped in your own comfort and keep moving. I think there’s a deadening that happens when we look away from the pain of others and it takes a toll on us.
Julia writes about suffering physical pain that she couldn’t quite understand, and then put it like this:
The dissonance I experienced between my life and my longing … was causing the pain. For all of the racial justice work I was doing, my body held the wisdom that I was harmed by the same systems of oppression that uphold anti-Black violence, and that I’d better work to dismantle those systems, otherwise I would never be able to escape the anguish of my inherited spiritual disaster.
A week later, I quit my job.
I love this: “my body held the wisdom that I was harmed by the same systems.” Yes, the same systems that are trying to destroy Drag Queens and trans kids, will come for all of us, and in a way, we know this already at a somatic, cellular level.
She closes with an invitation that I want to echo:
I wish to serve as an invitation to other white people to take up this work with me and thousands of others who are working to deepen commitments to racial justice through our daily lives. I write publicly about my experience as a way of finding others who share my longings, so that we may work together to articulate and build a future people wish to move towards.
Let’s build that future together. Find your people, mobilize. Do read Julia’s entire piece here.