Hi hi,
I am writing to you from a café in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I am here meeting family that traces back to the same little shtetl (village) of Zembin where our people lived for several centuries. My family is ashkenazi Jewish on both sides, and when my dad's mother's side of the family escaped Belarus around the turn of the last century, most of them came to New York City, some went to South Africa and some went to Argentina. We've been in our respective diasporas for over a hundred years now. We speak different languages, and being Jewish means different things to us. This encounter with my family's Jewishness in an Argentine context is makes me want to talk to you about White Supremacy, so let's talk! Specifically, about the tension of trying to not employ white supremacy thinking to dismantle white supremacy.
On one hand - as a white jew, I must understand my white skin privilege and identify as white so that the aspects of me that have assimilated into white culture are not taken as neutral. I cannot explain my life and my experiences without claiming both my experience as a Jew AND as a white person in the United States. And if I do not claim my whiteness then I cannot authentically speak to and organize other white people against racism.
On the OTHER hand - the important anti-racist work of deconstructing the entire notion of whiteness, a categorical construct unmapped to any genetic racial truth. Part of de-centering whiteness and creating authentic multi-racial relationships involves white people moving past "white neutrality" and investigating their own cultural heritages. The cultural poverty of whiteness and its placelessness generates the hunger to consume and abuse other cultures. White supremacy created the construct of whiteness, so to dismantle white supremacy we must deconstruct whiteness.
So, how to do both? and how does that look here in Argentina, where I have family in a different racial context, drawing light to how provisional the coincidence of my birth is in the racial context of the United States?
I am shpieling on about this not just to explore my own specific racial situation, which I'm also doing, btw. I think that this creative tension, of identifying with a group and dismantling the constructs of separateness AT THE SAME TIME, is divine.
From a spiritual perspective I believe that the only things worth adoring involve at least some level of paradox. Paradox and seemingly irreconcilable truths generate a space of mystery and surrender, where our logical brains have to let go and our hearts and sheer yearning take up the slack. There is Spirit living in the messiness of life. This is why if you're looking for a spiritual journey, I highly recommend putting your whole heart in social justice, it will wooooorrrrrk you and humble you and gratify your soul. The tension is where we begin, not where we turn away.
How many other irreconcilable truths do you wish to hold together?
That you can love someone and need to have a boundary with them?
That you are proud and confident AF and deeply insecure?
That you need to leave but you're not ready to go?
I come bearing no solutions. You're welcome. May 2019 be a year generous enough to hold all of your paradoxes, all of your deepest hearts' longings for justice, all your identities and all the joy you didn't even know you were allowed to have.
For 100% Liberation Throughout Space and Time,
Annie-Rose