A Response to “I’m Done Answering Questions About Cultural Appropriation”
“People who understand where to draw the line in a particular situation often can name their own racial identity and understand the reach of white supremacy.” — Nami Thompson, from I’M DONE ANSWERING QUESTIONS ABOUT CULTURAL APPROPRIATION
There’s a lot of angst right now about how white people can be better allies to people of color.
This anxiety of how to put the pieces of our broken social fabric back together threads through all people and all cultures in the United States and around the world. The US is a sort of petri dish for these kinds of dialogues as we have set ourselves up to be just that. The melting pot analogy of the US culture has been a guiding force for the development of our society as a place to receive the world’s tired and poor offering the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have held this banner high and it has given us our moral high ground standing in the world for decades. With the rise of Hitler, the ‘free’ world found an enemy it could unify against. The horror of the gas chambers and concentration camps, stories of children separated from their parents who would be lead to their deaths, starvation, physical and emotional torture, cruelty all based in a world view dominated by white supremacy. White superiority gave permission to eliminate the inferior races of men and women, and individuals not born perfect by that measure (homosexuals, those with deformities, etc). The banner of supremacy had been raised.
As these impulses push their way back into the mainstream attempting to gain a false moral ground, we struggle to hold them at bay. The adults in the room that once kept this ugliness contained have themselves wilted in shock of it’s hideous return. For those peoples who were never actually fully liberated, this resurgence of what we once easily named ‘hate’ comes with some fury but also with a sense of expectation and exasperation. Of course it has come back. It has been here for thousands of years. Nations of all lands have seen this infection of power seeking take hold and reek havoc time and time again. The righteousness of religious fundamentalism that is hypocritical to it’s very core — justifying carnage and terror to protect the ‘true sons’ and their inheritance to the dominion of this world. And so those of us ordained to do so look inward, as we have been taught to do, to sort out the seeds of racism, ignorance, and ancestral trauma that lurk within, in an attempt at healing on the microcosmic level so that we might heal in the macrocosm, too.
We are nowhere near the end of the angst or the anxiety that thousands of years of brutality has lead us to in this moment of untangling. We have populated the Earth in abundance whilst simultaneously depleting the resources that sustain life. The dominators want to dominate and continue to abuse the minerals, oil, trees and animals they see as their right to use to feed their culture. Dominators describe others as being of inferior genetics breeding in droves, demanding access to the same resources — they are quite simply in the way of the survival of dominant culture. As dominators have done before, they would sooner exterminate those they deem less worthy to ensure the survival of those they see as most pure and thereby deserving. So where do ‘white’ women come in? How can we be better allies of people of color?
Women in $90 yoga pants are not going to change this paradigm.
Organizations of allyships making room for a few peoples egos will not bring down systemic tyranny.
It is good that we in the western world are awakening to our own complacency in the perpetuation of dominant culture. It is good that we are uncovering the stories of our history not taught in school. We need to know that our forefathers lied to native people about making treaties we did not keep, that settlers duped them out of land with pittances, and enslaved people from far away lands to do their work for them. It is good that we know how dishonest others have been for our government to be formed and for it to conduct itself as it does until this day. Promises of Dreamers being safe to come out of the shadows to live fully integrated lives only leading to exposure and the hunt. Promises of clean water undermined by the likes of figures like Dick Cheney making room for dominators to pollute our land and our public trust in our governing bodies. Promises of no child left behind leading to a generation who no longer know the Holocaust as a cautionary tale of history to not repeat.
Know thyself. “People who understand where to draw the line in a particular situation often can name their own racial identity and understand the reach of white supremacy.”
When the Dalai Lama said that “The Western Woman will save the world” it is doubtful that he meant to do so by establishing systems of female hierarchy or by dominating spaces or by dismissing the pain or trauma held in black or brown bodies. It is doubtful he meant to do so by adapting capitalism to pink products.
So what else might he have meant? To answer this question I look to what makes a woman uniquely a woman. What does a woman know about childbirth innately? What changes when she is fed fear of pain and instructed to put her feet in straps? What does a woman understand directly from her relationship to her own body? She knows when she is ovulating or about to bleed. She knows when her child is in danger. She knows when someone is telling her a lie.
Moral, motivated women are highly intelligent, creative and motherly beings.
What the Dalai Lama might have meant is that modern western women having 1) fought for and won the right to vote, 2) having fought for and won the right to a seat at the table within dominant cultural structures, 3) and in keeping with their inherent biological and spiritual drive to protect life, and 4) having the luxury of time alone and together as independent women would thus have the literal space and capacity to identify injustice where it resides, to name it in the public square, and to mobilize communities locally and globally to address and remedy disparity, inequality and violence towards women, children, the planet and all who suffer.
In all likelihood it is the western woman’s hard fought freedom to educate herself, hold a job, raise children, choose her friends and how she prays, explore a healthy sexuality, dance, sing, smile and cry on the earth if she wants that might embolden communities of care, of kindness and of choice.
The leadership of women could allow, foster and protect the choices we now make to re-establish our connection with the earth, the water and the land and to re-integrate into the human community the wisdom we have almost lost. This might give space for the expression of our inner most human longings to understand our ancestors’ journeys and to give our children a sense of place in the world. Western women might be free enough to lead themselves and the sleepwalkers of our world ‘out of the wasteland’ as author Sharon Blackie so succinctly names in If Women Rose Rooted.
But to do so we must remember the sacredness of the body. We must restore our ability to uncover and unwind the trauma that lives there. We must be willing to sit with one another as we wail for the suffering of Mother Earth. We must be there for one another as we grieve the destruction we have chosen in our greed over the beauty and plenty of Mother Nature herself. We must remember the sacredness of the body of the Mother — both the women and the earth. We must re-learn the stories of our traditions. We must hear the tales our ancestors tell about the Maidens who once tended the wells. We must heed the tales told by the wailing women of the holy lands in the Middle East, Argentina, Nigeria, Australia, South Dakota and across the plains of Turtle Island who have seen their children ripped from their arms for war, humiliation and colonization.
We must know our own racial identity and understand the reach of white supremacy. Then and only then will we know where to draw the line in a particular situation. Because then we won’t have to guess, we will know where that line resides. Then and only then will people of color be able to trust building new relationships with descendants of Europeans. Then and only then will ‘white’ people cease to be colonizers when they are Irish, German, Latvian and Belarus.
Awaken all ye Maidens of the Wells, Brigids of hospitality! Where do you come from? Who are you in your very bones? Because when we know ourselves that long again we will awaken our true nature upon the earth. And the divides we speak about, the boundaries we draw and redraw and cross and re-cross will come to know themselves too. And common kindness can be restored.
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