All the Wrong Reasons
Slowly, the moronic, racist bias in me is becoming visible, uncomfortable, and ultimately understandable and actionable. This is important to me as an artist, activist, and writer, not just because I perform internationally, but because rooting out personal biases and bigotry allows me to connect with more people from more walks of life and cultures. Not to mention it’s essential work for all of us who are white on this planet to do if we truly want to create equality and social justice on this planet. Our roles as writers and artists require us to engage with assumptions and inherited beliefs that discredit and alienate others. We are often prompted by teachers or colleagues to turn to the uncomfortable spaces in our personal histories, even to harvest them for stories. We must also look to the present-moment impact of our privilege, not out of guilt, a way of making amends, and to mine fresh content for our writing, but as a way of responsibly writing in a larger, global context. So, I’d like to share a personal moment of inventory with you that helped me challenge my motives and try not to sugar-coat it.
A few months back, my friend Julio was finally released on bail after being held by ICE for five months. He threw a celebratory party once the team of lawyers and friends finally jumped through all the hoops with him to get him released. When I arrived at the party, I was instantly uncomfortable, not because I didn’t know people there. I was uncomfortable because I was white and walked into a party where, in the living room, everyone was brown and speaking Spanish. In the kitchen, 75% of the people were white and everyone was speaking English.
I was uncomfortable with my white privilege, as if I had walked into a house I owned even though I had no rights to own the house. I felt self-conscious, like I was wrong if I didn’t try to connect with people in the living room, and wrong if I did try to connect with them for the wrong reasons.
In my world, my misguided reasons for trying to connect are:
- to assuage my white guilt
- to prove that I’m not “one of those white people”
- to “collect” more friends of color
- to show how woke I am
- to try and be a decent human being
- to seek out an experience of being a minority or other in order to try and relate to people of color (It’s striking to me how complex and wrong-headed this is)
And my misguided reasons for avoiding connection:
- fear of going in the room for the wrong reasons
- fear of making mistakes and being culturally insensitive or ignorant
- fear of intruding
- fear of the language barrier
I also noticed a difference in my perceptions and feelings towards those in the kitchen with more North American appearance, those who had lighter skin, and those who spoke fluent English. I felt directly in my body: The unspoken lessons I had been taught about brown people being poorer, more religious, less educated, and more dangerous than white people. Growing up in Nebraska, people who were brown and spoke Spanish as their first language were most certainly seen by my family, if not by the white Nebraskan population at large, as being of a lower caste, intellect, and ability.
Since we don’t talk about class and caste much in the U.S., what it’s comprised of and how we react to it, it’s hard to move beyond that which we’re not naming. Classism and racism are bound up in each other. My own biases of Latino people are linked became obvious last summer, when I started to learn Spanish in order to travel in Honduras. I continued to realize these absorbed lessons when talking with my fellow poets from D.R., Columbia, Chile, and Ecuador, swallowing hard on the unspoken assumptions I had brought into those conversations. Now, as I continue to interview people in my live-time poetry campaign, Live Nude Girls and pitch installations of other works, the question constantly arises: How I can not only translate the stories of people of color into poetry, but write it directly on their bodies without veering into being a “collector,” capitalizing on another’s suffering, or objectifying them. A sticky question for sure, since photography virtually necessitates the objectification of the subject of a photo.
This question points me again and again back to intention, especially spiritual intention in my work. While dwelling in this question is much more important than arriving at any pat answer, I am satisfied with the knowledge that when I am in right relationship with a participant, we are creating together. Although I am the one writing, they give me the gift of sharing their experience. Ultimately, we choose what will be written and where on the body together. Most importantly, my energetic attunement – willing to be wrong, willing to receive the gifts of others, and willing to have what I create matter as well – is what defines my motivation and our interaction together.
For those of you who are white, I encourage you to engage in conversation with other white people who are willing to have messy, unenlighted, challenging, and good-hearted chats about personal, racial biases. However, if you are going into this work to help others gain equality, you will miss the point completely. Trying to help is different than working together to realize that our own liberation and happiness are interdependent with justice and equality. It’s quite possible that my new best friend or colleague was in that living room that night we celebrated Julio’s release. Maybe that person was the partner I had been looking for, ready to work with me, in humor and joy, towards the peace we so crave for all people. If I had been available to connect with that person, it would have been possible only if I was able to see them as an equal and understand what we both have to offer, individually and together. And maybe if I keep engaging in these conversations, I might not miss out on the next incredible party.
