Happy new year to all of you, my wonderful friends and family. It’s been an intense #VacationOfNewIdeas, and I’ve got quite a lot to report out as we start the year together. Please forgive the length — this feels big to me and I don’t know how to turn it into a snappy meme. I just know that I need to try putting words to it, and I’m hoping that some of you will follow along and share your own words of wisdom with me on where to go from here. I’m never going to get this perfectly right, so here goes.
When I said #VacationOfNewIdeas, I meant “new to me.” I knew I’d missed a lot of cool old stuff (hello Leonard Cohen!) along with brilliant newer stuff (OMG Coco is a movie for the ages!) by staying in my comfort zone of the time-tested and familiar.
But I went into this with unrealistic expectations about some of the “new” ideas I wanted to learn. Remember I posted a pic of my stack of books about race and racism in America? I didn’t say it to anyone, but I joked to myself that I had spent last year’s Christmas break cleaning all the household crap out of my garage, and this year I was going to spend it cleaning all the racist crap out of my head. Yeah, I did know that was a joke; I knew it could never be that easy to uproot the beliefs that our culture pounds into us from the moment of our birth about who’s better and who’s not. But I did hope that with two weeks of focus, I could really jump-start myself… pack some new tools, new ways of seeing and speaking, into my brain that I could take forward in powerful ways.
I definitely did learn something in two weeks. I learned that I never actually knew a lot of the #OldIdeas in the first place. So there I was, reading Tim Wise’s “White Like Me” and suddenly I’m realizing, who is this James Baldwin guy he mentions anyway? I’ve heard his name, better check out “The Fire Next Time,” OH MY HEART HURTS WHY HAVE I NEVER HEARD THIS MUCH TRUTH BEFORE? Then I’m pushing onwards into Michael Eric Dyson’s “Tears We Cannot Stop” and he mentions Fannie Lou Hamer and isn’t she some 19th century suffrage leader WHAT NO HOW COULD THE STATE OF MISSISSIPI NEARLY BEAT HER TO DEATH FOR TEACHING LITERACY AND STEAL HER UTERUS FROM HER LESS THAN 60 YEARS AGO? Yup, not really so #Old after all. A lot of those folks, black and white, on both sides of the civil rights struggles… when I kept googling to try and quickly fill these huge and important knowledge gaps, turns out a lot of them are still alive. Others — much like Erica Garner — should still be alive but aren’t. Their bodies broke before their time under burdens they shouldn’t have had to carry.
So at the end of two weeks of learning how incredibly much I have to learn… maybe this crash course did sort of work after all. I think maybe I did get that new lens I wanted. Because suddenly I’m seeing: I have missed the point of every book, movie, or poem I’ve ever seen about the history, struggles, and achievements of people of color and native people in America. Not to mention that I skipped most of them in the first place because I have to admit I didn’t particularly feel like I related to the topic, beyond a general human level. I thought they were about other people.
Fact is, they are alllll about me, or about people who look like me, anyway. And Jewish or not, I do walk around in this country of ours as a white woman. I don’t mean that to sound arrogant, like I’m centering the white experience in the narratives of people of color; I certainly don’t mean “we,” white people, are the heroes. Just the opposite. I somehow never realized that the experience of people of color in America was what it was, and therefore is what it is, because of the actions of people who look like me. Like, how could it possibly be a #NewIdea for me to realize that the civil rights struggle wasn’t just about black people, it was about white people who were fighting to keep black people in subjugation? If I’m white, guess what, my people are in that story, and not just as allies. Doh. It was being done in my name.
Which is why I need to go back to basics, finally read the books and watch the movies with clearer eyes, and listen hard to the current experiences of “other people” to see the huge but strangely invisible-to-me role that “my people” have always played. It’s embarrassing but true: now that I realize I’m actually part of those stories, I’m suddenly a lot more motivated to go learn about them.
You gotta start somewhere, right? #VacationOfNewIdeas is over. Now I need to keep it going as #LifeOfLearning.