The shields we carry
Some things about race I’ve been thinking for a while but haven’t had the courage to put to the page until now
Hello Dear Readers,
I’m coming to you from a hotel room in Jamestown, NY. I typically don’t share my location on the interwebs, but I’ll be gone from here by the time you all read this.
The location matters though, because I’m learning again how much the places we spend our time shape our worldview.
I’ve been healing and shedding tons of ideas about race lately. There are these frameworks about racial hierarchy, privilege and even antiracism that I’veclung to for years only to find that what once felt like a revelation now settles like residue over my spirit. I’ve never known a change quite like this one, so it’s difficult for me to categorize it. But over dinner with my dear operations lead, Jordyn, I found myself finally wrapping my mind around the shifts I’ve been experiencing.
My ideas about racial hierarchy, power, “whiteness” and oppression started to shift when I moved to rural Georgia almost four years ago. I was coming out of a stressful work environment where I’d been navigating some complex, racially harmful situations. So it made sense that I wrote a book trying to give language and solutions to the frustrations I’d been living through.
But I quickly realized as I interacted with rural folks—materially poor people of all shades, white children in foster care, Black farmers and contractors growing wealth, Latine homesteaders raising families, and white cattle farmers and plumbers serving their neighbors—that my fancy frameworks didn’t hold water in this place. At least not in the ways I was used to.
The critical race theories that sounded really good in my college classrooms and that were helpful in unpacking organizational power dynamics simply didn’t click in this new community I was navigating. The racial history, though still full of trauma and harm, seemed to settle differently along the dirt roads and hay fields than they did in city high rises and along the edges of gentrifying communities. It was just…different.
It’s an uncomfortable feeling to have your most deeply held convictions stand toe-to-toe with your neighbors’ lived experiences, and for those convictions be be found wanting.
It was difficult to acknowledge that the very racial frameworks and power analyses that once functioned like a clarifying pair of glasses had begun to feel like a pair of distortion goggles. They narrowed my view tremendously. They limited what I believed to be possible and true for myself and for others—all based on the color of our skin.
It’s tricky, and I want to be nuanced here. Of course racism is still very real out here where I live. But filtering every aspect of life through the lenses of academic race theories did not hold up here in the ways it seemed to when I was working in urban, non-profit life. And trying to make those theories fit anyway started to warp how I saw myself and my neighbors.
I found myself interacting with complete strangers, seeing them first and foremost as racial beings, sizing them up based on my political stereotypes, and hardly ever seeing them as a people.
I found myself doing strange intellectual backflips to explain why the young white girl aging out of foster care with no plans and no prospects was still somehow “more privileged” than the Black woman graduating from college with a job offer in hand and the world at her feet.
I found myself being critical of the substantial cross-racial collaboration and community building I observed in my town, undermining it constantly with questions like, “Yeah, that’s great but who owns the land?” and “Yeah, we love to see it but do those folks really know and trust each other?”
What was once critical thinking had seemingly become hardwired in my neural pathways as pure criticism. It was a thief, stealing my ability to be present, to connect and to participate wholeheartedly in the new story many folks around me were telling and living about race.
When I pause now to consider why my worldview came to this point, my best guess is that these racial frameworks once served as a protective shield. There was a sense that if I could understand past oppression, articulate present harm and anticipate future pain by way of defining and categorizing every racial interaction, then I would somehow be safe. I would somehow find wholeness. I would somehow be free.
But life is teaching me that carrying a shield all day, even one that I picked up in a season when I desperately needed it, is a really heavy burden. It’s hard on the body. Strength fails and the heart still grows weary.
I’ve been learning a ton in therapy lately about how trauma and stress responses get baked into our nervous systems when we’re children. As adults, without conscious effort and healing, we’ll return to those same patterns to cope with the challenges life brings. Even when we’ve outgrown them. Even when they no longer serve us. Even when they are no longer needed.
This has me wondering, to be really honest, if the bulk of my racial justice education work, and even my work with The Diversity Gap, has all been one big trauma response.
Yikes, right?
I feel a twinge of embarrassment admitting this, but I also feel overwhelmingly human. I feel relief. Telling the truth is good for the soul.
As vulnerable and uncertain as this confession makes me feel, in a way it is a testament to my healing and growth. It’s a testament to the ways Creator has been unforming lies and reforming true foundations in my spirit. It’s a testament to the fact that life, again, feels full of possibility.
Our traumas and our wounds do not have the final say on who we’re becoming.
This post has gone a different direction than I thought it would. It feels a bit like a journal entry and less so like a well-curated series of invitations. But…I’m okay with that for now. We’re all just out here trying to find our way, healing, changing, asking new questions, remembering who we are.
If you’re sensing an evolution at your doorstep, or an invitation to set down an old shield that used to protect you but is now just a weight you’re dragging around, then I want to invite you to consider what rest might look like.
Becoming new is scary work. But staying the same, especially when healing is calling your name, is far scarier.
Say yes to your life, friends.
Thank you for being here.
Bethaney