Indignities

The more I read, the longer my perspective becomes. I used to think that things were always getting better and better - or worse and worse - but the thing that strikes me now is that things are getting same and same.

Diligence in the "little" indignities, the things we accept after fighting for so long, is where we must go if we are to stop having a police state, an economy build on black bodies as widgets, work as indentured servitude.

Where in our lives is the safe space, the space we can get big hugs and regroup and know we can come back to after a day in the fray? Why is comfort and dignity so constantly under siege. Where to go when the traditional places - family or church - are the places that are eating you the most?

Resurrection vs Death

" the Holy Spirit is alive and militant, and in America, dwells in Harlem or wherever else human being so esteem life as a gift that they become insistent upon living as human beings in society (this is the quality sometimes called "soul" - as in soul music or soul food or soul brother) instead of the way most American seem wont to exist as dehumanized automatons dominated by unaccountable and seemingly uncontrollable institutional powers, or as malleable victims of an environment gravely, perhaps fatally, damaged by the jealous abuses of science, war, technology, and mercantilism, or as hapless pawns cowered by official rhetoric and deception and conformed by intimidations to privacy and livery, or otherwise, as slave consigned to pathetic idolatry of death elevated and enshrined as social purpose for the nation."

Stringfellow, "Harlem, Rebellion and Resurrection" in the Christian Century, 1970. Pulled from A Keeper of the Word.(bold is my own)

This is a far more articulate way of saying what I sum up as the ethic of "live and let live" as an abdication of responsibility.

Responsibility

I can say that after 10 years of pussy footing around, which wasn't working, it's time to talk plain. And my experience is, when white people start introspecting on these issues the hate and the mean come out in defense of the shame and the fear.

I have previously done this work in a Christian context, and I am a Christian, but if all you know is from TV, well, that is TV not Christian, and honesty compels me to say most Christians going to church are pretending they are on TV, too.

But here is the thing. This is moral work. This is about human centric living, not dollar centric or crap centric living (do not hear the whole the earth is for us to destroy, I don't go there), and it is so much easier to buy into the American and infecting idea that we take care of our own as me, me, me and maybe my kids or friends, and apply live and let live to everyone else because that allows us to abdicate our responsibility to humans and for systems we live in.

If you aren't engaged in politics - how do we live together in communities and nations and planetarians - you can't do this work. Because you can't see why it is necessary. And you have to have found your reasons why people are deserving of our responsible actions. At least religious people are trying, if poorly, to think about this. I so rarely find it in TV programming. Now, we are definitely making morality in this culture - but it, in dominant culture, so often perpetuates of the unspoken assumption of the live and let live and not my problem morality, and never exploring the consequences of that morality.

There is a difference between imposing my unspoken assumptions of "right" living on another and my knowing how I am living and how it is breaking over the heads of others. I have a responsibility to know that there are consequences to my choices and how they are affecting other and being able to hear and respond with as much grace and compassion as I can when I fuck it up. Because we all fuck it up - we aren't in a vacuum so that is always going to happen, but how we respond to that, how we try to mitigate it, that comes from actually hearing what those consequence are for someone rather than guessing and then fixing things in ways that don't really make me have to change.

Hark! Your life is speaking

How to listen?

So, you don't know any “brown” people and your stereotypes are keeping you from striking up more than the most superficial of conversations?

Well, amazingly enough, brown people can read and write, too. I bet you didn't know that public school even taught that.

Ok, nasty sarcasm aside. But here is where it tends to come from.

I grew up in a tiny backwater lost to civilization secessionist place in CA where there was one kid, who was half Blackfoot, in my school. His mom came to our class one time to talk about weaving with pine needles, and I thought she was an anthropologist. This is because this town never let brown folks in, and I never left. Migrant field workers came through from time to time, but they didn't come into town, and their shenanigans, if they were foolish enough to have them did not make the conversations that a child could overhear. There is a reservation for the local Native American tribe, but I didn't know that until I was an adult and lived somewhere else. From my history classes, I got that we not only killed all the buffalo, we killed all the Indians with them. From extrapolation, I believed we had shipped all the Africans home when we ended slavery.

As I hope many of you are aware, geography combined with the people who live in those patches of memorization, are very poorly taught in American schools – public and private.

So you can imagine it was something of a shock, at 11, to move to Port Hueneme/Oxnard, CA and learn that some of those dark skinned people did not need to ease up on their beach time. My favorite embarrassing story of my ignorance was being a huge Tina Turner fan, but being unaware that she was black until they cast Angela Bassett to play her in that movie. (Hey, some of us like music but don't need to sleep with the musician in order to do so.) My least favorite story is how in 7th grade (middle school for me), I was so horrifyingly ignorant of race issues, but still seemed to possess stereotypes I have no idea where I got, since it wasn't like I had any people reinforce them against and I presumably made them based on what I learned in school and the subtext of adult conversations. My grandpa had to come pick me up from school for a long time because a group of girls were sick of my cracker ways and going to kick my ass. I didn't even know what cracker was. Can I just say – it's still hard to see myself as a Ritz cracker, a buttery, crispy delicious snack that will probably give you cancer.

There are more stories, lots of stories. And I could tell you them, but what I really want is for you to sit down and find your own. Because you have them. Listen to yourself first, before you try to listen to someone else. I spent 10 years doing diversity and anti-racism training with white adults in Oregon. I can tell you true – YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW YOUR OWN STORIES. How can you hear anyone else's stories around race and class if you don't even know your own?

Start at home. Start when you were little. What was dinner like? What did the adults talk about? What were they talking about when they covered your ears (the dumbest thing ever)? What did they never talk about? What TV did you watch as a kid? Go back now and watch it again. So it's fresh for you when you do try to listen. If you have done any of the work confronting your stereotypes, you will probably start to see some of the subtle instructions you received unconsciously.

Start outside. (I'm gonna tell you that if you don't have someone to process this with, don't just say it out loud. That is how you get called a cracker in middle school.) WONER, WONDER, WONDER. Wonder why that person got pulled over. Wonder why you never see white people pulled over. Wonder why some people wander across the street any old time and place and look you in the eye while they do it. Wonder why that makes you so uncomfortable, not why it makes you so angry. Wonder what the difference between anger and discomfort and shame and guilt and an itchy nose.

And Ponder. Ponder what it is like for you to not be a surgeon because you couldn't pass that chemistry class. Ponder what it would have been if you could have been an astronaut, except for the whole application process and joining the military and and and. Ponder whatever dreams you gave up because they didn't seem doable, the process, the negativity, the derision, the need for a paycheck came too high and you gave up and here you are in human resources. (Hey, I love lots of HR people, and many are great, and none of them were aiming there.) Imagine all that mountainous difficulty – and apply it to getting a job at McDonalds. You now have just the tiniest taste of being a young black man but no idea of the baggage he is carrying around due to things he can't possible change.

Do this for a couple of years. In the meantime, don't tell people you are learning to understand the brown skinned people – because you are not. You are beginning to understand yourself.

Interns

Today's breakfast conversation, how to get some teenagers into intern positions. "This seems doable." I love it when people realize they can do something. By Monday, we should have a plan to build a cadre of companies in the Bay Area to introduce kids to living wage jobs that you don't have to have a college degree to do.*

What is possible is exactly what we have been exposed to. You don't know what you don't know. And no one else does either. Do not let your stereotypes define who can do your job. You aren't actually that special. Don't let your comfort, your assumptions and the fact that you don't want to think about how you live in the world, keep the world the way that it is. Obviously you don't like it or you wouldn't be tweeting about it.

• Unsurprisingly, I have opinions about college as a way into the middle class, aka out of poverty. I think that the changes to student loans that have happened over the last 20 years have been more about the government finding a new tax base than any expanding need for a college educated workforce. Sure, there are jobs that need a 4 year degree, but accounting isn't one.

Get over yourself, please

Feeling rather burned out by the outrage/remorse over Ferguson on my other sites.

Because here's the thing, all you white people who are my friends and coworkers, your Twitter rage is Twitter twat. No one gives a crap, least of all you, and making sure your social media thread is on the "right side of history" just makes everyone actually doing the work tired, and so profoundly sad.

If you don't like that young black men are getting shot - THEN GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO DO. Go to your HR department and find a way to make paying internships for them and then make the connections at a local high school and then do the work to listen to them, understand them, and show them how your job works. And then don't be irritated when they totally pass on your job and lifestyle - because they don't have to buy the hype you are selling either.

Better yet - actually do the slogging work of making the world a place that isn't still trading on the commodity of black bodies. Start by boycotting all movies with one nameless black guy who gets shot. Or where the only roles for black actors and actresses is drug or sex trade related.

Once you've tried that for awhile, and you should be pretty bored now that you have eliminated most of your mainstream entertainment, start spending your free time and your burning man money - and get the laws changed that criminalize drugs, that legalize guns, that make it hard for individuals to start small one person businesses. Hell, just pass some laws that easily and automatically re-franchise convicted felons - and make it illegal to discriminate in housing and employing them.

I suppose I appreciate that it is all very popular to say, I am not a young black man so I can't understand their lives, but I can listen. But how many of you are listening to young black men. How many of you even know more than "that black dude that works in the office" or "goes to my gym that I talk to by the lockers." And even that dude that works in your office or goes to your gym, he is still in your social or economic class, except in the subtle ways you and everyone you know remind him that he really isn't and is the exception to the rule. The only people excited by the word "articulate" are robot builders.

Just because you feel safe holding a sign on the sidelines of a protest does not mean that you have done the right thing. Use all the fucking power that actually being white is affording you. Make appointments with your legislature, with the local paper, with anyone you can - and then let bring someone who really needs to get their voice heard. Let them talk - you keep your mouth shut. And even better - bring 16 of your white friends and let the black guy be in charge, not the side show.

Hire the kid with the sagging pants anyway. Buy the candy bar or the magazine subscription from the kids anyway. Send your kid to public school and do the work to encourage their friendships with kids whose parents don't speak English anyway. Let the smack roll off your back anyway. Pay all the taxes you can anyway. Don't call the cops because you don't recognize that person walking down the street anyway.

Get over yourself, please.