facing white fragility

From where I stand
On unceded Tewa land
With an iPhone filled with minerals
Mined from Afghanistan.

Part of our white fragility / human resiliency practice is to know where we stand. To acknowledge and respect whose land it is we stand upon and whose lands we have come from. To learn and remember where our own blood peoples have come from, and why.

White supremacy and the construct of whiteness strives to erase and diminish our unique tapestry of ancestries.

Whiteness is indigenous to nowhere on Earth.

Whiteness is a hungry orphan - toxic, exploitative, oppressive, deadly, to authentic cultures.

I beg you to look into your family histories and attempt to learn the reasons for their fleeing, for their colonizing, for their settling. Look even if it’s hard, even if it’s painful. Do not avoid it. Ask your relatives. Do your research. Put together the pieces of what built your world, and how.

Only when we know where we’ve come from, can we start to become at home in ourselves. At home in who we are, at home on the land. Only then can we stop running from ourselves, from each other, from the “other.” Only then can we stop the same destructive patterns that show no reverence for diversity, or origins. No reverence for blackness, brownness, otherness, queerness. That show no reverence for life itself.

I carry threads from Lithuania, the Mediterranea, South Africa, Wales, Sardinia, Ashkenazi Alemania, Polska Ziemia. In my heritage are stories of fleeing from intense persecution, and stories of immense white privilege. Stories of medicine women and stories of warmongers. Stories of alcoholics and altruists, racists and racial activists. It’s all there, churning in my blood line.

Our stories are complex and layered and it is important to do the digging, to feel the feelings. The grief the pain the shame. It is our duty to be interested. I am interested not just in my personal family’s history, but in yours too. Please learn your stories of #ancestrytrails and share them with me. As we listen to our black and indigenous relatives, we must do our work. Anti-racist work is ancestor work. This is resiliency, this is us facing white fragility and supremacy.