We've Been Near Here Before
Why revisiting some of the darkest days of this nation's history can be hopeful and help you lean into deeper personal growth.
I’ve always been interested in social justice. I am a person who has felt deeply for most of their life.
But, moving myself from caring to action proved challenging for me.
As a white woman, my learning curve—not so much around what needed to change and who needed my commitment but around how best to show up and where and when I could engage, disrupt, uplift—was steep. Busting open the “go along to get along” culture so many of us are raised in was difficult for me. I felt paralyzed, telling myself I didn’t know enough to feel confident enough to act.
That’s a cop out. Let’s be real here.
And, if you’re in a similar place, I’m here to tell you that the narrative around “What can I really do?” that I leaned on requires you answer with something other than fear. You need to continually and forcefully push aside your reluctance to plunge yourself into what will necessarily be some deep, deep discomfort and just do the god damn work.
Looking back, was a perfect storm in my own personal history that led me to where I am now, to a more rigid demand of myself to honestly reconcile both this nation’s past and present, and do the real work of actively engaging in fights for justice.
First, I was the mother of a gender expansive kid who needed and deserved a parent who could hold themselves accountable and do the deep work of untangling the internal mess of unquestioned obedience to a social order that really made no sense.
Then came Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations in June 2014, a piece of writing that flattened me and truly was the origin of deeper work around racial justice.
The very next month, Eric Garner was murdered by state violence. Then, Michael Brown in August. Just three months later in November, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by an officer who fired three seconds after arriving on scene.
As people waited for decisions around whether charges would be filed, almost every BIPOC person I followed, read and listened to prepared and talked about the reality they knew, from experience, was coming: Nothing would be done.
Back then, I was naive enough to believe the platitudes people so often repeat around justice.
Of course, none of the officers involved in any of these murders were charged.
Protests started in earnest.
Ten years on, I am still stung with the shame of my own certainty.
During this time, Twitter was a real place of community and organizing. I quietly followed people, from trans people to BIPOC creators, to really lean into my own growth.
I set up some guidelines for myself around engagement, none of which involved actively sharing my own worldview:
Trust the person’s experience, even when that experience is different or directly contradicts others in the same community.
Ask myself, over and over, how my own experience, from gender to whiteness to where I grew up and where I am now, informs my understanding of the world. What don’t I know about myself? What assumptions, both conscious and subconscious, am I making? Where did I need to dismantle internal default settings that served a dominant narrative that harmed vulnerable communities?
Coates had a Twitter account I followed and loved. His profile picture was General Grant. Honestly, my understanding of the Civil War then was basic and uninspired and could probably be boiled down to the barest minimum: North = good, South = bad, Lincoln freed the slaves.
(I’ve sat here for more than a few minutes staring out my window thinking how I might make myself look less stupid here before finally deciding that brutal honesty is the only thing that cements lasting personal growth, and if at best I’m trying to help other people engage and at worst just sharing, then I need to let my ignorance stand).
The mythology around Lincoln freeing slaves overshadows the very real personal work he had to do to get to solid action around not only emancipation but equality.
Lincoln’s primary concern was saving the Union, and for a long stretch at the start of the war, the North’s strategy reflected that interest.
General George McClellan was cautious and largely if not wholly uninterested in confronting slavery, something that increasingly frustrated Lincoln as the war dragged on and eventually led to McClellan challenging Lincoln for the presidency in 1864.
But Lincoln, too, waffled.
When you dig into the history of this time, you begin to understand Lincoln tried almost everything to avoid reckoning with the brutality and inhumanity of slavery along the way to his deeper commitment to emancipation, including colonization, a plan he pursued with purpose beginning as early as the mid-1850s, and one that called for slaves to be freed over time and deported to land outside the United States.
Never mind it was enslaved Black Americans who were almost solely responsible for the work resulting in this nation’s enormous wealth. Never mind that by the 1850s, every slave had been born on U.S. soil.
As I poke at my own ignorance, what continually strikes me is that if not for an openness to listening and a curiosity pointed inward, Lincoln’s legacy may have been vastly different.
Many times, Lincoln was saved from his own ignorance and worst impulses by his respect for and relationship with Frederick Douglass. In community with Douglass, Lincoln was able to interrogate his own worldview and do work that today we might very well name “personal growth.”
Lincoln’s 2nd inaugural speech hints at how far he’d come: “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'“
In other words: Justice would be the war continuing until all that had been plundered by white men was repaid in lost wealth and spilled blood.
Imagine for a minute having leaders today who were as keen to grapple with the world with just a touch of the same intellectual honesty?
That won’t happen.
And honestly, that’s not the point.
The point is that as we set off, today, on what is bound to be some of the darkest days, we can do this work.
We can commit to never stop poking our own ignorance, digging out our own blind spots so we can more clearly see where we are and where we want to be. We can have difficult conversations with ourselves and others.
We can be in community with other humans and consciously choose to believe their experience and join them in their struggle for equality and liberation.
We can use our privilege where we have it to offer protection.
This nation, this world, is not its leaders, nor is it wealth or fame or any number of things we are told to value and uplift on any given day.
This world is you and me and every other human who has the capacity to dream and build and grow.
You’ll likely be asked to give up your power to believe that we the people is, in the simplest terms, the very essence of what we’re all doing here. Some days, you might even believe you have no power.
But that is and never has been true.
We’ve been near here before.
We can withstand together.