White Fragility and Facebook

 Two posts in one week. I don't think my blog has seen this much writing since like 2016.  I responded to a person's I did not know comment on a friend's Facebook post this morning. Then I followed up this evening with a second response to their reply to my initial comment. I am including redacted screen shots of both of the other individuals comments and the full text of mine.

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If by chance the Electoral college worked as designed in constitution where each state had one representative per 30,000 people then it would be more reasonable to argue both its value and our need for it. However once the unconstitutional permanent apportionment act of 1929 unfairly separated aportionment from a consistent population ratio it has completely become a way for rural mostly white states to assert their percieved supremacy over more urban racially diverse states. As with most everything in the United States, it was white supremacy all along. 

But white intellectuals defending white supremacy while denying it is white supremacy and pretending it is just rational logic rather than personal bias and bigotry is as American as apple pie too.

So it is no surprise the "We NEED the electoral college" argument is going nowhere.

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I wonder if you are aware of the term White Fragility? It is a term that has been around for while now within the communities focused on thinking critically and intersectionally about race and its role in our society. Robin DiAngelo is credited with inventing the term. Her NY Times Best Seller on race is titled using the term. DiAngelo attempting to define White Supremacy writes, "In a nutshell, it’s the defensive reactions so many white people have when our racial worldviews, positions, or advantages are questioned or challenged... And that defensiveness serves to maintain both our comfort and our positions in a racially inequitable society from which we benefit."

I bring the term up because your response to my earlier comment was not to consider the position I offered and respond with a rational rebuttal, but instead to insist you were proven right because I called you a white supremacist. Rather than be willing to consider how the Electoral College operates as cog in the systemic problem of white supremacy, you instead chose to become defensive in order to distract from the very real and very intentional system which protects the, "inequitable society from which we benefit." 

In her book, "White Fragility" DiAngelo writes, "The most effective adaptation of racism over time is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.” This adaptation allows white people the luxury to find it more offensive that they were implicated as benefiting from a racist system than the offensiveness of the racism itself. 

Racism and White Supremacy is not about you as an individual. Racism and White Supremacy is a systemic problem. It is singularly the greatest existential paradox of the American experiment. Our founding principle that, "all men are created equal," was written by a man that enslaved over 200 people on his estate. The absurdity is that "All men" has never meant ALL in the construction of our government and economic systems. For many people who have been privileged, by circumstances of their own whiteness, to not experience disenfranchisement and oppression the incongruity seems trivial. So they can comfortably assure themselves that they are not one of those evil racists; this is white fragility. 

The electoral college was designed to privilege slave states. James Madison admits this in his own justification for the substitution of electors over the direct vote. The 3/5 compromise enshrined this privilege by granting an over 40% boost in electoral power to just five slave states. Over time other strategic manuevers, like the addition of block voting by the states, would be made to protect the institution of slavery. As times changed and cotton replaced tobacco as the country's top export, even nothern economist were able to recognize the need for a disenfranchised labor force to pick, process, and ship this commodity which was the most important piece of the nation's economic engine. With that power threatened in a post reconstruction south further manuvering setup the stage for unequal apportionment.  At every stage the EC's purpose has been a White Supremacist purpose.

Oxford philosopher Terry Eaglton wrote a textbook in 1991 titled "Ideology." In it Eaglton writes, "[It] is not just a matter of what I think about a situation; it is somehow inscribed in that situation itself. It is no good my reminding myself that I am opposed to racism as I sit down on a park bench marked “Whites Only”; by the act of sitting on it, I have supported and perpetuated racist ideology. The ideology, so to speak, is in the bench; not in my head." 

Your reply subverts any discussion of the ideology of the electoral college by refocusing the discussion as a personal slight. I don't know you and have no personal slight against you. I have no intention of labeling you as a racist. You have been the beneficiary of systemic white supremacy; [Shared Friend] too, myself as well, and all our white peers. So in no way is my earlier comment intended to accuse you of that "conscious bias held by mean people." Instead, I am merely attempting to show how defending the Electoral College perpetuates racist ideology because, the ideology "is in the bench."

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Stardust and Stories

This morning as I was doing laundry I decided it was time to move the Biden / Harris face mask from usage to my memory shelf in my bedroom. I walk past the shelf all the time, but as I added the mask today the memories and stories these objects represent to me just filled me with love and nostalgia. There are good memories and painful memories both, but that is the tapestry of life. 

The shelf holds pieces of old costumes, thank you cards from friends, small gifts I have been given, stolen props from old shows, inside jokes, mementos of failed romances, important moments with my kiddos, possesions of loved ones no longer with us, and a bevy of other trinkets and echoes. 

Erin Morgenstern in her newest book "The Starless Sea" has a line I really want to get as a tattoo, "We are all stardust and stories." This shelf holds the portals to so many of those stories for me. Some pieces I could explain with a short recital of a single moment. Others are entire tales with all the backstory and nuance of fiction. Still, others would be told with such a yarn that they have crossed the memoir line and actually become complete fiction. Collectively and individually they each remain stories.

Looking at this shelf you may see something I held onto from an event we did together. There are pieces far too small to make out in a photo from this distance that might just contain a fragment of our relationship too. Some people are in one item and others are in many, as the fingerprints people leave in my life are as varied as the people I love and call friends.

In some ways, this newest addition of the Biden/Harris mask may seem an anomaly. The shelf already has the first mask my daughter sewed when the pandemic started, so it was not that the shelf needed a mask to represent 2020. I added the Biden/Harris mask as a chronicle of when the metaphor for the shared community we are in as humans became a piece of fabric. I do not like masks, they fog up my glasses and disturb my sensory issues. I did not like voting for Biden/Harris, I wanted actual progressives. So like wearing my mask, voting for the Democrats was active participation in protecting the most vulnerable members of our community the best I can. The Biden/Harris mask like all these other tokens is a story, a history of how I and so many others chose the community's collective needs while another segment of our society chose their individual selfishness. 

With time my shelf will acquire new relics because my life will acquire new stories that need to be remembered. There will be new testimonials to the love of my friends, new remembrances to loss, new trophies of shows completed, and more keepsakes that I do not know yet why I will find them worth keeping.  All the pieces there now, and all the pieces still to come, and all the people in all the stories past and future will share one thing, we are all stories of the universe made from the same stardust. 

History: Free of Charge (Copied from a Facebook Post)

Last night an evangelical Christian friend whose spirit for loving people I adore vented about her inability to understand the complicity of the white evangelical American church with the open support of white supremacy in their support of Trump. 

I found her statement most interesting because white supremacy is the historical catalyst for the formation of nonsectarian evangelicalism in the United States. One needs to know and understand history to know and understand the present. So I present to you the shortest history possible of nonsectarian evangelicalism in the United States and its complicity with white supremacy.
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In the years leading up to the civil war many of the country's denominations split between Northern and Southern councils over the issue of slavery. Most importantly noted is the Southern Baptist, which today is the largest segment of nonsectarian evangelicalism in the United States. The largest portion of this movement had the protection of the institution of human slavery as its conception point.
After the war however one needs to look at the man most associated with the Evangelical origins today, DL Moody. DL Moody's complicity with white supremacy in order to unify Christians under a single banner of revivalism is well documented. Racial Segregation for the sake of interdenominational unity is the womb for the movements gestation.
While studying the history one needs to look up names like Jerry Falwell Sr, Francis Schafer, and Bob Jones and the role White Supremacy plays in the formation in the late 1970s of the Religious Right. The catalyst for this final unification of nonsectarian evangelicalism in the United States is to protect the ability of Christian colleges to keep their tax-exempt status while still upholding their teaching on segregation and Miscegenation.
Religious freedom as defined by evangelicalism in the United States has been about the freedom to uphold white supremacy since its official birth in the late 1970s.
From conception, through gestation, and into its modern birthing Evangelicalism has always been intertwined with this "first sin" of American nationalism which is white supremacy. The racism changes its face, but never its history and intent.
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That history is lesson is provided free of charge and effort, but if you are willing to put in the academic work of understanding the larger movement of all these pieces there are many wonderful scholarly works I would commend to you.

Lastly to my beloved friends and family who remain a part of that movement, and yet understand that the love of God and white supremacy can not coexist, I want to say, the future is yet to be written.

Holy Ground

I wrote this a couple years ago and submitted it to be part of the official St Lou Fringe blog.  The editor was not a fan and so it was never published.  Being that we are all trapped inside and can't go to the theater I thought I would publish it myself in honor of our 2020 Virtual Fringe Festival.

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The Hebrew and Christian holy scriptures share a story of a man who after living as a refugee in the wilderness for forty years encounters a bush that while actively burning is not consumed. The miracle becomes even more fantastical when a voice speaks from this brush fire, "put off your shoes from off your feet, for the place where on you stand is holy ground." I have been fascinated by Holy Ground since I was a child in Sunday school. As I have lived life my understanding of God has changed drastically. I do not think of God like I thought about it in my youth, and yet my search for Holy Ground has not wained.

It was one afternoon three years ago inside the Kranzberg Black Box as I was alone in the space and waiting as the lighting board powered up. In just a few minutes Michael Hagmeier would be arriving to perform his 2015 Fringe show "Digeridoo In The Dark." For that moment though, I was alone in a dark room with 80 seats, 600 square feet of performance space, forty lighting fixtures, and a day scheduled full of theatrical productions.

The room I was in would be filled with the tones and reverberations of Michael's instrument. It would host the rhythms of Tapman and his team of dancers. It would be teleported to Moscow as Lucy and her troop presented a Chekov drinking game. It would host Patrick's high school students presenting a surreal production of Alice in Wonderland. Carl would tell a story of a lonely man and the rental of a dissatisfied sexbot. All these stories would fill this space that in this moment glowed with the just the dull blue of a computer boot screen.

This space I was standing in at that moment, this was Holy Ground. Moses stood before a flame in the desert and learned the meaning of his life. I stood in that dim blue glow and recognized the meaning of these spaces we call theaters.

It has been over three years since that first cherished moment. I have traveled between venues and producers. I have watched puppets skewer the US political process. I have seen other puppets address the struggle of infertility. I have now seen Elizabeth take her audience into the emotional core of two mothers; one who lost her freedom the other who lost her child. I have cried in these theaters, as Jackie told a story of two sisters very different worldviews. I have laughed in these theaters, as Taylor told a story of dinosaur erotica and human vengance.

Fringe is about the sanctity of the full human experience. Last night another staff member shared a song, "A Little Bit of Everything" by the band Dawes. The song's last lines are

It's not some message written in the dark.
Or Some truth that no one's seen.
It's a little bit of everything.

 

I produce theatre and work as the production manager for the St Lou Fringe Festival because I believe that theater is a sacred art. The art we create, the stories we tell, the voices we unleash into the world have the potential teach us all together what is the meaning we are searching for. For me this festival and these venues are my reminder that there is holy ground in this world if we listen to the voice from the voices speaking inside them reminding us there is something greater than our individual selves.
The reason this art of theatre embodies the divine is that it reaches inside the soul of the producers and exposes that "little bit of everything" we all need to see. Come take off your metaphorical shoes, and share this pure moment with us, because this space is holy ground.

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Lets make some Zoom Rooms Holy Ground 

I Am Becoming

As today is my 45th birthday I have been thinking a lot about the brevity of our human existence. When my time on this earth concludes and I have crossed the barrier from this existence to whatever, if anything, lies on the other side of the grave I hope as those left behind who loved me will read this series of paragraphs, from Daniel Keyes, as they plant a juniper tree and bury my ashes

"But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing."

"Finding out who I really am-the meaning of my total existence involves knowing the possibilities of my future as well as my pasts, where I’m going as well as where I've been. Although we know the end of the maze holds death (and it is something I have not always known-not long ago the adolescent in me thought death could happen only to other people), I see now that the path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being - one of many ways - and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming."

"This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other's arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other - child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death."

The Ideology Is In The Bench (A FB Post)

 "[It] is not just a matter of what I think about a situation; it is somehow inscribed in that situation itself. It is no good my reminding myself that I am opposed to racism as I sit down on a park bench marked “Whites Only”; by the act of sitting on it, I have supported and perpetuated racist ideology. The ideology, so to speak, is in the bench; not in my head." - Terry Eagleton "Ideology" 1991

This quote from Terry Eagleton's "Ideology" has been rolling around in my mind all day, or at least since I read the Amy Cooper "apology" this morning. I am completely unable to believe her apology as anything near genuine. 

On the video when Amy Cooper says, I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." It is obvious her intention is to sit down on the bench marked whites only. 

In the apology she writes, "I’ve come to realize especially today that I think of [the police] as a protection agency, and unfortunately, this has caused me to realize that there are so many people in this country that don’t have that luxury." But her actions show this is patently not true, she 100%  used the risk of Christian's death as a tool against him. She chose to sit on the bench.  

Whatever thoughts she has about "not being a racist" in her head, the ideology is in the actions.  This becomes most important to point out to my fellow white liberals when we accept the fact that Amy Cooper is one of our own; a donor to the Obama and Buttigieg campaigns. Yet with the privilege and power of white supremacy at her beckon she used it to her perceived advantage.

This is not an attack on Ms Cooper, it is instead my own rolling thoughts about my participation and complicity in the system of white supremacy. It is a reminder to myself once again of Eagleton's quote, "The ideology is in the bench."

The Christian Ex-Pat

I am Kevin, an Ex-Pat of Christianity. My grandfather was an itinerant preacher and I grew up being told from my youngest ages that I was going to be a preacher like him. I pursued that destiny into early adulthood despite the fact that I was always a weird fit with Christianity. I could speak the language, and preach in a way that inspired many but infuriated those ensconced power.
Leaving Christianity was the hardest thing I have ever done, it is my homeland and its language is my mother tongue for speaking of the sacred. Christianity was also an abusive lover. I was thrown out of churches for questioning and others for claiming love too radically and others for taking Jesus too seriously. Over and over I felt Christianity’s loving embrace by communities that would later be weaponized against me.

As I experienced repeated abuse at the hands of the church I became more and more aware of others who were too often at the receiving end of Christianity’s “loving” beat downs. It became more and more clear that women, people of color, the LGBT+ community, and other oppressed group were the church’s targets. America’s racism and bigotry was much more clearly on display than the Christ who said, “love one another,” and “the last shall be first.” In the end I could no longer see God at all within its boundaries and I became a spiritual refugee, dispossessed from my homeland.

But I have always been a seeker, and I can no more stop chasing after God than I can stop breathing. So I have made it my discipline to see the sacred in everything and everyone. If God is Love, which I believe and affirm, then every act of love is a sacred interaction with God. If God is just, then living in a way that seeks restorative justice is a sacrament.

So now, ten years after leaving Christianity where am I? I am still a refugee, but I have found a residency that feels a lot like home. My church is a stage. I produce theater, since I find that theater is the most honest place to both question and to inspire. I have love, acceptance, a voice, and a community. I practice live performance as worship of the divine.

I am not landed, I am still seeking, and still discovering myself and God both. I know like that lesson there are many others waiting and so much more to experience and learn.

I am Kevin, dispossessed and seeking the sacred.

Literary Quotes Too Good Not To Share

"Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. There’s a world of things I don’t feel free to talk to anyone about" - Octavia Butler
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"Sometimes the only choices you have are bad choices; but you still have to choose" -The Doctor

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“To me, religions are like languages: no language is true or false; all languages are of human origin; each language reflects and shapes the civilization that speaks it; there are things you can say in one language that you cannot say as well in another; and the more languages you learn, the more nuanced your understanding of life. Judaism is my mother tongue yet in matters of the spirit I strive to be multilingual. In the end, however, the deepest language of the soul is silence.” - Rabbi Rami Shapiro
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"God is change and in the end God prevails; but God exists to be shaped." - Octavia Butler
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"Inevitable is not the same as immediacy and love does not mandate forgiveness."- N.K. Jemisin

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Less Is More - Content Dictates Form - God is in the details - Stephen Sondheim

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"Only a fool is not afraid. Now Go" - Madeline L Engle

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"We are all Stardust and Stories" - Erin Morgenstern

Some Older Poems

 UNREPLIED
I have some time this Saturday
I think we are compatible
I'd like to discover if I'm right.
I've typed a message to you
Asking if you're free at that time
Sadly you have not responded
To the missive I composed you.

Did you have some other plans that evening?
Is my presumed compatibility misjudged?
Are you just not interested in this discovery?
I have yet to receive a reply
Letting me know if you are free
Most likely because I never faced my rejection fear.
So the note I wrote is still here with me unsent.

(04/2018)

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YOUR HEALING

I fought for your healing
Even when it cost
You walking out my door.

(02/2015)

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PURPOSE 

If life has purpose at all
then that purpose is to love.

No, not the safe
sanitized love for
a transcendent being.

Love,
the messy
vulnerable kind
for our concrete
carnal surroundings.

Love is embodied,
anything else
is just philosophy.

(9/2019)

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HARD STOP

Dot Dot Dot
Dash Dash Dash
Dot Dot Dot
Hard Stop

I need a hole so deep
Where light, sound, even thoughts
Can not pierce inside.
A hard stop.

I need a blanket so heavy
Fear, worry, loss, regret
Are crushed out of me.
A hard stop.

I need a clock so broken
The past, present, & future
Fail to tick.
A hard stop.

I need a whole rest
Nothing, total and complete.
Just one beat will do.
A hard stop.

Dot Dot Dot
Dash Dash Dash
Dot Dot Dot
Hard Stop

(05/2018)

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SELF HARM

I understand the cutter.
Loving you is
My self-harm.

(11/2014)

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