Shopping; didn’t get to Al P.’s New Years Walk in Trout Lake, le sigh, made pizza, wrote and mailed a letter to my mOm, made biscotti dough, three loads of laundry washed and dried and sort of staged for being put away, recorded Bob Dylan’s New Years Day.
This morning I shall bake biscotti and then deliver it to the deserving and the undeserving alike. Then I’ll probably make another batch because otherwise it’s too much room in the fridge as it chills.
This morning’s twitter is same like every morning, Black people begging not to be dismissed out of hand. Latest is some F6 (you heard it here first, that means white person, framed as a racist by Black people – white is #FFFFFF in hex code, lol) white woman doctor married to a Black man who kicked a Black woman out of a physician’s group for bringing up racism and then trolled for cookies on twitter by talking about how medical racism almost killed her husband.
The offending physician is Jamie Coleman, MD FACS.
There is a reason I don’t talk about Phil much. He’s not a psychic cookie. He’s my dead Black ex-husband, and I’ll say it here once: his untreated ADD made his diabetes hard to treat because it made him non-compliant and medical racism almost certainly shortened his life. But I’m not going on twitter to say that.
Marrying him didn’t touch my racism. That’s why I never say ‘but my husband was Black’, ’cause it would be BULLSHIT. 35 years on, only sitting down with it and working on it and thinking about it and feeling the feelings and taking certain words and constructions out of my working vocabulary and listening, listening, listening, to the lived experience of (particularly) Black and Indigenous people — that is what is moving the needle.
If you don’t have to think about it, THAT’S PRIVILEGE. And most of the time white people are completely unprepared to think about it, and they ache at being accused of racism, because they won’t take the first step of saying to themselves SIT WITH THE VICTIMS AND LISTEN until you TRULY HEAR.
The big thing for me is always pushing back on an academic or intellectual approach to anti-racism. You can’t take the pain away of a hundred micro-aggressions per day just by acknowledging them in a published paper. (This is not to disrespect the many Black academics who are busting ass, I’m just saying that you shouldn’t play patty-cake with racism for cookies in academe.) Racism for me is an owie. A big one. And I want to acknowledge how much it hurts, day in, day out, and how all of it is so undeserved by the people who day in, day out, suffer under its brutality, greed and malice. Until you can be a little kid again, sad and furious about injustice, desperate for fairness, anti racism will never grip you.
