#4: The work of awakening

Good morning,

This week’s letter needed a few extra days to gather itself because it is about some thoughts I have lived with for a long time and find difficult to put into words quickly.

As a teenager, I had Walt Whitman’s infamous words, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes,” plastered to my wall. I couldn’t quite explain why I loved this idea so much. The past several days have helped me understand myself more. I’ll take you through it chronologically.

Wednesday:

I came across this essay in The Believer (published Nov. 2018) and it is hands down one of the most beautiful, important, reported essays I have ever read about climate change.

Mario Alejandro Ariza compares the effects of climate change being experienced by the people of Miami to his experiences growing up in a machismo culture. I’m paraphrasing here but in short: Both explain away injustice or imminent danger by encouraging the affected to build “resilience” and it’s not okay.

He writes:

You might not think, at first, that my constantly getting the crap kicked out of me has anything to do with climate change or sea-level rise or the death of my city at the hands of an angry, swollen ocean. Yet when state and federal governments ignore the greater structural issues at play, the prevailing doctrine of adaptation starts to closely resemble the national discourse of “toughen up” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” and it’s worth taking a moment to check in with the folks who don’t have any boots.

And:

If certain people can’t build resilience, perhaps it’s because their bodies go into fight-or-flight mode too readily, because their neurons have too many stress-chemical receptors. They are, in a sense, too easily triggered. And even if a city is of a radically different nature from a human body, it’s still a complex system that can be challenged past its breaking point by persistent stressors.

It left me wondering: where is the line between being strong/broad-minded/gracious and accepting injustice?

Friday:

I watched the new Taylor Swift documentary, “Miss Americana" on Netflix and was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed its themes: the toll of public life, what it feels like to live for the sake of other people’s approval, and how to decide when to speak up (politically) while still plagued by the desire for approval.

Sunday:

A journalist I really respect, Monica Guzman, posted an essay by her friend Julie Pham on Facebook, called "Want to make space for awakening in a Woke/Unwoke world?” and Pham nailed it for me, whatever the lingering confusion was that had been building from the days prior.

She writes:

“Wokeness”  originates from within the Black community — yet it’s a term that has been unfortunately popularized by mainstream culture, to the point of being parodied. Wokeness is a complicated concept with a variety of expressions and has been the subject of lots of discussion and study that are beyond the scope of this essay.

But I do want to invoke and discuss the binary of woke/unwoke because I think it’s useful for understanding the context of what people feel they can and can’t say, why so many people stay silent, why people think that only certain people are qualified to say how and to whom inequity manifests, and what it might look like to create a space between woke and unwoke.

Using her own experience feeling unsure whether to engage across difference when her peers (in judgment of someone’s unwokeness, didn’t want to engage with them), she makes the case for adopting an “awakening” mindset, because the alternative, silence, gets filled by voices from the extreme ends of the woke/unwoke binary. This discourages learning.

Then she offers these key points about awakening (highly suggest reading through the examples):

1) Good conversations require reciprocity.
2) Individuals have stories beyond the privilege we perceive.
3) Everyone is affected by racism.
4) Mutual learning requires tolerance.

Monday:

I sent Pham’s article to my friend Kellianne, because we’ve had so many conversations about this stuff. She and I met in journalism school and later produced a story about the National Muzzleloading Rifle Association together. These days, she works at Fox in the news division (the stuff that plays on TV between 9am-12pm & 1pm-7pm, not the evening punditry side of things), and is often the target of harsh judgment against Fox’s conservative narratives from those who don’t know the difference. What people gain from judgment, I will never understand. I see her as my most trustworthy, open-hearted and thoughtful source for understanding my country better.

She grew up in rural Ohio and worked her way through school to obtain an ivy league journalism education, and the two of us often talk about how it’s hard to find a place to belong when you contain so many identities. I relate to this deeply: me, a South Asian American first-gen-ish immigrant working in media in NYC, her, a working class Ohio girl in corporate DC, both of us knowing how to speak and succeed in dominant cultures that our parents may never fully be seen by, and that we don’t know if we really feel seen in either.

It’s uncomfortable to hold these tensions. It’s work. It requires an enormous amount of effort and time to look carefully at yourself, see yourself wholly and see other people wholly. And if you manage to do all that, you also have to figure out when and how to take action against visible and invisible injustices without caring how it might affect your ego.

Suggested reading if you actually want to understand some communities that are too often analyzed from a poisonous “how they fell for Trump” narrative but are simply people living on the margins of society for reasons they both chose and didn’t choose:

• Flea Market Jesus (we also interviewed Art in our gun story)

• Kellianne’s essay about being both a journalist and the daughter of an NRA member

also Monday:

I finally got around to reading Amira Rose Davis’ poignant piece in TNR about how to process Kobe Bryant’s legacy. From A Legacy of Incoherence:

The story of Bryant’s life had been written over the course of decades, largely along the same parallel lines. As with so many other powerful men, it was rare to see these two things—beloved men and the harm they’ve done—held in tension for very long. So this ended up being a story about Kobe Bryant and a story about us. How we compartmentalize the people we love or admire… It’s incoherent, putting pieces of a puzzle together that don’t fit, jamming them, or discarding one or the other. But we need to hold them. Even if they are heavy. This is the work.

And finally, Tuesday:

I read Hilton Als’ breathtaking tribute to Toni Morrison in the New Yorker, where he writes of Morrison’s character Pecola (a young black girl who wishes to have blue eyes) in The Bluest Eye:

Pecola’s very presence exacerbates some of the other characters’ not so buried feelings about their own race and poverty— liabilities that push these Ohioans apart, rather than unite them: no one wants to be confronted with her own despair, especially when it’s reflected in the eyes of another despairing person. And the truth is, by the time we leave Pecola, pecking at the waste on the margins of the world, we, too, may feel a measure of relief at no longer having to see what Morrison sees, her profound and unrelenting vision of what life can do to the forsaken.

In summary:

These multitudes within us, and the ones all around us — they take time and effort to explore. But I’m so tired of both young men (as in Ariza’s example) and young women (as in Swift’s) being raised to believe you need to fit into a clear and specific space in society in order to succeed and be accepted. I understand how difficult it is (as Morrison and Davis show us) to accept the fallibility of heroes and the humanity of those on the margins of society. But I see this work — the work of holding space for others through careful listening, close examination and accepting dialogue — as the most important work we could possibly do.

I’ll leave you with Morrison’s words at the beginning of Pecola’s story:

“There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” 

Jihii

P.S. Some of you have been replying to these letters - thank you :) Always open to thoughts, questions, suggested reading or a coffee.

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