When talking about race feels big, scary, or nervous-system disrupting, it’s because you’re engaging with centuries of ancestral trauma and aggression wrought by your ancestors and your living family members. And also by you, despite your best intentions. It feels big because it is big.
You are going to fuck up. This inevitability does not excuse you from the work. Your paralyzing shame about this fact is an impediment to justice. Accept this reality and get to work.
You are entitled to humanity even though you are not entitled to goodness. From bell hooks: “How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”.
Watch the videos or don’t. But whatever you choose, don’t look away. Go to the artists. Hear Nina Simone singing Mississippi Goddam. Read Nikki Giovanni poems, or Ross Gay, or Sharon Bridgforth. Re-read Kiese Laymon’s How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. There are ways to comprehend Black pain without consuming it.
The emergency is chronic. Don’t let getting caught up in the online uproar replace taking clear, tangible actions in a long-term way. It can seem disheartening to work this way; you crave catharsis. And yet, this, from adrienne maree brown: “Small is good. Small is all”.
You don’t get cookies. Stop wishing for acknowledgement and absolution from people of color. And also, it’s only human to need encouragement. Ask a white person. We can and must cheer each other on.
Watch vigilantly for your own self-protective tendencies. Despite years of effort, your heart yearns to seen as good. This shows up as risk-aversion, and an avoidance of putting yourself on the line.
Grief is part of liberation work. Much has been said about white tears, so don’t weaponize them, but for god’s sake, cry them. Let that shit out. It’s been bottled up for hundreds of years, and now here you are, willing.
Despair does not become you. We are not entitled to hopelessness. This world can and will change and it will be because we demand it do so. Don’t lose sight of that. Keep imagining other worlds.
You never get to quit the work of liberation. Once you accept this truth, it gets lighter because you have less to prove.