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JIHAN MCDONALD
Facilitator. Writer. Ritualist.
Orienting Self Within Society
jihan mcdonald • February 12, 2020
There are many things that we take for granted as simply "the way the world is". One of the keys to a true liberation is understanding the fallacy of this belief. The world is the way it is because people made it this way.
From the design of our education system to the design of the toaster you pulled breakfast from this morning, someone else made decisions about how all of these things work and most of us simply do what we can with the decisions they’ve made.
Language is different yet also falls within this dynamic. It is no coincidence that the word black is used to denote only the most negative of things and circumstances in the English language. While the word itself is neutral our usage of it is anything but.
This is called coded language, words and phrases we use to illustrate meanings that are not explicit in the words themselves. Its how when a tea party politician mentions “welfare queens” you know they mean a large black woman; no, they never said the words large, black or woman but anyone with a reasonable knowledge of political rhetoric knows that this is exactly the image they intended to conjure.
While this may seem somewhat inane, it's not. Studies show that even with regards to race, people respond more positively to people of African descent who label themselves as African-American rather than Black. When primed with the various words, people are more likely to find an African-American more kind, educated & easier to relate to than a Black person, despite them being the exact same person.
As I have mentioned in other places, being Black is a distinct reality than being Negro, being Indigenous a distinct reality than being Indian, and being queer a distinct reality from being “funny”.
While much of what I look at focuses on what’s happening in this country specifically, I feel it is also crucial to understand this country in context. Unfortunately, our context is regularly skewed by politicians, busyness people, the media and anyone who is prioritizing profits over people.
One of the legacies of Europe’s colonial streak is the redlining of the entire globe to ensure that some places stay flush with resources while others chronically struggle. Ironically it is the places often bereft of natural abundance which are now flush while places where Nature abounds are systematically impoverished.
All of us do this on a micro-level when we engage in conversations defining the world as West, East and mostly fail to even remember we can also go South and North.
In the geographical world of European colonialism, there is no North and no South, only the West and the East as civilization, and humanity, then, by definition culture does not exist below the equator (a reflection of some sexual repression perhaps…).
We hear often of Eastern philosophy and thinking and little, if anything, about the wisdom of Kemet, Kush or even the Moors, rulers of a multi-cultural Spain for over 400 years. And how are they talked about when they are mentioned?
Our conditioning tells us that Europe is the Center of the World so despite the fact that it lies in the geographical North it becomes the fulcrum around which all world events swing. Much can be healed in our relationship to the planet by understanding and shifting this perception of how she is organized.
What do you think of when you think of the West? Most of us think of Europe and the Americas. We think of Socrates, and the Alamo, Zeus, Homer, the Renaissance, we think of the cultural lineage that defines the institutions, the ideals, and the cultural practices of our society.
Ironically, since so many of those enslaved and brought to this country came from West Africa, how many of us call to mind drums, Ogun, and camels as part of our lineage? If we do bring these things to mind they are often encountered as examples of otherness, things from outside of the place we live and come from.
What about even the concept of aloha? Hawaii and the Pacific Islands were colonized, heck Hawaii is part of the United States! Even so, the culture of its people still doesn’t make it into the cultural fold of belonging. And you can forget about the Inuits.
What is even more telling is how even the cultures that do get included do not get equitable representation as being a part of this “West” we speak of. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are also not who we’re talking about when we talk about people in the “West”. Again, how many images of acorn mash, the Sun dance, and the medicine wheel come to mind when you conjure the “West”?
When I bring to mind the “West”, especially as it is casually used in context, I think of mainly the material resources at our disposal through a combination of colonial manipulation tactics and the natural resources from countries relatively near the equator; I think of the mindset of Industry.
Industry is what makes a product more important than the process required to create it and although Industry has many ideological forefathers, with the most direct being the conceptual separation of human beings from all other forms of Nature, the simplest way to fully understand it is as the prioritization of economic, material benefit over all other forms of benefit.
What’s interesting about this is that the Industrial mindset, that of prioritizing products over processes, sprung up in tandem with a massive shift in culture that has gotten progressively more dysfunctional, greedy and violent. Agriculture, animal husbandry and crafts as the focus of human activity came into prominence around 10,000 years ago though humans, as we think of ourselves, came to being around 200,000 years ago.
So the hippies got something else right, this state of excessive competition and drive towards material gain isn’t our natural state, but it is what defines the West as a state of mind far more than any geographical area on a map.
If you visit the State Department’s website you will see that only the “Americas” are included in a description of the Western Hemisphere which is factually inaccurate.
The Western hemisphere, as defined by the Prime Meridian, of the globe is comprised of these lands masses as well as: Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Morocco, most of Mali, Ghana, Burkina Faso and a bit of Algeria. Oceania, Iceland, Greenland, Portugal, France, Spain, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, a bit of Russia and most of the United Kingdom are also a part of this area although Italy, Germany, Holland, Greece, Austria, Belgium and Switzerland do not make the cut.
This colonization of the geographical mind, how you orient yourself, plays an important part in keeping our perspective shaped the way those who actually benefit from Industry like it so they can continue to benefit from it.
What is called for in these transformative times, more than many other things like ever more products, is accuracy, the simple precision of knowing what we’re talking about and knowing when we’re talking about it. The way our language has been shaped for us often makes this more difficult than we think, and far more difficult than it really needs to be.
I think all of us agreeing on the four quadrants thing as a reasonable way to understand the shape of our world to be fair. Cardinal directions, how we orient ourselves from the core of the planet outward by its magnetic lines, are an important aspect of many Indigenous cultures and serve as easy, universal grounding points for reality.
To reconnect to this universal understanding of where we are in the world and in our relationship to it we must align ourselves with what we really know, and underneath it all we know the “West” is misleading; just like we know undocumented immigrants means Latinos and not Estonians, and that when tea partiers are talking about ineffective government they’re talking about Obama as opposed to the fuckery we call Congress, but I digress.
We do ourselves no favors by living with a false sense of inclusion, an intentional misreading of the words we use. To truly live in the West we must live with Taema and Tilafaiga, Sedna, Estsantlehi, Maui, Freyr, Mami Wata, Efua, and Guruhi as well as Hercules, Bacchus, Venus, Apollo and the rest.
We must eat corn, tomato, cous cous, acorn, potato, blood pudding, peanut, cassava, dandelion, okra, pineapple and pine nut. This is the least of what we must do. Whatever geographical lines exist to orient our minds, the people who now live in the West are from all over the world and we do ourselves equally few favors pretending they don’t belong here as equal citizens of this planet.
As with our individual selves, our larger self, this society, cannot truly welcome those who travel into its reaches until we first understand who we are, and to do that we must first understand where we are on and in this world.
Beyond obvious comparisons to a snapping turtle, I do have other actual opinions regarding the Dave Chapelle Netflix special "The Closer". To save you the trouble of figuring out what the hullabaloo is all about (because for all the commentary I've read no one seemed to actually be able to articulate what the supposed joke was, for all of their defense of it...) what people are taking issue with is Dave pitting the LGBTQIA+ (which I will shorthand with queer from here on out unless referencing a specific identity within the spectrum) against the Black community in an attempt to highlight the ways that white folks in the queer community can still be downright racist while being oppressed. I fundamentally agree with the premise of this "joke". And I thought its delivery was deeply unskillful. There's not a QTPOC (Queer/Trans Person of Color) person I know who hasn't felt the sting of that moment when a fellow queerdo with pale skin privilege chooses that privilege over visceral solidarity with their supposedly "real family". And I don't know a Black womxn who hasn't rolled their eyes at a skinny white boy/i sucking his teeth and trying to roll his neck like he learned it from his mama, which I promise you he didn't. Mainstream, which is to say white, queer culture is indebted to specifically Black, Indigenous, and Latinx womxn who have been setting the standard of fierce self-expression and self-determination for actual centuries. From hair, to clothes, to speech, it's us, commodified, whitified, and sold back to us as something outside of ourselves. And that's the problem. Dave's "joke" fails to complete the circle. Black culture, unfortunately, cannot be understood without understanding its proximity to white culture. You cannot appreciate why Christianity is so entrenched in the Black community without understanding the role that missionaries played in the work of colonization and enslavement. Once upon a time, which wasn't that long ago, it was illegal for Black folks to express any form of joy outside of the context of attending a Christian church service. Our songs, clothes, and dances of worship were deemed devilish and proof of our soulessness- I hope the irony of that is lost on no one. Of course, the way we do with everything, we found a way to subvert it and insert it with some humane humanity, to alchemize it into something that is recognized the world over as one of the most powerful expressions of the human spirit that has been known. And the working of this magic came at a great cost, namely our indigenous frameworks of reality. Enslaved Africans were taken from all over the continent although primarily from the western coasts and when they were shackled together they were intentionally mixed up with other folks who didn't speak their language or share the same eco-cultural customs as a way of disorienting the enslaved from the inside out. This made it easier for slavers to enforce their beliefs onto them, they provided them only a single story in which to participate. And so, while it is of little surprise, it is nonetheless disappointing when Black folks rally together to reinforce a belief system they were tortured into. This is of course in some ways a generalization as there were Black Christians before enslavement but the dogma of that Christianity was fundamentally different than the one used to justify the subjugation, rape, and torture of Black peoples as soulless chattel that existed for the sole purposes of furthering the endeavors of whiteness. The thread of Christianity I am speaking to is specifically tied to the project of cultural colonization that was systemically perpetuated against enslaved indigenous Africans on this soil. And that thread is the reason homosexuality is illegal in 34 of 55 African countries and homophobia/transphobia so deeply entwined with African-American culture. And this is the same line of thinking I see at play with people not being able to hold space for identities that don't easily fall into mainstream, and do interpret white, categorizations of reality. That Chapelle does not specify white queer people as the target of the joke is why it fails. That the context of cultural lineage he speaks to only goes back a few decades rather than centuries is why it fails. He names that his problem has always been with white people but it is the equation of white people with queer people that erases the very same "Stonewall gang" he purports to support. It is clear that Dave has done a superficial reading of queer history to buttress his stance. And since most mainstream folks, and do read folks accultured to whiteness by choice or force who are not actively challenging it within themselves and others, know as much about the queer cultural lineage as they do about the organic chemistry of a star, most mainstream viewers can't see just how much he's missing. And it's sad. The same people who will rally all damn day for the slightest oversight to Black culture by white culture will completely erase one of the most prominent cultures within its fold. Cuz you can't tell me for a second that the subversive fabulousness of the Black church isn't rooted in some fierce queerness. Or you can but I'll look you in your face and call you a damned fool. What Dave misses entirely is intersectionality. His "joke" posits that there are no people who are queer And Black, or only a handful that happen to exist in one random bar he was in when he needed foil for an encounter with a white queer person. The reason that the queer community has indeed made many strides that have outpaced those of the Black community is whiteness. Think about it. The first group within the queer spectrum who were able to effectively leverage the civil rights gains that Black and Indigenous folks had been agitating for for centuries were gay white men. While of course there is a level of discrimination that two white men would face being together, they also constitute the ultimate power couple: two cisgender white men in a relationship have the financial power of an entire neighborhood of Black folks, statistically speaking. I highly recommend the documentary Flag Wars for a cultural lineage perspective on just how it is The Castro in San Francisco came to be and a lot of it had to do with the fact that white, gay men could afford to buy property whereas their bipoc and lesbian counterparts could not. The problem is precisely that he doesn't go in enough. He rests on the surface of what would actually make what he's saying subversive rather than merely in service of a convenient narrative that paints the Black community as monolithically heterosexual, which is not only inaccurate in terms of contemporary reality but completely ignores the fact that part of the reason the Black community is so homophobic and transphobic is because of the impact of missionary zeal on "savings the souls" of Black folks who traditionally came from indigenous cultures that typically have much more space for a diversity of authentic human expression. Dave Chapelle's genius has always been rather hit or miss in my opinion. Dave has never been particularly on point when it comes to much beyond racial politics. In this respect, he is completely average. There are heartbreakingly few Black men who are able to skewer the politics of both race and gender with equal acuity. Clayton Bigsby is one of the most brilliant pieces of social satire in the American cultural canon; talk about layers! And the disproportionate amount of time he has spent fixating on boobs and/or masturbation is mediocre at best. Which is fine. Who's infallible? No one, but let's not kid ourselves about it. Which leaves me with my last point, which is really the whole point: I was bored. It didn't take long at all for my mind to start wandering and I found myself reaching for my phone to check-in on the internet (y'know, just to see how it was getting along without me). There was nothing that felt edgy or subversive or even really challenging in what he was saying. But then again, I live in a world where trans folks and nonbinary folks and all spectrums of queerness are normal so whatever it is that gets the mainstream in a huff rarely ruffles more than a single feather in my bubble. Lil Nas X in a wedding dress is just drag eucharist for me (S/o to the SF Night Ministry!). I fully admit to not being very clued in on normalcy and I like it that way because as long as I've been reckoning business as usual adds up to bullshit. Business as usual is patriarchy, and heteronormativity, and a lack of historical context. Business as usual is crude beyond just being gross (cuz humans Are gross, I mean, how much mucus are we?!?!), obsessed with sex and violence, and saturated at every level with the worship of money. Business as usual is killing us, and not just us fringy "weirdos", it's killing everyone and taking quite a few other living species along on this hellish handbasket ride. So no, I wasn't terribly amused. There were a couple of notes that he elicited a chuckle, but that was it. I still go back and watch episodes of Chapelle's show sometimes. There are moments of wild brilliance and pure delight in there, especially in the first season. But I don't watch the whole series. I watch what was potent and let the rest go. And that's really the always invitation isn't it? To take what's meaningful and let the rest go. So white queer folks, take his critique of how ya'll like to jump back and forth between identities when it's convenient. And mainstreamers, take the feedback that queerness is not the equivalent of whiteness. And Black queer and trans folks, just keep being fabulous.
[* Note to Reader from Part I: This is a rather long read I’ll warn you, and one that is organized more by the neurons in my belly than the ones in my head, but I audaciously, earnestly and genuinely hope that by the time you reach the end you will have discovered something new that will facilitate a greater empathy, awareness & passion for engaging in the life stories of different peoples. It started out as one post which I decided to break apart knowing the attention span of the average industrialized human being. Part 1 deals primarily with defining intimacy and with a bit of U.S. racial history, Parts 2 and 3 with my experience and observations. I would also like to make it clear that I DO NOT believe the relationship(s) between Black & White culture/people to be the only one(s) of relevance, importance or impact; it is simply the relationship(s) I will reference here because it is where my personal experience comes from and I practice not trying to speak others truths. Also, this is intended to be neither scholarly nor academic. It is what I believe today based on my experiences of yester days. Disclaiming is done.] – Part III – This lack of understanding created a situation where intimacy was blocked, there was no traffic between narratives. We’ve all been there, felt that obstacle, that thing in a relationship that you just can’t seem to get around, over or under, when connection just isn’t there. The block was already so vast at the age of 14 that it precluded our abilities to see each other in our full forms. Had they had any interest in increasing their knowledge it would have increased the level of intimacy possible, and increased the possibility to develop healthy, full relationships. The lack of interest killed the potential intimacy. Had there been an expressed interest I would have felt recognized, appreciated for my differences, and empowered by the potential value of what those differences brought to the table. Instead, I was overlooked, talked down upon, and shut out from being fully seen. I can count the number of white friends I made at that school with less than one hand. The reason is because I was not able to develop an adequate level of understanding, and therefore the emotional trust and safety also necessary for intimacy, with most of my white peers. They didn´t get it because they didn´t care and it was the not caring more than the not knowing that made genuine, personal relationship impossible. The only person I dated in all 6 of my years at that school was White though more by his skin than culture per se. He had none of the other markers of the status of his other white peers, not the money, the lifestyle, or the bubble. This difference made his reality closer to mine, we were both knowledgeable about crime, neglect & abuse, vacations spent at home, limited financial resources; we had a level of intimacy of life experiences available to us that did not exist with my other white peers of different socio-economic standing. His understanding of the life conditions that often accompany brown skin in this country thanks to centuries of societal neglect meant that I didn´t have to defend or prove certain aspects of my reality, which I constantly had to do with other classmates who were only intimate with an essentially homogeneous, white, middle-class life experience. When I moved to Portland a decade after graduating from high school I quickly, and sorrowfully, lost the hope that what I had experienced were the simple teenage growing pains people outgrow. While gaining certification in poetry & independent publishing I began dating someone who was 10 years my senior, southern and white (he was also a Virgo which makes no astrological sense with my Libra, but I´ve always been a risk taker). As someone who has never really experienced living inside of a comfort zone, I can honestly say I don´t know the difference between risk and breathing for they have always been so intricately intertwined, but that’s a whole other traumail. We fell in love quickly, and out of it with as much rapid-fire pacing, and while we had many other issues, one that loomed large in our relationship was race. For all the intimacy we shared as mainstream outsiders & book loving fantasyphiles who felt daily showering to be a little overrated, we shared almost no racial intimacy. Well actually, he shared none with me. I’d gone to college in his hometown and had been educated with other people much like him, comfortable, privileged & normalized. This would not have been quite as clear to me had I still been living in Oakland where the environmental diversity does much to offset certain kinds of strain, but in Portland this was huge. My own image in the mirror was the most brown-skin I might see all week, especially once my brother left the city. When I would walk, well anywhere really, all of my movements were followed by curious eyes, always questioning, wondering about my obvious difference. There was absolutely no space other than my workspace that I felt seen for being much more than black and therefore different, whatever that meant to the observer. One day while walking back from lunch I found myself on a street corner with a wrap on my head, earphones in my ears, and the unmistakable sensation of being watched. I looked up. I was literally surrounded. Five white people stood around me all with their necks craned and direct attention on my body, curious, yet none of them would meet my eyes when I looked up. One white woman actually ran away from me one night when I approached her to ask for directions; she had been standing still… ironically, I was with a friend, another White woman, who was too afraid to ask her. We got on the trolley stunned. I wondered if/what the woman who ran from me told her friends or family once she got home. I let my friend ramble about how weird it was for a few moments while I stilled the anger in my body before pointing out the elephant on the trolley, “I’m Black.” She froze. It hadn’t occurred to her. How? An otherwise well educated and conscientious human being who seemed to simultaneously lose the faculty of their eyeballs. I could never make these kinds of experiences up. Who would want to? While due to my previous life experiences I understood the societal & psychological functions at work in my boyfriend's struggle to come to grips with this being a major problem for me, he had none of the familiarity with the dynamics of my life needed to make reciprocal intimacy, nor appropriate support, possible. I also had an understanding of his life experience from having been socialized around it, though, of course, this was not reciprocal. And once again, though he tried as far as his self-image compelled him, he didn’t really want to know, because not knowing was comfortable and as a middle-class white male he was conditioned for comfort. Ultimately his actions admitted that his comfort zone mattered more to him than sharing the oft times painful information about my life experience, which in that environment were heavily influenced by my race, that intimacy requires. For me it was my life experience, simple & raw; for him, it was a great leap into discomfort to acknowledge the annoyance & pain that I felt daily as a result of living in a racialized society where my brown skin was considered strange and his white skin was not. It was more comfortable to dismiss my experiences, ignore the emotional content of them & rationalize the behavior of people who hurt me, not because he wanted to hurt me but because he didn’t have the knowledge to integrate the information into his life in a functional way, an almost tacit social survival skill for black people in this country. This inability to safely, openly share and accept knowledge around racial dynamics has proven itself time and time again to be a major stumbling block in my relationships with white people as friends, lovers or any position that requires a certain amount of intimacy. There are of course exceptions to this rule, but they are just that, exceptions. Me as the more context aware party is generally perceived to have the problem rather than the problem actually being an empathy crippling level of ignorance about both what´s at play and what´s at stake. Without consciously being aware of this division in understanding, the situation quickly becomes psychologically and emotionally abusive, just a microcosm of the macro issue of race relations here. I am frequently put into positions to prove my experiences relating to race as legitimate, valid & intelligently interpreted as if simply because something is related to race I suddenly lose all the credibility my education, experience, and manner otherwise afford me. I believe that when people are able to treat their interracial relationships with specialized caring- putting the unique needs of the individual/situation in front of you before preconceived notions or personal assumptions of what’s needed- this breach in intimacy may be healed, but only through developing an actively engaged knowledge base that is equally rich & informed from both perspectives. As with all relationships, it takes both parties and we have a lot of work to do. The beginning. Read more On Becoming an Ally for Life.
Originally Published in 2009 [*Note to Reader from Part I: This is a rather long read I’ll warn you, and one that is organized more by the neurons in my belly than the ones in my head, but I audaciously, earnestly and genuinely hope that by the time you reach the end you will have discovered something new that will facilitate a greater empathy, awareness & passion for engaging in the life stories of different peoples. It started out as one post which I decided to break apart knowing the attention span of the average industrialized human being. Part 1 deals primarily with defining intimacy and with a bit of U.S. racial history, Parts 2 and 3 with my experience and observations. I would also like to make it clear that I DO NOT believe the relationship(s) between Black & White culture/people to be the only one(s) of relevance, importance or impact; it is simply the relationship(s) I will reference here because it is where my personal experience comes from and I practice not trying to speak others truths. Also, this is intended to be neither scholarly nor academic. It is what I believe today based on my experiences of yester days. Disclaiming is done.] – Part II – I’d like you to do a small exercise here. Just take a moment and think of a situation in which you wanted to share something deeply meaningful or impactful with someone important in your life and they just didn’t care, wouldn’t even pretend to be engaged or interested, might even attack you for having shared it. They might be important because you care deeply for them, because of their position in your life, or because of the ways in which they can influence your life; what matters is how you feel in response to their response to you. How close do you feel to this person now? How safe? Do you feel you can trust them with your feelings, your emotions, your inner world? Now imagine this scenario playing out anywhere from 1 – 15+ times a day when what you have to tell them involves race. Yeah, it’s like that. I can still remember the numb anger that settled in me when we got around to reading Toni Morisson’s Beloved in high school. Many of my white peers complained about it, they didn´t understand why it was important to read this book, they did not understand the relevance of the lives of these rural, black women in the South in their white, privileged, city lives in the West. What hurt most about this was not the fundamental lack of understanding, that was merely frustrating, it was that they didn´t want to understand. I felt invisible; even if they couldn´t see the relevance to their own lives they had to be able to at least comprehend that there was a connection to mine and that that made it important… right? After all, it’s only fair that after going through a full handful of courses in U.S. history that at least one story out of the whole narrative be heard from somebody that wasn’t an old white man. More importantly, by not being open to the stories from my racial tradition they were not open to me; it was an unspoken rejection of my reality via encouragement to leave that part of myself on the bus when I came to school. Intimacy is not possible without interest (remember) & they just weren’t that into me. We all know what that feels like, it’s awful when you actually care. That was the key the article gave me to unlocking the connections of my personal experience with that of a greater dynamic, the fundamentally abusive relationship between black & white at the group level. For white to be okay the reality of black has to be denied, something black isn’t too keen on; for black to be okay white has to listen to how white has hurt black, something white isn’t very excited about. Both have to be vulnerable & open to hearing & sharing things about themselves which they’ve been hiding their entire lives, having all the frank appeal of wet shoes in winter to all involved. And yet, I think it to be easily understood that this is the only way to truly heal the wounds that fester between, to get past the denial and get to the listening, to be both vulnerable and trusting, and for both parties to be truly committed to the process. If you can do that, you can have intimacy. To be very, very (very) clear: I am NOT making any form of claim nor do I believe that every white person is an abuser, nor that every black person is abused, or vice-versa; nor that all instances of interaction between people who are either self- or externally identified with these two ways of categorizing human beings are abusive. What I am claiming is that there is an abusive RELATIONSHIP between the two realities and that over time the abusive element of the macro-relationship will manifest itself in the micro-relationships and have a poisonous effect on them. Period. I am also claiming that we have the power to change this poison into water and restore the flow of love between people; and that it takes consciousness, intention, and more than anything the development of a healthy relationship between the two, which requires this intimacy I’m talking about. Now, the real the kicker, and the other barrier to intimacy was that I did have an appreciation of why the lives of these women were so crucial to being an informed human being, regardless of race. I also knew why my classmates weren’t interested in learning more. It was uncomfortable. They were manifesting the group level relationship in our interpersonal interactions. All their lives they had been groomed for comfort and this knowledge, this information, this reality, was uncomfortable. I was groomed for this discomfort and had held it so long I could no longer feel it. It is a part of the rearing of every black person I have ever known to have heard some version of the “so there’s this thing called racism and in it you always lose, and losing is not fun” speech. It is openly discussed and at a certain age we all learned to laugh over the pain of its truth; it’s cultural, a survival technique. At least I had some idea of the cause of my suffering. My classmates were suffering even if they didn’t know it because this avoidance of discomfort meant that there were countless roads left untraveled, and Robert Frost is right: our roads make all the difference. There were lots of questions asked, but only the most superficial, and generally offensive, ones. I’m not exactly sure when but at some point I noticed that if a peer were to ask me about my culture it would either be a question about rap, hair or slang. I wondered if I was putting more on it than was there and asked other black students if they’d had similar experiences. I heard the same thing, unless they were already friends with the person, those 3 categories represented the entire spectrum of interest. Intimacy is not a one-way street and it is our relationships that nurture our development, the consequence of not doing so being internal stagnation based in a lack of diversity; we cannot eat only carrots & survive. It is common scientific knowledge that diversity is one of the not so secret keys to life; biological communities that do not contain diversity die because they cease to evolve. Take a look around you, do you see anything that can functionally exist on in a vacuum (that microwave needs electricity, that pillow needs a floor or a chair to be useful, your blankets need a body to cover to function fully & your cat won’t make it either, sorry) Evolution is the process of adapting to change and when there is no change, or difference, there is no adaptation. And again, as our interpersonal relationships can teach us, what happens in a relationship that is one-sided or lacking in intimacy? It dies. The women of Beloved are my great-aunts, grandmothers and kin; the architects of my existence, the dreamers who made my life possible. This was also true of my white classmates; these women were & are the backbone of everyone’s existence in this country; it was their hands that held babies & their breasts that fed them, their backs that bent to pick cotton and scrub floors while those founders sat around thinking up theories on equality & businessmen made the deals that formed many of the big companies still in existence today. They were content to leave those women nameless and without personal human experience or empathetic consideration because it was uncomfortable. It meant they’d have to start asking questions that affected every aspect of their lives, and they, like I, were human and not interested in inviting discomfort into their lives. So they shut down their emotions and essentially left me & the other black students abandoned in a sea of stories, stories that told some painful truths that only we would hear because no one else would listen. The desire to be comfortable became racism because they had the power to deny, ignore, and ultimately penalize- sometimes supported by adults, de facto supported by the culture at large- whereas I did not. This power differential, so ironically relevant in Beloved itself, was then used as a tool to intimidate, silence and dehumanize me and other students of color into not disclosing the parts of us that were related to these women because it made the white students too uncomfortable for them to engage with. My peers who became my friends asked me uncomfortable questions about race, they cared about how it affected my life, family & community, allowing for true connection. Interracial Intimacy- Part III
There is a focus that comes from the notions of White Supremacy that is notoriously difficult to eradicate from our thoughts, actions, values and the institutions we build from them. When we talk about “privilege” and insist on White people recognizing it, in some ways we are doing the work of furthering notions of White Supremacy. In my work I do not use the word privilege to teach about the dynamics of oppression; it masks a huge host of cultural assumptions that do not serve true liberation from oppression. What is a privilege? Who decides what is a privilege and what isn’t? Privilege implies that the ways of Whiteness are, that the culture and living of it is, in fact actually better than that of other people’s and that it is, therefore, a privilege to be living in accordance with the culture of Whiteness. Privilege leaves a sense of the nebulous, “How did I receive these privileges? Where did they come from?” Do White people need awareness of “White Privilege”, per se, or do White people need to be aware of Black & Brown Oppression? How are those questions different, how are those conversations different? Priority asks, “Why am I prioritized?” and I talk about White Priority because priority makes it clear that what we’re dealing with is the result of human choice. Understanding why you receive that prioritization clarifies how it is that you have come to be having this living, social experience. What I hear often is that White people know they’re treated differently; consciously, silently, there is awareness that their lives and the ways they live them in alignment with status quo cultural values receive more care than those who don’t look like them, who don’t live like them. There may be White people reading this, saying to themselves, “But wait, I’ve always wanted to be [pick a non-White cultural group] because they have such great food/hair/clothes/music/language/are so beautiful, etc.! Being White is so boring!” Imagine this scenario: you’ve just been stopped by the police for not making a full stop at a stoplight; the cop in your window clearly hasn’t been having a great day; would you rather be in a sari/dashiki/with cornrows/be listening to music that isn’t in English in this scenario than have Taylor Swift on blast in standard business casual? The likely feeling of pause after reading those words is exactly the point; you had to think about it because its not about how you feel or what you like, its about how they, the cop, feels that matters in this moment, its how they feel that will determine the outcome. Walking with this awareness 24/7 is what its like to live in the world without having your particular cultural reality supported and prioritized for access to resources, just one of which is safety; and there are publicly funded officials to do so. Police are paid by, and for, through a system that prioritizes Whiteness. That pause after questioning the scenario is the place in your awareness you just haven’t given words to yet, haven’t been allowed to say, for whatever reason, “Yes; this is true. However I feel about the world does not define the way it functions and it functions with more care for me than for my non-White companions.” Social privilege is the experience of having the expressions, values, beliefs and practices of your culture protected and given prioritized access to resources like housing, employment, material resources, financial stability, health care, functional & effective education, institutional advocacy & support, and yes, safety (or its concept at least, whether or not safety is actually a functional delusion for anyone is another thought piece). Understanding this also allows for the delving into complexity necessary to actually address the illness of social oppression. Talking about who and what gets prioritized and why points to the intersections of social identity that any of us can easily see in our lives. Identities as managers or CEO’s counting for more than our identities as artists or philosophers, though we may be both; we know which one will help us more in the traffic stop, or at court, or in a job interview for a corporation with the access to resources to actually add to our 401K. So rather than asking yourself about your privileges, ask yourself about your priorities; who and what is receiving yours and why?
Originally published in 2009 [Note to Reader: This is a rather long read I’ll warn you, and one that is organized more by the neurons in my belly than the ones in my head, but I audaciously, earnestly and genuinely hope that by the time you reach the end you will have discovered something new that will facilitate a greater empathy, awareness & passion for engaging in the life stories of different peoples. It started out as one post which I decided to break apart knowing the attention span of the average industrialized human being. Part 1 will deal primarily with defining intimacy and with a bit of U.S. racial history, Parts 2 and 3 with my experience and observations. I would also like to make it clear that I DO NOT believe the relationship(s) between Black & White culture/people to be the only one(s) of relevance, importance or impact; it is simply the relationship(s) I will reference here because it is where my personal experience comes from and I practice not trying to speak others truths. Also, this is intended to be neither scholarly nor academic. It is what I believe today based on my experiences of yester days. Disclaiming is done.] – Part 1 – While reading up on yet another of my emotional-psychosomatic physiological conditions, also known as the side-effects of being a well-lived human being, my brain mixed together quite a few different bits of information and a peculiar concept came out of it: racial intimacy. Not dating or relations in the group level sense, but intimacy. I know this sounds soo Berkeley woo-woo strange but, please, dive with me. Merriam-Websters online dictionary defines intimacy (noun) as: 1. the state of being intimate, familiarity; 2. something of personal or private nature. It’s a good place to start, but, of course, there’s also that whole defining a word by its root thing, so let’s take a step back and define intimate: (adjective): 1.a. intrinsic, essential; b. belonging to or characterizing one’s deepest nature; 2. marked by a very close association, contact or familiarity; 3.a. marked by a warm friendship developing through long association, b. suggesting informal warmth or privacy; c. suggesting informal warmth or privacy; 4. of a very personal or private nature. Now, in this country’s history the separation of people into races has produced unique, specific & easily identified differences in how people go through the life experience and there is nothing more intimate than our experiences of our own lives. They are the basis of all culture, the ways of surviving and thriving we create by adapting to our particular circumstances. What is so strange is that despite the intimacy of our environment (we’re all in this together and have been for the last 500 odd years), for the most part, we seem to be unfamiliar with or unable to recognize, at the empathetic level, how these differences affect people. For example, while many white people may experience both shame & guilt for being descended from slavers, the descendants of enslaved Africans might experience shame in being descendants of enslaved people & it’s unlikely they would experience guilt in response to this truth. This results in the development of different coping skills to deal with these different feelings. They represent just two very distinct, profound & understandable relationships to the one reality that chattel slavery was practiced. Another reality is that regardless of how you’re related to it, it’s painful. It hurts to know that you carry the karma of slavers and it hurts to know you carry the karma of the enslaved, and it’s even more confusing (and therefore painful) to know that you likely carry both. Not to mention those who may have immigrated after the fact yet still have to grapple with this cultural karma through their experiences here (talk about a goat rodeo!). When it hurts, how it hurts, where it hurts, and why it hurts are all different because the nature of the wounds is different, as are our relationships to them, but we are one in being hurt. We are also unified in having human reactions to being hurt, like denial, defensiveness, aggressiveness, stockholming (my verbification of Stockholm Syndrome) and so forth, all of which are easily observable in our world (the next time you think Uncle Tom, think Stockholm Syndrome and see how differently you understand the phenomena). Intimacy, specifically in the realm of relationships, is one of those areas of life that has proven itself to be just as much of a conundrum for contemporary living in the United States. Capitalism thrives on the negative feelings that separation & isolation create while our industry-driven technology addiction keeps us more firmly attached to our gadgets than the people around us. Intimacy is something much sought after and little understood because the socio-cultural environment we live in does not openly acknowledge its existence as something both real and necessary for human survival; more often than not it’s regarded as something that merely improves a sexual experience. Yet, while reading an article (which did indeed have to do with sex) an idea of relational intimacy was presented to me that punched the ticket on this thought train: the creation of intimacy (remember, those definitions) is driven by interest. Damn; obvious & profound. Many of the relationships I´ve had in my life have been interracial, romantic or otherwise. Until the 5th grade, I lived in an incredibly diverse neighborhood in a different part of both state and country than most of my family. Once we moved to a shockingly less diverse, mostly upper-middle class White, part of town I attended my last year of elementary then jr. high and high school in an environment with incredibly limited access to people who shared my cultural background, as well as less access to the general diversity of my previous life experience. So much of what defined life for me was simply not possible in this environment. Like learning Spanish from our next door neighbors to the South & Vietnamese from our next door neighbors to the North, or why not to use God’s name in vain from the Jehovah’s Witness’ across the street, and how to swear like a sailor from the Irish family two doors up from them; I’m talking diversity way deeper than race here. From 7th grade on, the majority of my classmates came from very homogenous cultural backgrounds, they went to school with people who looked & lived like them, they lived in neighborhoods where people looked & lived like them, and they frequented environments where 90% of the people looked & lived like they did. And if this wasn’t the case, it was likely because they were the pepper, chili, or tumeric in the salt shaker. There were many consequences of this vast difference of experience, some amazing & helpful, others not so much, but one that I didn´t understand until reading this article was that much of the not so much resulted from a lack of intimacy, a situation I still contend with. The lack of resources available for me to feel seen, understood & appreciated around my racial identity, especially at that time in my life, has had a unique, tangible, long-term & detrimental impact on my life, which in itself is a case in point. Whiteness as a culture/perspective is so pervasive that there is no need to create specified resources to support it, it’s de facto supported by the vast majority of what is created in the media and thee other social institutions which dominates our environment Relational intimacy intricately involves knowledge (which the aforementioned media distorts quite regularly). It involves knowing someone for more than what they appear to be, knowing how they respond and are shaped by the dynamic interactions between their tangible and intangible lives and knowing something about what those lives are. It is not created by one person talking at or about another, it’s created by the active sharing of information from experience that puts both parties in a place of being equitably informed, it’s the creative process called unity. One of the key factors of the continued racism of this society and culture are the spheres of knowledge that do not cross the racialized spheres of experience this socio-cultural environment creates. Growing up with a rich oral thistory* tradition as a descendant of enslaved Africans, I was always privy to knowledge about U.S. history which most of my peers were not. I received a parallel education outside of school where almost all of my extra-curricular activities reinforced my sense of belonging within a strong pan-African diaspora. I was also privy to a certain amount of information, intimacy in the sense of familiarity as well as due to my cultural immersion, about their culture which was thoroughly unequal. And what made it worse was that most of them didn’t care that they didn´t know, there was no interest in knowing this part of me. Here’s where it starts to come together. Interracial Intimacy Part II *Thistory is a term I use to recognize that all stories are the singular story of reality becoming this present moment and is as non-anthropic as it is non-gendered in its scope.
Haha, I click baited you! I lied. I didn’t call my friend a nigger. I called her a coconut, which is basically the same thing. I’ll backtrack. I went to Spelman College, an all-female, all-Black, college in the South. I am from Oakland, CA and in particular the Oakland of the 80’s & 90’s, the Oakland of peak national diversity, Oakland mid to post-(pandemic) crack & pre-gentrification. For all the glorious mix of cultures I come from, it too had its limitations. There is a decidedly different mix here than in the East, North, or South, and although most Black-Americans in the West come from the South, particularly Texas & Louisiana, there are far more Black people from the Caribbean as you move East, which I did after graduation. After college I moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, and in particular post-hip-hop and pre-gentrification Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, with one of my good friends from college and we took over the apartment she’d grown up in. It was a total culture shock. The narrow, neo-liberal lens of “diversity” often obscures, quite ironically, the whole deal about diversity: we’re not all the same. As above, so below: not all Black people are the same. I knew this already but at Spelman, I had been more like a bell pepper, or a cherry tomato, in a cobb salad; part of a plethora. In Crown Heights, I was an adorning anchovy to a Caesar, clearly just adding my own flavour to an already stable palate. The African diaspora is a vast swath of both geography & culture. Depending on your chosen timeline of humanity All of humanity is the African diaspora. That’s not really helpful when looking at something as socio-political as a racial slur though; it Matters that people who carry the physical and cultural traits of African tradition as it has survived through the generations experience an oppression on this planet that those who don’t, well, don't. And when I say African what I mean most at heart is Indigenous, but that’s another thought piece. Upwards of 95% of my neighbours were West Indian, including my roommate. Most had emigrated themselves or were 1st generation Americans. And it was clear that I didn’t “belong”. — I am walking home from the subway station after a day at my internship in the Upper West Side. I’m in my boho business casual wear- ironic t-shirt, a skirt with 30’s hemlines, flip-flops, and a backpack. The brick buildings with grated windows that line the sidewalk are removed, all of them, from the sidewalk by a short flight of stairs, a squarish lawn, and another short flight of stairs before their gated & buzzered doors. What differentiates them most are their relative heights. Some are shorter, and feel more like homes. Other are more true to their functions: boxes of human beings stacked upon one another like so many forgotten tools in a garage. The systemic neglect is written across the walls and the faces of the people that line them in the middle of the day looking for something other than a wall to see. I am stopped by a neighbor a few buildings down. They wait in front of the wall to their building, a shorter, homier one, in a white t-shirt, blue jeans and a doo-rag. As I come down the block towards their building I see them move towards the flight of stairs closest to the street. I have become accustomed to this as I move through the neighborhood. The curiosity. It doesn’t bother me here, though it does make me curious in return. I understand their curiosity, their wariness, and only wonder, what does the sight of me mean to them? The neighbor, a middle-aged man, stops at the steps. - ‘Scuse me. Hey! I have on earphones, which I always do when I am walking in the city. I don’t always have them turned on and today I hear them through the buds, though I initially pretend not to. But they are insistent, and at 22 they are my elder so I slow and pull the buds out of my ears. - I seen you walking here, a new face; you live a few buildings down, right? I say yes, and vaguely gesture in the direction of my building not wanting to reveal too much and already feeling so very conspicuous, exposed. - Most of us have lived here for years, some always, so we know who’s who and so I knew I didn’t know you. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve got an eye out in case anything happens. I’m always looking to see who’s around. As we talk he is indeed looking around, not in alarm, but a gentle, known, surveillance of his environment. I feel it as a message with double-meanings: I am both protected, and accountable. If something happens to me it’d get checked out; if I was that something I’d get checked accordingly. I wonder what role they play in the flow of life. Who they might tell about what they see, and why. I thank him and promise to let them know if anything unruly happens in the community that they should know about. Nothing ever does. Well, there was The Cat-Rapist, but that’s another thought piece. — Black Mike, a friend who lives in the next building, tells me while we smoke a blunt in my then somewhat circa apocalypse living room- futon, a tv, on a nightstand, literally nothing else-, – You stand out here you know. (I knew) - Really, how? – For one thing, you wear flip-flops, and like Keep wearing flip-flops, waay past summertime. It was true (it’s still true). - Okay, okay, but I’m from the Bay, where I’m from Fall is the warmest part of the year! – Whateva Jihan. It’s not just that, I seen you on your way to work sometimes, you leave about the same time I get my sister up for school, and I see you sometimes out the window, and you come out the building with your backpack- and your fucking flip-flops- on, (he mimes my morning strap adjustment on the stoop) and nobody from here walks like that. His caricature of me is spot-on. - Ha, ha. Like what? – Like they’re about to go on an adventure. - Well, I am! To prove my point I quote Bilbo Baggins, “Stepping out of your door is a dangerous business, you never know where your feet may take you,” which only proved his, as his amused side-eye let me know. – What? the fuck Jihan. (laughing) Yea, exactly. We both crack up, me from the familiar knowingness of how being a nerd interrupts my belonging most places, and how being Black interrupts my belonging as a nerd, and he because now he realizes: it’s not a joke, and that’s why it’s so funny, I am an adventurer, because I don’t belong, there, or anywhere, really. As a Black, female-bodied, neurologically atypical, nerd I am always between. I started to wonder how else I might stand out. I’d already experienced 3 distinct socio-cultural environments (mixed race, mixed class childhood; mostly White, less mixed-class adolescence; all Black, mostly female young adulthood) and traveled to places where I wasn’t “normal” so I had no expectations of belonging, per se (I usually get a reaction like that quoting Tolkein anywhere/everywhere), but I did expect to at least blend in. — There were other little incidents and I started to feel more and more awareness of living on a certain surface of my neighborhood. There were rules, codes of behavior, norms of address, that weren’t mine. And that was ok. I’m an Oaklander through & through (hella), but I didn’t want to eschew these cultural expectations either. I acknowledged my place as an outsider and sought to understand rather than become. I spent time with my roommate & her friends and the more I did the more I started to understand. How to make proper curry, where to get the good roti and how to order it. I started to get comfortable. And then it happened. One day in our kitchen while a friend of hers from around the corner was over, it happened. She said something funny, and then I laughed, and said, - You crazy coconut. That was the wrong thing to say. Well, it was the wrong thing for Me to say. Both of them froze along with the laughter in the air. They looked at each other, and then at me. – You can’t say that. I feel mortified and confused, and embarrassed, and a little hot from image protecting defensiveness. - Oh, my bad. Is that a bad word? I know I don’t know how to use it. I said it because I’d heard you say it to each other and because I like coconuts. [And because I want to belong too!] They relax a little and tell me it’s slang in the West Indies, but is like using nigger for them, a laughter only appropriate for those hurt by it. - Oh. It’s too bad they fucked up something as wonderful as coconuts like that. That’s actually the end of the story. Nothing else happened. And that is the point of this story, of all of these stories. My desire, need, to belong didn’t trump anything about my impacts, what I changed by being who I was where I was. My friends didn’t need to know anything more about my intentions than that my impact was harmful from ignorance & I didn’t need to know anything more than that it hurt them to never say it again. Yup. The end.