Generous Connections
“Do you already know that your existence—who and how you are—is in and of itself a contribution to the people and place around you? Not after or because you do some particular thing, but simply the miracle of your life. And that the people around you, and the place(s), have contributions as well? Do you understand that your quality of life and your survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in? Are you actively practicing generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable?”
It’s been a while.
I've been listening so hard to hear if the window to real, transformative change in our world is opening or shutting, listening so hard to people I care about to see what they need, listening so hard to people I learn the most from to see what I should be learning. In times of flux, I try to just shut up and listen.
Something tells me that this is the time to speak. After our current health and economic crisis was joined by the movement to end police violence, defund the police, and protect Black lives, so many predominantly white or white-led organizations rushed to "message" the moment. Or, to stay on brand while messaging the moment. Or to make sure they were managing the optics by staying on brand while still messaging the moment. So many of us were basically standing in front of partners and clients, hands in front of us and palms pressing out, coaxing folks to just Put. The Mailchimp. Down. Nice and easy does it …. You don't need to hit send, friend. You don’t have to send that thing.
Sometimes it's better to shut up and listen.
Sometimes it's good to open your mouth and speak. Listening and speaking, that's how trust happens and relationships are built. I don't know how Mailchimp fits in there. I have my doubts.
But, yes. There's something so radical right now about laying yourself bare. As an avid reader of adrienne maree brown, I learn so much from her process of self-observation, her disclosures about her responses and reactions to what she is reading, thinking, and noticing. I spent a lot of my quiet time listening to her, watching how she moves through conflict, taking her words to heart. And then, in the last few weeks, I've noticed more and more women I admire are laying themselves bare, dropping the pretenses, putting it all out there, in the hopes that we can build better bridges, connect more authentically, become more accountable to one another. For weeks, I have held back, hanging on every one of your words but unable to start this blog post. Bareness is not really my thing.
It's not because I don't like talking about myself. I do. I mean, duh, I blog. I have a blog – I must love the sound of my own fingers typing away at the keys. But I also like control. I like to control what you know about me. Hell, I like to control what I know about myself. This control is about vulnerability of a special kind. I know how incomplete language is. I spent much of my first grad degree studying comprehension and the gap between what people write and say and how other people read and hear them. So, I know what readers and listeners bring to their meaning-making, and I worry that if I tell you X, you'll assume Y. If I tell you A, you'll assume B. So I generally just tell you 1, 2, and 3 instead.
I mean, because it's complicated, right? We as a people are socialized to increasingly oppositional categories of identity – white/black, male/female, gay/straight, femme/butch, abled/disabled – and for a long time, it has been difficult to explain oneself without providing a one-word answer to, "How do you identify?" And worse yet, on some occasions, people feel the need to push back on your answer about yourself: "Why lesbian, rather than queer?" "Don't call yourself sick, it hurts the disability movement." "It makes me uncomfortable when you call yourself fat." "You're a femme."
For me, as a person who has lived a kind of liminal existence, that question – "How do you identify?" -- is an instant migraine, a signal that I need to figure out which flat version of myself is the easiest for the asker to digest. But I hate the inauthenticity of my answer – hate the place it comes from. Like adrienne maree brown, I believe these fictionalized categories of identity as identities come from a place of fear -- fear of the other, fear of difference, and fear of bodies unlike one's own.
Yet, socially constructed race and abledness and gender and ability and everything are with us now, and pretending they do not exist will not end oppression. To talk about yourself right now, you must talk about identity categories. For me, personally, to talk about my own identity means to look at and speak with my ancestors, to watch their journeys from one identity category to the next over hundreds of years, from one racial or ethnic category to the next, from one economic status to the next, and to embody their experiences in constructing my present sense of self.
To put it simply, I work from the worldview that I am my ancestors. Not just, perhaps, but discernibly. I believe I am made up of my ancestors (not just the ones I like, either, though boy is that tempting), that I am made of stardust too (why not?), of my own unique sequences and cells and the materials I have absorbed in the places I have made my home, and of the layers of fabric that have been wrapped around me by key influences, from my adoptive family to our ingrained system of interlocking oppressions. I am both of my mothers' daughter, both of my fathers' daughter, all six of my siblings' sister. Though I did not carry my sons in my womb, I know that I have physically absorbed their presence, and they are a part of me as well, as are their first mother and their first fathers. I am composed of the caliche of my West Texas home and the fog of my San Francisco home, of the swirling spirits that remain in Comancheria and Ohlone land. When I'm in Manhattan, I walk the streets through the eyes of my ancestors who started living there in the late 1500s. And when I'm in Indiana, in Tennessee, or in Ohio, I know that this land was sacred to my Shawnee ancestors for thousands of years before colonization and still is.
Stardust and clay and ancestors might be hard to grasp, so I will also say that in my life so far there are moments and features that are not me, do not define me, but are important experiences. Some I share regularly, if asked. Most, less so. I've never put them all together to be heard or read at once though. But here.
I was born and grew up mostly in Texas, raised in a conservative Bible Belt town that conceptualized race as hierarchical, with white on top and black on the bottom and Latino inhabiting several categories in between (and sometimes co-existing with whiteness to some degree), depending on how long one's family had been in Texas (not in the US, but in Texas, because you know how Texans are).
My mother was not well educated, barely finished high school, but my father had a college degree from an agricultural university. Both of my parents were raised partly on farms, my father's family land-owning and my mother's family share-cropping. Both had childhoods informed by the Dust Bowl, by poverty and hunger, and, in my mother's case, by a lack of sexual safety and emotional nurturing. My parents were thoroughly organized by white supremacy and capitalism, but were less accepting of patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism.
When I speak of "my mother" and "my father," these are the people who adopted me; they raised me alongside their biological child, my older brother. I was my first mother's middle child – she raised my older and younger brother, but not me. It's unknown whether or not my first father knew of my existence. I am one of two children he fathered out of wedlock (my older sister, who does not know me, and I were followed by his two legitimate children, my younger sister and brother).
I grew up in a difficult home with parents who had trauma and addictions that kept them from even neutral parenting, much less good parenting, in a precarious financial situation sometimes, with precarious physical well-being and safety, and with a profound sense of isolation.
As an adult, I have soothed myself with education, and I continue to soothe myself with learning. My father helped me pay for my undergraduate degree, but I also used student loans and work study and worked 20 to 30 hours a week, mostly serving beer and delivering pizzas to frat boys. I haven't been able to afford really good schools, but I have been able to afford three degrees at okay schools. I am still paying my last student loan.
I have two sons, now launching into their 30s, who came to live with me when they were six and seven. I am their second mother, technically, legally, though they had another foster mother who was very important to them as well. I raised them mostly alone, not exactly by choice. It was hard on all of us, traumatizing even, and for all of their childhoods they qualified for free – not reduced-price – lunch and subsidized healthcare, and I relied heavily on high-interest credit cards to make ends meet. I still carry some of this debt, which amazes and angers me.
I am married to someone I admire, who makes me laugh, who has a strong moral compass, who is a feminist, who identifies as "a cooperator," as in, a worker-owner of a cooperative. I have benefitted so much, in every way, from the stability and love of this relationship. These last dozen years have been the easiest, safest, most love-filled of my life. We have what we need – love in abundance and a rent-controlled apartment, and one adorable dog named Schnitzel. We basically live paycheck to paycheck (and invoice payment to invoice payment), but we have some financial safety net and did I mention that rent control makes this possible?
So this is me, I suppose, the part you probably want to know, but not enough to answer the important questions. Can you trust me? Can we work together? Is there enough for both of us so that we feel comfortable having each other's back? Do we have the same vision in mind when this movement is successful? How far would we go to ensure each other and each other's loves can be free?
To work toward those bigger questions, there is something more I want to tell you. My understanding of myself grew as I began to first study and then, as I say, "be in conversation with" my ancestors. This is an old way of knowing, and why in many cultures one introduces oneself through one's family tree, through one's parents and grandparents and villages and sacred lands. To know me is to know my grandmother and grandfather, my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather, and so on and so on and so on, and about the ways that these bodies traveled across land masses and continents and came together with other bodies in love and war.
Because of oppression, because of attempts at genocide in the name of imperialism and colonization, because of statelessness, dislocation, and family disruption, because of white supremacy, because of capitalism, because of patriarchy, many people cannot know themselves through their ancestors, cannot trace their grandparents from one generation to the next. It's a paperwork problem. It's an oppression problem.
But if you are able to build out your genealogical family tree -- if your social constructions have allowed your ancestors to have the "privilege" of having legal names that are the ones given to them by their parents or tribe and recorded in the State's record-keeping systems, marriage certificates that record the actual details of your conception and birth and the names of both of your actual parents, records of births and deaths that have been carefully preserved for posterity despite fires and floods and tornados and hurricanes, despite slavery and servitude, forced migrations or migrations deemed unlawful and so made in secret, despite conventions of legitimacy, stringent societal norms about mental health and incarceration, then you might see yourself in snapshots across time – you may have a sense of how much or how little identity labels that serve you today served those who came before you. And if you define yourself, as I do, as the embodiment of your ancestors, well then … It's complicated.
In this snapshot of my family tree from 1650, for instance, my Shawnee ancestors are engaging mostly, but not exclusively, with other indigenous people of the southeast part of what is now known as the United States. The people that will change the way that we are perceived by race and ethnicity and legitimacy many years later are becoming known to us, French Canadian fur traders who are already taking Indian wives and fathering children who stay with the tribe – this in addition to their legitimate (thus documented) French wives and French children in Quebec. Other of my ancestors have just arrived on this continent for the first time, some, known as Huguenots and others known as Walloons, fleeing France and Belgium and the Netherlands for reasons of religious persecution, some with an eye to extraction of resources and the accumulation of wealth – and some doing both of those things at the same time. In 1650, the majority of my ancestors are on this land, and of course some of them had already been here for thousands of years.
In the decades that follow, my ancestors sometimes kill each other in battle (literally), and sometimes the children of these very ancestors who killed each other a few decades earlier marry each other and have children, mixing ethnicities often and races occasionally. A few of my ancestors "own" a little land and three or four slaves, but one of my ancestors, the grandson of an Irish Catholic immigrant, "owns" a lot of land and many slaves, some of them his own sons and daughters achieved, we can most certainly assume, through his rape of their Black mothers.
For the most part, those of my ancestors who have land divide it among their children until the small parcels are almost worthless, including this Irish immigrant, though of course his land is only passed down to his white children. His Black children he leaves to their own devices.
Two hundred years later, as another snapshot in time, almost all of my ancestors are poor. Increasingly rich in skin privilege (which will eventually pay off), we are increasingly poor in the paycheck and pantry. These generations move around a lot, but only in a small geography: Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas. And of course, not by choice, some are force-marched onto those hardscrabble plots of land in so-called "Indian Territory," just as we are on the cusp of being able to pass for white, which will quickly turn into actually being white. Within a few years, we are white. Still, almost across the board, we think we have nothing, because we don't know yet how powerful white supremacy is. By the time I am born, 116 years later, the distinct ethnicities and even races of my ancestors have melted into the category of whiteness, and the benefits are many. There is still poverty, yes, and there is still patriarchy. There are still the impacts of colonization and capitalism, but our whiteness operates as a kind of social safety net, even given all of the other obstacles we face.
And this brings us to here, to me, 54 years later, in the time of COVID and a dying planet, in the time of a bellowing monster of white supremacy who has taken a few arrows but isn't going down easy. In the time of festering patriarchy and unchecked capitalism, and surrounded on all sides by two dozen California wildfires, and to this attempt to lay it bare.
So here's what happened.
A few weeks ago, a new potential work partner questioned my ability to do relational work that I have been doing for thirty years because she wondered how others would engage with me as a "white middle-class woman." And I cringed. Not about the white part, but about the class part and, really, about the interlocking part. We had just met, and on Zoom, and I was flabbergasted that she had, in my mind, allowed race to signify class. This is pretty ironic because I have spent a lot of time in my life trying to look and sound class-neutral to avoid discrimination, but in my head I still have a lot of markers of working-class, poor-class, agricultural class existence. This was the first time someone had ever inflated my socioeconomic status as a way of negating my ability to do a job, a job I needed because … Well, you see how it works.
First: I felt flattened and unseen and stereotyped. I felt so unseen for my struggle. I got really heated inside, didn't feel competent to communicate the gap in what she was assuming and who I was, gave up, and politely checked out of the relationship.
Next: I made a hot, milky chai and listened to some music. I chilled out. And I started noticing some other things about this exchange.
On the one hand, yeah, this person didn't see me, and she did, in fact, flatten me by failing to question her assumptions about who I am based on how I look to her.
On the second hand (there are always at least three – I don't know why I keep using this dumb analogy), this is pretty understandable – we (as a broad identity-based social justice movement that doesn't really exist, but you know what I mean) have consistently dropped the ball on talking about class, despite our good intentions to document and understand how various oppressions intersect. We have trouble seeing our way clear of capitalism, of even beginning to imagine a post-capitalistic world, and class as a factor of oppression is going to continue to be dismissed until we learn to talk about it better and consistently.
And on the third hand, yay!
"Yay!" says the third hand -- because whether I was deep in my feelings or not, here was someone who worked for a funding organization (I think I forgot to mention that part) questioning the status quo, considering the role of whiteness and capitalism in "the work." Considering the role of my whiteness and my socioeconomic standing in my work, in their work, in our work! That is exactly what we are all working for! That is the thing, and here is an example in which the thing was achieved, so yay!
I mean, you can't pay the rent with yay, but you can transform the world with yay, and I will find other ways to pay the rent. I always do.
But now, weeks later, here comes the fourth hand. The fourth hand usually holds back, ruminating, so I'm not surprised to see it now. It says, “It's important, this call, that we must show ourselves. We must show ourselves so that we can begin the dialogue that may or may not lead to our work together.” I agree. Step one is show yourself. Step two is begin the dialogue. For some of us in this field, we and our kind have been dominating the work for long enough that we are pretty comfortable the second we meet because we come with the same trappings of privilege, the same notion (conscious or not) that we have a right to this space. For some of us, we have been at the boundary of this work, standing at the door knocking to get in, even when the work is literally about us, and these conversations don't come so naturally because we were left waiting for way too long. And there's a good reason to be suspicious about the sudden invitation to come on in, share resources and good will.
This is one thing. One tiny piece. And there's probably a fifth hand. There is a lot more to think about. But a single blog post can't do all things …
Plus, that's about all I can handle of baring myself at the moment. Plus, I have bookkeeping to do. (Like that's going to happen on a Friday afternoon.)
The final thing: I have no demands for you to reciprocate, and certainly have no wish to see folks performing this exercise without taking some risks, but if you are in the space where you can show who you are, who you really, really are, in some way that allows us to build trust and build a new world together, then I am all for it. That would be very cool. So, do that if you can, share it somewhere, put it where we can find it.
Until then, ne yi wa and merci and bedankt and thank you -- for taking the time to read this, for holding a little space for these ramblings. For not only wondering but also asking if I can be trusted, for thinking about power, for paying attention to oppression, for transforming the world.
Laurie Jones Neighbors is an independent consultant and educator who specializes in developing, implementing, and assessing programs and educational experiences in support of equitable political representation and local, regional, and national decision making by low-income communities and communities of color.