don't give up, part 6: stay local and pay attention

 To hear Brandi read this essay, visit the Expand Your Us youtube page here: https://youtu.be/UnniNVKmQI0

This week’s essay continues a series called Don’t Give Up. It is geared toward helping us find resiliency, stamina and hope in at least two areas of our communal life: One, to keep pursuing wellness, creativity and compassion for others as COVID drags on. Two, to stay present, leaning in to the stories of the toll our racialized society takes. Don’t give up, but keep learning about the lives others lead, actively rejecting any position that upholds a dangerous hierarchical status quo.

In part 5, I recounted an incident I witnessed earlier this month when a couple’s aggressive public commitment to white supremacy scared me. See my last essay to dig into the deep toll such moments take on people of color, and, indeed, on all of us. When we live in communities where belligerent white supremacy runs rampant, we live in communities struggling with terror. This week, I will speak mostly to a white audience, helping us consider how we might respond to such active racism.

In my experience, when we see open displays of racism in others—like I did at Kroger—many of us let ourselves off the hook by comparison. It is easy to see a couple like that and sigh, resting in the fact that they are what racism looks like, and you thankfully act nothing like them. This is dangerous, because we can’t confront or repent of that which we choose to ignore. If we don’t acknowledge our own subtle racial biases, we can’t strip them of power, or free ourselves from their grip.

White supremacy takes many forms, and I urge us all to do the work of recognizing the form it takes in us. In May and June, we experienced a collective awakening as we recognized that as individuals and as institutions, we are biased to doubt and fear the presence of brown bodies. We saw that when all of us, police included, don’t confront the evil in our history, that evil is more likely to thrive inside us, giving us bias against folks of color that we barely even recognize. We saw that we are more likely to trust whiteness, dismissing bad actors among us, while we chronically mistrust the presence of black bodies, applying stereotypes that undermine their humanity.

If we hope to re-seize the moment of cohesion we are losing, we have to make it good and normal to notice our secret racialized judgments, to confess them, and to re-teach ourselves to reject any thinking based on white supremacy. Further, when our executive branch threatens to defund any agency, school or department that implements training in bias, in clarifying our history of hate, in teaching the way that white supremacy impacts communities, we should reject that executive branch.

Here’s the thing though, just like it is easy to absolve ourselves and instead blame the Kroger couple for their issues with race, it is also easy to live unexamined lives while we complain about what our government is or is not doing. By all accounts, our President believes a comprehensive view of American history is unpatriotic, and that training in bias or racialized assumption-making is a threat to America’s safety.

If you see racial inequities and want to make our country safe and more equitable, don’t look to Washington.

Instead, look within. Stay local, doing your own crash course in American history. Stay local, observing your possible tendency to make assumptions about others based on their outward appearance. Stay local, noticing when you let a joke or coded language stand unchallenged in your hearing. Stay local, recognizing when you equate whiteness with safety (especially when it comes to your kids). Stay local, observing who you trust, learn from, or talk with about the polarized state of our country. Stay local, paying attention to what you will bring up in certain friend groups. Stay local, noticing who you are willing to forgive, and who you are likely to ignore. 

One day last week I went on a long run on the country roads near my childhood home. A few miles out, I took a side road I had never before taken, and was stunned by the beauty. The road curved over gentle hills, trees nearly touching overhead. Realizing I was on a stretch of road that was stubbornly uphill, I decided it was time to turn back. As I ran back toward what was familiar to me, I started laughing. There was a massive cow staring at me behind a barbed wire fence enclosing a field. I thought I had been paying attention when I initially ran by! In fact, I was intentionally looking around, trying to take it all in (the way my Dad taught me to run). But there was a big fat cow, and I had totally missed it. It got worse as I got closer: The big fat cow was surrounded by many other, less fat cows. I’m ashamed to admit there were even little baby fat cows, frolicking near a pond in the dappled sunlight.

We have to train ourselves to pay attention. For many of us, we live in kind, generous worlds built on evil white supremacy. Once we discover it, we can either pretend its not there, we can get angry at whoever else sees it, or we can humbly say, “Wow. A cow. How on earth did I miss that?”

We have nothing to lose and everything to gain if we stop our fixation on violent racists or rioters. Instead, find the cow in your own backyard. Pay attention to your life, your thoughts, your friends, your habits. Pay attention to your police department, court fines and Sheriff’s office. Pay attention to your child’s history curriculum and your family’s past or present acquisition of wealth or land. There is so much to learn, so much to repent of, so many connections to be made, so much healing to be done. Don’t give up. Pay attention.