Season 6, Episode 22: Danielle, Rebecca and Jenny

Jenny (02:14):

I have been thinking about conversations that I've been having and things that I've been seeing lately about this new found anger and rage for MAGA friends and family members. And I think this facade of hope for a long time that I had been called Hyperbolic and I'd been saying I was overreacting or I was paranoid, and then when things continued to escalate, there was the sense of, okay, now they'll see. Now they'll see. And really feeling like there's pretty much not more that could happen that would lift the veil of where we are in this current moment. And so then to still have family members not rejecting Trump, not rejecting Christian nationalism, not rejecting white supremacy, it has been really challenging to think through what does relationship mean right now? What does it mean from a privileged body too? I'm really hesitant, and Danielle and I have talked a lot about this, that it's a very white thing to be like, ah, I'm just going to not talk to you and I don't feel like that's necessary. And if people are saying, you just need to not talk about politics with me, what does it look like to hold my own integrity and be in relationship with people in this moment? I am struggling to know what that looks like and how to do that.

Rebecca (04:20):

It makes me think I'm getting ready to do, you guys probably saw this, but I'm going to do starting Monday, a group with Jen Murphy, and the name of it is Rebuilding Hope. And I think Hope has something to do with what you just said, Jenny. I am not sure how it plugs in, but I do think there's, what I hear is what do I do? Do I just give into the, they're never going to get there, and what does that mean for our capacity to stay connected in any way? Or do I still hold something of this hope that might even feel foolish in this moment of someday? Maybe somebody's going to get there.

(05:18):

And it reminds me a little bit of, I probably said this before in here too, there's a podcast between a conversation between Tahi cos and Ezra Klein, and in some ways they end up talking about this question of hope, although I don't think they use the word necessarily, but one of the questions that Ezra Klein it keeps asking is like, why do you keep putting everything in this long historical arc? Every single thing that we're talking about in this moment is sort of this question to Tanya. She comes like, why do you keep putting it in this long arc of history? Because that feels too heavy. It's too much, right? That's too dark. And in part I think at least the way I interpret coats as an answer is because that's where you access this kind of hope that over the long arc of history, something will shift and bend towards something that feels like justice. And that's sort of bringing Martin Luther King into this conversation about the long arc of justice. But I think Coates's answer is something of that's where we gather the capacity and the strength from the past in order to actually stay in the present with the kind of insistence for something good to come out of all of this. So I don't know, there's something in that sort of narrative and that history that I want to borrow from to say, unfortunately, this is not a new conversation in this country.

(07:13):

It feels that way because it's new in my lifetime. It's new in our lifetime, it's new in our generation, but it's not actually new to the country. And when you look over time, there has always forever been this strain of Christian nationalism and white supremacy, and yet we are still here and we are still here with moments like Bad Bunny in the Super Bowl still happening. And so I think, at least for me, in part, the answer to your question is I have to borrow from that space in order to have the capacity to stay in this one. And it occurs to me that I was born in the seventies post civil rights legislation by the time I was in high school applying to college, affirmative action was the law of the land

(08:21):

I have lived in. We have lived in the harvest of someone else's labor. We have lived in a time when rights were continually being added to the conversation in our lifetime, women could vote in our lifetime. Women can own property, they can have credit cards, they can hold all of these things. And this is the first time in my lifetime I have lived through a retraction of rights, a retraction of oxygen, a retraction of space, and it feels excruciating, but it's not the first time this country has been through that kind of rhythm and our ancestors survived and we will survive, right? At least for me, that's maybe not an answer to the question of how do you relate to your family? But it's the only way I have to go with it is to just say, somehow we will actually survive this. I don't know how, and I dunno what will be left when we start the process of rebuilding, but I have to borrow from that history to feel like I can breathe on a Thursday morning.

Jenny (10:08):

Yeah. I think that's part of what I am thinking of, and it's almost this existential, what is relationship if we can't see reality, if we can't acknowledge reality, if you're asking me to swallow my own reality and this collective reality, and I think it feels connected even to what you were sharing, Rebecca is like, there's something I feel particular in this moment where as far as I know, I don't have personal ancestry of resistance. I have ancestry of complicity. And so what does it look like to draw from the past with white ancestors who chose to assimilate to adopt whiteness rather than work against it and resist how we got here? Because it is like I don't want to appropriate the civil rights movement and I don't want to appropriate these resistances that I have so much respect for, and they weren't my collective or my ancestral resistance. And so I feel that even in this moment where there's this tension with my white community, my white family, the white spaces, I know it feels like there's so much tension there. I think

Rebecca (11:45):

Mean, the thing that I would say is that when I say the word ancestor as a black American person, I don't actually mean bloodline. And even if I did, I likely couldn't prove it because the records are either lost or weren't created. You can only go so far back before lineage because of the slave trade is not reported as people is reported as property. And so you can't track it past, once you run into slave owner, you can no longer track bloodline. I think what's true in collective cultures is this very broad collective tissue that means blood or not.

(12:53):

You are family that means blood or not. There is a recognition of some connective tissue between us because of our shared collective experience. And so I have no freaking idea if I'm related to Rosa Parks, I'm probably not right. But when I say that I'm borrowing from the strength of my ancestry, I'm still borrowing from her narrative and from what her contribution to our collective narrative. And so I think one of the things that I have noticed in my sort of limited lifespan is that when I say the word ancestry to someone who is white, they hear something very different than what I hear when I say that word. And so I don't feel the restriction of only being able to borrow from the story of people in my bloodline. I feel permission to borrow from the larger, wider collective that is the black American experience, that is the African Diasphoric experience.

(14:08):

And I would say I even feel permission to borrow things from other cultures. And I say this to Daniel all the time, I'm going to steal that from you, right? I'm going to borrow that, right? And I will give credit where credit is due. I will say, I'm borrowing something from the Latinx experience. If you watch the black interpretation of Bad Bunny, literally there's stuff on social media that's like, why do you care? We're not Latinx. And then it cuts to this clip of this, I don't know what it's, it looks like Bad Bunny in a tiny desk concert, but behind him is this black African drummer who's going off. And then the answer is, because I feel this music in my soul. So you can hear that we are intentionally borrowing something that feels familiar to us because we feel permission to borrow it.

(15:13):

And then there's a lot of conversations in the black community about Bad Bunny that's like, I don't need to understand Spanish to feel what cultural pride looks like, and I'm down for that all day long. But you can feel that sense of, I feel permission to borrow something that feels familiar. I won't name it as borrowing, so I won't appropriate it, but I do feel that permission. And so that's probably what I would say to you, not as a pass for what might be true in your actual blood lineage, but I think that there's a strong strain of resistance for people of European descent around race and racism in this country. It's buried and it's untold for probably really intentional reasons, but it's there. And what does it mean to actually be given permission to give yourself permission to borrow from that and to name it as, I'm actually going to pull something from someone else and I'm going to borrow their collective strength. I'm going to add it to mine so that we could go in a different direction.

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.