I recently took--along with a marvelous group from Green St. Friends Meeting--a 28-day challenge by Layla Saad in Me and White Supremacy. I worked hard at it, and will for a long long time. I am beginning to hear and cringe at micro-aggressions. This morning I heard many refer to "we" as white Quakers doing something to help Black Quakers as if they were not part of "we." Do I do that?
I wanted to call it out (without naming names), but the clerk moved us on to a group picture and a moment of silence at the end. Efficiency on Zoom is so much more powerful than in person. Assuming it's necessary to hold deadlines for so many people, and believing this morning generated ideas that will be picked up and acted on later, however, I urge myself to voice this and other contributions to the dialogue through letters and phone calls and writing. Always writing.
I wrote this essay-poem in worship earlier today, but I could add these new observations to it. Language expresses where we are in space, time and openness. But let me not bias my observations against a bias. Or should I? Should I?
we gravitate to nieces, nephews, neighbors, students.
On Language
How young are we when we notice that learning means
acquiring languages? Not soon enough for us to become
world citizens conversant with multiple living tongues,
but early enough to learn to read multiple sign systems.
We use them for self-preservation. Passive grammar is
among the first: Not taking responsibility, but assigning it
to objects and thin air, like “It broke” instead of “I broke it”
and like “He died” instead of “I killed him.”
Impersonation might be next, soon followed by
choosing the signs we want others to read on us
rather than being genuine and unmasked. Offstage,
we wear signs as easily as make-up and costume.
And before we learn that unlearning might be good,
we have swallowed the codes of dominant culture,
which we have less skill to use strategically than
outward signs, less ability to control as we use them.
And then we learn Silence. Did all or some of these
languages keep us safe? At what point did trauma
cause us to let go of direct child-like speaking? Or
were layers a game to be smart, smarter, smartest?
With children to raise, we see the complexity
of learning, the necessity for instilling safety in movement
and language. Without children of our own to learn from,
we gravitate to nieces, nephews, neighbors, students.
This morning in meeting for Worship, O pointed out that
the Bible book of Matthew records Jesus saying we have
to turn around, humble ourselves, and become like little
children again. How young would we have to become?
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© 2020 Susan L. Chast
