justice
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A Place We Cannot Enter
I've watched my friends express their shock, their hurt, their anger, their outrage, their fury, their fear, their hopelessness, their isolation, their understanding of their own oppression in a society that does not see them. Does not value them. Does not, from beginning to end, love them.
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 32: Getting Over Myself
The liberation of letting go of my self-image. Choosing to engage in the effort to dismantle racism promises to bring with it discomfort, yet how can I compare my discomfort to what people of color endure? While I don’t like this for a few reasons, I think I understand the meaning behind it. Still, it doesn’t help to say “your feelings don’t count because other people have it worse.” This is what we’re told when we feel bad or angry or disappointed—and it’s a way to dismiss the validity of our feelings. White people who work to dismantle racism—to become, as Dr. Kendi says, “actively antiracist,” will experience discomfort, and…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, Celebrate Recovery, faith, justice, Life Recovery Skills, racism
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 31: Courageous Conversations
Learning to listen and speak across differences Before I start into this chapter, I wanted to update this series on something that is related to this journey. I took part in some conversations this week, and one of them highlighted something that I may have heard before, but it resonated this time: We are not trying to be good white people, but safe white people. There’s a lot to unpack here for me, but I can say that part of my struggle is attempting to deal with what I think and feel, which then becomes what I do and say. I struggle with all the nonsense that it in me,…
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When We Don’t Want to Know
Ignorance is sometimes a lack of opportunity. We don’t have access to resources, including people and their lived experiences, to understand the width and depth of racism. I can understand that there might be such people, although in the connected world of today, I can’t accept that it is a frequent occurrence. But in almost every case, our ignorance is deliberate and our culpability in our lack of understanding is a deliberate choice to avoid the hard truths of American racism, and to avoid the very hard work of breaking that. That awareness and confession and breaking apply to our own individual selves, of course. It is such a common…
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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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Of Course I’m Racist
I don’t think I’ve ever been called a racist—not because I’m not, but because the people in my life are simply too kind and too gentle, and treat me as if I’m terribly fragile. But I will say, with the same level of clear-eyed truth about being in recovery for my addictions, that I am a racist. Thoroughly dipped and dyed, all the way through, head to heart, sole to soul, from earliest memory until today. Being called a racist will not kill you. It might sting because it attacks your self-image of being “not a racist.” Actually being a racist is what kills you. It deadens you to humanity.…
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A Non-Traditional Blessing
Text composed by Sister Ruth Fox, OSB, from the Sacred Heart Monastery in Richardton, North Dakota, in 1985.
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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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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 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…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 26: Surviving Versus Thriving
In this chapter Ms. Irving recalls a famous experiment conducted in 1968 by Ms. Jane Elliott on a class of third graders, and then repeated in other circumstances with adults in various settings, including corporate settings where the participants came in order to learn about prejudice and race issues—and yet they were unable to process their experiences and feelings even though they knew they were there for such training and understanding. The experiences of discrimination overruled their intentions and their self-knowledge. “I’ve had plenty of moments where I’ve felt underappreciated, invisible, or misunderstood. I can’t imagine feeling that way most of the time at school, at work, on the train,…
- #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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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 24: Everyone Is Different; Everyone Belongs
We need to do the right things when we can, but it is critically important that we continually reevaluate whether we're really doing the right things. We might not be able to wait until we have all the data before we try to make changes, but we absolutely must be willing to reexamine our efforts and even our understandings.
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 23: Diversity Training
More than having a map, a method, and motive, grasping what race and racialism in America will involve something deeper than just a way to work things out.
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 22: Why Do I Always End Up with White People?
Ever wonder why it is that even when good people want to fix things, nothing really gets fixed but a lot of talk passes by? I grew up in the fabulous 50s and 60s, and I remember the talk on how we were well on on way to fixing racism. “Just a little while longer,” I heard, “and we’ll get this discrimination eliminated. Just a few years more and all God’s children will be playing together.” Spoiler: It didn’t happen that way. The effort needed to make change happen is much, much great than the effort needed to think about making change happen. We can wish all we want. We…
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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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#Waking Up White Chapter 21: Straddling Two Worlds
This chapter is unbelievably relevant, especially in light of the post I put up not six hours ago about my past (“News and Updates”) as well as my essay on Medium (“My Journey into Blackness”). While I was in process of rethinking my thoughts and recalibrating my actions according to my values, I was using the online persona “Between Two Worlds.” My own feelings were much like what Ms. Irving relates in this chapter, and I can say I experienced many of the same things she did in the struggle to find who I was and where I belong. “Having my new friends ridicule my old world confused me. I…
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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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There Are No Racists
I’m involved in a group that’s digging into American white racism, and I gotta say, there are times when I feel so discouraged that I feel like giving up. It’s too hard, it’s too much to deal with, it’s so overwhelming—and no one’s really a racist, anyway, except for maybe some white people in the South with CBFs on their pickup trucks. Or something. What I saw was some white people saying “Is it really helpful to call anyone a ‘racist,’ when that could just push them away from wanting to change? Calling someone ‘racist’ isn’t going to get us anywhere, and besides, you might be tempted to call me…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 18: Color-blind
We talk about the things that are important to us, or we talk about the things that are completely unimportant to us in order to avoid talking about the important things that threaten us. Intimacy threatens us. Empathy scares us. Accountability scares us. Responsibility and connected-ness provoke us. In our heart of hearts, with our bosom friends, we may, if we are very, very fortunate, have a brush with intimacy or reality. Race in America scares us white people. Scares the bejesus from us. I see things we do to ameliorate the pain and the fear. We talk over it. We deny it. We claim it’s not us. We say…
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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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The Whisper of the Wind Without Words
My goodness, how deeply this spoke to me this morning: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if…
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Enough
If you don’t know by know I’m a believer and follower of Jesus Christ, then I’ve done a damned poor job of making my faith explicit, and for that I’m sorry. I believe in Jesus the son of God, true God of true God, born, lived, died, and risen. But with that said, I stand with my brothers and sisters in the Muslim Ummah right now as we all are reeling in shock from the latest atrocities of white supremacist terrorism that’s being done in the name of Jesus Christ and for the followers of Jesus Christ. It is an abomination. Full stop. If your church is teaching that whiteness…
