An American Tale
My dog has always had a vendetta against appendages on her plush toys. At six pounds, it takes her a while to chew through fabric to remove the offending parts, but this week, she finally, chewed through her rat’s tail, a project she’d been working on for months.
I feel like I’ve been doing my own chewing through some American tales for the last couple of months. The last time I wrote a post was on cusp of Memorial Day weekend, when I was awash in my familiar pattern of lusting after things that are unavailable to me—namely in this moment—the freedom of movement that was available before Coronavirus was a household word.
In hindsight, this was a tone-deaf post, given what was happening in the country as I wrote, unaware of the news unfolding (I’m guilty of often being behind the times). By Memorial Day weekend, George Floyd’s name was gaining global recognition, and the spotlight was landing on the lack of freedom and security (among many other things) that black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) have experienced in this country, since this particular expanse of geography was conceived of as a country.
As far as we know, humans are the only story telling animals. In Jonathan Gottschall’s book, The Story Telling Animal, he writes:
“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories…Story is for human as water is for a fish—all-encompassing and not quite palpable.
Not quite palpable. So, how do we begin to understand the water we swim in? The stories we’ve bathed in since before we were born.
In so many ways, on a larger scale than has happened before in my lifetime, as a white person, I’m being given the opportunity to really look at the myths that I’ve learned and lived and upheld throughout my life in ways that are a mixture of conscious and unconscious.
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that my life is saturated in privilege. Privilege of all kinds. Every identity I carry, except for being a woman, is an identity that is privileged by the society I live in. This privilege has not saved me from suffering. No human life is exempt from suffering. But it is suffering that has been private and personal, not systemic.
The invitation is on the table now for white people to stop burying their heads in the sand. Maybe especially white people like me who profess to care about social justice—that we, not just spout narrative—but actually examine our own complicity and our own complacency in racism and in deep injustice.
I don’t know what this is in reference to, but in my notes from a lecture in my yoga teacher training, I have underlined, “We try to blame others, but it’s always you,” which feels appropriate to this moment for my life. How instead of pointing a finger out, can I turn the gaze inward? And how can I do this in a way that isn’t shaming, but is willing to see where I’ve been wrong and done wrong?
As my fiancé and I get ready for our wedding, we’ve been spending a lot of time with Alain de Botton’s novel/philosophical musings, The Course of Love.
In the section of the novel titled “Beyond Romanticism,” Alain de Botton writes:
“Pronouncing a lover ‘perfect’ can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us. However, the problems aren’t theirs alone. Whomever we could meet would be radically imperfect: the stranger on the train, the old school acquaintance, the new friend online…Each of these, too, would be guaranteed to let us down. The facts of life have deformed all of our natures. No one among us has come through unscathed. We were all (necessarily) less than ideally parented: we fight rather than explain, we nag rather than teach, we fret instead of analyzing our worries, we lie and scatter blame where it doesn’t belong. The chance of a perfect human emerging from the perilous gauntlet are nonexistent.
What does this have to do with racism and taking real look at my white privilege and fragility? This, for me is how the threads connect: Taking feedback is exceedingly hard. Being willing to look and see how I am imperfect and how I cause pain is exceedingly hard.
The people who we live with most closely are the ones who most reliably hold up the mirror and allow us to see how we are fallen creatures. And this is not an act of cruelty (well…sometimes in the heat of an argument it might be). But when done with love, this form of feedback is an expression of love. It is also an expression of faith—that we needn’t remain as we’ve been. That we can become. And that we will always be in process. We never arrive.
There is an urgent invitation for white people to become. To shed American tales—the myth of meritocracy of colorblindness—to wake up.
White people are being given feedback. Can we take it in? Can we metabolize it? Can we be changed by it? Not to become perfect, but to become humble. To be willing to see things as they are, rather than as we’ve believed them to be, or wished for them to be. To be willing to unlearn, and to be open to new learning and new action.
