Catch And Release

Portland Race Talks, is introduced each month by Donna Maxey using an analogy…that having white privilege is like being fish in the water.  It’s white folks’ water. The world we live in is the water in which we swim, eat, play, and everything else, and we have a hard time understanding why others who need something other than this particular water cannot thrive in a white privilege environment.  The privilege is so pervasive that light skinned folks can’t describe it any more than a bird can describe air.  

To seek equity, it seems white folks would need to be like a fish out of water.  I remember thinking to myself the first time I heard this, if a white woman like me can achieve the American dream in spite of inequality, everyone else must be able to get what I have?  What I failed to see was that I had married a well employed white man to get what I have.  I have the privilege of marrying for love, but I can't help but wonder if color influenced my ultimate choice.  In my culture, to be truly transformed, one must seek the truth and struggle against the anesthetizing effects of having everything we ever wanted.  

I’ll try to speak to this.  Even if I fail or worse, offend. 

Underneath all of this success, for me, is a dark pain. I know the long history of oppression that has led to my success and that it continues every time I take advantage.  Some of the sadness comes from a place of fear, that there is only a tiny morsel of success and if I don’t use it, someone else will and then I will have to fail knowing it's for the common good.  In reality, there is plenty of success.  I have engaged in group-gluttony for so long that it hurts to have less so that everyone can have enough.  There isn’t a limit to “success”, there is a limit to my success. It takes time to shrink my hunger for material happiness, so I am always looking for something to replace the kind of sustenance to which I have become accustomed.  I replace it with service, faith, community connection, laughter, creativity, curiosity, family love, friendship, story telling, teaching, organizing, nature, and more.  The hard part comes when I have to look at what the world around me is defining as happiness. 

There are new, glossy, pretty, and useful products being invented, created, sold, consumed and used as a way to connect with others.  The illusion is to believe that I could have more success if I take part in this production process and that not taking part in this process means we will all fail.  It’s as if I am actually hurting people like me when I refuse to succeed in this agreed upon way, to take that promotion at work, to get that book published, to get my kid in that good school, to get that loan, buy that house, go to that good college, look like those models, talk like people in the movies.  Every time I say, yes, I support the system.  But, how can I walk along side all of this temptation and be different?

Stopping to be quiet in all of this enticement is one way I start to observe and see through the illusion.  The joy I feel in looking at the stars in the sky, hugging someone I love, hearing amazing music, reading a poem, or dancing, is enough to shake off the illusion, but the loneliness I feel when I am excluded can be overwhelming.  This exclusion is nothing compared to oppression. 

Fish Out of Water by Glee 2009 

I go to Gandhi to remember to live simply that others may simply live.  I am nowhere near Gandhi's kind of simplicity, but I see his vision as something I will do someday when I am braver than I am now.  

The other helpful idea is to understand the notion of a commons.

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons

If we all have equal access to common resources, like success, a good job, health, community support, etc. and we have a say in the future of these common resources, we have the opportunity to lead a full life.  I can’t recall now the specific study, but I was about the success of the commons being that if we all take just what we need and not more, we all succeed in the long run.  If any one of us takes more that we need, we all fail in the end.  I am reminded of what often happens after a natural disaster in an urban environment, a run on goods, like water, food, medicine, and more.  Humans are always portrayed as feeling panic when we think there isn’t enough to go around.  And worse, we are often told that this is human nature, survival of the fittest. 

Truly, when we all agree to put the resources into a common space and calmly talk about how we will all get what we need, there is peace and we all live in the end.  If we come at this panic in a society where one person is considered lesser than another, the recourse is to grab as much as possible so that the lesser might have less that is needed to survive.  This is why practicing non-competition is so essential to creating an equitable society.  Engaging in friendly dialogue across boundaries, playing non-competitive or co-operative games, using consensus or unity process in group-decision-making, and restorative justice methods in response to dysfunctional behavior are useful ways of practicing. 

What about the pain I feel when I realize how much other folks have suffered for my success?  After all, the real work here is to create equity, to put up what has been put down by making way, stepping aside and speaking up.  How do I check in with this suffering in a healthy way?  Or maybe this is the goal, to break open.  I’ve been told to lean into it.  What?  Lean into the pain and feel it completely to understand it.  Don’t treat it as if it is just another day, business as usual.  Listen to or read the stories of people who have suffered.  Sit down, stop everything, go for a walk, talk to a good friend, talk to the pain and ask what it needs to feel heard.  Then speak to this pain in yourself, even if quietly at first, or in poetry, or in a small gestures.  Be tender.  This, for now, has been good advice.  Like a fish out of water, I feel the thirst for comfort and the struggle it takes to be whole. 

For me, being Quaker is like being a fish out of water in American society, where materialism, competition, militarism and growing economic inequality are the norm.  But, as for white privilege, Quakers have in some part individually been accepting of white success, even with a testimony of Simplicity and one of Equality. Still others have worked to change this.  In terms of fish and water, I think this means I will need to keep swimming, but endeavor to learn how to create water that is alive for everyone.  

A large portion of humanity have been misled into believing that their happiness depends upon their possessions, position, power, prosperity and all the other adjuncts of material well-being--and even if they do not have them, they believe this and strive for them.  Some, faced with a truth that proclaims something diametrically different, will abandon their illusions.  Others, however, will cling to them; and the more they are threatened by reality, the more desperately they will cling.  Often they will attempt to evade the threat to their precariously ill-founded sense of security by attacking the peace maker.  For this reason, throughout history, many have been slain. -Adam Curle 1981 

Learn More: Debby Irving: Finding Myself In The Story Of Race (Ted Talks) 
                     Women Of Color Speak Out