I arrived to the Bay Area safe and sound, thanks to my friends and family who helped me to prepare in body and spirit for this big adventure. I feel much gratitude for those who dropped me off and picked me up from the airport, who helped me pack up and store my things and who sent me off with good wishes and thoughtful, loving messages. Because of your support, I have been feeling relatively calm and solid as I've started exploring and settling in here, and preparing for the official start of the program.
So far, I've been enjoying getting to know little by little the diverse places that make up the Bay Area, and soaking up the sun, greenery, flowers, and abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables.
I've also started to notice how the political and social landscapes here differ from familiar ones. I'm sure those observations and understandings will evolve a lot while I'm here, but right off the bat, it is really weird to see things existing as institutions and mainstream practices that I've only experienced in small subcultural pockets. Forget recycling: whole cities compost here; there is a compost bin in every house and the city picks it up for you. It seems like everybody bikes here. Walking around, I happen on a gas station turned bio-diesel station and urban garden center. Where am I?
Earlier this week I met up with a few of the other out-of-town Braden program participants. They all seem quite interesting and thoughtful. People expressed some trepidation about the program, but, maybe because of what I've heard from the people I know who have participated, I feel a whole lot of trust that the program, the people in it and the people facilitating it are all going to be amazing.
As proof, I leave you this list of good questions that came up in during our very first meeting with one another):
How do we respect movement elders, or people long established in an organization or community, while at the same time voicing new ideas and critiques?
When we are the long-established members, how do we make room for new people and new ideas?
How do we challenge invisibilized hierarchy in supposedly non-hierarchical formations?
How do we practice self-care and challenge the abilistic expectation that people should be working non-stop for the movement?
What is the most effective way to challenge oppressive statements or behavior? What do we do with our anger around these situations? Is it ever appropriate to shame people? What is the role of compassion and gentleness?
What is the role of guilt in transformation? Is it always unhelpful?
I imagine we'll be chewing on these for a long time. Feel free to chime in if you know the answers :)
thank you, emma, for taking the time to share your experience and such refreshing and necessary questions. i am really looking forward to all that is to come on this blog. miss you already!
ReplyDeletexo ruby
What you write made me think of what my friend Gita Gulati-Partee wrote in response to my initial (written) thoughts about guilt, where I essentially said that guilt, while an inevitable response to both our own and historical racism, is not particularly useful. Gita had a different way of looking at it and with her permission, I included it in the book chapter. Here's what she said: I am troubled by the "new anti-racism" that suggests that guilt and shame are useless emotions, rather than windows into our humanity and entry points for accountability. There's yet another manifestation of privilege here -- feeling entitled to only the positive emotions of the human experience (joy, peace, righteous anger) and entitled to avoid the messier or less comfortable ones. Also, guilt, shame, or any emotion have value in and of themselves - because they are natural and human - but also have the potential for spurring some behavior change or other action.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for sharing your experience. I look forward to what you continue to share. Tema
Thanks so much, Tema, for those remarks.
ReplyDeleteI was frustrated in my first exposures to examinations of privilege where groups of white college students learned about a lot of awful injustice and how we were implicated, and then told: "but don't feel guilty, because that's useless." And then we would feel bad about feeling guilty. Talk about stuck! We weren't offered a "bridge" on which to cross over guilt, or very much vision of what more useful action would look like, or what feelings would support that action. Since then, I've seen many positive examples of solidarity, but I particularly hope that this training and these conversations will lead me to a deeper understanding of how to mobilize people with privilege in effective and compassionate ways. I've got lots more reading, thinking, and doing to do on that point! (including an article next week written by you, Tema!)