American Exceptionalism
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Sliding Away from Relevancy
If you haven’t been tracking the news, there’s been a dust-up in the American Evangelical world. An influential publishing outfit that produces RELEVANT magazine has been having some of its more dysfunctional efforts and people come to light. You can go read the initial posts by Mr. Andre Henry (a former Managing Editor) here, or related posts from Ms. Rebecca Marie Jo here. You can then read RELEVANT’s official response and the response from Mr. Cameron Strang, as well as a fine commentary by Ms. Ally Henny here. And you can read Mr. Henry’s reply to RELEVANT here. It’s kind of a mess, and the temptation is just to say…
- American Exceptionalism, Celebrate Recovery, essays, faith, justice, Life Recovery Skills, musings, racism, writing
What Is the Home That Shuts Its Doors to You?
ETA: I misnamed Ms. Ally Henny in this article & have corrected it. My apologies for misnaming her. I follow people in social media, and try hard to follow people who give me insight into their worlds that I don’t see. I follow people all over the world, mostly English speakers (but I throw in other languages and attempt to puzzle out their meaning with translation tools). Most of the people I follow are here in North America, specifically in the United States of America, and one them recently posted a blog entry about “Leaving Home.” (You can read it here: https://thearmchaircommentary.com/2019/09/22/leaving-home/) It is the story of Ally Henny and…
- American Exceptionalism, Celebrate Recovery, Contests, essays, faith, flash fiction, justice, Life Recovery Skills, musings, writing
When You Fall
I write and edit for a living, and I write for fun. I have a few novels in progress, with one released (so far); I write short stories and poems; I develop short screenplays and radio scripts, some which have been performed. That’s an incredibly heady feeling—to see your words expressed through actors on a stage or from a microphone! Often my stories and scripts come from a prompt as part of a competition. The poems are just extra—no one wants to read my poetry which is their sad loss. I try to be authentic and real, and I work hard—danged hard!—on creating characters who ring true, who speak like…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 30: Feelings and the Culture of Niceness
It’s been a while since my last post (7/29/19!). I’ve been busy over the summer, far busier than I expected. I’ve gotten more involved in some relationships and responsibilities, and my writing output for short stories, scripts, and essays has jumped considerably. (I even had Ms. Irving stop by a set of Facebook posts…) But it’s time to get back to this book. Ms. Irving is still processing her experiences at a conference, and so this chapter opens with an incredibly important insight, one that I’d like you to read a few times to consider what this means. It’s that necessary: One of my first challenges in the hours and…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 29: Intent and Impact
The process of "waking up white" isn't just to be aware of whiteness. It is to wake up, and then to leave it. To go to something that's better and more life-affirming and full of health. And to not even be sure where the destination is, but with the calm assurance that it's out there.
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Moral Switzerlands
This is a prescient verse from 3000 years or so ago: “And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15, AV White people are gonna have to choose, every single time. Every single time we choose complacency and choose safety and choose white solidarity we are choosing wickedness and cruelty and destruction. Whether we want to be honest about…
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The Voices Are Coming from Inside the House
Before this day in 1957, Hazel Massery (white) had never met Elizabeth Eckford (Black). After this day, they did not meet again until a decade later. And yet Ms. Massery became the face of white reaction to the mere presence of Black people in their reserved spaces. Without prompting, she exploded in anger and fury—and yes, hate. Something in whiteness trains us to be like this. To simply hate not only the “other” but the “inferior.” We’re trained to believe in the innate superiority of white people; in things where we appear to fail we say we have no interest. What was the actual problem Ms. Eckford caused that would…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 28: I Am the Elephant
This chapter explores the meaning behind not only identifying as white (which is simple enough when we check off the census form), but also identifying white as a race in the same construct that black is a race. Being white, or whiteness, is a construct, with similar rules and roles and obligations as those that are imposed upon being black, or blackness. “[B]eing a part of American organizations, institutions, and traditions came so easily to me, I couldn’t imagine what could be so tough about adjusting to them.” There are at least two parts to being white. One is that we have an entire set of behaviors and standards, of…
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Juneteenth, Reparations, and What Do I Do About It?
Today is June 19th, a day when we remember that our American experiment with freedom included over 200 years of enslavement for Africans stolen and sold to white slavers. Today is the day when HR#40, a bill to set up a commission to study reparations, was introduced for discussion in a House subcommittee hearing. And today I considered the long and winding road of my own presence in America. I have a history, y’all. My father’s family came to America in the early 1700s from England—the region where Matlock, Derbyshire sits. The family split early into Northern and Southern branches, with one group leaving for North and West, from North…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 6: From Confusion to Shock
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 27: Living into Expectations
This was a fascinating chapter for me, in that I hadn’t really dived into this before: what is it that we thought about ourselves when we were young that has somehow determined who we are as adults, based upon the choices we made from youth to adulthood. I was talking about this today on the bus with a friend. In high school the guidance counselors said “You can pretty much do whatever you want—you have no one specific passion.” And I’ve done that in life, settling on my current career of doing something interesting in tech while I wait for something to pique my interest elsewhere. I’ve done all sorts…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, challenges, faith, history, justice, Life Recovery Skills, work
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 25: Belonging
This chapter is about the tendency of white folks to feel like they belong everywhere. Ms. Irving focuses on the school environment, because she was a volunteer or participant at so many levels, including being on committees to help bring about and embrace “diversity.”
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The Charlottesville Declaration
From the founding of this nation until the present hour, the idolatry of whiteness has been a pro-death spirit within our republic. I did not see this earlier, but I think it’s important to proclaim—loudly, confidently—that the gospel in America is the eternal gospel of God, of recognition and repentance and restoration.
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News and Updates
So here’s what’s going down… Some of you might know that I’ve been thinking about and writing about issues of race and equality for a long time. I’ve been vocal about my beliefs and vocal about my insistence that we all must repent and change. A few months ago an online publication, Our Human Family, reached out to me to begin writing for them. They had been reading my work and were interested in what I was saying, and they considered my work to be helpful and healing for the conciliation of us all. As they put it in their mission statement, “OUR HUMAN FAMILY exists as a safe digital…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 20: My Robin Hood Syndrome
“You know, we’re trying to focus on programs that serve Boston’s inner-city youth. If you could develop a vision that includes that population, we’d be more interested in supporting you.” This is an intriguing chapter, and one that is perhaps the turning point from comfort into awareness. The author is given great power and influence, and then is tasked to “go do something good for people.” Intriguing because the attempt was made, but here, at the beginning, perhaps the attempt went wrong when there wasn’t an inquiry into what is needed and how versus what do I think is needed and how can I help? Us white people “doing good”…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 17: My Good People
“How it was possible that I was both a ‘good person’ and utterly clueless.” It’s possible because being “good” does not mean “also smart” or “also educated” or even “also aware.” I’m good. I do good things. I have good intentions. Even when I was actively participating in conservative politics that were leading to the destruction of the oppressed, I was good because I had good thoughts and good intentions. Being good isn’t anything unless it’s coupled with intelligent action, and intelligent action isn’t good if it sets a priority upon intention rather than impact. Hand to God, I am ashamed and embarrassed by my words and actions to people…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 16: Logos and Stereotypes
“The monumental cognitive task of processing the millions of pieces of information that flood us daily requires that we sort and categorize.” I agree here that this is a survival skill and, on the face of it, neutral. The problem is that we then use the sorting/categorization not just as identity but as threat-analysis. White people are our friends; people of color are likely antagonistic and unwilling to compromise with us like white people do. The identity is not only what they look like, but what they represent, even though that representation is largely imagined. “One way people differ from animals, however, is the way we use symbols to make…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 15: The Whole Story
“One of the most powerful tools of racism is stories.” More broadly, all history is stories, sometimes told in a Domesday Book, sometimes told in a slide deck. We have to pick and choose what we think matters in history—the world every instant is crammed full of events and meaning, of people and actions. No one thing at an instant is “the one thing” of the instant. History is shaped by what we want to remember. That my mother was expelled from Ukraine in 1933 is just as much a matter of history that Hitler came to power in Germany, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco started construction, and…
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When the Past Tries to Reclaim the Present
Last night the hemlock tried to nail the house again. This time it failed. We live in an area that is mixed rural and forest. Just down the street is the river, and across the river is an escarpment that’s the outlier of the Cascades. Western Hemlock, Douglas Fir, and Big Leaf Maple are the most common big trees here, with scattered alder and cottonwood in the understory, especially of disturbed land. The trees used to grow big here—we started as a logging and milling town until we ran out of trees, then switched to agriculture—hops and dairy as the most common. Now we still have some dairy farms, but…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 14: ZAP!
The fact that the playing field is not level means that life experiences are not merely different, but unequal and unfair. This is a hard concept to hold on to. Theoretically I understand it, but essentially I ignore it. And yet, every so often I hear the stories and hear the pain. I take for granted that everyone has a life like mine—you simply do the work required and you are rewarded. This is extremely not so. I’ve made it a point to not bring up personal stories from now on that involve people without their permission, and as a result I’ve removed about half of my blog entries. (The…
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Lenten Lamentations
I don’t usually participate in Lent, the season marking the weeks before Jesus’ last days. It’s kinda “churchy” and I don’t do churchy. But this site and this blog and this entry hit me in all the feels right now, and I cannot express to you how apt this is: “We lament because paradoxically, the cure for the pain is in our engagement of it.” I am lamenting some poor choices I’ve made very recently. I’ll confess I’ve had two sleepless nights so far as I consider over and over what I did, and how I broke my own principles and my own values. I lament that with all my…
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Words and Deeds
This is short today, and a freebie: it matters that we use words. It matters that we listen to what people are saying. It matters that we think deeply about what we experience and what we hear, and even that we think about what we write or say. Words tell us things that can generally be understood in the same way by most people. (Yeah, there’s a philosophical argument that no one experiences the same experience, whether it’s from words or from interactions, but in my view there’s a general idea that we can understand even though we appreciate it with different emphases.) Words help me process my feelings or…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 12: Icebergs
“One of the breakthroughs I had … was understanding the degree to which I tend to align what I see and hear with my underlying beliefs.” You know, this is a great opener to help us understand how it all happened with us, the good people. I presume that most white people think they’re good people, and therefore just assume that they can’t be either racist or contributing to racism. “I don’t generally feel negative emotions about people of color, and generally don’t think negative thoughts about them.” How could anyone be contributing to racism or even be a racist themselves if they don’t have overt emotions and thoughts? We…
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Green Books, Black Lives, and White History
I’m reading some interesting responses to “The Green Book,” which, if you have been in a cave in Thailand for the past six months, is a movie about a white racially antagonistic chauffeur who ferries around a black musician. There have been complains, and their have been counter-complaints, largely on the line of “it’s just a movie.” (I have written elsewhere about how our entertainment does matter. A movie is never just a movie.) The complaints about the movie itself might be due to what’s in this article, about a slice of history that is used as a prop for another story entirely. I researched the meaning of the Green…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 11: Headwinds and Tailwinds
“Skin color itself is not the barrier; it’s the beliefs attached to it. And beliefs, compared to birth dates or other more tangible barriers, are harder to pinpoint and also much harder to change.” The chapters are starting to get down into the weeds now, and it’s getting thornier to navigate. This chapter explores the systems that create systemic racism. Helpfully, it does not just say that systemic racism is a thing, but it explores the interlocking small systems that make up the bigger system. The systemic part of the systems—they all work together in their small cycles to become one big Krebs cycle of racism. This reveals something in…
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Entertainment Matters
We usher at the local theatre about once a month for live productions. It’s our “date night,” and we generally make a half-day of it. We have to prepare for the show, because even though we are “out there” in the lobby or in the aisles, we are still part of the theatre production: our clothes and our demeanor are to support the on-stage events. Our customers are the theatre-goer who’s paying for a seat and a view and an experience. We are there to assist in that. So we dress to be somewhat invisible and yet in ways that mark us as not quite blended in with the paying…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, education, family, history, Life Recovery Skills, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 10: The Melting Pot
“The United States has reaffirmed its commitment to being a melting-pot society adhering to Anglo-Saxon standards, as opposed to a mosaic nation built on the diversity of multiple cultures.” This chapter dives into a common myth about America—that it is a “melting pot.” It is, if by that you mean that everyone is baptized with fire to lose their heritage and identity, to be reborn as a WASP-y character—as long as they have visibly white skin and features. The stories here match some of the experiences of my mother’s side of the family—she was an immigrant from World War II, and when she went through Ellis Island (figuratively; I’m not…
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To Study Portuguese
When I was younger (well, any day in the past is when I was younger, but stay with me here), I worked in an environment where many of my co-workers did not have English as their first language. The most common language they spoke was Portuguese. Because I’m curious about things I don’t know, and because I really wanted to be able to talk with them and understand them better, I decided to add classes in Portuguese to my college courses. I took a year of Portuguese hoping to get familiar enough to be able to listen to them, and perhaps even to have a real conversation. I remember at…
