I woke up way too early this morning

Many years ago, when I was in my early twenties and still on the fringes of evangelicalism, I was in a bible study made up of grad students. Most of us were there as part of a couple, but there were 3-4 single people, too. We'd been together for several years when one of the single people bravely spoke up one night about how difficult it was to be a single person in our group, because we all "coupled up" whenever there was a pause in the study.

It was my first adult experience with being confronted with an unconscious practice on my part that was hurting someone else and making them feel left out. I had the classic responses: denial (you're imagining it), we didn't mean to hurt you (#notallcouples), etc. But she was someone we all loved and valued, and eventually we got our act together, realized she was right, and changed.

I'm lucky my first experience with that sequence of events was a relatively minor thing, and so easily remedied. It gave me some early experience with how to handle similar experiences, because it still happens: oh, it can't be that bad. You must be imagining it. Well, even if it's true, we never meant to hurt you. (we! you!)

I'm reading Austin Channing Brown's book I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness. The title says it all. I'm moderately woke, as they say. I can't claim any more than that, but I'm lucky to have had some experiences and some teachers (in the form of friends, acquaintances, co-workers, and actual teachers) who have helped me see my own blind spots.

But reading Brown's book, and the other memoirs by black women I've read this year, has opened my eyes to a whole new level of understanding of our culture and the biases that still live within me. It's difficult for me to admit that the current administration has any positives, but there's one: it brought out into the open the festering wells of racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, and misogyny that have been building for years while those of us who cared thought we were past all that. Surely all that was left was fixing up the window dressing.

I think many of us who are progressives have been completely blindsided by the tenacity and virulence of our culture's attachment to The Way Things Are. I thought that given enough time to wake up, it would be as clear to social conservatives as it was to me that things needed to change. It was just a matter of helping them see, and once they could see, they would work as hard for change as the rest of us were.

But I didn't realize the power of the power structure. I didn't realize how tightly we would hold on, how defensive we would become, how bitterly we would object to change. There's a guy we studied in my intro-to-theory class in grad school (Althusser? I no longer remember which guy it was, but it was a guy, for sure) who theorized that none of us have any free will at all, we are all just "subject positions," expressions of our culture, acting out whatever the group-think needs to perpetuate itself. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous and extreme. Now it makes a lot of sense.

Sorry. It's 4:30 a.m. as I'm writing this. I forgot to write a post yesterday since we didn't get back from our trip till Sunday night and I was out of my usual routine all day yesterday. When I woke up at 3am, I opened my kindle expecting to drift back to sleep as I usually do. I picked up where I left off on I'm Still Here, and now I can't go back to sleep for outrage and sorrow. Her writing is remarkably free of bitterness and revenge, but it's not an easy read. Read it anyway. We have to wake up.

p.s. this has been a difficult post to word, because at the same time that I identify as "progressive" and as someone who is in favor of change and has been for a long time, I know that I still have work to do on myself. Sometimes I am they/them. Hence the awkward wording.