The Wrinkles in a Linear Story
We always have vastly more than two choices.
[I]
Kill your darlings, our mentors say. Art requires a cold, calculating, surgical precision. Use the scalpel. Cut away flesh if it doesn’t serve the beauty of the body as a whole. Don’t make your words and images too precious, they tell us. Even though they have emerged from the lungs behind my rig cage and the brain inside my skull.
So I assert the contrary: protect your most precious creations. Or rather, trust the protection that naturally exists around them. They are protected by barriers difficult to penetrate, even when they break.
Recently I had the honor to talk with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, renowned philosopher of our time, author of How to be an Anti-Racist, Stamped from the Beginning, and Chain of Ideas. I’ll admit — I was very nervous. I found myself speaking quickly, grateful for his time but careful not to take too much of it. For that reason it may be the shortest conversation I’ve had in this series thus far.
In it, he told me something that startled me but should not have. He said, and I paraphrase, as a cis, straight, male, I am taken more seriously than you, a queer woman, when I speak. He spoke it like the objective injustice that it is. After all, he has that same tender gray matter surrounded by hard bone. Same rigid cage of ribs defending life giving lungs that fill and empty every moment with air.
I was halfway through reading How to be an Anti-Racist when I met my ex-partner. They said, “I have to restrain my desire to applaud you for simply acting like a decent human. It’s like when a cis, straight man is respectful to me, I almost want to pat him on the back, but no. Those are the minimum terms of interhuman engagement. You don’t get a cookie.” I laughed but they didn’t. Soberly, I agreed. What followed for the next nine months of our short yet long time together was a lot of the same: my nervous laughter in the face of their deadpan silence that never failed to evoke my sober, sheepish agreement.
They did a fair amount of educating me on my blind spots, my shortcomings, my complicity in white supremacy. One of the more stinging things they accused me of was, “you’re attracted to me because you fetishize blackness.” I didn’t believe that was true. What I wanted to say in response was that I was attracted to them, I thought, for far more primitive reasons. Biology drives sexual attraction; the goal of a species is to diversify. Therefore, a biological system, a body, will be sexually attracted to difference. But I didn’t say this--defensiveness was not a form of effective communication.
I finished reading How to be an Antiracist and picked up Witnessing Whiteness: The Journey Into Racial Awareness and Antiracist Action by Shelly Tochluk. She asserted that by disavowing whiteness and its inherent privilege, one is actually contributing to the problem. Instead, one might consciously inhabit white racial identity and do so responsibly with antiracist thought, words, and actions. I should use my privilege and my platform to educate, to stand more firmly my truth.
Indeed when Dr. Kendi spoke the plain truth he inhabited his cis-het-male privilege. That is the moment of our conversation I will recall most: I am taken more seriously than you, a queer woman, when I speak. He wasn’t tentative or cruel; he was generous in telling a truth as it needs to be told. He had agreed to come speak with me in front of my audience, which is a fraction of the size of his. He told me, You’re doing important work here.
[II]
My partner and I, at the time, had attempted to gather a group of interracial couples specifically to have conversations about white supremacy and antiracism, but none we approached would agree to join such a group. Instead, we wrote letters to each other on these topics with an idea toward one day compiling and publishing them into a book. Both writers, the letters were lovely poetic missives about our perspectives on such topics and how they affected our relationship. Here is an excerpt from one of theirs:
I am asking you to write about a thing that does not exist; I know this. I know that race is imaginary, and that it wasn’t imagined by you--that you would never have imagined the world this way. But I also know that to have you here, in this dimension, we must sometimes play in this make believe, and that pretending that I am not black and you are not white is akin to telling a child that there is nothing to fear in the dark. A child must go into the dark over and over again, must grow to trust themself and others, and even then, the dark will still have some power over their grown self. Here we two are, grown, and still afraid. So we must go here over and over, and mine our power from the darkness.
I am most afraid that you will opt out, that you will decide at some point not too far from now, that you do not want to talk about race anymore, and that it is too hard to die and be reborn as someone new. I fear this because there have been many days when I have wished for this, when the weight of blackness has seemed to crush my frame and take my breath, when I have wanted to scream with empty lungs at the made up monster that blocks the light from reaching me.
And here, an excerpt from one of mine:
I’m afraid that the meaning assigned to the amount of melanin in our respective skins—one of many organs, albeit the largest—is too charged and too already/always for two thinkers like us to overcome. Perhaps that is the foundational fear. Because I am white, I’m afraid that your filter while listening to me will be set to white. And with that filter, you will hold each thing I say up to the light, turn it over to inspect each angle, and determine whether it’s influenced by my programming, our programming, the programming of white supremacy (a trojan horse inside of which is capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, hetero normativity), or what you call white supremacy culture (WSC). The work I’ve done so far to counter such programing notwithstanding, I am bound to produce words and ideas tainted by WSC and I am afraid that none of it will get past your filter unnoticed, and you will see me as just another racist white person in a long line of racist white people you have tried to date. And when you call me out on it, I will feel made wrong, and I will have two choices.
These letters, written five? Six years ago? They’re almost more relevant now, and sadly so, as we have witnessed the stunning resurgence and emboldening into mainstream culture (if there be such a thing?) of all things hate directed at all things non-male, non-white, and non-het. Older now, am I wiser? I want to say to my younger self: we always have vastly more than two choices.
And in their letter, they first acknowledge the non-existence of this entity called race. It’s as Jeannette Winterson writes about class in her brilliant essay collection, 12 Bytes, that “it is mistaken for a noun, like horse, or house, but doesn’t exist in its own right. It isn’t a thing. And it isn’t a natural phenomenon — like gravity. In an equal society, it would not exist. Social division is relational — it isn’t a pre-existing condition.”
[III]
I need to say something about time. I’m getting older and time is … shrinking? Time doesn’t feel shorter as much as slacker. Like my skin in perimenopause, it’s losing its elasticity in places. Just a little crepey where it once was perfectly smooth. The same way a young body seems to promise strength enough to run, to flee, to fight. Time used to promise tomorrow and next year like they were waiting quietly just in the next room, like we would have more time to rearrange things, to protect them.
But now I see the fine lines, the wrinkles, the flaws in a linear story. Maybe it’s because the world is turning the same and along the same route as always, but the sun is bigger and hotter. Maybe it’s because that primitive species I mentioned earlier, a category to which I reluctantly belong, complicit as I have been with my selfish conveniences like straws, plastic water bottles, and commercial flights to vacation destinations, has ravaged the living flesh of this vibrant miracle planet and catalyzed its season of death.
As though our existence on this ellipsoid spinning through space around a magical ball of fire were ordinary. As though it were promised. As though we took just how impossible it is seriously.
Maybe the task was never to kill our darlings. Maybe it was to speak, to outline the injustices as plainly and as factually as they exist and insist themselves upon us, to be precise, the way the great Dr. Kendi was for me.
Or maybe the task is to stop mistaking the ornamental for the essential. Skin, categories, certainty, even time itself. Stories stretched over something quieter and more miraculous: The unseen labor of lungs filling beneath ribs, hearts insisting on another beat, a planet carrying all of us through impossible darkness without asking whether we deserve the ride.
Maybe the gift of getting older and growing thinner skin is wisdom. And wisdom? That’s turning out to be simpler than I ever thought. It’s nothing more than learning, at last, what has always known how to protect itself and then spending whatever time remains protecting it too.
Life has always hidden its tenderness beneath bone, beneath bark, beneath atmosphere, beneath the darkness where seeds split open and stars are born, The oldest mistake may be believing that what is most visible is most true. So we choose to keep seeking, trying to share the deeper truth, creating our tender, life-giving creations.
