Is the truth too difficult?
Navigating discomfort in the pursuit of progress
The other day, a friend asked me if my writing could be more positive, more like my post last week about love, and less like the one below…
I said no.
Both of my hands really wanted to get into the conversation as well, so they fluttered about as I spoke about spectrums and multitudes and reality. We don’t live in a world where everything feels good. Distancing ourselves from discomfort is a disservice to the collective and our personal growth. Some things need to be said, particularly by women like me. How one perceives my words—positive or negative or somewhere in between—is more about the reader and less about me.
“To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.” ~ Audre Lorde
Do you remember the summer of 2020? I do.
I can still see the tanks rolling through the streets of downtown Reno, the tear gas, the rubber bullets. I remember the next morning when we all went outside to clean the spray paint off the walls and sweep up the broken glass. We all had different takes on what had happened the night before. We still don't agree. But the words of Kimberly Jones still ring true.
Here we are, nearly four years later, and it's as if we forgot why we metaphorically and literally set fire to everything, marched in the streets, Venmo'd that cash, bought the books, and posted the black square.
That racial reckoning was long overdue. What it took for us to get there was horrific. Perhaps that's why we've distanced ourselves from it. What could have been a revolution lost momentum when we (read: white people) decided that it was easier to go back to how things were in the before times.
Since our "awakening," corporations have cut DEI programs, perhaps because they were never committed to them in the first place. Diversifying our feeds didn't really do shit. There's a national movement to ban books and change curriculum, this time without pretending that we're doing anything but attempting to rewrite history. We still won't have real conversations about race because we don't want to make people (read: white men and women) uncomfortable.
I wonder if, during Black History Month, we'll ever truly recognize George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and all of the other Black women and men whose murders forced us to look at ourselves and taught us things we didn't want to know and showed us what we didn't want to see. The truth is too difficult to face and the remedy too costly to the status quo.
wrote last week that privileged white women with progressive politics are very much able to see injustice, but we all but refuse to give anything up to rectify that injustice. She continued, "What most reliably moves us to act is personal stakes, and the absence of them makes it easy for us to 'move on' from causes that other people have no choice but to engage every day of their lives. It can feel like white women are only in the fight when the fight is popular, easy, and without significant social or financial risk — and when they do join the fight, they want to be celebrated for it."Here's the thing: The fight will never be easy, it will never end in our lifetimes, and you will never walk away from it fully intact. We, being white women (and I'm looking at you too, mens), need to own and accept this. We need to be willing to move through the world with discomfort and accept the personal consequences. We don't need to distance ourselves from discomfort and loss when, ultimately, it can support and enrich the collective and create a new culture.
We have an opportunity to do this all year long, not just during Black History Month. What will you do today?
I wrote that for an issue of Lady Parts, the weekly newsletter I send out for Coalition. The question that I presented to the reader is a question I often ask myself. Sometimes I have an answer, and sometimes I don’t. I do believe, however, that there are little things that we can do every day. Not everything has to be a grand gesture, nor do people need to know about it.
“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” ~ Toni Morrison
We all have read the lists about how to do the “do the work,” so I won’t bore you with more of the same same. Instead, I’m going to end today on how you can exist and work through your discomfort in having difficult conversations. Without them, nothing changes.
Don’t enter into conversations thinking you must change people’s minds or prove a point. You don’t. You can have a conversation, tell someone you disagree with them, and walk away from it. You don’t have to “win.”
Nor do you have to be an expert or have all the answers. Do you need to be informed? Certainly, learning is part of our daily work. But next time someone aggressively challenges you to prove it, tell them Google is free but you’re happy to send them an invoice. Questions that arise from genuinely wanting to understand feel completely different, and you’ll know.
If someone, being a white woman, pulls the not-all women-reverse-racism-blip-blap-boop card, tell her that if you’re not talking about her, you’re not talking about her. If you’re not part of the problem, these conversations shouldn’t be triggering.
As I mentioned earlier, people’s discomfort is more about them and less about you. Don’t center yourself in the experience. Allow them to own their feelings.
Be okay with losing shit. Like friends. Or lovers. Or clients. Or whomever it is that can’t handle the words that come out of your mouth in the name of human rights. White women oftentimes don’t have as much to lose as women of color; our safety is rarely at risk, we hold more power to begin with, and we can afford it.
Ask yourself why you want people to think you’re nice. Of all the things we could be in the world, why do women strive for that above all else?
Don’t worry about not everyone liking you. They already don’t.
I’d love to hear from you. How do you sit comfortably in discomfort, and what do you gain from that?