What Can We Break

Good morning. 

I took a week off of writing this newsletter, which turned out to create a very necessary space to listen to a lot of what is going on in the world in the last two weeks, which includes everything that is being said about what is going on. I often find the discourse and reaction to current events as informative as the events themselves, and by way of example, when Simone Biles bowed out of the Olympic All Around on Tuesday, the thing I found most alarming and informative was the absolute scorn rained upon her globally, reaffirming that the world looks at this young human woman primarily as an object of entertainment, and in that moment many people were having a tantrum because they felt like their toy broke. #MeToo until it’s self care. #MeToo until it’s long term survivor healing. But further, after a year and a half of unrelenting challenges related to a pandemic that we continue to deal with, I suspect that many, many people are feeling a lot like Simone Biles right now - potentially even some of the same people who are showering her in scorn, which re-establishes that one of our biggest societal battles is a deficit of compassion not just for others but even for our own selves. Many of us have our personal version of The Twisties right now and are having a hard time coping with it.

This lack of compassion and introspection was perfectly emphasized by the brilliant author Alok Vaid-Menon’s explanation of the hate that so many people feel toward non-binary or otherwise nonconforming folks stemming from a hatred of those nonconforming feelings within themselves and their constant desire to destroy and silence them. This brilliant breakdown culminates in the question they should always truly be asking of the non-conforming: “Can you help me get free?” This felt so applicable to so much of what we face these days, and extends to so many struggles.

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On Saturday, The Daily was a conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates that very much struck the same chord for me. Covering the outrage directed at The 1619 Project and the recent attempts by local governments to ban the teaching of anything that could be described as Critical Race Theory in schools, both Hannah-Jones and Coates pointed out that the refusal to accept the duality of American history - captured perfectly by Coates comment, “Thomas Jefferson wasn’t moonlighting as a slaveholder, George Washington wasn’t moonlighting as a slave holder” - is willful and deliberate as part of the effort to preserve the mythology of American democracy. If we have to accept the gaping, harmful, violent truths instead of omitting them for a much more comfortable narrative in which we play the savior and the rest of the world needs saving, we have to accept that we are imperfect and inheriting a legacy of (at best) imperfection. And think of all of the issues to which that extends.

From Nikole Hannah-Jones, on critical race theory:

“What they’re saying is that if we teach these to kids, our kids might think we are a racist nation. So think about what that is saying. That if we teach the true history of our country, if we teach these facts, then the logical conclusion that our children will come to is that we are fundamentally a racist nation. And so we cannot teach those facts.”

The themes from this week of observation and listening have been denial, subversion, and all the other ways we create obstacles between ourselves and the truth in order to preserve our own comfort, always at the sacrifice of someone more vulnerable.

The wonderful sister of a friend of mine has been managing cystic fibrosis for her whole life, and is a brilliant advocate for her community. Years ago she said something that I think about all the time: that people place such a heartless level of blame and fault on the ill because they are trying to create distance between themselves and the complete lack of control we have over our own health. When someone blames another human for their illness or disease, their purpose in that blame is to build a wall between them and the possibility of they themselves becoming sick. When there is a reason, we feel that we have control. But it effectively boils down to denial, and this is where the sentiment shared by many that those who developed COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic were somehow deserving of the illness because clearly their lifestyle was not clean enough - ignoring all of the people who could not shelter-in-place, or go without work, or social distance in a crowded home. And, extending further, this is how many humans dealing with what-would-be manageable illnesses are demonized and overlooked by the healthcare system every day for diabetes or HIV or cancer.

All of this denial, wall-building, and anger in the name of avoidance of reality, which is extremely complicated, never black and white, and certainly never complete or perfect. And what I would propose is that the earlier we each reach a place where we are able to accept the duality that comes with facts or the lack of control we have over nature, the more readily we will be able to embrace what an incredible, improbable, ridiculous gift it is to be here all together, with no real control and never really knowing the future, because it is not our destiny to know. It is only our destiny to build in the name of what could be.

When I started writing this essay it was about Impact, which is a topic I have wanted to chat with you on for a while and is something I fully intend to cover in a future letter. I am finding now, as many people have begun in earnest to rebuild their lives into the molds of the beforetimes, and the privileged world runs at a slightly slower pace for the last half of the summer, and the internet is teeming with elaborate luxury-brand-destination-parties and international vacations, we can feel the space that was filled with protests and community building this time last year being re-filled with…. everything else. This is not to cast aspersions on those that are anxious to return to the comforts of their regular lives, because I count myself among those ranks and know how long and hard we have craved some semblance of normalcy. And honestly, the point is not to never travel or frolic or embrace again, the point is to take everything you might have woken up to recently and incorporate it into your everyday practices: your personal operations. And for many of us, our personal operations and philosophies extend to our work, our parenting, our caregiving, and other areas of our lives, and so those practices actually end up spreading pretty widely into something that could actually be considered Impact.

Recalling the first interview I published here, with the brilliant people leader Bridgett Lindsey, she highlighted that we have a tendency to standardize our own values, beliefs, and desires as what should be everyone else’s values, beliefs and desires, and so when it comes to helping people or communities, humans have a tendency to conflate charity with their own idea of what would be helpful. Which is (unfortunately) often not the thing that the receiving community would find most helpful, or the mark is missed in execution.

I won’t go further into charity and giving in this week’s letter, but in preparing to write about impact I researched an important example that I would like to share with you to have a think on.

New York City’s The Fresh Air Fund has been sending low-income city kids out into rural and suburban America for free, two week vacations in host family homes for almost 150 years. It has long been known that fresh air and interaction with nature is good for the body and soul, and New York has long failed its poorest citizens in providing public spaces to be in nature - low-income neighborhoods barely even become slated for tree plots and park improvements until they are thoroughly gentrified. So, in essence, the idea of exporting children that spend 50 weeks a year living in landscapes of mostly brick and sandstone to the lush foliage anywhere outside NYC is a brilliant one. 

However, as the demographic of NYC’s low-income neighborhoods have changed over the last 150 years, first slowly then more dramatically which each wave of white flight, Fresh Air Fund kids were increasingly Black and Latinx, but the program did not adapt to screen or vet the host environments that the children were being sent into, which means that many Fresh Air Fund children were extricated from their home communities for these two weeks to interact with nature while also being called racist epithets and facing physical and sexual violence in the host homes or host communities, which were primarily white and rural. 

It took decades for The Fresh Air Fund to address this fundamental flaw in their program, or even to start screening host families for criminal or violent behavior. 

The assumption here, when the demographic The Fresh Air Fund was serving began to change, was that non-white children were being given the gift of being in the presence of what have been established as white spaces. That a seat at the dinner table of a white family is a special piece of a charity that need not adapt or evolve to make space for these visiting children’s lived experiences, and that the violence as a result of lack of care and protection is simply collateral damage.

And unfortunately, this is the attitude with which so many people still approach impact, charity, diversity and all of the other areas that attempt to address the imbalances we enforce in our societal operations. In many people’s opinions, to just open the door to a room full of white people already functioning in a white-dominant system is the end of the work, and any non-white persons should simply be happy to have a seat at the table. And because many people still think of racism as individual acts of physical violence rather than what it really is - a whole system of that most micro-systems are unwittingly modeled after - we have a tendency to believe that our own individual anti-racist attitude is the extent of the work that needs to be done to make a better world. There is never any thought to the way that metaphorical room needs to adapt - and I assure you it does. Desperately. Otherwise that room is a space of harm. 

And so my challenge to us all, in consideration of this example, is to find the systems in our lives that we uphold and defend for the sake of comfort and tradition, and examine them for what they silence, or deny, or attempt to exterminate. For most of us that will not be The Olympics or the State School System or U.S. Healthcare, but the size of the system is less relevant than the potential power you can exercise over it.

Can you look at it from a new perspective? Can you imagine it as a system that also honors an unpopular or radical experience? And which, of the parts of it that keep you comfortable, are you willing to use your power to break?

That’s our assignment.

I hope you are having a beautiful, safe summer connected to this world in whatever way makes sense for you.

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