Shoelace Metaphor

written by Amanda Gross

Centuries before white ladies began selling our souls to whiteness we were fighting our living death in Patriarchy, in our own communities and in our own homes.

How did we get from Patriarchy to whiteness? That is a question we will examine by starting with that half-day Professional Development workshop your employer made you attend. Let’s call it Diversity & Inclusion 101.

Chances are if you’ve ever been to any such workshop/dialogue/conversation/seminar, at some point the trainer would frame the conversation in terms of social identity. Known to insiders as the “Big 8,” these main social identity markers include “race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, religion/spirituality, nationality, and socioeconomic status.” (Sometimes age makes the list.) The “social” part of “social identity” means that all of us — whether we want to or not — contend with all of these social identity markers as we navigate our lives.

I see these and other Diversity and Inclusion frameworks as limitedly helpful, like a mouse trap when you’re trying to catch a tornado.

The helpful part of this framework is that it supports us in claiming parts of our identities that society discourages us from seeing, as is typically the case when our social identity markers reflect dominant identities in our society. Like white people in an all-white space, generally we are not thinking about our race or talking about our own racism. At the very least, Diversity and Inclusion frameworks help us to acknowledge our differences based on our social identities.

But what is inadequate about these frameworks is that they aren’t functionally real. These markers compartmentalize our human experience into silos. In the real world, we can never isolate aspects of our identities. They are in relationship to each other and to power structures all the time. This interdependent point of relationships is known as “intersectionality.” A term first coined by Black feminist scholar, Dr. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989, “intersectionality” was further developed by Black, Indigenous, and other Women of Color as a way of naming the intersections of oppression. It was also offered as an important critique to white feminism and Black resistance movements, both of which historically marginalized Black women. Intersectionality makes visible the relationships between various aspects of our identities, which is how I’ve come to understand that my socialization into white middle class womanhood cannot be universalized as the experience of all women.

Likewise, bell hooks describes the dominant system in our society with a lengthy yet apt term: “Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.” Intersectionally speaking, Imperialism cannot be removed from Capitalism, nor White Supremacy extracted from Patriarchy.

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In January of 2018, Felicia Savage Friedman and I collaborated on a workshop for Pittsburgh’s Summit Against Racism (now called Pittsburgh Racial Justice Summit). We called our workshop “The Wicked Webs of Racism, Patriarchy, and Capitalism” and were looking for a way to describe the historical roots and present-day fruits of these intersecting oppressions.

Some of the white women in the room were struggling to understand the relationship between their personal experiences of sexism and their complicity as white people in upholding racism. This was something I had been grappling with over the past few years, too. Neither dismissing our ability to uphold racism (because we have been victimized by sexism) nor totally erasing gendered experience from a racial analysis seemed satisfactory. These are intersectional Wicked Webs after all. As any fiber artist knows, it is the combination of entanglement and tension that transforms individual threads into yards of fabric.

I had been turning over fiber art metaphors in my mind for some time. Plus, the night before our first Wicked Webs workshop, I had had a dream. And so when a young white woman educator confessed to struggling with her relationship to both sexism and racism, I shared a concept I had been mulling over — one which would become known as the Shoelace Metaphor, a visual and experiential way to conceptualize the interlocking layers of the Wicked Webs of Racism, Patriarchy, and Capitalism over time (or more accurately, Patriarchy, Capitalism, and Racism).

Using the Shoelace Metaphor, the Wicked Webs appear less like the intersection at a four-way stop and more like the tied knots keeping your sneaker laces in place.

(If you have access and want to follow along at home, you will need something to write on, something to write with, and a shoe with untied laces.)

I learned how to tie a shoe in preschool (a shout out to my preschool teacher, Ms. Martha). I have vague memories of practicing on a shoe box, but more clearly remember trying to teach my little brother. “You cross one string over the other and then pull tight. But not too tight!” His fingers fumbled with the laces. His face affixed with concentration. Learning this first knot took time and many tries. Usually one lace would end up entangled in the other, but rarely would that knot be stable enough for the next step.

Like the tedious repetition of a preschooler learning to tie their shoes, it took Patriarchy thousands of years to get its foundational knot in place.

In our Wicked Webs workshops, we define Patriarchy as a historically-established process that takes all of humanity and divides us into two separate groups based on the biological categories of male and female, after which each biological category gets a gender.

(For those of you following along at home, it might be helpful to take out a paper and pen, draw a big circle. This circle represents all of humanity. Now draw a line down the middle, from top to bottom.)

Humans with the anatomical body parts of penis, testicles, scrotum, prostate, with relatively high levels of testosterone and low levels of estrogen, and XY chromosomes are given the biological sex “male.”

(Write “male” on the left side of your circle.)

Those humans with the anatomical body parts of vagina, vulva, uterus, ovaries, with relatively low levels of testosterone and high levels of estrogen, and XX chromosomes are given the biological sex “female.”

(Write “female” on the right.)

Biological sex may inform a human being’s reproductive capacity and what they are able to do anatomically with their body. But regardless, that human is assigned a corresponding gender, which is socially described and enforced and has to do with things like power, behavior, appearance, identity, norms, and weird associations like colors, deodorant scents, and toy genre. In the world of Patriarchy, as it has been defined by Europe, the sex categories of male/female neatly line up with the gender categories of man/woman or boy/girl and also with all sorts of other English words such as he/she, hero/heroine, god/goddess, priest/priestess, John/Jane, and blue/pink to name a few.

(Now fill in the left side of the circle with the words “man/boy/he” and any other random masculine gender associations you have learned. Write “woman/girl/she” and any other feminine gender associations under “female” on the right.)

Like zooming in on a low-resolution jpeg, the hard lines that establish and keep male=men and female=women get fuzzier the closer you look. As many as 1 out of every 60 children neither fall neatly into the male nor female categories; they are born intersex. According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights:

“Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (including genitals, gonads and chromosome patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. Intersex is an umbrella term used to describe a wide range of natural bodily variations. In some cases, intersex traits are visible at birth while in others, they are not apparent until puberty. Some chromosomal intersex variations may not be physically apparent at all.”

In Western society, it’s been common medical practice for doctors to alter a child’s anatomy at birth to fit more neatly into a clearly female or male sex category, often without the informed consent of the child’s parents. Which means you or I could have been born intersex without ever knowing. Beyond being born intersex, there are many other reasons why an individual’s anatomy might not neatly fit into sex box one or sex box two including a wide range of surgeries and medical procedures like hysterectomies or getting one’s tubes tied.

(Drat, now what are you going to do with that middle line? Did you write in ink?)

Gender, as I mentioned, is socially constructed and enforced. And while there are plenty of examples of societies throughout the world and throughout history who have multiple and overlapping gender categories outside of and beyond a man/woman gender binary, Patriarchy’s strict binary depends on the initial subjugation of people gendered men. Or as bell hooks states:

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” (bell hooks)

(At this point, I usually draw mad arrows surrounding the left side of the circle, but however else you want to represent the ritual of emotionally harming boys will work too.)

The ritual of emotionally harming boys prepares them as grown men to dominate women and girls, compete with and command weaker less masculine and younger men, and police that gender binary with violent aggression. The performance of violent homophobia is one example of gender binary policing that Patriarchy demands.

(Again, arrows work here to represent domination. Sometimes I illustrate this forced violence by compelling the circle to tilt 90 degrees to the right and then morphing into a pyramid.)

Originally brought to parts of Europe through nomadic warrior tribes from the Russian steppes, Patriarchy became established in Europe over several thousands of years. Its spread in Europe began in the 5,000–4,000 BCE time range and became more and more entrenched throughout history. Patriarchy’s violence marked the eras of Greek and Roman domination and was especially ingrained in the rise of Christianity in both eastern (Eastern Orthodox) and western (Holy Roman) traditions. By the time the Witch Hunts rolled around, Patriarchy was integrated into economic, political, religious, cultural, and social systems at every level. {For more on this early history of European Patriarchy see The Rule of Mars edited by Cristina Biaggi}

Shoelace Metaphor 1

(Now for that shoe I’ve asked you to find; make sure you have a shoe that is laced up, but not yet tied. Cross the two laces one over the other. Wrap one of the laces around and up under the other. Pull both of them tight in order to create the first foundational knot. This knot represents European Patriarchy.)

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Shoelace Metaphor 2: Foundational knot is European Patriarchy

The era of the Witch Hunts in Europe corresponded with an entire economic shift away from Feudalism and towards Mercantilism, the predecessor of Capitalism. To sum up hundreds of years of history and an entire book (Caliban and the Witch by historian Silvia Federici), the ruling wealthy class got greedy and kicked the peasants off the land. The peasants organized to resist. The ruling class clapped back using the Witch Hunts and persecution of Jewish people and Heretics to undermine peasant resistance. All this eventually resulted in a new economic system: Mercantilism, which focused on trade for profit and private ownership. Its accompanying philosophy, Mechanical Philosophy, began equating the human body to the machine, viewing the body as raw material, disposable for profit and the emerging nation-state.

At the same time as Europe was philosophically separating the physical body from the sacred soul, its religious leadership (Pope Alexander VI) was sanctifying violent conquest. Now any land not already inhabited by Christians was proclaimed God-ordained for the taking. According to the Pope’s Bull, it was now Christian obligation that “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.”

These religious proclamations had a disastrous impact on Indigenous people around the world. In the Western Hemisphere, some historians estimate that 56 million Indigenous people were murdered leading up to the 1600s — equaling 90 percent of the pre-Columbian Indigenous population. Neither this devastating history nor the ways my ancestors directly benefited from it, nor the ways Indigenous people resisted, exist, and still resist European Colonization were ever taught to me in school. Certainly it was not the “Pilgrim and Indian” story of annual preschool Thanksgiving Day theater productions.

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Speaking of preschool, we last left our historical preschooler with the triumph of their first knot, poised and ready to take on the next level of shoe-tying anatomy. When teaching little kids to tie shoes, I tend to stick to the Bunny Ears method, in which you create two loops, one in each hand, and then tie them together and pull tight. This seems to be the clearest way to demonstrate, conceptualize, and explain the next step. However, when left to my own devices, I prefer the more complex “Loop, Swoop, and Pull” method. It’s amazing how as an adult, I do this now without even thinking. I make that quick grab with one hand for a loop on the lace to my right and then use my left hand to wrap the left lace around. Then, in an expert move, I seamlessly switch which hand is on which lace by momentarily holding the arrangement in place with my right hand. My left hand reaches for my right lace loop at the same time that the fingers on my right hand make contact with the left lace, guiding it through the gap. In one motion, both hands pull the two symmetrical loops taut.

(Take your shoe and add the second knot using your preferred—Bunny Ears or Loop, Swoop, and Pull—method. This second knot with its pair of loops represent Mercantilism on one side and Colonization on the other.)

Shoelace Metaphor 3: Bunny ears of Mercantilism & Colonization

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I can say with confidence, that the white women asking questions about race and gender on that cold, January day at our first Wicked Webs workshop weren’t the upper echelon of society. They weren’t the One Percent of 2018’s America. But, neither were they barely surviving at the lowest rung of the U.S.’s economic ladder. One of them even had enough expendable income and leisure time to meet up a few weeks later for a lovely chat over coffee. We were both wearing winter boots; mine had laces, double-tied.

Something else happened between the tie that brought together Mercantilism and Colonization and the metaphorical shoes worn by today’s nice white lady. And that something was the invention of race.

I first learned about the distinct historic connection between race and class at a People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond Undoing Racism workshop, which was being facilitated by Dr. Michael Washington. Dr. Mike painted a captivating and grim picture of what poor indentured European servants, Africans who were enslaved, and members of Native tribes were going through as dehumanized laborers for the European elite.

In Birth of a White Nation, Jacqueline Battalora also describes this set up with  attention to the ways European Patriarchy carried over into new laws in the British Colonies of Virginia and Maryland, particularly in supporting the legal creation of a new category of people now called “white.” These brutal 17th Century laws established a drastically different set of consequences and outcomes depending on whether one was European or African/members of Native tribes and included (and I share an extremely abridged version of this history here—for more in depth information, investigate the resources listed in the bibliography at the end of this post):

•        In 1640 in the colony of Virginia, John Punch, an enslaved African man ran away with two indentured Europeans. When caught he was sentenced to lifelong servitude, while the Europeans were given added years of indenture, but not the permanent loss of their freedom. This is one of the first legal distinctions made between Africans and Europeans and set a legal precedent for lifelong Chattel Slavery.
•       In 1643, and further clarified in the decades that followed, the Virginia Assembly added a tax on African women that was consistent with the tax on English men ages 16–60 and on African men. With this new law, English women became the only category of women tax exempt and, rather than being taxed for their labor, they were instead classified as dependents (both servants and free). As historian Kathleen M. Brown puts it, “This created a legal fiction about the different capacities for performing agricultural labor between English and African women” (from Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs).
•       Deviating from hundreds of years of British Common Law in which land, child custody, and inheritance all flowed paternally, a 1662 Virginia colonial law made the status of a child (whether enslaved or free) inheritable based on the status of the mother rather than based on that of the father. This law had the traumatic impact of incentivizing the systematic rape of women of African descent. It also delegitimized Black parenthood by simultaneously relocating parental authority of Black children to enslavers while erasing evidence of their white paternity.
•       Anti-miscegenation laws in the colonies of Virginia and Maryland established the existence of white people in 1681, first established to control who “British and other free born” women could marry and later declaring that it was illegal for white men and women to marry people of African descent and members of Native tribes. Although illegal for white men to marry non-white people, this was primarily enforced in the case of white women, serving to make white women exclusively available to white men and subsequently all women more available to white men. At the same time, patriarchal privileges (carrying firearms for example) were stripped from men of African descent and members of Native tribes, centering patriarchal power in the hands of white men.

This gruesome history was justified with the development of pseudo-scientific classification and ranking systems (aka race), which consistently placed white at the top and Black at the bottom. {Read: The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter.}

These legal and “scientific” categories of human beings once again sub-divided humans into fictional and unequal groups (this time based on race) and became cleverly integrated into all aspects of U.S. society. The European “natural hierarchy” for gender relations adapted for racialized colonization and enslavement as Black and Indigenous people were feminized and infantilized as requiring the supposed protection, guidance, and domination of the European/white race. I say cleverly because the invention of whiteness by the ruling colonial elite has served to successfully align a lower class majority (poor and middle class white people) with the elite wealthy minority rather than align with their class-based peers. Moreover, the invention of a racialized exploitated lower class was fundamental to the development of Capitalism, an economic system based off of the historic supply and demand of people as property, their labor, and the colonized ownership of the Earth and all that can be taken from her.

To directly address the white educator’s question, racism depended and depends on the invention of white womanhood by carving out a specific pedestal for white women as the purest,  most beautiful, holiest model of civilized wife, mother, and daughter. The notion of white women as damsels in distress projects patriarchal white fears that white women will be coveted by Men of Color, which has incited horrific and ongoing racist violence. White women during the First Wave Feminist Movement repeatedly used racial superiority to reposition themselves as educators, missionaries, nurses, and cultural evangelists of white American culture by occupying prominent roles in Native boarding schools and southern schools for African American children, overseas missionary work, and women’s prison reform.

Which brings us full circle to the shoelace metaphor. If European Patriarchy is the first knot on your tennis shoe, proto-capitalist Mercantilism with its bottomless hunger for free and cheap (able-bodied) labor and Colonization with its hunger to dominate the Earth are the twin bunny loops that make up the second knot. And as any caregiver knows, a single knotted shoe tie often results in loose laces. Tie those sneakers twice. The double-knot of modern Capitalism and its co-conspirator Racism make up the historical third tie that reinforces these overlapping systems of oppression.

(Take the two loops and tie them one last and final time, making a double-knot. The loops of the double-knot represent Racism and Capitalism.)

Shoelace Metaphor 4 – Double-knot of Capitalism & Racism

As Felicia often points out, “In order to undo a knot, you must first go back through.” Which is why white feminism has failed us and will continue to fail us. It is impossible to untie a double knot by pulling at its base. In fact, pulling at its base only tightens the tie. From Suffragettes to the Women’s March, white women have been vocal about ending Patriarchy. And we should be: Patriarchy is indeed the foundational knot. But in order to undo that knot, as well as all the interconnected knots that keep this arrangement in place, our collective liberation journey depends on our ability to untie its most recent mutations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Does Whiteness Separate Us from God? Take Ten

WRITTEN BY emmaxfieldsteele

With the graciousness and generosity of the creator of this blog, I have had plenty of time to think about the question she posed to me: “how does your whiteness separate you from God?” It is a big question. It is built upon the premise that whiteness does separate me from God. And it is a difficult question for me to grapple with, because “whiteness” is self-normalizing for those of us who benefit and suffer from it. The moment I try to grasp it, it fades back into the background of “normal.” To write about something so deeply ingrained is to stare at the very thing I have been taught does not exist. The chameleon hiding in plain view, until it blinks.

Years ago, I saw a documentary about a middle-aged, white, protestant man who agreed to a cross-cultural experiment: he would live with a Muslim family for a period of time, attend worship with them, and effectively shadow them through their everyday lives. There were many heart-warming conversations with the kind host family, and eventually—predictably—Muslims became more human to him and the “us/them” dynamic faded some. But the scene I remember most vividly was the first time he entered the mosque to meet his host family. He walked into the middle of the broad, open space and stood there, confidently waiting. He seemed to be totally at ease, even casual and comfortable, in the worship space of an unfamiliar religion. He seemed to “own” the space.

As a woman, I’m sensitive to the ways that so many white men I encounter occupy space. So often, they move as if they have been assured of an absolute right to exist, to take up space—any space. 

In my white feminist upbringing, my parents worked hard to foster my self-confidence. I was taught to believe that I could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. White male privileges implicitly functioned as the ideal. I would not be held back by gender. I deserved all good things. My parents, I know, never connected any of this with whiteness. They were advocating for me and telling me what they thought the world would not—that I had inherent value.

But even this was a product of whiteness—my inherited privilege. For me, the anti-racist task of recognizing my whiteness is like teasing out a parasite that claims to be whatever it attaches itself to. I cannot do it fully or well without help or tender, loving care. 

Whiteness tells me that my genetic inheritance, rather than my createdness, gives me a right to be, to take up space, to possess. Whiteness claims to be my ticket and my deed of trust—it proclaims my inherent right to be.

The Christian task of recognizing what separates me from God requires opening myself up to a process of redemption. I believe that God’s creation is an on-going process, and that God is not done creating me or any of us. 

Amanda’s question is a deeply pastoral one, because it requires that I stare into that “empty” space where I find that whiteness has claimed to be the source of my inherent human worth. That fallacy is the parasite.

As a Christian, I believe in the inherent worth of all humanity and of all creation. Inherent—meaning permanent, essential, and unearned. Whiteness claims that I have worth because I am white. Christianity claims I have worth because God created me.

As a little girl I had some grandiose dreams of bringing peace to distant places where wars were being fought. I longed to be a missionary and to help people who were in need (none of them, in my imagination, were white). These dreams may have been early signs of a call to ministry, but I believe they were also evidence that I had soaked up the rhetoric of white supremacy. Like the man striding into the mosque, I believed early on that I had a right to go anywhere, be anything. And, as long as I pitied those who did not have my privilege, I could enjoy its benefits without guilt. 

When I am aware of my whiteness—see it for what it is, standing apart from its surroundings, then I move through the world with more humility. I am aware of others’ right to take up space, to set norms that I may or may not agree with. I am aware that my inherent worth is no greater or less than that of anyone else. I am God’s beloved child—no more, and no less. I am released into a more complex world of boundaries and differences. I play a smaller role. The moments when I find the grace to be aware of my whiteness, I find myself in genuine relationships, participating rather than dominating, surrounded by other beloved children of God—I find myself closer to God. When I succumb to the rhetoric of whiteness, I find myself alone.

Whiteness claims to be the source of my worth and my ticket to belonging. The truth is that my worth and belonging have nothing to do with my race. I have inherent value because I am God’s beloved child. In recognizing that, I find myself in a very large and complicated family—just one of many siblings. And there I find God.

The author is an Episcopal priest in Sylva, NC.

Unscripted liberation? (How Does Whiteness Separate us from God — Take Nine)

Photo: “Beyond the Script” by bemdavey

This is part of a series of guest posts and dialogues around the question:  How does Whiteness Separate us from God?

WRITTEN BY Bethany McLean Davey

Breathe in, breathe out. Curtain opens. Step onto the stage. Smile into the crowd. Squint into the spotlight. Become the character. Recite the lines. Move in choreographed unison. Wait for the cue. Exit stage left. Enter stage right. Move downstage for the monologue. Pause for dramatic effect. Hurry backstage for the costume change. Final number. Smile big. Smile bigger. Hold the pose. Curtain closes. Curtain re-opens. Join hands. Rush forward. Absorb the applause. Receive the resounding approval. Smile still. Smile longer. Hold it. Exit stage left. 

Audience leaves. Cast trickles to the parking lot. 

Lights out. 

Doors lock. 

Emptiness. 

Matinee tomorrow.

Breathe in, breathe out. Curtain opens. 

Everyone is watching, and I am ready to perform. I didn’t have to audition, as this role was handed to me at birth. Whiteness* offers the allure of center stage, if I am willing to do as expected. I am not a creative here, not an imaginative being, but a receptacle for the ingestion and on-demand regurgitation of Whiteness’ promises: here, I can make you something! Here, you will be watched and seen and applauded for and envied and part of something bigger than yourself!

Smile into the crowd. Squint into the spotlight.

I am prepared for my White Lady role, knowing precisely what is expected. The trick is to find oneself in the in-between spaces: be opinionated, but not too opinionated. Take up space, but not too much. Show emotion, but only from the prescribed set Whiteness has deemed acceptable. If I perform as demanded, the show can go on, and how fulfilling it must be to receive the promised accolades, to possess a leading role without an audition!

Become the character. Recite the lines. Move in choreographed unison.

Such a unified production must be rooted in artistry, and I’ve been invited to partake!

Performing provides a certain thrill, the rush that comes with being watched and admired. And yet, though surrounded by people, the stage can be one of the most disconnecting spaces. Whiteness’ script is rigid, and thus, so is the performance. We are actors confined to the limitations of our assigned roles, performing side-by-side and yet disjointed; though onstage with many humans, I have never felt so alone. Whiteness is counting on me to do my part. We are center stage. After all, isn’t everyone watching, enthralled with our every move? We dance to the three-four rhythm of an Old English waltz, knowing our sophistication as surely as we have ever known anything. This must be art.

Wait for the cue. Exit stage left. Enter stage right.

It is clear that improvisation will not be tolerated. Those who err from the script are cast out: deviants, defectors. We are afraid, acting out of our fear. We take no risks, reciting our lines as demanded, with shallow breath and perspiration on our brow. If I can’t be perfect, I should make all efforts to appear perfect; we are told repeatedly to present ourselves as Whiteness has taught us. We were born onto this stage that was constructed by and for us. I suppose I ought to appreciate it. 

Why do I feel short of breath?

Move downstage for the monologue. Pause for dramatic effect.

I’ve said too much. Taken too much of the scarce space. I felt more deeply than I ought, and I worry this will not be tolerated, that I will not be tolerated. 

In the pause, 

I hesitate, 

alert. 

No one has noticed. I am still playing the role as expected. 

I wait for the right moment, then move once more.

Hurry backstage for the costume change.

I am disconnected from all bodies: my own and others’. Solitude in a multitude is perhaps the most disorienting. I step rigidly about, and I do not feel like myself in a dress too small, in shoes that squeeze my toes together. Whiteness insists that anyone and anything other than the main actors be ignored: they are the set, they are the background,** instructed to move about silently as though invisible. They are to keep the spotlight on center stage, to make us look good. I sense danger and suffering around and within, yet Whiteness orders me to ignore it: the show must go on. I shift just enough to gain approval. I know how I should look, move, speak. It hurts when I bend my body this way, but I will tend to that later. I should fulfill my role.

Final number. Smile big. Smile bigger. Hold the pose.

I am told center stage is the only place to be and so I smile. Smiling this big hurts, but it’s expected so I ignore the pain. I hold my body in place for as long as I can. I feel rigid and tense, my body aches with exhaustion. I anticipate the roar of applause and wait for it to fill me.

Curtain closes.

Are we done?

Curtain re-opens.

Not yet. 

The pace of performances is unsustainable.

Join hands. Rush forward. Absorb the applause. Receive the resounding approval.

It’s so loud. 

Where’s the joy? 

I thought I would feel differently than I do.

Smile still. Smile longer. Exit stage left.

The exhaustion sets in.

Adrenaline slips away.

We each played our part—is this something to celebrate?

Audience leaves. 

The show is all there is, and no more: nothing before, nothing after.

Cast trickles to the parking lot. 

So quiet.

No celebration after all.

This isn’t what was promised.

Lights out. Doors lock.

I’m cold. The hollow sterility of the darkened theater engulfs me. The theater doors clang shut and I am desperately alone, severed from the depths of myself, from relational connection, from creative potentiality, from the divine.

Emptiness.

A scream roars from deep within me, echoing through the rows of empty seats as if attempting its own escape. I touch my face, wet with tears. This pain isn’t scripted. This pain isn’t allowed.

Matinee tomorrow.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I tear down the aisle—barefoot, hair loose—and throw the weight of my body against the door. Will it give? I didn’t know I was trapped inside this theater, unable to access the life that lies beyond its doors. 

Oh, God.

But wait. A sound from the back of the theater. It sounds like a melody. This can’t be right. I thought I was alone, I thought the show was over. 

And yet.

I move slowly toward the hypnotic rhythm, noticing a drum, deep and resonant. 

Voices! Syncopated, harmonious, fluid and free.

It sounds like joy.

I inch closer still.

Am I allowed here? 

And yet. 

I see what moments ago I had only sensed: the theater is teeming with life, movement. Even the stage is alive! The set is in motion, stagehands and actors—some from the earlier show and some I have never before seen—dance among the scene, hammers and drills undoing the set as the set undoes itself. The stage deconstructed in song.

I creep closer.

I hear laughter.

It’s warm here, surrounding me.

I feel held.

Is that my great grandmother? A wink from her and she returns to her work, sawing beams that once held the stage.

Eyes and souls connect as the stage is broken down, bit by bit. 

May I join? 

The air here is fresh, flowing. A window opens and then a door. Earth’s dewy sunlight seeps into crevices long cast in shadow.

Someone sees me. They seem to realize that I was just in the evening’s performance. 

And yet. 

I am beckoned forth, invited in. The song swells around me, the drum’s beat vibrates through my body and I am compelled to move, to release, to exhale. 

I am not alone.

I am surrounded.

We are not alone.

We are surrounded. 

I can breathe here. I can be known and know, I can love and be loved.

What is this space, being both deconstructed and constructed anew? 

In joyful and interwoven collaboration, we improvise in co-creating this new thing that is becoming. 

No show.

Just life.

Invited in.

Do I accept?

This is where the life is. 

Breathe in, breathe out. 

Wholly holy.

*I intentionally capitalized “Whiteness” in this portion of the piece to signify that whiteness is acting as its own character, a force in and to itself. I wanted to play with personifying whiteness, and capitalizing in this instance felt most resonant. The same is true for White Lady, as I wanted to represent a set of racialized patterns in common for many white femmes as both a characterization and overarching idea.

**I was introduced to the concept of “backgrounding” through the work of ecofeminist Val Plumwood, who described it as integral to the dualism of colonialism: those/that perceived as the “center” regard those/that perceived as “other” as part of the background to hegemonic power. This “hyper-separation” serves the perpetuation of dualistic, domination-of-“other” relationships and denies the existence of interdependence among individuals and groups (Val, Plumwood, “Decolonisation Relationships with Nature,” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, no. 2, 2002: 10, 12).

My initial attempts at this post were “academic.” This is understandable, as I am in my second year of a Master of Divinity program. However, as I began incorporating Plumwood’s notion of backgrounding, I remembered how it initially struck me as the paradigm through which I have understood my life, as though I am center stage, and all else (initially, this thought journey regarded the Earth) is my set, my backdrop, merely a support to Centered Me. This led me to consider the ways that whiteness functions as a hyper-separating stage performance, with a specific script and expectations of rigid compliance for those centered and those backgrounded. This piece became an attempt to convey how whiteness feels in my body—both as an isolating force from which I need to be freed, and as an identity that has nothing to offer until I begin to deconstruct it. I don’t want to perform my White Lady role. I want to go off-script with others who are doing the same: I want to co-create something new.

Whiteness demands that I sever from the deepest parts of myself: my emotions, my fullness and bigness and fury at the collectively-felt impact of injustice. Whiteness demands that I sever from all it considers “other.” Whiteness demands I disconnect from all within and around me, leaving me isolated from the divinity and vibrancy of existence. 

I refuse to sever. 

The show must not go on.

Blogging with the Mennonites… again!

written by AMANDA K GROSS

I’ve been in and out of Mennonite spaces for several years, but earlier this year I had a chance to connect with the awesome leadership at Mennonite Women in Leadership and was honored to be invited to share my perspective in a guest blog post.

It was a little overwhelming to have to narrow down some thoughts to 800 words (Okay… it ended up closer to 1,200), but I was pleased by where the process took me. I got to share a little bit about how some of the ruptures from conflict in my early childhood church are being repaired and transformed. I also got to consider how toxic shame is a racialized trauma response for white Mennonites.

Check out the blog post!

Playing in the honeysuckle and poison ivy . . . together

How White Supremacy Culture Shows up in our Families + Practices for How We Can Dismantle It

written by AMANDA K GROSS

I have long found Okun and Jones’ document on White Supremacy Culture (WSC)* to be an incredible resource for anti-racism. I appreciate how the document names the hidden parts of dominant culture, the parts we as white people are especially taught not to see (kinda like an iceberg). I also love that they include antidotes. For all the helpfulness of critical analysis, studying history, and self-reflection, the critique alone will not necessarily inspire us to dream alternatives and motivate us to practice them.

In using Okun & Jones’ resource in non-institutional settings, there have been many times when it didn’t quite fit. When sharing it with someone in White Women’s Group who worked exclusively in the home, when examining how we learned WSC in our childhood (within an awesome collaboration with Ivonne Ortega), or when applying it to my own family patterns, the institutional leaning of the document has often left me curious about how WSC shows up more specifically in our family cultures. Besides, I am especially interested in this question because the cultivation of family culture is an area in which status quo and passing white ladies have extraordinary power to make change.

Then, my extended family offered me an unexpected opportunity to facilitate an anti-racist white affinity space, which finally gave me the structure and push to draft my own list of how WSC plays out at the family level and what practices might support us in dismantling it.

A couple notes before you delve into the tenets and practices: The tenets are directly drawn from Okun and Jones’ list of WSC tenets. A few of the descriptions/practices are from their list, but mostly I have adapted and added descriptions and practices based on relocating the tenets in a family context (considering how the tenets might play out in childrearing etc.). I intend this list as a living document and recognize that it is absolutely not comprehensive. It’s also very much inspired by how I see WSC showing up in my own family, which is highly influenced by European Mennonite puritanism and pacifism. Please use what is relevant for your family context and feel free to add and amend, while respectfully giving attribution to its sources (Okun & Jones and this blog post). Lastly, I am choosing to use the word “Practices” rather than “Antidotes” because of connotations of “Antidotes” with being one-time cure alls (perhaps from childhood cartoon storylines?) and because I want to reorient us to focusing on dynamic processes which can be messy, change, and take the self-discipline of ongoing commitment.

*Since my initial exposure to the White Supremacy Culture document, Tema Okun has launched this fabulous and multifaceted website devoted to Dismantling White Supremacy Culture. It is an excellent resource! https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info)

PERFECTIONISM

• Little appreciation for the work others are doing, especially when work is within prescribed/assumed gender roles.
• Little, if any displays of affection, use of words of affirmation, or other types of positive behavior reinforcement. Certain “positive” behaviors and accomplishments are assumed as normative and unspoken (such as bringing home an A report card, or heterosexual marriage and having children, etc.). If these don’t happen, an explanation/reason/justification is required (i.e. I didn’t get married because I was focused on my career).
• Erasure and devaluing of emotional, relational, and reproductive labor.
• Common to point out how a person or their work/actions/behaviors are inadequate, as in punishment-based childrearing practices.
• Making a mistake = being a mistake = sin. Mistakes are seen as a personal negative reflection on the individual and/or family and involves shame.
• Mistakes aren’t seen as growth and learning opportunities.

Dismantling Practices

• Practice authentic generosity with words of affirmation, appreciation, and rituals of gratitude.
• Create space and acceptance around making mistakes. Discuss ways/expectations about how family members can make amends and learn from mistakes. (Understand identity and who is situated to support this process.)
• Create a family culture where people can recognize that mistakes sometimes lead to positive results and transformational change.
• Separate the person from the mistake, while acknowledging the context and history of systems of oppression. Use mistakes as an opportunity to deepen everyone’s understanding around these issues.
• Disrupt fixed roles (i.e. gender). Value, celebrate, and prioritize emotional, relational, and reproductive labor.
• Approach people directly about concerns and also build relationship through non-conflict-based interactions.
• Understand the role of shame and trauma. Work on healing around shame.
• Create a family culture that celebrates and encourages authenticity of each family member.

EITHER/OR THINKING

• It’s either/or, good/bad, right/wrong, with us/against us. Binaries persist everywhere (gender, ability, race, Mennonite/not Mennonite, believer/non-believer, liberal/conservative, etc.). Note: Systems of oppression are all rooted in this dualistic power dynamic and ascription of value.
• Closely linked to perfectionism in it’s difficult to learn from mistakes or accommodate conflict.
• No sense of both/and. Little ability to take multiple perspectives, frame, ways of being into consideration or see the potential for new, emergent, nuanced alternatives.
• Results in trying to simplify and compartmentalize complex things.
• Creates conflict and increases sense of urgency as people feel pressured to choose sides or do this or that.
• If people don’t agree/conform, then they are completely excluded (historical roots to shunning, and theologies of hell).
• Family members feel that they must code switch (language and culture) in order to ensure belonging and safety within the family.

Dismantling Practices

• Notice and name when only 2 options and either/or language comes up. Work to come up with more alternatives. Disrupt binaries. Give children more than 2 choices.
• Slow down decision-making and support the development of an analysis of power with deeper investigations of how systems, cultures, identity, history, etc. impact decision-making. Take breaks when you need to. Avoid making decisions under extreme pressure.
• Embrace mistakes as learning moments and growth opportunities. Teach this to children.
• Understand how you’ve internalized dualistic thinking and ascription of value.
• Strive to abolish the use of “good/bad,” “right/wrong,” “with us/against us,” “either/or” from your vocabulary. Notice when punitive models of accountability come up.
• Work with family members to address the root causes of harm and establish supportive communities focused on accountability through learning, taking responsibility, and staying in relationship.
• Refocus/orient accountability processes around what the goals and values are (i.e. BIPOC family members are safe).  
• Integrate collaborative creative practices, artmaking, and play into family time and culture, including as a way to envision and engage alternatives. Note: right/left brain integration and embodiment practices and other modalities (music, images, etc.) help us get beyond an intellectualized, linear, binary way of thinking.

FEAR OF OPEN CONFLICT

• Those with power are scared of conflict and try to ignore it or run from it (can show up as silence).
• When someone raises an issue that causes discomfort, the response is to blame the person for raising the issue rather than look at what is actually causing the problem.
• Conflict is punished and ignored.
• Emphasis is on being polite and not bringing up things about which family members disagree (politics, religion, etc.).
• Raising difficult issues = being impolite/rude/out of line/un-Christ-like/etc.
• Tendency to talk about issues and disagreements to other family members but not directly to the person.
• Conflict is repressed until it reaches a boiling point. After the boiling point, the lid is put back on.
• Family teaches and models that we don’t talk about certain topics (these are often associated with shame: sex, race, ability, etc.). Questions and curiosity are also shamed.
• While family culture openly supports narratives around being polite/peaceful/Christian/etc., there is also a deep undercurrent of passive aggression, especially in conflict.

Dismantling Practices

• Distinguish between being peaceful and raising hard issues. Don’t require those who raise hard issues to do so in acceptable (peaceful) ways.
• Once a conflict feels resolved, take the opportunity to revisit it and see how we could have handled it differently.
• Understand your own experience in family around conflict. Notice your own patterns of triggers, reactions, and ways of responding.
• Practice courageously sharing what you think and feel with an openness to others’ responses. Build relationships based on authenticity—practice speaking your truth with the little things.
• Accept conflict as a natural part of life, relationships, and family dynamics.
• Acknowledge power dynamics and begin to learn how to differentiate between “principled struggle, conflict, abuse, harm, misunderstanding, mistakes, critique, and contradiction. “(from adrienne maree brown’s book, We Will Not Cancel Us)
• Support children in raising dissenting opinions, naming their emotions, listening to their intuition, and noticing their embodied response.
• Reorient family culture around values of authenticity, care, preventing and addressing harm rather than centering comfort and being polite.
• Begin to see conflict and decision-making as opportunities to build and deepen family relationships.

INDIVIDUALISM

• Little experience or comfort working in collaboration. “I’m the only one who can do this.” “If something is going to get done right, I have to do it.” Think you’re responsible for solving problems alone.
• Accountability is one directional (up) to authority figure (parent, elder, God, etc.), not two ways or horizontal.
• Supports the idea that everyone can think/be their own person without being connected to systems and power, especially if your identity reflects invisibilized (to you) power (white, straight, cis, wealthy, able, man, Christian, etc.).
• Strong desire for individual recognition, credit.
• Competition is more highly valued than cooperation. Little time or focus on developing cooperative skills, such as play, in games, etc.
• The same family members do the same tasks/have the same roles year after year. Little focus on leadership development, supporting younger family members to take on non-tokenized leadership with developmentally appropriate support.

Dismantling Practices

• Cultivate a family culture that prioritizes leadership development, apprenticeship, collaboration, and delegation.
• Name, notice, and celebrate shared goals.
• When one family member makes a mistake or is unable to follow through with a responsibility, see it as a collective responsibility to support that individual to figure out how to follow through with the responsibility.
• Establish clear processes of accountability.
• Integrate cooperative and non-competitive games.
• Plan to rotate responsibilities and apprentice family members to learning them.
• Create and celebrate shared family goals and accomplishments. When celebrating an individuals’ achievement, notice and name who else in the family played a role.

RIGHT TO COMFORT

• Those in power have a right to emotional and psychological comfort (often at the expense of marginalized family members’ discomfort) and those who cause discomfort are scapegoated as the problem.
• Equates individual acts of unfairness against white family members with systemic racism which daily targets BIPOC family members.
• Equates false harmony/unity with healthy family systems.
• Little to no experience, skill, culture, and practices to navigate discomfort in the body and support regulating the nervous system and emotions.
• Projects discomfort towards the blames of others. Little capacity to identify, acknowledge, and take responsibility for one’s own feelings of discomfort. Like sense of urgency, the impulse to discharge discomfort immediately and often at other’s expense.

Dismantling Practices

• Understand that discomfort is at the root of all growth and learning. 
• Notice your comfort threshold and practice things that help you to sit with discomfort (yoga, somatics, breathwork, singing, etc.). Teach these to your children.
• Be curious about discomfort (as an individual and as a group).
• Deepen the family’s analysis of racism and oppression so that we can see how expectations of comfort are tied to one’s conditioning into their identity.
• Practice receiving boundaries set by marginalized family members and realize that part of that boundary may include not receiving an explanation. Rely on other family members to learn in these moments.
• Celebrate those who shake things up as a gift to the collective. Celebrate and value the art of struggling together.
• Notice, name, and take responsibility when you feel uncomfortable.
• Support children in being with their discomfort—don’t appease or protect them from feeling uncomfortable. Support them in recognizing the difference between comfort and safety.

DEFENSIVENESS

• Prioritizes protecting power dynamics as they exist (the status quo) rather than facilitating the best, most authentic relationships or clarifying who has power and expectations around its use.
• Criticisms of those with power or the status quo viewed as threatening and inappropriate/rude.
• Family members respond to new ideas with defensiveness and make it difficult to raise these ideas.
• A lot of energy is put into making sure (certain) family member’s feelings don’t get hurt and/or strategizing around defensive family members.
• Punishment for “getting caught” doing something “wrong.” Little focus and energy on harm, how to repair harm, self-accountability, and opportunities for sincere apology and acceptance of apology.

Dismantling Practices

• Understand and work with the links between defensiveness, fear, and trauma response.
• Work on understanding your own defensiveness, where it shows up in your body, what triggers it. 
• Support a culture of learning and self-reflection in which we can always change our minds.
• Give family members credit for being able to handle more than you think.
• When defensiveness shows up it is an opportunity to get curious and continue engaging with your process.
• Cultivate joy practices. Teach and practice self-love. It’s okay and natural to make mistakes; that’s part of what makes us human. You are still loved and belong even when you make a mistake.
• Model making mistakes and taking responsibility, especially to and with children.

OBJECTIVITY

• Belief that there’s such a thing as objectivity. Belief that emotions are inherently destructive, irrational, and should not be part of discussions or decision-making.
• Little support and skill in developing emotional intelligence, embodied intelligence, and/or cultivating intuition and energetic senses.
• Requires linear thinking, while ignoring and becoming impatient with those who think, act, and communicate in other ways.
• Erasure/minimization of power dynamics (i.e. equating political viewpoints).
• Does not contextualize or take into account personal experiences, especially based on nondominant social identity markers.

Dismantling Practices

• Realize each family member has a worldview (even you) and that each person’s worldview frames the way they understand things.
• Practice sitting with discomfort when family members express themselves in ways that are new to you.
• Assume everyone has a valid point based on their worldview, and your job is to understand what that point is.
• Encourage family members to share their feelings and notice embodied responses.
• Celebrate, uplift, and prioritize non-linear/cyclical thinking and non-linear ways of knowing, doing, expressing, and learning (multimodalities).
• Understand historical power dynamics and value personal experience.
• Move your body in new ways. Play games that encourage creative thinking and multisensory investigations.

WORSHIP OF THE WRITTEN WORD

• Only one right way/only one right interpretation (i.e. biblical supremacy).
• Assumptions that all family members share the same beliefs, etc. Use of religious texts to control the framing of an issue or conflict.
• Those family members with strong documentation, writing, literacy skills or higher levels of education are more highly valued.
• The belief that there is one right way to do things (like conflict) and once people are introduced to it, they will see the light and adopt it. When/if they don’t adapt or change, then something is wrong with them—not with us.
• Sees only value in one’s own beliefs about what is good (i.e. missionary thinking).
• Prioritizes reading books/articles for learning and as the preferred way to communicate perspectives and feelings.

Dismantling Practices

• Accept and celebrate that there are many ways to get to the same goal.
• Notice and name when one right way shows up.
• Acknowledge that white family members have a lot to learn about and from BIPOC family members and BIPOC cultures.
• Integrate body-centric and emotional ways of knowing and being.
• Create spaces where family members feel able to share a diversity of faith perspectives, including not having one. Don’t assume family members share your same religious, political, etc. orientation.
• Use learning and teaching tools that engage multiple intelligences.

PATERNALISM

• Those with power (based on identity and within the family structure):
  • Are dismissive of concerns
  • Don’t think it’s important/necessary to understand the perspectives of those for whom they’re making decisions.
  • Think they have the right to make decisions for/on behalf of/in the interests of others
• Those of marginalized identities:
  • Understand how they don’t have power, what that means, and who does have it.
  • Don’t really know how decisions get made and who makes which decision yet are completely familiar with the impact of those decisions on them.
• Connected to one right way, often legitimized by religious doctrine. View of divinity as paternalistic.

Dismantling Practices

• Clarify and make transparent decision-making roles and processes.
• Include those most impacted in decision-making processes
• Get clear about the value that each family member brings to the family. Name and acknowledge this. Create space for family members to contribute and lead with their gifts/talents/experience/skills.
• Consider how collaboration, leadership development, and role-sharing can happen (i.e. teaching family members who haven’t historically cooked or cleaned to do so).
• Take concerns seriously and make space for them.
• Practice and celebrate asking for help when you need/want it (also an antidote for individualism).
• Engage with stories and media in which people with marginalized identities have agency (that don’t emphasize victimhood).
• Understand the difference between charity and justice.

SENSE OF URGENCY

• Difficult to take time, be inclusive, encourage democratic thoughtful decision-making, think long term, or consider consequences.
• Scarcity mentality
• Focus is on task and doing over authentic relationship (i.e. preoccupation with logistics at family gatherings and not on the quality of communication).
• Family culture is shaped around time, logistics, doing, scheduling, etc. Impatience with those (children, etc.) who don’t fit into prescribed time frames.
• When a conflict arises a fix, solution, or resolution must be found and offered immediately.
• Discomfort with conflict and multiplicity of viewpoints.

Dismantling Practices

• Establish realistic goals and practices that support family members to be with each other in the moment.
• Create more spaces for family to be together without pressure of time-sensitive tasks. Take breaks from planning.
• Cultivate a family culture of abundance and generosity: there is enough (time, energy, space) for everyone.
• Develop patience, especially in understanding that long-term vision and goals take time.
• Integrate embodiment practices to support noticing discomfort and being with it, especially for and with children).
• Practice self- and community care.
• Meet family members where they are at.
• Prioritize the quality of relationships over time and task.
• Notice and name when being motivated by a sense of urgency.

POWER HOARDING

• Little value around power sharing. 
• Power seen as limited, scare, zero sum.
• Those with power feel threatened when anyone suggests changes in how things should be done and take it personally as a reflection of their leadership, parenting, etc.
• Those with power don’t see themselves as hoarding power and assume they have the best interests of the family at heart (like in paternalism) and assume those wanting change are ill-informed, emotional, inexperienced, wrong, misled (by Satan?), etc.
• The ways marginalized family members express needs, concerns, desires, etc. get demonized, suppressed, and/or shamed.
• Power flows through the father who is divinely appointed. Divinity is seen as masculine.
• Decision-making processes are unclear to those who are marginalized within the family.

Dismantling Practices

• Have conversations about decision-making processes and leadership. Define leadership as developing the skills of others.
• Embrace metaphors, rituals, spiritual practices that acknowledge change as inevitable and that celebrate change (cycles of the earth, etc.).
• Develop a process for the creation of a family values statement that includes how it will be regularly revisited and put into action.
• Study your own reactions, trauma responses, and coping mechanisms. Embrace a trauma healing framework that makes space for embodiment and self-reflection.
• Play games that encourage cooperation. De-emphasize competitive games and talk about competitive impulses when they show up.
• Learn about and lift up feminine and queer divinity, leadership, and ways of knowing.
• Create spaces that center BIPOC family members (like affinity spaces), can be used to support decision-making processes.
• Continue to educate yourself and family members on history, power, oppression, resistance, and resilience.
• Cultivate joy practices.
• Practice sharing power as both giving and receiving. Notice and name when this is happening.

PROGRESS IS BIGGER, MORE

• More value and attention is placed on family members who have achieved certain accomplishments, who are already more public/celebrated, particularly within the celebrated norms of the family culture (being a pastor, missionary, married mother, etc.). Little celebration of accomplishments outside of achieving bigger, more, and family norms.
• Progress is a family that grows and expands. Family members who don’t have children, have fewer children, or have children in non-“traditional” ways (adoption, step children, etc.) are relegated to the margins and become less central to the family structure.
• Attributes little to no value (even negative value) to the costs and consequences of idealizing bigger, more (how larger events may sacrifice the quality of events, how larger events may ignore the interests/safety concerns of marginalized family members (children, BIPOC family members, those with disabilities, feminized labor, etc.).

Dismantling Practices

• Consider how these decisions will impact future generations.
• Consider a cost/benefit analysis that includes all types of costs (how it might harm our relationships, etc.).
• Identify and center processes (shared agreements, etc.).
• Create space for feedback loops and self-reflection in order to check in within ongoing relationship.
• Begin to see conflict and decision-making as opportunities to build and deepen family relationships.
• Celebrate those who have accomplishments outside of the family norms and the status quo.
• Consider how to be inclusive of non-“traditional” family structures. Move beyond inclusion to appreciation, celebration, and normalizing these.
• Plan a variety of types of family gatherings. Consider how to make space for different types of interactions and relationships.

QUANTITY OVER QUALITY

• That which can be measured is more highly valued than that which cannot, for example making an income versus unpaid reproductive labor.
• Little or no value attached to process.
• Discomfort with emotion.
• No understanding that when there is a conflict between content (what family members disagree on) and process (family members’ need to be heard) decisions that have been made are undermined and/or disregarded.
• Few collective skills at facilitating processes that humanize and that don’t replicate oppressive systems/punishment models.
• Classism in the ways status is given to those who have more (money, degrees, etc.). Activities require resources to participate in family events.

Dismantling Practices

• Celebrate and develop rituals for milestones that are not already marked by the status quo. Base these on quality, not necessary on what’s more or most.
• Acknowledge and express appreciation for unpaid work (i.e. emotional labor).
• Reframe conflict and decision-making in terms of process and relationships as the highest value.
• Develop non-punitive abolitionist accountability processes.
• Practice naming feelings aloud. Integrate emotional and intuitive decision-making into family processes.
• It’s okay to revisit the past.
• Consider accessibility in family activities (cost, location, police presence, representation, etc.).
• Focus on doing one thing at a time.

Sermon Hour: Why Mennonites Can’t Dance: Co-Creating Embodied Resilience for the Beloved Community

written by AMANDA K GROSS

On Sunday, August 15th I was invited to give the sermon at Columbus Mennonite Church.

Some of my friends were surprised to hear this due to my lack of theological training and general skepticism of religious institutions. But perhaps a lesser known factoid about the Mennos (and Anabaptists more broadly) is that there is a solid lineage of any and all believers being legitimate vessels of spiritual messages. And, in the many cases when that profound lineage hasn’t been squashed by The Patriarchy, you and even I might get invited to give a sermon on a Sunday in August.

Amanda preaching at Columbus Mennonite on August 15, 2021

This was actually not my first time giving a sermon at a Mennonite church, but it was a very special invitation; the result of a lovely several-year ongoing anti-racist organizing relationship with Bethany Davey that started at the 2018 Mennonite Women Doing Theology Conference (okay, maybe I’m more invested in theology and church stuff than I originally let on). It was also very special, because it was the most integrated service I’ve ever participated in.

I’ve copied the sermon text below, but to really experience the full service, hop on over to Columbus Mennonite’s page and scroll down to August 15th. There you can watch a recording of the service which includes movement, breath, visuals, and words.

https://www.columbusmennonite.org/sermons

Why Mennonites Can’t Dance: Co-Creating Embodied Resilience for the Beloved Community

Scripture and I have a pretty complicated relationship.

Of course there’s the ways it has been used deliberately against me: justifying my father’s authority as the “spiritual head of the household” or condemning my sexuality. Those spiritual traumas have become obvious to me now after 37 and a half years on this earth in the body of a cis-white woman. Those abuses, at least at this point in my life, are easy frames for me to reject, the motivations seem obvious to me now: the desire to control feminized and queer bodies, a deep-seated fear that indigenous ways of knowing would threaten the structures of colonized power. 

Over the years, I have developed several techniques to protect myself from the ways scripture gets used against me. Much of that came through surviving a childhood family unit in which one of my parents strongly adhered to theological sexism. (and still does.) Mainly, I have learned to remove my body from communities that would put her in danger and also to limit my engagement with my father, knowing that interacting with him will inevitably require me to do the emotional labor of constantly establishing and re-establishing boundaries and potentially be retraumatized.

I have a clarity in being victimized within these dynamics that while uncomfortable is somewhat comforting in its familiarity. It brings up in me what one of my mentors, Felicia Savage Friedman, would call “righteous rage.” This generational rage feels hot in my body and travels quickly and directly, like lightning. When skillfully directed, I can smite like one of the God of the Old Testament’s greatest hits.

But there are other times when my relationship to scripture is more complicated, when the energy running through my body gets stuck at that stubborn knot in my upper right trapezius or ends up churning around in my digestional track.

Like the one time when I was seven and had just learned about the story of Esther in Sunday School. I was excited, overjoyed even. Finally, a female biblical character with agency! Finally, a protagonist with whom I could identify! 

In my loudly relational way, I left the Sunday School room and skipped through the church education building letting every adult in sight know how thrilled I was that there was a book in the bible written by a woman. Standing by the front door, on my way to the sanctuary, an elder in the church, also my friend’s grandpa, quickly corrected my nonsense. The story of Esther was not written by a woman, he said in a matter-of-fact tone, in fact, there are no books in the bible written by women. And also, why would you expect such a thing?

Disappointment. Devastation. Ultimate betrayal. My shoulders dropped and my pace slowed. How could a community that nurtured my gifts undermine me so severely?

In the Mennonite church of my upbringing in the heart of Atlanta, I learned that scripture is always a compromise. At church I learned there were things to be loud and things to be silent about. At church I learned to quiet my joy and contain myself because scripture did not have my back. At church I learned to repress the wisdom of my own body, to lower my shoulders when my joy wasn’t real.

At church I learned that the disappointment only comes when I open myself up to it. Since then, building up strong defenses has served me to reclaim my sense of Self. So why then in preparing to share a message with you, would I want to open myself up to the potential violence of 1 Kings 2:10–12, 1 Kings 3:3–14, and John 6:51–58 or whatever else my lectionary google search results turned up for Sunday August 15th?

Or, for that matter, why would I want to make myself vulnerable to challenging my own narrative of victimhood? What would be the benefit of digging into the places I carry my self-protective tension, like that knot, which is not-so-coincidentally located in the same place as where my mother stores her stress, also her mother before her? What would be the value of paying for a deep tissue massage or remembering to lift my arms and open my chest several times a day? Why would I care to reopen my heart? 

Or to reach into the culture that helped shape who I have become: why would I want to mess with the self-soothing and long-held narrative of righteous persecution that led my Swiss German ancestors to this land? What would motivate me to skip loudly through the church education building proclaiming that scripture granted safe passage to my ancestors in 1709 at the direct expense of the Lenape and Susquehannock people? Why would I tell every adult in sight about how the governor of Virginia strategically invited Mennonites as “loyal foreign Protestants” to be the buffer between righteously enraged indigenous organizers and one of the first colonial assemblies to legalize whiteness? 

Relatedly, this scriptural history happened on the very land where I now sit, on land that has educated me with more than one degree. (and also educated my parents, my aunt and uncle, my brother, several cousins, and one grandparent.) This land stolen from the Monacan people, was settled as much by pacifist ploughs as militia guns, and on which a 16-foot sculpture of a giant plough made from reclaimed handguns bursts through the land. The sculpture, located 4 blocks up the street on Eastern Mennonite University campus, is called “Guns into Ploughshares,” an artistic statement by Esther and Michael Augsburger against one type of violence, but in ignorance of another wholly interconnected form. 

A part of me is curious what my friend’s grandpa would say to these particular responses to scripture’s use. What justification might be called on to muddle the clarity of a seven-year old’s righteous rage? What guilt or shame spirals might be invoked so that the church community would not have to feel the pain of being part oppressor? Which genre of silence might be practiced in order to pass the grieving process off onto the next generation? Which aspects of healing might be denied, instead choosing what so many past generations have, in the more familiar embodiment of fear? 

I wonder where this fear and silence has lived in the bodies of my ancestors? Where has it lived in the bodies of their congregations? Where does it live in us now?

For me, usually the multigenerational silence cycles around in my chest cavity. Like a cyclone in a valley, its fast winds bump up against the edges of my ribcage. It too, wants out, but I have learned as yet another self-protective technique, to contain it close to my heart.

(Movement Break)

There is a tool I use in anti-racist organizing called the “4Ds.” If you have something to write on and write with, you can draw four D’s nested one inside the other.

In preparing to be with y’all here today, my first D appeared in the form of denial. I have preached a couple times before, each time in spaces where scripture was more or less optional. So when I was asked to share a message, it didn’t even occur to me to start with scripture. Actually it was a non-religious friend who asked with some hesitation, if preaching meant that I’d be interpreting the bible. 

Distancing showed up as a close second as I kept the possibility of scripture at a long arm’s length. I put off thinking about it. I half-heartedly poked around the Mennonite Matriarchy Facebook group to see what the groovy theologically-inclined grandmas were posting about.

Deference snuck in, sneaky as it usually does. Okay (I felt a sense of obligation). Maybe they won’t take me seriously if I don’t at least pretend to care about the bible. Then my inner good little white girl remembered the sticker charts from Sunday School. Ooooh how I love a gold star!

And when I ultimately did my google search and read the words, defensiveness showed up strong and mighty and with a glint of sarcasm. This 1^st Kings author is totally sucking up to David, pretending that he was all righteous and Godly when we know he abused his power and was about that rape culture life. And then there’s the Gospel passage, the one that’s supposed to be subverting the old-world order, is just perpetuating a 2,000 year-old tired trope that co-opts the divine feminine in the role of creation. This is very unoriginal material here. People with uteruses have been bleeding to give life for as long as humans have existed, and those same humans have literally been feeding human children from their bodies for just as long. All of a sudden, we’re supposed to reorient life-giving to a distanced father figure and male savior? I think not!

But the years of yoga practice and following my body’s urges to take breaks, is beginning to soften something. Also heeding the advice of Black women has helped, like Alice Walker who reminds us “to take what you need and let the rest rot” along with indigenous frameworks uplifting the wisdom of the earth which is reminding me in this moment that composting transforms the stinkiest of rotting vegetables into nutrition for future generations.

I looped back through the scriptures another time and reminded myself that I’m the one who chose to engage with them. I released a big sigh and then realized that it’s not all a wash. I’m drawn to the themes of lineage and David resting with his ancestors. Hopefully an elder is giving him a talking to. I’m appreciating that Solomon did his own thing, following his dad’s path “except that he offered sacrifices and burned incense on the high places,” kind of like how I burn incense and my father gets suspicious. I’m nodding my head to the focus on discernment, a current and constant theme in my work and life, discerning when and what to name and how far to push anti-racist change. And I am absolutely all about the flesh and blood images, which feel like a direct connect to bodies and healing in the body, which is really where I intend this sermon to land.

At any rate, the Solomon asking for discernment passage is reminding me of a particular summer vacation bible school moment when we made stick figures out of felt. I loved all things crafty. I made him robed in felted finery with sequins and positioned him on a throne, as the “wise judge.” But that one story about the women with the baby never felt right to me. I can feel the deep disgust in the pit of my gut right now at the thought of a man in power suggesting that a baby get split in two.

It’s reminding me that the divine wisdom I’m interested in is relocated in the body, in my body, and comes out warped when administered as abstract justice from a distanced position of power and privilege, which is making me curious about the cost to Solomon and about our interconnectedness and responsibility in this co-creation of Beloved Community.

Dr. Joy DeGruy’s writings in Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome was one of the first places I learned about the interlocking traumas of victims and perpetrators, of both the oppressed and the oppressors.

Quoting Dr. Joy: “These crimes are perpetuated in a seemingly never-ending cycle… For who can be truly human under the weight of oppression that condemns them to a life of torment, robs them of a future, and saps their free will? Moreover, who can become truly human when they gain so much from the pain and suffering of those whom they oppress and/or take advantage of?…”

Her groundbreaking work describes Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome as “a condition that exists when a population has experienced multigenerational trauma resulting from centuries of slavery and continues to experience oppression and institutionalized racism today.” 

Dr. Joy builds off of the more familiar concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to unpack a pattern of behaviors and beliefs impacting those who were enslaved, their communities, and their descendants. She later posits that white people have also been impacted by this traumatic legacy of multigenerational violence, racial superiority, and the justification of “500 years of trauma and dehumanization [that Europeans and their descendants] and their institutions produced.”

To paraphrase Dr. Joy, if there is a Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, then there must be a Post-Traumatic Master Syndrome. 

Post-Traumatic Master Syndrome – the ways in which the multigenerational perpetration of physical and structural violence, the internalization of superiority based on race, and its corresponding belief system that afflicted and continues to afflict the racial descendants of slave masters, read: those of us who have come to be called white – is not entirely mine to unpack, but a very (inter)connected piece of it – Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome – most definitely is.

My work on Mistress Syndrome (for short) focuses on the multigenerational inherited trauma at the intersections of race, gender, and class for status quo and passing white ladies like myself and that historical legacy, yet to be undone is a collective struggle which is both specific to white women and also entirely connected to Post-Traumatic Master Syndrome in an interlocking and overlapping partnership that has kept violence unnamed, normalized, and securely in place both inside and outside our white houses.

As Dr. Joy writes: “Those who have been the perpetrators of these unspeakable crimes and those who continue to benefit from those crimes, have to honestly confront their deeds and heal from the psychic wounds that come with being the cause and beneficiaries of such great pain and suffering.”

This is why understanding racism through the lens of trauma healing is so helpful. Trauma is not just a thing that individual victims experience, but a collective dynamic that whole societies and communities are impacted by, including those communities responsible for the traumatic events. Trauma impacts us all because we are all connected. 

Rachel MacNair’s work on Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS), draws our attention to the impact on the perpetrator of violence. MacNair compiles studies revealing that a high percentage of soldiers in war either avoid shooting or intentionally shoot off target when in close physical contact with the assigned enemy, especially when eye contact is involved. In an effort to adjust for this, the U.S. Army altered training methods to desensitize and condition soldiers with denial and defense mechanisms (2 of those 4 Ds). While this adjustment resulted in more efficient shooting “in the short term,” according to MacNair, it “also contributed to greater psychological costs in the long run.”

Which may help explain why Mennonites can’t dance.

One of the problems with the racialization of white in this unhuman system of value is that being more than human is impossible. To be human is to be imperfect. So of course a system of racialization results in the constant fear of not being enough. As long as our value lies in the extrinsic measurement of an inhumane system, we can and we will never ever be enough. 

Whiteness too, as it turns out, was founded on fear.

We know on the individual level that fear can induce a traumatic response in the human brain, triggering flight, fight, freeze, or fawn mechanisms and that, as psychologist Bessel van der Kolk identifies,  “traumatized people cut off their relationship to their bodies[AG3] .” But what does that mean for the bodies of those of us navigating a culture that was founded on fear? The work of expressive arts therapist and somatics practitioner Tada Hozumi scales up this understanding of traumatic dissociation to the cultural level in unpacking the cultural somatic context of white culture. That is: 

“…how bodies move, breathe, think, feel, and know themselves within a culture.”

I’ve begun to realize how my cultural somatic context has been shaped by whiteness through exposure to embodied spiritual practices that don’t come from my ancestry. Recently, I was at one such training that was all about being in body. I love to dance, which is something I’ve cultivated more or less at different times in my life. I was at this training addressing trauma and healing and we were being taught samba and house steps and I was loving it and building confidence and fully participating. 

At the end we formed a circle and each person danced in the middle, something done in slightly different ways in many cultures. It was a freestyle moment—to share and celebrate each of our human individuality in the middle of the collective circle with everyone watching and cheering on. Needless to say, it was a very supportive environment. 

When it was my turn, I froze. I refused to jump in the middle like a stubborn four-year-old. Panic set in. Then, after everyone had had their turn, it came back to me, again. I reluctantly schooched to the middle and did whatever came to my body. There was instant release and I burst into tears and fled the space. It was uncomfortable in so many ways.

As I was outside in the courtyard bawling white lady tears of humiliation and release, I reflected on dancing in my tradition, or rather the absence of it. The trainer shared about how the Black Panthers would celebrate together after an intense day of organizing by dancing. I was furious and incredibly sad that there was no such tradition of dancing for me to draw on. In fact, Mennonites of Swiss German ancestry historically forbade dancing. 

For generations we have lost this profoundly human way of knowing… and healing. In my Mennonite subculture, so much of celebration and pleasure is seen as evil—sex, play, really anything that is not productive is either sinful or a waste of time (which is also sinful). Under the cultural somatic context of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy all of our bodies in one way or another have been reduced to being valued in terms of work—reproduction, physical labor, competitive sports, pragmatic nurture. Our bodies are forced to prove their worth.

The circle moment was both terrifying and liberating for me and there were many witnesses. 

And some of us wonder why white Mennonites can’t dance. 

This is not to say that individual white Mennonite can’t dance—there are many exceptions we could name. I, myself, although not a skilled dancer, have decent rhythm, am quick to pick up new dance moves, and generally enjoy dancing, even though my ancestors swore it off and there is no cultural tradition in my family. 

I attribute my affinity to dance mainly to the multiculturalist and Afro-centric movements pervasive in Atlanta’s pre-K–12^th grade during my childhood. And even with a childhood of multicultural exposure, the confidence and ability to freestyle (especially with witnesses) generates in me initial alarm and lingering dread. For the collective of white folks, there is a way that the inability to dance and dance without inhibition (yet still in rhythm with the music) is a direct product of embodied racism.

Tada Hozumi draws connections between trauma and anatomy and especially the role of the iliopsoas, which they describe as:

“the muscle responsible for engaging us in our stress reactions of fight, flight, and freeze. White-ness [is an] energetic imbalance… Emotional energy becomes concentrated in the upper body, particularly gathering in the mind. To live in a world dominated by white-ness is to live in an environment that denies and protects white-ness as embodied trauma.” [AG4] 

The deeper I dig, the more I am feeling how white womanhood, as a microcosm of whiteness, is trauma in the form of dissociation from the body. Uncomfortably for me, healing means getting out of the comfort zone of my intellect and into the awkwardness of my body. It means less reading and more public hip wriggling.

What I get most from Hozumi’s article is not the identification of embodied trauma (although this is certainly a helpful framework) but rather the invitation through their own experience to discomfort in our bodies as a means of healing.

This call to discomfort flips a white-centric understanding of healing on its head (like a breakdance move or a headstand). The vulnerability of appearing unskilled and out-of-control, the awkwardness of getting it wrong, the discomfort in not being dominant or centered in the ways we have been taught to expect, and the call to notice, feel, and be fully in the icky newness that comes with dancing while white Mennonite will not be found in a how to manual, or the diligence of hard work. The revolution is not in perfecting an anti-racist Beloved Community. It is in the embarrassing, unpleasant, uncoordinated movements of Mennonites, in community, learning to dance[MOU5] .

For me, this is directly connected to relocating discernment as integrated with the body, our individual bodies, and our collective ones. We can, like Solomon ask for discernment. But will we be able to feel it? Discernment towards Beloved Community is not just a cognitive exercise, it is the knowledge of our guts, the history of who and what brought our guts into being, the guts of others that all around us keep our guts fed and healthy, and the future of our guts when we are dead and gone. 

---

 [AG3]https://onbeing.org/programs/bessel-van-der-kolk-how-trauma-lodges-in-the-body-mar2017/

where there used to be wings

I think you can learn a lot about a person and their collective traumas by how they dance.

Like the Taurus that I am

(Rising)

I dance with grounded ass.

I can move my hips

up and down

side to side

figure eights undulating on the axis of my spine

but I do not move my arms.

My elbows cling like Velcro down by the small of my waist as my bottom half catches the beat.

One time on a fieldtrip charter bus in middle school, Seventeen Magazine diagnosed me as pear shaped and said I should only buy bootcut jeans.

When I was a child, dinosaurs were remembered as the ancestors of reptiles and amphibians.

However, my nephew will probably learn they had more in common with birds.

“My internalized racial superiority is causing my neck to tense up again,” I say to my lover, fishing for a back rub.

In my mind, rhomboids and trapeziuses pop out of my body in red, green, and blue, like the flat shapes drawn on the ninth-grade geometry white board rather than the living, fluid multidimensional sinew that are the very attributes of me.

My scapulae are trying to remind me that our DNA existed long before Patriarchy taught us to clip our own wings.

I am trying to remember how to fly.

On Leaving

written by AMANDA K GROSS

I started making Trauma Containers soon after purchasing a home in a city still new to me. I wasn’t actually residing in my relatively new home at the moment of their first construction. Instead, I was taking my first Restorative Justice course at my undergraduate alma mater and was feeling overwhelmed by the stories of violence that had led the family members of murdered loved ones to sit down with those who had committed the violent acts in an effort to reconcile, possibly forgive, and restore — or maybe more accurately, transform — what had become harmful relationship.

But this post is more about divergence than conjoinment. And at the time, I was motivated by my own personal overwhelm from hearing other people’s traumas, not from experiencing my own.

Trauma Container Public Art Installation by Amanda K Gross

I needed a way to hold their stories respectfully, but I also wanted a container external to myself, with a lid so I could write down the bits and images of their stories, which kept following me across wakefulness into my dreams.

My first Trauma Container was small and soft and green with a button and string. She fit cozily in the palm of my hand. After a heavy case study was shared, I would write the stickiest of details down, whisper a prayer for the people involved, and neatly roll up their traumas so I wouldn’t internalize stuff that wasn’t mine.

Thus began a decade of me and Trauma Containers. They took on many forms over the years and evolved as gifts for friends embarking on hard journeys, as a collective activity for White Women’s Group in initiation of our anti-racist family history projects, as a personal tool for processing my internalized dualism, and as a vessel for healing intentions. My most profound experience with Trauma Containers has been in using them to acknowledge, process, and (usually) release specific relationships… with myself, with other people, with communities, and with places. These relational Trauma Containers eventually leave me. (Maybe you’ve had a glimpse of one at a public park or found one alongside the road.)

Trauma Container Public Art Installation by Amanda K Gross

Last year I turned thirty six and decided it was time to uproot and leave the City of Gray. This was a decision I might have made sooner, which, in retrospect, I probably should have realized sooner, but I was comfortable (enough) in my solitary space, distracted by a self-imposed excessive workload of VERY IMPORTANT and PURPOSEFUL anti-racist lifework, and affixed by something I’ve now come to understand as depression. (Seasonal Affective Disorder is real, folks.) In fact, I only came to clarity and commitment around leaving due to some major disruptions and upheaval in my home, work, and social life.

Trauma Container Public Art Installation by Amanda K Gross

But even after I knew I was ready to leave, knew I wanted to leave (for my mental health, I may have even needed to leave), I still spent most of the last year holding on, weighing myself down by obligation, a sense of responsibility, and a fear that the deepest desires of Amanda Katherine’s heart would reveal themselves to be racist, individualized actions driven by access to privilege and not-at-all in alignment with collective liberation. Most of all, I feared repeating a multi-generational trauma pattern of fleeing, which both historically reinforced my ancestors contributions to white settler colonialism and, in return, enabled them to repeat it.

Instead, I chose another family-iar pattern (so many patterns to choose from!). From the dropdown virtual menu of inherited multigenerational coping mechanisms, I went with the classic martyr-freeze response. I chose in my daily routines and in my relationships mostly not to fight for myself. I chose mostly to endure. I chose mostly to follow the lead of a handful of Black women and repress/suppress/ignore the discomfort in my gut and tightness in my right rhomboid.

Trauma Container Public Art Installation by Amanda K Gross

This time around, the depth of my perfectionism has surprised me. There are layers there that I didn’t notice before: a whole driving-force layer of perfectionism, which has been steering a lot of my work with Mistress Syndrome over the past six years. I have preached that there is no one right way, but I have been practicing a few hard-and-fast rules. For example, I have been so committed to the idea that the right way to do anti-racism work for a white person is to have accountability to and follow the lead of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color that I have created an unhealthy (and unsustainable) power dynamic in some of my closest relationships. I have nurtured distrust of my ability to see, know, and understand my own whiteness — especially to know which is my Self and which is my very sneaky false white self. I have been at times very confused about which parts of me are ME and not just white violence in disguise to the point of shutting myself down and limiting a full range of self-expression.

Trauma Container Public Art Installation by Amanda K Gross

I feel angry at the way these anti-racist rules for white people were taught to me and at how I chose to learn them. I feel hurt by how I feel harmed within these relationships. I struggle to direct my hurt and rage at the abstracted systems and cultures which led to the interconnected playing out of our harmful coping mechanisms and not attribute my pain exclusively to the individuals with whom I have shared such intimate spaces. But mostly, I feel angry at myself for not fighting harder for me in those moments when I invoked self-sacrifice instead.

Trauma Container Public Art Installation by Amanda K Gross

Leaving town, as I have come to accept, is, of course, like my ancestors, facilitated by my privilege. Not staying to fight the local fight alongside my Pittsburgh community is, in many ways, a manifestation of individualism. And, also I am increasingly okay with that.

Trauma Container Public Art Installation by Amanda K Gross

Leaving, is the most compassionate act I have done for myself in a long long while. I am finding joy and agency and energy and excitement in this liberating practice of self-compassion. It does not necessarily surprise me that in selling my home, scaling down my work responsibilities, and letting go of relationships, I feel freer. What is currently a most delightful surprise, is that through accepting it all, I am experiencing a deep and buoyant joy.

I am also experiencing a paradigm shift. Some of the rules I attached to are getting transformed in surprising ways; where once there were pedestals (for myself and others) now there are only bubbly, hot tubs.* A healing container of a different sort.

Trauma Container Public Art Installation by Amanda K Gross

In the month leading up to my departure, I began an outdoor installation of Trauma Containers, to honor the joys, triumphs, challenges, failures, and growth which have marked my time here and also as a parting gift to the land, creatures, and people.

Maybe you’ll notice them when you’re out for a walk some day.

Trauma Container Public Art Installation by Amanda K Gross

*Thanks to a dear friend for the suggestion to replace pedestals with a visualization of everyone in jacuzzis!

Blogging with the Mennonites

written by Amanda Gross

Last month, I was honored to be invited to write for the Menno Snapshot Blog of Mennonite Church USA.

Having dreamt of being invited to address a vast audience of Mennonite white folks, I wanted to say so much. It took me several drafts to find words that resonated with how I was thinking and feeling at that July 2020 moment, especially about how I’m feeling about and grappling with my inner oppressor. The theme of befriending the parts of our selves we don’t love and which are also connected to oppression has also been present in our recent work in White Women’s Groups (you can read their blog here).

Ultimately, here’s  how I decided to approach the opportunity of examining my white Anabaptist identity in a society where racism is infused at every level, including inside of me.

Read the blog post!

Loving the Enemy Within: Grounding in the trauma-healing work of anti-racism

Border Walls

written by AMANDA GROSS

Sit.

Breathe.

Notice the life force streaming in through your nostrils. Watch it go out the same way it came in.

Do you notice your insides?

Can you feel your inner Mother Theresa? The selfless care? The love-practice lived?

How about your inner 45?

 

I was feeling rage and grief at my family’s willing ignorance and at the names and Black bodies that kept piling up on my twitter feed. Something mammal and hungry had devoured the mustard greens in my garden that I had grown from seed. Also, the carrot tops were missing.

(I guess my faith was small.)

 

I scraped the soft flesh of my forearm on a rebellious sheet of chicken wire. Wooden stakes. Staple gun. Wire cutters. Rocks and dirt filled in the gaps.

Satisfied, I stood back: At least the collards, tomatoes, basil, swiss chard, and cucumbers would stand a chance.

 

I stood back

And noticed that

I had built a border wall.

photo collage by Amanda K Gross

Yesterday, I walked in the sunshine to the farmer’s market and purchased the juiciest of strawberries. One fell out on its way to my fridge.

I tasted how it surpassed my expectations.

 

My dear friend asked for some.

Sure, I texted back, and also, I wish I had known or I would have bought more. I would leave half for her and her household on the top shelf of my fridge.

What I meant was, I wish I had planned to take more for myself. I remembered the taste of that one juicy berry. I anticipated my morning meal.

 

I remembered, too, the feeling of experiencing another’s pleasure—how deliciousness can be magnified by a chorus of “mmmmm’s.” I remembered how much I actually do like to share.

I boxed the berries up for her and stood at the sink to breathe.

The Milk and Honey of Our Denial

written by AMANDA GROSS

 

Dear Readers of the Mistress Syndrome Blog,

 

It’s been a while. It’s not you, it’s me.

If you hadn’t already heard, I’m working on a book, a long one. After several months of blogging here, I realized there was so much more I wanted to say. I wanted to connect the dots between blog posts and put my weaving skills to literary use and so I got the incredibly original idea to write a book.

At that point in my writing, the ideas and the stories were flowing freely, and I gave myself one year to complete this 100,000 word oeuvre. Now it’s going on three years. I have been learning so much.

I’m learning about myself through reflecting on childhood memories and through reading a lot of challenging books about racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. I’m learning too, what it means to write about real live people and to learn how they may have experienced a moment quite differently than I. I’m learning about how they might not be as excited as I am about the vulnerable glance into my (and subsequently their) life.

I’m learning about my own process, too, especially noticing what feels easiest to write (things further in the past) and what feels desperately difficult (things that I’m experiencing now and dynamics where I don’t feel clear).

I see my perfectionism getting in the way. It knocks things off of shelves just as I was grasping for them. It peers over my shoulder censoring my truth. It builds almost instantaneous walls of denial when I am afraid of not knowing what the “right” thing is.

VVH Cousin Lydia Victim; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

I’m writing a (very long) book about Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome, about my Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome and as my accountability partner recently reminded me, there were some very big themes I had been leaving out. I’ve been afraid to touch upon them because of the painful emotions they bring up for me, even though I was justifying my avoidance to myself as things that might be hard for others to read. To be more specific, I’ve been trying to write a book about Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome without delving into white women’s relationships with Black men (well, specifically my own), without considering what it means for white women to raise Children of Color (because I don’t have my own), and without going deep into the complexities of intimate relationships with Women and Other People of Color (again, specifically my own experiences).

When I stop avoiding avoidance then I know exactly what it is: I’ve been avoiding feeling.

I’ve been avoiding feeling pain.

Today, I received a painful email. Someone my age in Atlanta — who I’ve only known tangentially — just passed away due to complications from Covid-19. Her death is tragic and, most likely preventable given the incompetence of our government and public health systems to contain the spread of the virus. She left many people who loved and depended on her and will be deeply missed.

This final email which announced her passing was the last in a long line of prayer requests sharing about the moments she had been on the edge and the moments she had begun to recover. The email was, subject line and all, framed as a celebration of her home-going. It is important to say that the email I received was not initiated from her family, instead from a white colleague. It is also important to note that her death, as someone who was racialized as Black, will go down as statistically consistent with how racism is causing Black people to die at highly disproportionate rates in this pandemic.

I am not privy to whether or not her family was using the hours immediately following her death as a celebration of her home-going, but it occurred to me as I began to feel enraged at the pollyannaish tone of the email and swift reply-alls, that heaven is a form of denial. (Please bear with me if you’ve already had this revelation.)

Several of the emails followed a similar format: First, acknowledge her passing and give condolences. Second, glorify God. Third, acknowledge that in her last breaths she may have found Jesus and/or that others might find him through her suffering. Fourth, glorify God again.

In my head I have composed and recomposed several drafts to metaphorically body check these anonymous and inconsiderate God-glorifiers on their ill-timed positivity. It seems an incredible offense to project one own’s beliefs onto a freshly grieving family. It seems a veritable disrespect to not offer them, their own space for grief, their own space to have their own experience with it, even if the imposition is coming from an email chain of tangential strangers which they might never read.

I realized then that the email chain said far more about the emailers than about this particular person’s life, death, or family.

I also realized then that denial is a form of heaven. The emails indicated how the people sending them were choosing (or not choosing) to grieve. Were these people not sad and enraged about the injustice of her death? Were they not destitute in the loss of a unique soul who could never be replaced? Were they not empathetic to what this might mean for her family’s emotional and economic well-being? The evolution of a white conservative Christianity has come into its glory. Pain does not have to be felt, struggle does not have to be gone through, vulnerability does not have to be opened up because God is good.

Also, feeling might mean having to make a change.

The Chickens got away with Jesus: Mixed Media by Amanda K Gross

I think too about the violence this attitude of required praise does to people navigating depression and what it meant for me when I was in the midst of a severe eating disorder. God was supposed to be good all the time. If I didn’t feel that goodness of God in the moment, that meant something must be wrong with me.

But what if God being good was not a cop-out for being in and with the hard things? Less of a “God is good” and more of a “God is”… Don’t quote me on this one, I learned the idea from the Buddhists and it’s probably in the Christian bible too, hidden beneath the layers of contemporary interpretations of atonement theory and the evils of sexual sin.

I am still resisting the urge to carve up the (probably white) emailers with the deft blade of my words in a Reply All response (they called me Dagger in college for a reason… which had nothing to do with writing or violence). But non-violence, etc., blah blah blah, and all that jazz. For the moment, I am dealing with my painful feelings by writing this blog post instead.

While I might not be able to change the behaviors of the emailers who come and in and out of my life, what I can work on is feeling my own pain in the moment. And I have been working on that, especially in delving into writing about some of the feelings I’d rather bury in the sand or pretend went to heaven. As I’m practicing this new feeling-in-the-moment tactic, I’m beginning to notice some interesting changes in my body. There is more ease and movement in my shoulders, which has served as my dumping ground for where I store pain and trauma for future moments of feeling and processing it.

Of course, the progress isn’t as linear or as shiny as those words may appear. There are also many days when my shoulders tense up as tightly as they used to.

Either way, God is.

 

How Does Whiteness Separate Us From God – Take Eight

This is part of a series of guest posts and dialogues around the question:  How does Whiteness Separate us from God?

WRITTEN BY Rachelle Regner

Decolonizing my mind, worldview and faith is an ongoing process that requires a lot of listening and relearning.  It has been both freeing and terrifying, healing and painful, beautiful and messy.  Just when I think I’m in a good, stable place, it takes me deeper into the suffering of all creation and deeper into myself.  Recently, it has brought me to a crossroads in my faith as I seek to discover my deepest self and relationship with the Creator and creation.

Growing up in rural western Pennsylvania within conservative evangelical Christianity shaped my identity and worldview in a whiteness I didn’t even know existed.  The Bible I was taught to trust as God breathed and inerrant, as the “Truth”, was used to teach and defend this whiteness.  Now as I am learning to see and name the whiteness and the inconceivable harm it is causing, I am recognizing the “Truth” I was taught to believe has actually separated me from God.

Whiteness has separated me from creation. (Genesis 1:26) I was taught that humans are the superior creation and given the right to dominate the rest of creation for their own use and benefit.  This led to a lack of concern and hardness towards animals, plants, and the earth.  It taught me to support and participate in policies and practices of over consumption, greed, and exploitation that are killing our planet.  These actions were justified with a belief that the rest of creation did not possess the same inherent dignity as humans. Writers and speakers such as Kaitlin Curtice and Robin Wall Kimmerer both members of the Potawatomi Tribe and Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Priest, are teaching me to see not only the outer beauty of creation, but the intricate, complex design, interdependence and pattern of life, death, and resurrection in all things.

Whiteness has separated me from others.  Whiteness within my evangelical faith taught me that I am an individual and my faith is individual.  It taught me that my faith was the only way to God (John 14:6) and to focus more on evangelizing hearts than opposing the structures of oppression because people’s suffering was the result of their individual choices.  It trained me to ignore my complicity and participation in the structures of oppression through viewing myself only as an individual.  The individual approach to my faith focused on getting to heaven and ignored the suffering of the world.  Whiteness taught me dualistic thinking and to negate other faiths, spirituality and experiences.  It taught me to be blind to God in others and in all of Creation.  It trained me to judge and call out the “sin” in others and not see through eyes of compassion and grace.  Whiteness in my evangelical faith trained me to believe I had the truth that would save others and to separate from others until they believed in that same truth.   

 Some of my past memory verses

I have defined myself as stable and even keeled; someone who doesn’t cry a lot or experience many extreme highs and lows of emotions; an individual who is able to use my mind to make decisions rather than my heart, my intuition.  I have considered this a strength of mine, but this process of decolonization is revealing to me that this is one of the central ways I have been separated from God.  Whiteness has separated me from emotions and feelings, from my heart, my intuition. (The heart is deceitful above all things. Jeremiah 17:9)  Whiteness in my faith told me that the heart is deceitful and cannot be trusted and that emotions are misleading and even sinful as they come from our sin corrupted heart and not the truth.  I separated myself from experiencing and processing my emotions because I was taught that the way to listen to God was not listening to my heart, but instead only listening to the written word. So, now as I am trying to discover my deepest self and connect with my emotions/heart/intuition, I am finding it hard to go into the depth of my emotions.  I have been so trained to disconnect, connecting is unknown to me and even scary.

Whiteness has separated me from my body (2 Corinthians 5:1-10; Romans 7:18, Romans 8; Galatians 5).  My faith taught me that my body is temporary; I would receive my eternal body in heaven.  Even further, I was taught to separate my body from my soul and that there was nothing good in my body.  I was taught the desires of the flesh were “sin” and at war with my soul.  Therefore, I was not only taught to ignore my body, but to force it into submission to “holiness” often causing harm to my body.  I was taught to deny it pleasure; viewing pleasure as purely “sinful”.  I didn’t recognize how intricate my body is and how interdependent it is to the Creator and creation.  I didn’t know how to listen to my body and pushed it past its limits.  I couldn’t hear it screaming at me that it wasn’t well until it stopped functioning and my health declined.  A long healing journey for my body is teaching me its unity with all things and that I must not only recognize and live in that unity for the healing to continue, but learn to trust and listen to my body.

Whiteness has separated me from the very essence of who I am.  My evangelical faith was built upon the belief that I am a sinner and separated from God (Romans 3:23).  I was constantly reminded of that sinful nature within me and that I could never be “good” enough for God to accept me.  Being made in God’s image was proclaimed, but quickly overshadowed by “the fall” (Genesis 3) and our sinful nature (Romans 5:12).  Love and grace were preached, but drowned out by the wrath and judgement of a god who could not see past “the sin” within the people he created for relationship with himself (Romans 1:18; **use of male pronouns for god as taught in my evangelical upbringing).  These conflicting messages and the emphasize on sin and separation have separated me from understanding and recognizing God within me.  It has separated me from truly experiencing the love of God and my unbreakable connection with my Creator.

Whiteness has shaped and polluted Christianity.  An individual approach to faith, truth, and redemption have ignored the connection between God, humans, and all of creation.  Whiteness has taken a story of love, peace, justice, and a message of opposing power and structures of evil and used it to defend greed, violence, and oppression.  Whiteness has distorted the Bible leading to individualism, meritocracy, and a focus on “getting to heaven” as fundamental belief systems within Christianity, which are tools to continue to ignore and feel the impact of being an oppressor.  Whiteness is separating us from God, from others, from creation, from our feelings, and from our truest selves.  Whiteness is killing us.  I am discovering to find my way to a life of connection and love, I first have to acknowledge the violence of whiteness towards me and through me (as an oppressor), especially through a faith that was taught to me as the salvation of the world (1 John 4:14).

How Does Whiteness Separate Us from God – Take Seven

This is part of a series of guest posts and dialogues around the question:  How does Whiteness Separate us from God?

WRITTEN BY Jennifer Arnold

In February I attended the Bartimaeus Kinler Institute in California which was focused on “Indigenous Justice and Christian Faith: Land, Law, Language”. While there I watched over and over as indigenous folks from around the country and the globe greeted each other. Bearing gifts they would introduce themselves and welcome the other. Their introductions were not like the ones to which I’m accustomed. They would name not only their tribe, but also the specific place their ancestors had called home. There were no white western colonized names, no “California” or “Indiana”. Instead, they would name the watershed, the valley, the native plants and insects. As I listened, watching precious natural gifts trade hands, I was struck by how much we who call ourselves white have lost, and how much we have stolen.

Just yesterday I was in a room and the speaker asked us to name where our families were from. To listen to a group of “white” folks name aloud: Scottish, German, Irish, English, and on and on is an unusual experience. It made people uncomfortable and voices quivered ever so slightly. Answers were inflected as if they were questions. We have forgotten these places and named ourselves white but to be white is to be from nowhere. To be white is to have ceded home for power, to have exchanged culture for advantage.

What would it look like if we flipped that question so commonly asked to folks of color on it’s head, “No, really? Where are you from?” Let’s try it on me first.

 

• Where are you from? I grew up in Indiana, but I lived in North Carolina before I moved to Georgia.

• That land was stolen. Where are you really from? Well, my ancestors moved from Germany and France to Pennsylvania in the 17th century. They came from the Alsace-Lorraine region which is right on the border of the two countries.

• Yes, but where? Where are you from? Really? Ummm…that’s all I know.

 

See how quickly I get stuck? I can’t name anything specific because I don’t know the places of which I speak. I can’t tell you the trees that grow there or from where my people got their water. I can’t speak the native tongue. I cannot chose a gift to represent this place I only know in name. I cannot tell you about the local creation myth. My memory has been cut so short. Surely, if you go back far enough, there was a time my people were indigenous somewhere. Everyone comes from somewhere. It’s not as if Europe was devoid of people until they appeared and all at once decided they wanted to violently conquer the rest of the world. So when did we lose our traditions? How far back do I have to go to find my ancestor who would have been able to come to the Bartimaeus Institute, shake hands, bear a gift, sing a song, tell a story, and intimately name the landscape of their ancestors? Yes, surely we have lost something. Many things. Not just the tangibles – like the name of our watershed, but the intangibles too. We have lost our ways of relating to each other and to all of creation as siblings. How far back until we can reclaim ceremonies of hospitality towards strangers instead of domination and death?

“But this blog is supposed to be about separation from God,” you’re thinking. “Why are you going on about all of this stuff about ancestral land?” I say all of this because God is not a thing that exists out there beyond us and beyond our world. Although I believe that God is always bigger than anything we know, it is also true that we are human. As such we can only relate to God through our bodies and through the world around us. If God is the Creator of all, then we are related – siblings – to all. We are one. Imagine the world as a circle with God at the center. Every living thing is a straight line from the outside in towards the center (like the radius or spokes on a wagon wheel). Following your line, the closer you get to God, the closer you get to all of creation. And the closer you get to creation, the closer you get to God. The two cannot be separated. We are one. When we lose touch with our watersheds, the wisdom of our ancestors, and our practices of hospitality and welcome, we are losing touch with God. 

The more we give up in our quest to claim the invisibility of whiteness, the more our hearts ache with longing for what we have lost. I believe that deep in our hearts we folk who call ourselves white, like all humans, crave relationship and intimacy. But we have sacrificed deep connection for the cheap substitute of power and control. “Owning” land is not knowing it. Production is not partnership. Profit is not benefit.

A common definition of sin is “separation from God” and so it strikes me that the question “How does whiteness separate us from God?” is ultimately a question about sin. That’s big heavy theological language that many people want to run away from. I get it. When systems of power and privilege enter the mix, “sin” language has often been used to shame anyone who doesn’t conform to the status quo. That’s not what I’m talking about. Legality is not the same as morality. Instead, is it not sin to choose disconnection from the center of the circle, to move further away from God and from others? If God is the source of all being and love, then to be connected to God is to feel our being and the being of others. It is to be in loving relationships with that which God has made, all of creation. It is connection, not separation.

Yet, our whiteness has demanded separation, psychic and physical. When indigenous Americans first encountered European colonizers (there was no idea of “white” yet), they welcomed these strangers to their home. Ancient practices of hospitality, connection, oneness reigned. In many instances the Europeans would likely have not survived otherwise. What kind of mental gymnastics then must our forebearers have gone through to convince themselves that these folks who met and welcomed them, were less than human? Deserving of death? I think about the white folks centuries later who gathered in jubilance to watch black men swing from trees. How do you watch that horrific scene and not have your insides torn to shreds? How do you keep on living? I think of myself, who recently learned about another lynching just this month – 2019! – in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. About how I could read this and be upset certainly, but not filled with the utmost rage. How I turn on that intellectual part of my brain to “find out more” instead of sitting in terrifying pain. How I can justify my lack of feeling by choosing to believe the police who ruled it a suicide despite some super sketchy evidence. As if murder is just a misunderstanding we all need to really get over already. 

Like the chicken and the egg, I wonder which came first: the belief that we were superior or the refusal to see and feel others’ pain. Really though, show me an instance where either exists without the other. They don’t. They can’t. Both are symptoms of our disconnection from others and from ourselves. Separation is like a lie you tell that quickly spirals out of control. Whiteness demands that we keep lying and denying pain (not just others’ but also our own) in order to hide the truth that are all in fact one, created for connection with God and each other, without hierarchy or power over the other. There is no “natural order” of separations where whiteness is on top. That superiority is the lie we use, knowingly and unintentionally, explicitly and implicitly, to justify our sin. 

We like to pretend that when we sin and separate ourselves to the top of a false hierarchy it really only hurts those who we believe are less valuable than us. We somehow remain unscathed. Yet, there is no way to be separate and not be absolutely deformed. The problem is we’ve just lied further to believe such deformations are normal, good even. Yet, if we are honest we can feel the fragmentation of our sin inside ourselves, in our personal relationships, and in society at large. The circle where God is at the center has no hierarchy, no separation. If we want to be whole, connected to God and each other, we must stop lying. We must stop justifying. We must start feeling. Can we relearn the ways of welcome? Can we know our watersheds and native flowers? Can we allow ourselves to be filled with rage at the way whiteness has dehumanized not just others, but also ourselves? 

Nothing about this is easy. We who call ourselves white must pick up our cross of tortured mental gymnastics, of hiding from our sin, of superiority. We must carry it around and feel it’s weight on our shoulders. Let it burden us and make us uncomfortable. In carrying it may we learn where it hurts in our bodies. May we learn how to feel pain. May we learn how not to throw it off onto others expecting them to bear it for us. May we learn to not be overwhelmed by the seemingly insurmountable. May we learn to just keep going. As we stumble towards the center of the circle, , burdened under this cross, we do not move in vain. Our God is a God of resurrection and new life. Sin, death, and violence will not have the last word in this story. Still, if whiteness is to die we must bring our crosses with us. Then perhaps, eventually, when we get to the center of the circle, where all of God and creation are one, we will finally be able to partake in that ancient ceremony of welcome. We will tell God who we are and where we really come from. We will present the cross which we have labored under as our gift. We will lay it down without hurting others. No longer separate, no longer lying, no longer superior. And God will not scorn our faulty, painful, broken gift but return it with another, better gift. The gift of connection, of love, of wholeness. Redemption. With open arms God will be there, celebrating with all of our brothers and sisters, to welcome us home.

To Protect and Serve

written by AMANDA GROSS

Unlike 17-year-old Antwon Rose II, I have never been targeted by the police in a way that made me fear for my life. My three and a half decades of personal experience with the criminal justice system can be counted on one hand: jury duty + 4 traffic stops, only one of which resulted in a ticket.

Upon further examination, though, my involvement with the system goes deeper. My above list omits the times I have initiated contact with the system, like the one time I called the police when my neighbors were having a domestic dispute so loudly, I could hear chairs being broken through the thin apartment walls. I was afraid; terrified really, as my neighbor screamed for mercy. I felt both powerless and convicted that something must be done. And so I did what I had been taught to do: I called 9-1-1.

There are also the numerous other times that I have considered that option but not followed through, sitting on the front porch or peeking out through the blinds while clutching my cell phone as I struggled with the moral dilemma of whether or not to call the cops. I still struggle with the urge to call even though I am now aware that law enforcement disproportionately targets Black and brown communities and that police involvement can harm more than it helps. I still struggle internally even though I know that the police force as an institution was never intended to protect and serve my neighbors. I know now that the police force we have today began originally as slave patrols. In 1857, the Supreme Court declared that under the Constitution, a Black person “has no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” A 17th century Virginia law proclaimed that if an enslaved person was ever killed in an attempted arrest, the person who killed them “shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such accident had never happened…,” as if Antwon Rose II’s murder had never had happened.

I know now too that enslavement is still legally sanctioned through incarceration, that we disproportionately incarcerate Black and Indigenous people, that Black students are disproportionately pushed out of education and into the criminal justice system, that in Allegheny County, Black students are suspended at 5.6 times that of white students, and that white women are the frontline offenders in upholding this dynamic termed the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

If you haven’t guessed already by my traffic-stop-to-ticket ratio, I am a cis white lady. And as one of many such white ladies who have been entrusted with the education of young people, it would be easy for me to obscure my relationship to the systemic violence of racism. It would be convenient for me to point to the violence of white men: the police officer who pulled the trigger, the attorney who represented him, the first and then second judge who presided over the trial, the majority of the jury responsible for Officer Rosfeld’s acquittal, the D.A. who failed to present a strong case. It is so much more comfortable for me to gloss over the long-lasting history of white ladies organizing for racism and my connection to it.

White Middle-Class Neighborhood; Digital Image by Amanda K Gross

To Protect…

There have always been white women rallying for the cause of racism. Since the early 20^th Century, Women of the Ku Klux Klan and its predecessor Ladies of the Invisible Empire have had reach beyond their base in southern states, spanning from Portland, Oregon, to Baltimore, Maryland.[1]White mothers were on the front lines against school desegregation both in the Jim Crow South and also against integrated busing practices in Boston.[2]Closer to home, white women took on leadership roles in organizing against the 1981 court order that merged the then-predominantly white school districts of Churchill, Edgewood, Swissvale, and Turtle Creek with the predominantly Black districts of Braddock, North Braddock, and Rankin to become the Woodland Hills school district, the district where Antwon would eventually attend.

Despite recent calls to “stand against hate”, our history of racist organizing at its root is more about fear than hate. This fear exploits a patriarchal narrative that presumes an innocent victim status for white women and white children in need of protection from the violent pathology that has been projected onto Black and brown people. The fear that has me gripping the telephone is not disconnected from the fear tactics used in crime reporting on the local news, in commercials for home security systems, on the NextDoor East Liberty listserv asking if anyone heard gunfire 20 minutes ago, or from the weekly Pittsburgh Police Zone 5 email blast, which lists names, ages, and descriptions of people who have been arrested and reminds us to stay vigilant. My persistent urge to call points to a very deeply instilled belief that for every time I feel helpless, there should be a hero ready and waiting to protect me from an outside danger or at least protect me from my own feelings of helplessness.

College Classroom; Digital Image by Amanda K Gross

…and to Serve

I wholeheartedly believe that of Pennsylvania educators, 96% who are white women,[3]get into education because they want the best for their students. I believe that these same educators went to teacher school with vision, integrity, and the intention to nurture all young learners and to help prepare their students for brilliant futures. I have witnessed many of these white lady teachers put in countless, unpaid extra hours, spend their own salaries on classroom supplies, and advocate for their students within a system bent on pushing out students of color. I don’t believe that any teacher enters the field eager to disproportionately fail, discipline, and suspend their Black and brown students while disproportionately passing, promoting, and graduating their white ones. And in a system where teachers are so often stripped of institutional agency and scapegoated as the problem, I also don’t believe that any teacher joins the teacher’s union planning to organize for their own best interest to the detriment of their students’. Yet, these are the dynamics we have today. Pennsylvania teachers, 96% of whom are white ladies, are the ones making decisions in the classroom that lead to racial disproportionality while teachers unions frequently stand with the institutional status quo instead of with student of color-led organizing, such as in the case of siding with the administration during the recent student walkout and in opposing an extension of the moratorium on out-of-school suspension.

As a fellow white lady, I want to know how our good intentions have become so distanced from the collective negative impact we have on the young people we say we serve. As a student of history, I am seeking answers to how we have come so unaligned with organizing that would actually make life better for our students andfor us.

A brief history lesson shows that this is not the first time we have used whiteness to advance an agenda for white women at the expense of People of Color. The end of the Civil War opened up a whole field of work in education to white women who had previously been discouraged from working outside the home. Northern white women descended in droves upon the South to teach Black children to read. Around the same time, white women gained employment and status through government jobs working on Indian reservations, teaching at Native American boarding schools, and doing church work as missionaries in other countries.[4]White women assumed these roles under the guise of benevolent caretakers and cultural workers who would guide their young charges away from their home cultures and towards a “more civilized” white way of being. These teaching opportunities were steeped in a racism that promoted the superiority of white culture and was built on a false narrative that Black and Indigenous children needed white women to help, fix, and save them. It is so important that we know our history. This history helps explain how white women have come to dominate the field of education. It also helps explain how we as white women inflict violence when we don’t recognize our power as white people. Like the white mothers protecting their white children from going to school with children of color, like me clutching the phone, like teacher unions inadvertently organizing against their students, we are most effective at organizing for white supremacy when we carry our victim mentality with us into the halls of institutional power.

Only You Can Prevent Racism; Digital Image by Amanda K Gross

When I see injustice or harm, I am moved by a loud voice in my head to JUST DO SOMETHING and so the idea of not doing something – of not calling the police, or of not discipling students, for example, seems contrary to the parts of me that want to spring towards action, to the parts of me that have learned that I too should protect and serve. And I am learning that there are so many ways towards action that challenge racism. It’s just that those actions are not as simple as a phone call. Those actions reject the historical claim for white women as righteous victim/saviors. Those actions take a whole lot of unlearning and learning anew. Those actions require creativity and are grounded in humility and relationship. Those actions call on a type of persistent collective courage we rarely see in heroic films. Those actions require self-study and a long term lifelong strategy that acknowledges the extensive power we currently hold through institutional positions, cultural access, and proximity to cis white men. There are so many ways for us to refuse to collude with white supremacy. Above all, those actions require us to center the humanity of Antwon Rose II and of his peers.

[1]Women of the Klan by Kathleen M. Blee

[2]Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

[3]Public Source Reporting

[4]White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States, Louise Michele Newman

Lying While White, Again

written by AMANDA GROSS

Once you tell a lie, more lies are required to cover it up.

I have a vague recollection of a children’s picture book that had this lesson as a premise or maybe it was a cartoon or perhaps several iterations on the same theme. At some point in the beginning of the tale, the main character tells a lie about something seemingly insignificant (racism calls this a “white lie”) and then finds themselves weaving a web of lies to cover it up – first for their initial lie and then for a gaggle of proceeding lies until eventually it all falls apart until either the character is caught and/or feels so incredible guilty that the entirety of the truth spills out. At the end we learn never to tell the small lie in the first place because if you give a mouse a cookie…

My exposure to this moralistic tale happened first in preschool or maybe Kindergarten around the same time that most children are taught not to talk about race, especially in mixed (read: multiracial) company. This includes learned silence and sometimes shame around noticing, pointing out, and identifying racial difference. For most of us who have come to be called white, this vow of silence applies to mixed company as well as the all-white ones. We were shushed and taught to pretend that we are all the same, that we don’t notice difference because that would be impolite. We were taught to pretend that the differences in our relationships to power are rude to point out.

Whiteness Montage; Mixed Media by Amanda K Gross

It is an early lie, more accurately a white one. This lie has required lies upon lies to prop up its initial false claim, creating a (wicked) web* of tangled deception. And we are all caught up in it one way or another because the lie of race has shaped our perceptions, our thoughts, our realities, and our life expectancies. That white people exist as a biological, genetic, or phenotypical category are all lies. That this falsely constructed category of people is superior in any way to other falsely constructed categories of humans is also a white lie, though this time a rather significant one.

As I struggle to breathe amidst the toxic air of my surroundings, I think how these lies of racism show up in my body’s allergic reaction to Pittsburgh’s air (in)equality. My body is creating mucus in record quantities to expel that which is unnatural, that which does not belong, that which threatens the universe of my organism. The earth too is in the process of expelling us humans and our toxic racist lies. My childhood stories ring true, white lies – the small ones and the racial ones – are not so insignificant after all. They build up and create an unsustainable mess.

Truth-telling, like lying, is also a slippery slope. As you may have noticed, lying has been a recent theme of this blog, and by lying I don’t necessarily mean the Who-stole-the-cookies-from-the-cookie-jar?-Not-me!-Couldn’t-be!-Then-who?-ones. I mean the lies that we tell ourselves about our feelings and the one about the impact other people and things are having on us. Mainly, the lies we tell ourselves.

Initially, I wanted to write that truth-telling is complicated or complex or complexly complicated… But in writing that and in being honest with myself, I’m realizing it’s not the truth-telling that’s complicated, but the lying that complexifies my truth.

VVH Cousin Lydia Victim; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

I have recently set an intention for truth-telling and truth-seeking, which inevitably means the Universe has offered me more than ample practice. It also means more of my lies are being revealed to me. And because I am out of practice, I am noticing my dishonesty several lies in. Several lies behind, I am still not catching the white lie as it leaves my lips.

Like just this week as I observed my gut feelings and knew there was something I didn’t like about an email communication that was unfolding. I also told myself that an email chain was not the place to address this. So I waited. And I waited. And waited for the previously agreed upon moment of in-person dialog to appropriately share the feelings I’d been damming up for days. Then when that moment didn’t happen, the truth exploded – or sort of the truth, but definitely something exploded. Really what happened is that I ended up telling the truth about my feelings by lying about what incited them, leaving a whole lot more mess to clean up. (Tune in next week to see how it ends.)

This mini-white lady processing rant points out a pattern of mine on my journey towards truth-telling and reveals how much I am still attached to the lies of whiteness, how much I am willing to hold onto the toxins and swallow the mucus, how deeply committed I am to following the rules despite what my body communicates to me in the moment. I am still relying on an external playbook and not the inner truth of my being. In this case, I opted to follow the rules of anti-racist racist whiteness that cautioned me to communicate relationally, in person, and definitely not over email.

These moments have also cued me in on another lie I deeply believe: that truth-telling is seamless, easy, effortless, and ends in comfortable happy endings that celebrate the teller of that truth. As I begin a process of telling my family my truths from childhood, there are many (white) lies to untangle – some of which are being loosened, some of which are being pulled tighter because whiteness demands a pretense of invisibility. As I build up my emotional resiliency, sometimes I struggle to stay focused; truths can be so painful.

Clearly, the emperor is standing butt-naked in the snow storm, but our stubborn allegiance to the emperor’s imaginary cloak has become more important than finding him an adequate winter coat. (It would be a lie if we pretended the emperor doesn’t suffer, too.) He stands naked in the midst of the Polar Vortex as the earth seeks to expel both him and humanity’s white lies.

Snow on Christmas Morning photo by Amanda K Gross

*Wicked Web Workshops forthcoming in partnership with YROL. Please inquire for more details.

Lying While White

written by AMANDA GROSS

I have said it before and I will say it again, stoicism in my maternal line runs as deep as our varicose veins.

Now at the age of 35, I have been practicing the art of lying for decades. Perhaps this genre of art is not the one you’re thinking of where lying is a deliberate conscious effort to cover up one’s tracks. Although I would be lying to say I haven’t had moments like that.

This is not the type of lying that I would use after smacking my little brother across the face. He wailed like a fire siren. Amanda, did you hit your brother? My parents asked. Nope. I adamantly lied, shaking my head so hard it was bout to fall off. This is not the lying with which I covered up my anorexic tracks, its own menu of sorts: I’m not hungry… I already ate at soccer practice…  I gave that [insert food group] up for Lent…

Like a superficial understanding of racism, we’ve been taught to picture lying as intentional and overt, rather than woven into the very fibers of our social being. The concept of whiteness is based on a lie and so it is unsurprising that my white womanhood has been cultivated on a bed of lies that bestow qualities of purity, goodness, beauty, niceness, and victimhood to the white lady, just to name a few.

Hear No Evil, by Amanda K Gross

There is a lie steeped in stoicism grown from this falsely raised bed, a lie that has been part of my white lady practice since cultivating niceness became a personal goal. It was probably kindergarten, even preschool when I first learned the tools of the trade, that being hyper-nice, compliant and obedient to adults in authority gained me the advantage of Good Little White Girl. Sometimes modified with the adjectives Smart or Nice or Quiet, the benefit of the doubt was in the classroom before I arrived. All I had to do was play the part (or at least most of the time).

Each year I got better with practice. Being nice, quiet, and polite kept the adults happy and provided a safe emotional distance from my peers. Sometimes my classmates would ask for help with their assignments. Sometimes my teachers would assign me to do so. Either way, I was happy to oblige, my good little white girl purpose in life fulfilled.

One important tool in the box of lying while white has meant training myself not to express how I really feel. Frustration, irritation, annoyance, impatience, anger, and rage did not, could not belong to a good little white girl who was growing into a nice white lady. And so, those emotions, too could not belong to me.

As an adolescent, I recited the fruits of the spirit from a framed embroidery at my grandparent’s house. Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. And Self-Control. Visually tattooed on my mind, patience and self-control were clearly the hard ones. I vowed to stuff down any feelings that would detract from this list. If you don’t have anything nice to say, say nothing at all.* The dilemma is that I often have so much not nice to say.

White Silence, by Amanda K Gross

And so when recently, while in the middle of chopping vegetables, a feeling of irritation at a colleague welled up within me, it did not occur to me to bring this feeling to them. Instead, I sat with it for a moment, as my yoga practice has taught me. I acknowledged the emotion, as my therapist has taught me. Well hello there irritation, I said to the feeling. And then I lied to myself, as white supremacy has taught me. I diagnosed myself with impatience, surely stemming from my internalization of racial superiority. Impatience, by the way, was not listed on the framed embroidery of the fruits of the spirit. I quickly labeled this feeling bad and, renewing my vow to be patient, stuffed it down and continued cooking dinner.

Except the thing about lying, is that the truth is still there packed under the layers of cover up. The truth is still there and it wants to get out. It too wants to be free.

It took many days for me to realize my self-deception, and even then I only confronted it because of someone else’s emotional labor. It was several days more until I acknowledged my feelings to the colleague, and revealed that I had been lying to them. I created the harm that I feared. I shook the foundation of trust that I had convinced myself that my silence was trying to maintain.

I too have consumed the lie of whiteness with its false pretense that emotional distance (plus privilege) maintains a wall of security that will keep everything okay. The more honest I am with myself and others about my feelings, the harder nice white ladyness is to achieve. And so I am working on divesting from the wall. While obvious in theory, divestment proves elusive in the moment because I – more often than not – confuse the nice white lady for the real me.

*According to Thumper from Bambi

 

Only You

written by AMANDA GROSS

Meet Roger:

Only You Can Prevent Racism; Digital Image by Amanda K Gross

I was first introduced to Duke University’s report, Fighting at Birth: Eradicating the Black-White Infant Mortality Gap at the Allegheny County Health Department Infant Mortality Collaboration. This study cuts to the quick in a very helpful way.

I, along with 99% of white liberals, have a closely held assumption that as someone’s income, education, and access to healthcare and career opportunities increase, so too will their health, wellness, and quality of life. This concept of increased access = better outcomes is why I support a move towards universal healthcare, more public and subsidized housing, as well as free higher education.

Not so fast. (this study says)

While that is the case for white people giving birth to children, as seen through the Infant Mortality Rate, it is not the case for their Black counterparts. The Infant Mortality Rate (or IMR) is one very important marker of health. The Duke study shows that IMR actually increases for Black women as their education increases (especially for those who hold Masters and Post-Doctorate degrees), rather than decreases. As access to higher levels of income, education, healthcare, and career opportunities improve, health markers decline. Come again?

The study controls for a lot of things (you can read it for yourself to get all the details), ultimately coming to the conclusion that the increase in IMR is because of Black women’s increased exposure to structural racism and microaggressions. Or another way to think of it is that Black women’s IMR increases as they interact with more white people (especially of the middle-class and affluent variety) and begin to live and work in spaces that are even more culturally white.

Well, of course this makes sense because racism. And though this is consistent with what Black women have been saying for years, we white people love a good study. And so it was this study that got me all inspired.

The study reminded me of a horrid billboard campaign, which – speaking of incredible Black-led organizations – New Voices for Reproductive Justice had first alerted me to. While Black mothers are often villainized in the media as bad promiscuous single moms, this anti-abortion ad campaign was particularly heinous stating: The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.

This textbook victim-blaming technique serves as a handy distraction. The ad campaign wants us to think that Black babies are dying because of the bad choices of their parents (translation: abortion) rather than see the circumstances around them, structural racism, stress, and increased interactions with white people as the main factor in those children’s deaths.

I was taught that meddling in Black peoples’ business was the sign of a good white person, but since that approach isn’t really saving anyone but my ego it’s time to move on and be more helpful.

Both fortunately and unfortunately white people are the real cause of racism, which means we have the opportunity to be both the harm and part of the solution.

Remember Roger?

He’s making public service announcements aimed at white people through this Public Ad Campaign. As he posts them, please download the images and share widely!

College Classroom; Digital Image by Amanda K Gross

White Middle-Class Neighborhood; Digital Image by Amanda K Gross

Corporate Boardroom; Digital Image by Amanda K Gross

 

Godly Abuse is Nothing New to Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy

written by AMANDA GROSS

The news out of Pittsburgh over the past week has been grim. Also stomach churning.

Across PA, the Catholic Church has been outed for the decades-long institutionalized practice of child sexual abuse. The Grand Jury named 99 priests from Pittsburgh and 20 from the Greensburg diocese. I’m not going to get into the gory details, but you can find more info and an extensive list of the priests here. Since the Grand Jury Report was released, hundreds more people have come forward with allegations not previously reported. And nuns are breaking their vow of silence about their abuse at the hands of holy men.

Spilt Milk; Mixed Media by Amanda K Gross

Our dominant child abuser narrative is that of the lone, sick, criminal abuser. Our crime and punishment approach assures us that locking up a few bad apples will solve the problem and keep our children safe. And so I am hopeful that despite the horrors, the discourse is shifting away from these lies. The Grand Jury report not only shows a clear, widespread pattern with 301 people involved (and 1000s abused), it also points to the institutionalization of abuse with cover up after cover up and a culture that punished whistleblowers and nurtured toxic discretion.

Of course the Catholic Church isn’t the only institution implicated in the recent exposure of sexual violence. Mennonite institutions are being exposed too. These patterns of abuse being made public have long been the norm in the film industry, in media, in U.S. Gymnastics, and in the U.S. Immigration System where thousands of migrants report sexual abuse including a 6-year-old girl.

In any of these institutions, abuse is horrific and unacceptable and has long-lasting life-altering impact on the survivors. But with this recent news out of Pittsburgh, I have been thinking about the spiritual violence present when experiencing abuse from your direct line to God. Abuse of power comes as no surprise. And these particular abuses – sexual abuse at the hands of priests, abuse of children in immigration detention and at the hands of the juvenile criminal justice system as well as their predecessors in Native American boarding schools and chattel slavery all have a common root in 15th-18th Century Europe where clergy, jailers, and local officials institutionalized the sexual abuse of adults and children in the name of God.

The witch hunts of 15th-18th Century Europe set the stage for the legacies of abuse we’ve inherited today. Across Western and Northern Europe there were targeted campaigns spanning hundreds of years built around a document known as the Malleus Maleficarum written by Catholic clergy in Speyer, Germany*. This bestseller lead the way in the oppressive theology of the time.

As I’ve blogged about before: in campaign after campaign to root out evil, the witch became the criminal of her day, a convenient scapegoat whose tortures, trials, and burnings fueled religious, political, and social institutions. At the time of the Protestant Reformation when Europe was being carved up along religious lines, priests and ministers on both sides were back in demand, called in desperation to exorcise the demons.

Wooden Frame; Mixed Media by Amanda K Gross

New courts were established, expert judges and attorneys were required to legitimize fear and its antidote – law and order. According to historian Lyndal Roper, attorneys began to make “a fortune in legal consultations…” and established a lucrative system in “housing and feeding the children (awaiting trial) and paying guards to watch over them.” Men of God were ushered into the detention centers, torturing and sexually abusing both adults accused of witch craft (the high majority of whom were women) and children as young as seven with their Godly methods to test for witchery.

Outside of detention centers, mayors and other leaders vowed to purify their towns, platforming off of the fear, suspicion, and subsequent hatred. Using lessons of torture learned from the Inquisition, persecution of European Jewish populations, and failed religious crusades outside of Europe, entire societal structures and institutions were developed and called upon to root out this evil. And so we persecuted both our grandmothers and our grandchildren to the fullest extent of the law.

Sound familiar? The resurgence of the law and order candidate, being tough on crime, our U.S. juvenile justice system, detaining immigrant children, systematic child abuse in religious institutions, and misogynistic rape culture all have roots in these several hundred years of terror.

The Chickens got away with Jesus: Mixed Media by Amanda K gross

What I am saying is that religious child sexual abuse is not new and we know where it comes from. 500 years later the psychological consequences continue both for those doing the abusing and those being abused.

The European witch hunts broke the back of the Peasant Revolts and other class warfare that was threatening the European ruling class at the time by targeting poor older women, the keepers of their community’s historical memory, the weavers of communal networks, the advisors of resistance. The witch hunts taught our ancestors the psychological somersaults of cognitive dissonance and disassociation. What psychological toll would it take for you to turn on your grandmother, or your aunt, on your child? What psychological sickness might get passed down generation after generation?

Once you’ve accepted the abuse of your own mother, how much easier is it to accept the abuse of others’? The psyche of the witch hunts crossed the Atlantic in the minds and bodies of Europeans paving the way for racist colonization and for the racial category we know as white.

Of course the survivors of 20th Century Church child sexual abuse are not the only children of the witch hunts. As usual the ones who have come to be called white get a whole lot more press.

The torture and enslavement of children of African descent during American chattel slavery in which enslaved children were systematically raped, the children born from those rapes enslaved by their own fathers.

The torture and incarceration of Black and Brown youth disproportionately represented in the U.S Juvenile system and the School to Prison Pipeline is morally if not religiously sanctioned with droves of Christian voters supporting abusive “tough love” policies.

The torture and imprisonment of indigenous children at Native Boarding Schools, a forced religious education aimed at cultural genocide.

The torture and detention of immigrant children, separated from their families and left vulnerable to institutionalized abuse.

All of the above have been justified on Christian religious grounds at some time or another. What I am saying is that religious child sexual abuse is not new; it is old. It is old enough to know better.

We are old enough to know better. We are old enough to speak our truths. We are old enough to disrupt these cycles of abuse. We are old enough to share our own stories. We are old enough to equip our children with this knowledge. We are old enough to say “no!” and to teach our children to do the same. We are old enough to make consent an everyday practice. We are old enough to hold our friends, families, significant others, children, representatives, judges, and priests accountable.

We are old enough to uproot this invasive plant and to uproot it together.

Les Temoins 2; Pen and Ink by Amanda K Gross

*Anabaptists might note the importance of this location. Historian Silvia Federici makes the connection that witch hunts were most prevalent in places where heretics, such as the Anabaptists, had been previously persecuted.

What’s Wrong with Being Wrong (?)

It was a blog post I hadn’t thought twice about. My artistic abilities were proudly Mennonite Humbly on display. The info book-researched and personally connected. The white ladies had put the finishing touches on their assignments. The Victim, Villain, Heroine project was complete.

Or so I thought. Then mom came to town.

The Cousin Lydia I reported on in my last blog post is a figment of my imagination, or at least the way I recreated her story is. While the Cousin Lydia whose photo and date of birth and death I found in  Mast Family History lived, died, taught at a girl’s school as a missionary in India, and is indeed my distant cousin, she is not the family relative that inspired my grandfather’s medical career and set the trajectory of my family lineage into white professional assimilation – as I so eloquently blogged about in my original post. In my weaving of family lore, memories, and analysis, I had in fact conflated two other people merging their roles into late 19th Century Cousin Lydia’s convenient persona. I had not conflated family members intentionally, yet conflate I had.

VVH Cousin Lydia Heroine; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

So let me set the record correct. My grandfather was inspired to go abandon the family farm and go into medicine, not because of late 19th Century Cousin Lydia, but because of physician, Dr. CJ Esch, who worked in India and is most likely of no relation. Another Cousin Lydia, this one of the 20th Century variety, was a missionary in Red Lake, Canada who my mom and her siblings visited bringing back tales of pontoon planes, campfires, and moose liver.

More interesting to me (and perhaps to you) than the actual correction of these factoids is the amount of energy it took for me to work through my resistance to being wrong and making correction. Astute readers will note, it has been 90 days since my last confession blog post.

VVH Cousin Lydia Victim; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

Right around the time of my mama’s visit I attended the Creative Nonfiction Writer’s Conference and sat through a workshop on fact checking. Ugh. Fact checking. The workshop, which was sophisticated and nuanced and seemed to have some understanding of the subjective biases carried by all humans, still touted the critical all importance of facts. As an anti-racist feminist whose life work has been built from a foundational assumption that facts bounce off frames* and that the ways we see the world are framed by our lived experience, power, and how the world sees us**, I spent the entirety of the workshop very resistant to the notion of facts. Rather than listening to the tips and arguments put forth by the fact checking team, I invested in a mental dialogue of poking holes in their presentation and getting quite huffy at the gigantic bother of facts. Just like Al Gore and our Alt Right cousins, I was saying facts are oh so inconvenient.

My life is fact, I thought.

Why would I need/want/look for anything more, I complained.

Objectivity is such a white male framework, I accused.

And it is.

But if I’m more honest with myself now than I was able to be then, my feelings of resistance are hands down emotionally lazy, and also shaped by a convenient one right way perfectionism that is attached to effortless rightness. You could substitute that phrase for an attachment to effortless whiteness.

VVH Cousin Lydia Villain; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

Have I mentioned I’m writing a book? The yearlong process of which has been fraught with motivation and the fear of trying, confidence and insecurity, practicing naming my truth unapologetically and living in their consequences, exposing my vulnerabilities and acknowledging that in so doing I’m also exposing the vulnerabilities of others. The process of becoming brave enough to write my truth has meant a constant grappling with the insecurities I’ve been conditioned to believe while I fight the silent cloud of silence brought on by conflict avoidant white liberalism.

But my speaking of truth does not forego listening. In defending my heart and in order to tamper down the pain of how others receive my truth, I have been tempted to open my mouth and close my ears. When my mother challenged my version of Cousin Lydia, in that moment I really wasn’t that interested in challenging myself. I was annoyed, irritated, already done with that post and that project and ready to move on to new more exciting adventures. My resistance didn’t entirely surprise me, by my heightened awareness of it sure did.

In an effort to be more vulnerable and relational, I have offered up a space for dialogue and feedback on the book in progress to certain family members and friends. This move has been important and powerful and a painful knot untangling. Despite dialogue and truth tellings and listenings, the painful knot of relational exchange does not feel any more resolved. It perhaps never will. I am learning that in listening to others, with as much love as I can muster in the moment, this process might still lead to disappointment, to messy disconnection. For as much as getting solid on my truth doesn’t forego listening to others, it also doesn’t necessarily mean accepting and integrating others’ truths into my own. The powerful, terrifying thing is that at the end of the day I decide which facts and frames I let in and which ones I keep out, which ones I work with and compost and which ones I throw out. The powerful thing is that you do too.

*George Lakoff Don’t Think of An Elephant

**Every womanist/feminist ever

Victim, Villain, Heroine

WRITTEN BY Amanda Gross

While calling on our victim identity is a comfortable position for white women from the perspective of white feminism and while the popular white savior complex justifies our helping, fixing, and saving others, rarely do we honestly examine contemporary and historical white ladies’ contributions to upholding and dismantling intersectional oppression through the lens of racism. We all have the capacity to occupy aspects of all three – Victim, Villain, and Heroine – usually at the same time.

VVH Cousin Lydia Combined; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

In our anti-racist affinity space, White Women’s Group 3 asked these 3 questions about 3 white ladies: self, a family member, and a historical figure:

• How are we victims of systems of oppression?
• How do we perpetuate and uphold systems of oppression?
• How do we resist systems of oppression?

And in challenging the myth of individualism in the archetypes of Victim, Villain, Heroine, we also investigated the historical and contemporary context of systemic oppression and social movements surrounding the white ladies in question.

Queen Elizabeth I

Victim – Born the daughter of the King of England, she endured a traumatic childhood based on the patriarchy and misogynistic culture of the time. When she was 2 ½ years of age her mother was murdered by her father, who repeatedly tried to disown her. As an adolescent, she was imprisoned by her half-sister. She had several step mothers and her half-siblings, cousins, and their families were in constant often violent competition with her for the throne. She began fending off suitors at the age of 13, which was considered a marriageable age for girls at the time. She spent a lot of her life ill, had almost total hair loss at a young age, and suffered from many harmful physical beauty standards put upon women including the toxicity of her make-up and girdles that reconfigured her vital organs.

VVH Queen Liz I Victim; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

Villain – She was responsible for England’s initial colonizing endeavors and paved the way for centuries of colonization, imperialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and militaristic global violence. She granted stolen land of what is now called the Eastern U.S. to her favorite rich English merchants, never acknowledging the rights of Indigenous peoples to that land. Because of this patronage and legacy of displacement, Virginia is named for her. She established the groundwork for the equivalent of modern day corporations, the East India Company and the Virginia Company. She pursued scorched-earth tactics in Ireland, during which tens of thousands of people starved to death and many more people died of the violence. At home, she led land enclosures which forced peasants off of commonly held land resulting in skyrocketing homelessness and poverty at the advent of a capitalist economic system.

VVH Queen Liz I Villain; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

Heroine – At a time when women were marginalized in religious institutions, she became head of the Church of England. She resisted patriarchal expectations by never marrying nor having children and exercising bodily autonomy, which was rare for women of the day. As an adult she had many suitors and intellectual, emotional, and most likely sexual affairs. Due to wealth and status, she was extremely well-educated unlike most of her contemporaries.

VVH Queen Liz I Heroine; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

Historical Context – The 16^th Century was the start of European colonization, global militarism, and capitalism. At the same time that Europe was violently suppressing peasant resistance movements, the heretic’s challenge to religious authority and power, and women for their role in nurturing common society, European monarchs were supporting wealthy merchants to explore, pillage, conquer, and claim other parts of the world and its people for their crowns. Under Elizabeth’s rule, England rose to prominence as a dominating dominator, leading the way in greed and violence. While not technically white (race was not yet invented), Britishness was used as a standard to define whiteness for generations to come.

VVH Cousin Lydia; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

Cousin Lydia

Victim – Born into Mennonite Patriarchy in Pennsylvania, Cousin Lydia had few life options outside of getting married, having children, and nurturing a Christian household. Family power flowed through her father and her brothers, one of whom accompanied her to India.

VVH Cousin Lydia Victim; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

Villain – She was born into Settler Colonizer society in Pennsylvania in the mid 1800s and continued that colonizer culture through perpetuating imperialistic norms as a missionary in East India where she taught at a girl’s school for East Indian students. In a photo of family genealogy she is seated above and surrounded by East Indian teachers of the school (who are not named), summoning a narrative of white savorism. The same family history book features photos of homestead after homestead built on the stolen land of Native people, the legacy into which Cousin Lydia was born.

VVH Cousin Lydia Villain; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

Heroine – By living in India and pursuing a career in Education, she challenged expectations of white womanhood including the idea that white women were inherently frail and unfit to travel to certain parts of the world and also the idea that white women should marry and devote their lives to the reproductive labor of white families. She worked in the field of girls education which was not accessible for many girls at that time, not just in Pennsylvania or Indian but all over the world.

VVH Cousin Lydia Heroine; Mixed Media on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

Personal Note – Cousin Lydia’s example inspired my maternal grandfather to leave the Amish Mennonite farming community and pursue further education in medicine which he practiced in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Her example is also pointed to as reference for our family values of travel and education.

Historical Context – The Post-Civil War era was a time of affirmative action for white women who had previously been confined to their homes. After the Civil War, careers opened for white women in missionary work, education, and nursing and white women began to be valorized for their role as cultural purveyors of the whiteness. Along with being given the duty of helping to assimilate poor white women and children and save recent Europeans immigrants from their slovenly ways, middle class white ladies were entrusted with the paternalistic responsibility of educating Native Americans, recently emancipated Black folks, and non-European people around the world whose cultures, languages, and religions were viewed as savage, backwards, and heathen. Cousin Lydia’s ancestors helped settle the colony of Pennsylvania a century before her birth, which meant several preceding generations had benefited off of the stolen land and attempted genocide of Native peoples who were forced to given up their homes to European farmers. This accumulated privilege granted Cousin Lydia access to education at a time when it was still forbidden (if not in law then in practice) for Black Americans to read and at a time when education was used as a tool of violence to strip Native Americans and other Colonized global communities of their indigenous cultures and ways of being.

VVH Amanda Katherine; Acrylic on Transparency by Amanda K Gross

Amanda Katherine Gross

Victim – As a white woman in Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy, I endured childhood spiritual trauma and ongoing sexism resulting in abuse, sexual assaults, self-harm, economic dependence on men, the spiritual void of materialism, isolation from authentic connection to other human beings, and the internalization of gendered inferiority, not-enoughness, self-doubt, and the repeated suppression of my intuitive and spiritual self.

VVH Victim AKG; Mixed Media on Transparency

Villain – I have repeatedly accessed institutional privileges at the cost and impact of other human beings and especially People of Color and people living in poverty. Examples include receiving As when graded on a curve, receiving academic scholarship monies and other forms of affirmative action, moving into communities and neighborhoods without relationship or knowledge of local context and history while ultimately taking away jobs and housing from local residents, contributing to gentrification, contributing to environmental degradation and economic exploitation by participating in capitalism and consumerism, micro-aggressing strangers, colleagues, friends, and family, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees from studying structural violence and poverty, and earning a salary off of the backs of poor people.

VVH Villain AKG; Mixed Media on Transparency

Heroine – I have questioned and challenged the status quo in order to uproot systems of oppression by studying history and honing and re-honing my analysis. I have built authentic relationships and developed systems of accountability towards growth. I’ve leveraged my role as a gatekeeper to center perspectives of People of Color who share anti-racist analyses and practice an economic justice model of compensation for work and energy. I have organized other white ladies for mutual liberation and modeled vulnerability through creating art and writing to challenge the status quo and envision alternatives. I’ve worked to undo Internalized Racial Superiority within myself by reclaiming my spiritual intuition, by practicing the release of control and expectations, and by honoring my Self and needs in alignment with mutual liberation.

VVH Heroine AKG; Mixed Media on Transparency

Historical Context – Dubbed a “Post-Racial Era” by some, the time period after the Civil Rights Movement saw its peak in racial equity outcomes in the 1970s followed by rapid increases in racial disparities in education, housing, wealth, health, employment, political representation, and incarceration. With the election of Trump in 2016, many white women in the U.S. began to realize that the narrative of American progress – especially related to gender – is far from realized. Consistent with previous movements by and for white women, most mainstream women’s movements continue to center and uphold white supremacy and operate within a capitalist framework. By 2018, Amanda Katherine’s ancestry had accumulated almost 400 years of white social and economic privileges especially impacted by access to land/home ownership and education – land which was explicitly stolen from indigenous peoples and education that was withheld from people of African descent and used as a weapon against people of Native communities.