Life Recovery Skills
- essays, Fifth Avenue Theatre, justice, Life Recovery Skills, musicals, musings, racism, reviews, reviews, Theatre, writing
Pride and Prejudice, Staged
Last week we went to see a production of the new musical AUSTEN’S PRIDE, the story of Jane Austen‘s creation of the world of Pemberley and Darcy and Lizzie and Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Wickham and … well, the entire world that lives between the covers of the book Pride and Prejudice. Precis: Miss Jane Austen has had a successful run with her book Sense and Sensibility, but her publisher wants a new work. Simultaneously, her intended fiancé decides to break with her. She’s been rejected a few times, and is living in genteel near-poverty. All she has now to her assets is an idea with no form or view.…
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The Purpose-Driven Lie
“The purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people, not Black people. For Blacks, guns and tanks are sufficient.” Dr. Otis Madison There are a few mentors in my life right now, men and women I both respect and admire. They teach me from their wisdom, from their experience, from their souls, and I attempt to listen, process, and adapt my own self to the new information I discover. One of my mentors, Andre Henry, posted this quote, which intrigued me immediately. I’ve been chewing on it for a day or so now, and musing about “what it means.” (Sometimes we do this even if it’s obvious,…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 33: Perception and Fear
Once again, a reminder that this series (“Waking Up White”) is from the book by Debby Irving. I read the chapter cold, and respond as I read. Then I answer the questions at the end. I do this work in public not because I need the cookie. When I was lost and frozen in white racism, one of the things that held me locked up was that I had no models of others who had found a way out. For those of you who are locked up yourself, maybe I can give you some assurance that you can be found, that there is a way out, and that it is…
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Walking in and out of Justice
Sometimes we can choose our inconveniences. I was watching a video late last night, far past midnight, and stopped about half-way through because it was one o’clock or so in the morning. Released by Paramount, I Am MLK, Jr., is a powerful new (2018) film about the life of the man who shaped America and was murdered for it. One thing that struck me, again, was the immediacy and fragility of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a seat-of-your-pants operation with multiple streams and leaders, even though MLK had become, for many, the leader, the Man for Justice. I’m sure there was planning — the councils and commissions comprised serious…
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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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#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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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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#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 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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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 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 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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#Waking Up White Chapter 13: Invisibility
“We were pushed hard to be cognizant of what we did and did not notice. And most importantly, why?” This is the hardest—the why of our actions and our inattention. Why do I feel that white people around me are just worth my time, and yet black people are somehow safe to exclude? That came from somewhere, and I picked it up, but why do I think this and act this way—that is the part of me that still has mysterious roots. Did I really choose to be racist? Based upon what I’m reading and thinking about, it seems more and more likely that yes, I did choose this. “I…
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Hope
“Hope always breaks my heart. And yet hope always restores my soul.” One of the difficulties of any endeavor is that there is just no guarantee of success. A journey is not like a recipe, where, if you put in the right ingredients at the right time, mix it in the right way, and bake it for the right amount of time, you’ll get, barring any spectacular issues, the thing that you expected. A cake recipe makes a cake, a pie recipe makes a pie, a cashew chicken recipe makes a decent plate of food for a dinner, a dinner that I’m eating right now. The journey, tho? No guarantees…
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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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Getting From A to B
It was a hard day today. I spent much of it reflecting upon the journey and upon my words and my deeds. I wrote earlier about words and deeds, and as karma and God would have it, the lesson bounced back to me to learn. It is hard, damned hard, to make yourself fit into your own moral principles. You discover that what you think are your principles are really your presumptions, that you think are “good” and all you need to do is to be bold and act rightly. That’s when you find out that the real you is quite alive, and is ready to sabotage and reveal itself.…
