Navigating divides in my community.
I sit outside a coffee shop reading the LA Times. It is the 30th Anniversary of the LA Riots when police were acquitted after the brutal beating of Rodney King. My 13-year-old eyes digested that story in a context without guidance on the system at play. Where I live now, we will soon mark the 2nd year after George Floyd’s brutal murder was watched round the world.
How am I navigating divides?
As I visit my parents and hear their off-hand racist comments, there is great conflict inside me. If silence is complicity, then I am complicit with racism. What is the way to a new perspective? Where is there an opening to a conversation that won’t be shut down?
Mr. McBride reminds me again–
self-reflective questioning,
curiosity,
practice vulnerability.
If I continue to feel it’s all so big, and so deeply embedded, how can I have any impact? I must hold near–yes, it’s in “them” and it’s in ME.
My co-worker reflects back to me ways I sought to comfort the white leader, where in the past the power differential had impacted me in a negative way. Instead I see that the anti-racist route would’ve been to seek after the wellbeing of my BIPOC colleagues and how they were impacted in a specific hurtful conversation. And to acknowledge that there isn’t a general way to engage, it’s different for different people. She reminds me to ask questions, to LISTEN. Self-awareness is a long road.
“Follow the leadership of subordinated people in structural change,” he said. I am leaning into this by listening and circling back to voices that are trying to be heard. If, as McBride also said, “the right first question is– who do we need to become?” then it is the time spent on inner change that is needed as much as or more than, “What do we do?” I keep hearing that meditation is the way to self-awareness and healing and can impact how I show up as a white person, how much space I take up in a room, in a conversation. To regulate my body, my responses. I endeavor to learn and embody how this learning and these practices will show me who to become.
1 comment
Hey Laura,
Your essay highlights the key question that Mr. McBride named, and vulnerably identifies how you (I) miss the mark. Bold and brave, and definitely the first step, as he said. Becoming is that long arc, and as we become we suffer our ego’s pride. Our meditation softens us and humbles us, and gives us permission to NOT take up so much space in the room.
Thank you. We are learners together.
Andrea