Common Shared Humanity

Hi Friends,

I hope you all had an enjoyable summer. I have been reading I Never Thought of it That Way: How to have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times by Mónica Guzmán and it has been shifting my perspective, yet again. Isn’t learning wonderful?! I highly recommend the book and I’m hoping to share some resources related to what I’m learning and seeing that might help illustrate just how essential these perspectives are for creating the world we want to live in. In case it’s not clear, that world includes every single one of us.

The goal is to reduce the divisions among us and to find ways to connect over our shared humanity.

I’ll start with a very clearly laid out opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof called “Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters” in the New York Times last month. He rightly points out the classism that many progressives engage in, even as we fight against sexism and racism and how important it is that we learn to stop doing that, not simply because it is expedient for the upcoming election, but because it undermines our moral values to demean any group of people for any reason.

Much has been said about Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, but I was particularly moved by Phillip Bump’s focus on her phrase that most of us “will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.” He explains the genius of her phrasing: “Her line overlapping affirmative action and generational wealth wasn’t offering “affirmative action” as a pejorative term. It was, instead, contextualizing a different way in which people are boosted by circumstances that aren’t always under their control. It was a defense of affirmative action programs that noted how wealth built in an explicitly unfair economy was its own form of unearned advantage.” I share this here to highlight the ways in which most of us have more in common in our experiences of (economic) systemic oppression than not.

There was a story in the Washington Post recently about a Black couple hosting parties at their home and their neighbors calling the police. The article by Ellie Silverman does a good job of capturing the nuance and complications of the situation and it made my heart ache. I share it here to highlight the situations that arise when people don’t reach out and get to know each other as people, but treat a situation as something for the police to handle. I can see so much lost opportunity for everyone involved to create a connection and the ability to treat each other as people instead of a problem.

The next story is by Abha Bhattarai about how the unhoused population in our country increasingly includes working people. Besides raising awareness about this growing problem (again, along economic lines), I encourage you to consider your assumptions about the unhoused population and consider that who you might see on the sidewalks and streets is not a complete picture. For example, ask your local school or school district about their programs for unhoused children and learn more about the less visible unhoused population in your community. Did you know that it costs less to provide basic preventative support for people (housing, food, medical care, etc.) than it does to address the challenges they face when things fall apart (prison, ER visits, clearing “encampments,” policing and crime)? There are multiple studies that prove this, but we’re way behind because of fear, ignorance, and a lack of connection around our shared humanity.

Another article that broadened my understanding of the complexities and brilliance of humanity is the Washington Post Opinions series highlighting government employees. Michael Lewis wrote about Chris Mark of the Department of Labor in an article called “The Canary” and I found the entire thing riveting. But what keeps running through my head is the way the article brings out the personal story, the relationship he has with his father, the ways he has adjusted his perspective and understanding of the world because of his experiences. “But Chris had been endowed with a deeper-than-usual desire for fairness. He had a powerful father and a powerless mother and wound up feeling powerful sympathy for the underdog. He’d ended up working for the institution best equipped to help the unlucky defend themselves from the lucky. And the effect of his work had indeed been to make the world just a little bit less unfair.” I am so grateful for the problem solvers who are passionate about their work for its own sake.

If you’re interested in another perspective-challenging experience, I want to highlight Robin Givhan’s article about artist Hank Willis Thomas. His description of the conundrum of race is poignant “‘And so there I am: [Race] is not real. But the impacts are real! But it shouldn’t exist. But it does!’” The images of his work are striking, particularly “The Cotton Bowl” and his statuary with hands and arms is very moving to me. “Thomas strives to link our past to our future, to communicate urgent and difficult ideas when words fail us, when politicians make matters worse, and when moralists and terrorists all lay claim to God’s unique favor. As we struggle to communicate across the divides — political, racial and demographic — perhaps a monumental sculpture or a disruptive photograph can help us better recognize each other’s humanity.” [emphasis mine]

Food for thought (and action!).

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow. In Solidarity.

Repair

Hi Friends,

I hope you’re all doing well now that summer is (almost officially) here. I don’t know about you, but our spring felt like a frenzy of activity even though I try so hard not to overschedule our family. So far, I have been spending more time outside, in the garden or on walks in the neighborhood, identifying our local birds and plants, seeking connections that will help me feel rooted and supported. I hope you also have time and space to slow down and feel connected to your community. Maybe upcoming Juneteenth celebrations are a good opportunity for that.

I started reading Braiding Sweetgrass a while back and then put it down for a time. I picked it back up recently and it has again shifted my perspective so foundationally. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes so beautifully, and her deep beliefs in reciprocity, abundance, respect, and restoration of our relationship with the Earth are so inspiring. She writes,

“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the rest of the earth’s beings.”

We have lost our relationship with the earth and this isolation and our harmful systems also contribute to the loss of our relationships with each other.

I want to highlight two recent articles about how our culture contributes to the burnout of BIPOC women leadership, even in spaces that work towards inclusion and equity. The first is by Chris Talbot-Heindl, who writes for Community Centric Fundraising, entitled, “Let’s Talk About How Nurturance Culture Can Improve Our Movement.” The second article, by Kerrien Suarez and Whitney Parnell (of Service Never Sleeps), called “‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: Navigating Three Black Women Tropes in Leadership” is essential reading for anyone who works with Black women in leadership roles (which I hope is most of us!). I recognized every one of these tropes acting upon women who I love and respect and I am grateful for this article for raising awareness and showing us how we can do better.

The 70th anniversary of Brown v Board took place this year and I wanted to amplify a resource shared by Anti-Racism Daily called the Segregation Explorer map. Check out your area (or anywhere in the US) to see trends in race and income by school, district, and state.

I appreciated a reminder from Anti-Racism Daily about the four levels of oppression and how to work to recognize those levels even when what we’re witnessing might feel individual in the moment. These skills take practice.

I have been thinking a lot over the last few months about how to shift beyond acknowledgement to action. Here are two areas in which I encourage you to learn and hopefully take action to engage in shifting the power dynamics in our systems.

Decolonizing and repairing Indigenous communities
- Learn — All My Relations podcast, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
- Shift Wealth — Decolonizing Wealth Project
- Shift Power — NDN Collective
- Shift Opportunity — Rock the Rez

Legacies of Slavery and Reparations
- Learn — The Cost of Inheritance (PBS special)
- Contribute — The Jamestown Foundation, Reparations4Slavery, The Reparations Project
- Raise Your Voice — Redesignate Arlington House as a National Historic Site
- More Ways — Coming to the Table’s (CTTT) Guide to the Reparations Movement

More opportunities to learn:
- Esther A. Armah’s Emotional Justice
- Garrett Bucks’ The Right Kind of White
- James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time
- White Awake is offering “Radical Genealogy: Research Skills for Liberatory Ancestral Recovery” in July

Please continue to engage in advocating for human rights and against genocide. The Catalyst Project (Anti-Racism for Collective Liberation) shared a speech by Lara Kiswani at the People’s Conference for Palestine last month about the importance of organizing. The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights is encouraging a Summer of Resistance. White Awake is running a summer “Study & Action for Palestine” starting June 17 (register by June 16).

My guiding values for all of this work are more and more clearly centering around Humanity. Healing. Belonging. Love. Sending so much love and hope to you during these challenging times.

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow. In Solidarity.

Distraction From What Matters

Hi Friends,

I hope spring is finding you (it’s slow here in Denver as we just had over a foot of snow last week). I find that March can be a mix of excitement and new growth, coming out of our winter burrows and stretching towards the sun.

I also find a franticness, a rush to do things, to get things done, to push into high gear as though we’ve been lazy or unproductive during the slower winter months. I notice people driving more erratically or impatiently, our schedules filling up with even more activities, a rush to pack everything in before the school year ends and summer arrives. There’s almost this constant push to get all the things done so we can rest…. but do we ever actually rest?

I’m reading Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry, and it is another significantly impactful book. She rightly points out that rest is a human right and is essential to our survival. She notices the way “grind culture” prevents us from resting and is intrinsically part of the way capitalism and white supremacy keep all of us in a state of oppression and distraction and exhaustion.

Have you noticed how exhausted you feel? How distracted and overwhelmed and BUSY you feel? Why do you feel this way? Take a look at what our society asks of you (especially moms out there, and any caregiving person) and how little support you receive. And if you experience intersections of identity that add layers of oppression, society asks even more of you, just to “keep up” and provides even less support.

BUSY is not a badge of honor. It is a distraction, an effort to divide us, a tool of oppressive systems to keep us from having any time or energy to fight against them. Social media and constant access to technology contribute to the distractions we face, creating distance in our relationships and connections to each other even as it supports the illusion of community. Our news cycle and political shenanigans also serve as distractions, overwhelming us and contributing to a feeling of helplessness.

What would happen if you had a truly vulnerable conversation with another person, face to face, about what each of you care about, are affected by, and want to do something about? What if you made that a priority? What if you made a conscious choice to let go of the things external forces are telling you you have to do and made decisions for yourself based on your values and priorities and said NO more often? What if you made time to take action on the things that matter most to you?

We are surrounded by and inundated by a constant flow of do this, buy this, say this, host like this, live like this, look like this, raise your kids like this — all ostensibly to make our lives better, more comfortable, more satisfying, more successful. Is it working? Do you feel fulfilled? Or do you feel frantic and empty and wanting for something real? Listen to that feeling, to that internal knowing. Somewhere deep down, you know the truth of what you value and need. Block out the noise and rest and LISTEN.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we were less distracted, more connected to our communities, more aware of our basic needs and how to meet them. I understand the pull of productivity as self-worth and I can tell you that there really is a better way. What could we accomplish if we rejected the need to be busy and stood up in the streets, in our neighborhoods, in our state houses, in our schools, and fought for improvements to the things that are harming us?

I can hear that this could sound like “DO MORE!” In fact, we need to do less for a time until we can hear our inner knowing and then use our time and energy differently, more intentionally, so that we can maintain momentum and action for the long-term, taking turns to rest and act, rest and act, collectively. Taking time to heal is an essential component of this.

Jessica Valenti wrote recently about abortion rights:

“Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists are counting on us being too overwhelmed to stop them from normalizing this madness. They know that being sad, angry and exhausted all the time is difficult — if not impossible — to keep up. They figure if they can keep hitting us with horror after horror, the next time we read a story of a woman going septic we’ll respond with a resigned head-shake rather than energized outrage.”

The things happening in our country that are further decreasing our rights and putting more people in grave danger is not normal. Despite the fact that many types of oppression have been around since our founding, and that they regularly put people’s lives in danger on a regular basis, the dangers are increasing and our freedoms are decreasing. We must not accept that this is normal or that there is nothing we can do. We must not give up or turn away, thinking we are too busy or too tired or too small to do anything about it.

Naomi Klein wrote in her book Doppelganger about Jewish re-traumatization vs collective grief,

“Remembering puts the shattered pieces of our selves back together again (re-member-ing); it is a quest for wholeness. At its best, it allows us to be changed and transmuted by grief and loss. But retraumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state; it’s a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible. Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us — and to stay in that state.”

We must have opportunities to heal, to grieve, to find our way to resistance and solidarity. This requires rest, space, time, and each other. We have more choices than we think we do about how we spend our time, energy, and resources. We will be most effective in our quests for a better world if we are rested, healed, and whole.

Being stuck in a trauma or frantic state can be just as damaging as apathy and resignation. Many of us have experienced a heightened state of vigilance during the pandemic, a state that felt unsustainable (and was) and still we did not feel safe resting or letting go of our need to control and prevent. For our community members who experience layers of oppression, this has been even more constant throughout their lives because of the ways our systems threaten them.

And yet, we must find a path in between, a balance of rest and action, to both survive and to thrive, as we change the systems and refuse to allow oppression to be acceptable. Be reminded of such efforts as Revolutionary Love to inspire and guide you. Shelly Tochluk recently shared,

“Amidst the cancelation of sociology as a requirement in Florida’s university system, there is a call for historians to stand up in solidarity. To my mind, we can all be public historians, shining lights on contemporary societal inequities and their link to our nation’s history. To that end, check out this beautiful example of how we can all do something in our local community to push against the far-right’s highly motivated, organized, and well-funded force, as it tries to force the maintenance of a “colorblind” view of the world.”

There are so many people engaged in this work and we need you to join us. Find your niche, make time to rest, and take action.

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow. In Solidarity.