however much more softly

whiteness as grieflessness (lovelessness...)

this passage came to me twice:

“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”

first i saw it in Krass Journal, which i found on the street some weeks ago and scooped up for future collages. then i read it again on Friday in Eula Biss’s essay, All Apologies.¹ i figured i needed to read it, to be with it again. the words belong to Black poet and theorist Fred Moten, uttered in a conversation with his collaborator, Stefano Harney at the end of their book The Undercommons.

it felt like a another expression of the relationship with self that I heard Nicole Newman describe in an interview on the Emergent Strategy podcast, when asked what she was practicing. she said,

“I mean, I think the first thing for me--. So, my grandmother died, and then a aunt who was very close to me died four months later…And I think that time taught me that the only ground that I have is the one that I cultivate inside of me…..And that can't be what Aja gives me. It can't be what my partner gives me. It can't be what my friends give me..I have to be in a practice of deeply rooting myself…..And if I am not rooted, I can't practice anything else….And so, for me, the practice has been, how do I let my grief be….Like, ground, right? For something else….And I think the other practice I've been is what is the--, then, how do I be a invitation? ….As a organizer, as a consultant, as a facilitator, you spend a lot of time in strategy……Right? How do I say the thing or do the thing or ask the question that gets the outcome. And for me, the practice has been less about that and more of, can I be a invitation? When people are experiencing me, are they experiencing something that makes them curious enough to see something else as possible for themselves?….And so, invitation, which means making direct requests, right?….But it also means creating the space for people to not always meet those direct requests….I have to invite, and I have to be okay that, depending on what's happening with another human being or in an organization or with someone else, that they might not be ready to meet my invitation…..And sitting with that has--, is the practice that is….You know, it is knocking me. Cause in every area of my life, I can get so fixated on what I wanna create and what I want the outcome to be that I don't actually join with another human being to say, what's more possible when we come together. Not just when you consent to my agenda…..It's hard. It's hard, but it is so different, right?….I wanna go fast, and I wanna do the thing, cause we don't have any time, and the conditions are killing us, and everything's bad. And I'm like, <squeak> Oh, I actually have to be more grounded and more generous. Okay. That sucks. <adrienne and Aja laugh>. And it's counter to what everybody is telling us that we need to do in this moment…..Right? Generosity and going more deeply inside of ourselves to find the well that allows us to even engage is not what everyone is calling us to in this moment. So, emergent strategy has been the thing that I've held onto--…..In this time because it's the only thing that gives me--, I feel like in some spaces, gives me the credibility to say there's some wisdom here….Right? There's some wisdom to how we don't have to meet the moment. And for those people who are doing that, more power to you, that's not my call in this season. Right, and discerning what's my call in this season and not what the call is that everyone else is responding to.”² [emphasis mine']

squeak indeed. the well within ourselves. it is there. there’s a lot of shit clogging all our wells but i believe that our wells are accessible and can be restored. fresh water.

Moten is referring to white people tangled up in white saviorism who bypass the ways that this system hurts them. those folks, a category that i am sometimes a part of, are not in touch with their own pain, are not in touch with their own hurt, yet imagine that they have So Much To Offer The World, are The Ones To Save Black People and all the other nonwhites. this delusion is one of the more sinister consequences of the insidious and enduring superiority complex that gets installed in us. it leads us so far away from ourselves.

it is neither instantly gratifying nor particularly pleasant, but i think the more i know what i’m bringing in the hurts department the more i might discover what i can offer to the coalition. the more i meet my own shit with kindness the more capable i am of offering you some. the more we can actually meet each other to study something other than war, other than the wound.

1. Notes from No Man’s Land, p. 208

2. https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vS6M_m9TS-pq-TicohaOaY3Nc-im6NdYVIzR3qrRiOP58UlIs70575HmC2FFAIhlDBvkB7cH2ivfzwt/pub or listen from 34:52