ook so this is gonna be a random disjointed collection of thoughts. they’reconnected in some way, but i’m not sure how at the outset, so i’ll just start and we where it lands.
Read more...a few weeks ago i was in a conversation about professional development (pd) and i offered this comment up to the group: professional development (individual or organizational) fails unless people actually sit down and take the time to adjust their work load (often via calendar). if it just stay at the level of an idea, the work load stays the same, people don’t adjust their schedules, they fill their plates like they usually would (which typically means overwork), and they end up with no time or mental energy to do any pd.
Read more...i’m reading salvation: black people and love, the second book in bell hooks’ love trilogy. as always, there’s lots of good stuff but chapter seven: cherishing single mothers, has a ton of pushback on the westernized notion of the male-headed, two parent nuclear family.
Read more...just finished episode #1701 of show about race titled will you be my black friend?. gotta be one of the episodes that has gotten me the most riled up. two thoughts are lingering with me from last night.
one of the key mechanisms oppression is putting the burden of progress on the oppressed group. poc having to teach white people that what they’re doing is supremacist. women having to teach men that their ways of talking, thinking, and being are sexist. trans people having to tell cis-folks that their ways of being are transphobic. and on and on.
as a result, it seems that oppressed folks and writers have avowed to not be the teachers of their oppressors. i am 100% on board with that. but that leaves a very obvious logical hole (one which i have not figured out how to fill, but i’m working on it). if it’s not in the oppressor’s obvious interest to end oppression and it’s not up to oppressed people to teach their oppressors that they’re being oppressive, but it seems that oppression benefits the oppressors greatly, why would oppressors ever do the work it takes to end their own oppression?
i think at least part of the solution is in a statement someone made during the show: “we have to change the calculus on oppression for oppressors.”
it has always bothered me (and i’ve written about it before somewhere) that oppression is most often framed as hurting one group and benefitting another. i think shifting this frame is a key part of ending oppression. some people do this, but i think we have to make it even clearer that oppression hurts oppressors as much as (if not more than?) the oppressed.*
i’ve only ever come up with what i think are weak examples, but we need way more. things i’ve heard of to date in the sexism frame:
we need more.
another part was this interchange where tanner basically posited that white feelings need to be tended to in order to end oppression. one discussant mentioned quoted someone who believed that most discussions about racism are racist because they center white feelings. i feel that, for sure.
but my friend grant quoted this line in his master’s thesis:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality.” - Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy
as much as i don’t want to center white feelings, it is obvious to me that white feelings create reality. we are an empire and when the people making the decisions up top have feelings, they reverberate. across the entire fucking planet. the president elect is donald trump and a single tweet from him when he was in his feelings almost triggered a nuclear arms race. in fact, it might have and we just don’t know it yet.
now, i’m not saying that poc are responsible for managing white feelings. i think there are enough accomplice white folks who can do this work at this point, but the question stands. will white supremacy go away as long as white feelings still revert to wanting to be on top?
*i realize this is a problematic thought, but i’m looking at decades of strategies that seem to have not taken us very far so maybe this is another thing to try.
Read more...earlier this week i completed my third personal reflection retreat. the roadmap for it is over here so i’m not gonna rehash that in this post. this post is just general thoughts, what went well, and what i think would make it better next year.
i love doing this. why don’t they teach people to do stuff like this in school or religion or other cultural institutions? maybe they do and i missed it. anyway, having three (mostly) offline days to look back and plan for the year just felt really good.
as always, i was surprised at how much happens in a calendar year. the process of building my 52 weekly summaries highlights from my calendar just how much i did and time i spent. i always see stuff that i forgot happened and i’m continually reminded about the first thing on gretchen rubin’s habit manifesto: what you do regularly matters more than what you do once in a while.
this might sound corny, but i feel like a new person with an entirely new set of possibilities after reviewing what happened last year. i think this is because i had no idea what was possible in 2016 when i did my jan 2016 retreat. and then looking back on the year from now it’s like… well if that’s what happened based on what i thought would happen, who knows what could happen this year?