Would we forget the good things?

When I speak about the challenges of being white I immediately feel fear that you, the reader, will not understand that there is a bigger picture. I am saying this one line, or telling this one part of the story, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many many more pieces of the puzzle. I’ve spent my whole life discovering these pieces and I’m so afraid I’ll miss an important one in the telling – that maybe you will judge me, or judge someone in my family, because of what I speak out loud. Maybe I struggle with judging myself most of all.

I want to start in the good places, the beautiful things. I want to honour the memories I have. Of him, there are many. It was the simple things. Sitting and having a cup of tea. Drinking a gin and tonic. Snorting with laughter. As a little girl, watching the news on his bed in the morning.  I miss him. I miss his study full of books and wisdom and questions I never heard. I miss watching him walk off to bed. I miss the way things between us never changed even though what I knew about him did. I miss my burning desire for his respect. I miss his eyes. I even miss his prejudiced jokes, the way he knew after making one that I would not laugh. I miss the way he saw through and into me, and never needed to speak love he showed. I miss knowing he is there.

Do I struggle to tell the story of how he changed me because I’m afraid you’d judge him, or me? Do you think that, if people knew the hard things about us they would no longer remember the good? Or is it that when we look at the hard things in ourselves, we forget to look at the good?

Please let me know your thoughts by posting a comment. I hope that in this space I can share my story out loud so that we can interact and explore questions together rather than always on our own…

My story from silence

This is a reflection on my own story and how it has grown into Talking About It. This is the first post of many and the first part of a larger project, where I’m taking the step to go into the messy bits. My story is about the messiness of the distanced, labeled, concept of ‘oppression’. It is about the questions we don’t ask of ourselves because we don’t know how to.

I grew up in a silence of whiteness which offered me very little history of which I could be proud, little that I would want to claim as my own. I grew up in South Africa within the last of the apartheid years. From the age of 11 to 22 I lived in America. I found as much silence as in the history of my own country.

Why do we almost never tell the stories of what it is to be white? Why do we remain so quiet about what we struggle with?

For me, it is hard to worry that what I say might offend someone. It is hard to not want to know exactly where I come from. It is hard to be on the side of the oppressor, time and time again. It is hard to take responsibility for all the destruction my ancestors have reeked. It is hard to see the destruction when I know they were also just people. It is hard to say I love people who have hated and who have killed. It is harder even to say that those people had fears and challenges and that those fears and challenges are what made them human. It is hard to understand that the problems lie deeper than the people. It is hard to also take responsibility for a past I did not take part in. But without knowing where I come from, without owning the ways that the past does live on in the present, how can I move forward?

It is hard to speak a story that my lineage has kept silent. It is hard to admit that I’ve made assumptions about people. It is hard to say that I have racism within me. I do. It is hard to admit that there are many times I just don’t know what to do. It is hard to be so hard on myself. It is hard not to be…

It is hard to accept myself. I also want to be able to shout out proudly when I see other people claim their roots and stand with clarity as people with a clear indigenous history are doing. But in my history I read of men hung from trees, their penises cut off and stuffed in  their mouths. The stories I have to remember are painful, not liberating. I have heard of an Afrikaans man who kept the hand of a black man in a jar on his study desk. A man I loved dearly was known as the hanging judge because he sentenced so many people to die. In the history of my culture, I find few heroes and many silences. We have stories from before these times also, but I have to own the ugly parts of being white in order to own the joy.

I, too, have been haunted by the silence. Many nights, long before I knew these stories and my own family secrets, I dreamed of myself as a murderer. The dream was always the same. I hid the body, cut in pieces, underneath the floorboards of my school. The smell gave me away. I awoke and felt sick with the guilt of having killed. Disgusted, horrified, as though the blood were really on my hands. These dreams first told me the stories that others didn’t want me to know. My unconscious was already aware.

It is the shame that this kind of brutality is possible, that I could commit such atrocities given the circumstance, which has fed my own silence. It reflects brutality that will continue to cycle until we speak the stories, accept our truth, and love ourselves enough to heal. Because from a place of authenticity our pain offers us the opportunity learn from our mistakes. It is hard to know where to even begin to transform the mess and how to remember the beauty of being human within the shame. It is hard to believe. It is hard to hope. But I do.

We have been quiet for too long and it is our time to speak. We play a part in creating the future. I am a white woman and I too must find my place in the world and I must too find belonging. I want to own who I am, all of it, and I believe that in my darkest parts lies my light. I am learning to tell my own story because I believe that, one story at a time, we can change oppression from within.

My story has become a story about choice. The question that I’m left with is about what we do with those choices. Talking about it begins with, “how did we get here?” It takes us to, “where are we going?” How can we choose compassion for our selves and others?

If I look hard enough at my own reflection, my eyes are not full of problems but full of life.

This is a bodymap I created from silence to decency.

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

– The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran