Drawing inspiration from Black activists

I am writing because I have just finished reading, at last, When They Call You A Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors. I have taken in what I could, the intense stories and pain and softness springing from the void of no return, the way she pulls us all into the daylight to look at what has been.

That, after being on a Zoom call earlier today with Aaron and Porsha, the founders of Holistic Resistance. As they put it at HR, I am feeling called to "reach for Blackness". To be with the rage and the shame and the fear, and to move towards witnessing, listening, being with discomfort. Listening to the trauma stories. Listening to what they say, and what's beneath them. To find a way to bear witness to my own humanity, and the humanity of those I have been taught to dehumanize. To move inexorably away from the white supremacist state that would have all of us be divided, whether in hateful ignorance or in frozen shame.

Did you know...

That Black Lives Matter has health and wellness directors who seek to uproot toxicity and bring healing justice to the movement itself?

That after taking to the streets in Ferguson during the day, protesters gathered in a church basement to receive acupuncture and massage and make art together?

That the modern-day movement for Black racial justice was co-founded by a queer woman who is raising a child in a non-monogamous relationship with a genderqueer partner?

That the same activist leader who helped stage a protest at a Bernie rally, to call attention to Trayvon Martin's murder, has also supported his campaign since 2016?

These are the things that come to mind most strongly for me when I think about those that the state would label terrorists. The way recognition reaches across the gulf of difference and lights in my mind. I spit out the covert ways whiteness numbs my feelings of connectedness, directs them into certain channels while pretending to represent the full horizon. And I speak the difficult truth: I have by and large not included the Black experience when I think about, talk about, or meditate on life, on humanity. And how could I? My neurons tricked into the homogeneity of safety. My mental stories patterned by the ways I have been insulated. As Porsha put it today, the very notion of resistance is counter to the story of assimilation.

It's about the ways how in one fell swoop, that same state-sanctioned conditioning narrows the way we think about normalcy. The way division creates blind spots in our compassion. The ways our consciousness subtly edges out those who are not like us, and ignore the plight of those raised in a world utterly different from our own.

This is the gratitude I have, sitting with the SCT gift that is this memoir and its inexorable poetry, its lilting lines moving from accounts of brutality into  relational tenderness, which has expanded my consciousness into realms I have not personally lived, to bring me to an awareness of how it is, for so many growing up Black in this country.

And the gift that was two Black community leaders reaching back for me, taking the time to hear my story today, helping me hold my own racialized complexities, and asking for more connection. Relationship building is truly at the heart of the Plan; I hadn't realized how much so before now.

I am deeply grateful for the way those most on the margins of society can alchemize pain, can open their hearts, and be soft, and come from Love in all that they do. The way they can tap into collective grief. The way they insist that we open our eyes, and see what is true. I'm inspired by the people who have never given up on our humanity. I want to be one of them.

I was saying to Alia today that I think when we feel despair, overwhelm, hopelessness, that it's not actually about what our minds want us to think they're about. It's not actually because everything is hopeless. But rather, the small, scared parts of us, who had to resort to despair as a bulwark against non-existence, against death. The parts of us that had to retreat into the eye of the trauma storm, and wait it out. Little by little, we are learning to be with that pain. To, as Isabella says, bring love to those hard places.

And then we can rise back up into the true knowing that the darkness will never win, because our spirits are stronger and our hearts more resilient, and we can lean on each other when we need to. Like that day you let me just cry into the phone for two hours, Isabella, holding my broken pieces with your own wholeness in that moment. Together, we can make it through. We can turn the tide on everything that matters.

<3 Tessa