Sexism & Racism: Care, Curiosity & Social Justice

The Good Girl part of me wishes I could tell you that I’ve been doing anti-racism and social justice work my whole life.

I haven’t.

Based on my education and experience, I thought of racism and white supremacy as historical, part of the past. As far as my own behavior goes, I figured if I wasn’t doing anything overtly harmful or racist and I had some Black friends and colleagues then I wasn’t racist.

Sadly, it took the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd in 2020 to wake me up to massive systemic inequities and persistent white supremacy. These travesties opened my eyes and got me doing the work.

I began by reading My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem with a community of folks on the same path. Since then, I’ve been reading, listening and processing in an effort to unlearn white supremacy.

Recently, I read Regina Jackson and Saira Rao’s White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How To Do Better.

White Women pulls no punches and speaks directly to the racism in white women – all of us. Not just torch-carrying Proud Boys. Not just skin headed Neo-Nazis. Not just conservative Republicans. All of us. Even NPR-listening progressive Democrats with Black Lives Matter signs in the front yard. All of us.

Me.

I could only read small sections of the book at a time. I felt defensive, confused, fearful of doing (or thinking or saying) something wrong or causing more harm. I felt called out, but for what I wasn’t entirely sure.

It will take time for me to process and understand this book. It’s going to take lots of unpacking and unlearning with other white women. I’m in no position to offer any insights now — or probably ever. But one thing the authors did has given me a toe-hold into how to approach that unpacking: the parallel between racism and sexism.

Reading and re-reading, unpacking, unlearning. (Photo: Rebecca George Photography)

I will never know what it feels like to suffer under deeply entrenched American racism, but I do know what it feels like to deal with age-old patriarchal sexism – at work, in sport, in relationships, in the general world. It’s exhausting and frustrating. Seeing the cancellation of female actors over 40, the gaping disparities in women’s athletics, the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, fills me with a rage that I don’t know what to do with.

Most men in my life don’t talk or act in sexist ways but I find it hard to talk to them about the inequities of being a woman in this culture. Men in my life often get defensive, confused, or fearful of doing (or thinking or saying) something wrong when talking about cultural oppression of women. And honestly, I didn’t know what I wanted from them.

Jackson and Rao draw connections between my experience of sexism and misogyny and their experiences of racism and white supremacy. Even in the context of the painful and difficult work of anti-racism, this parallel helps me find a way forward.

I see that what I want from men is simply for them to look at my lived experience tenderly, with curiosity and to be willing to use their social power to speak up. I want them to care enough to listen to women’s stories and their emotional toll, for them to believe me and for my experience to matter, for them to see both the benefits and harms they get from the patriarchy. And I want them to stand with me and speak up about what they know is sexist bullsh**t.

Of course different Black folks and POC may want different things from white people. But for now, as I continue to unlearn my own racism, I want to approach it with care and curiosity. Care and curiosity about experiences I haven’t lived, care and curiosity about how I benefit from the systems that are causing detrimental harm, care and curiosity about how I’m harmed by racism, too, and a willingness to both speak up and be corrected when I inevitably mess up.

Adding something familiar to an unfamiliar scenario can build connection, understanding and compassion. If you find yourself baffled by another’s experience, can you find your own parallel? Or can you relax enough to care and get curious.

The Delight & Insight of 1000 Rubber Ducks

Rivers are my favorite kind of water. I love the ocean and lakes, sure, but I’ll take a rocky, rolling river (extra bonus for a waterfall) every day of the week.

Funny, then, that for a weekend getaway with my sister, we landed in Sperryville, Virginia. My sister found the spot: a small, vibrant town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains with the Thornton River burbling through it. As an extra bonus, this weekend was the annual Sperryfest which includes The Great Rubber Duck Race down the mighty Thornton.

Ducks warming up for the race.

One thousand rubber ducks are tossed off a bridge at one end of town and whichever one crosses under the bridge at the other end of town first wins. It was without question one of the most adorable and delightful things I’ve seen in years.

The dumping of the ducks. (Photo: Ireland Hayes for Foothills Forum)

As Sebastian the pro river racing duck explains in his interview with the Rappahannock News, the town “started these races as a way to draw attention to the need to clean our rivers and protect our environment, to pick up litter and fight invasive species and protect water quality.”

And, even for me – someone who loves rivers and is committed to protecting the environment – it worked. The Great Rubber Duck Race literally threw in something both familiar and unexpected which helped me look at the Thornton River differently.

Watching a waddling of ducks cruise down the river helped me notice how clean the water looked (and cold! when I saw kiddos wading in) and that there was no Japanese Knotweed or other invasives (that I recognized). I noticed the trees that were down (those ducks were so skilled, they didn’t get caught up…mostly) and a series of small waterfalls. I’d seen the river in passing but a thousand rubber ducks made me look at the river more tenderly and with more curiosity.

Consider how introducing something different or familiar but out of context (like bathtub duckies in a river) can shift attention, awareness and appreciation in other arenas.

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For more photos of The Great Rubber Duck Race, go here. And for a few short videos, go here.

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Next week we’ll look at how my perspective on racism was shifted in just this way.

Savor

Emily: Softly, more in wonder than in grief.
“… I love you all, everything.—I can’t look at everything hard enough.”

~ from Our Town by Thorton Wilder

Floating in the Caribbean Sea, salty warm water holding me up, little white clouds in a huge blue sky with frigate birds sailing overhead. Tears prick at the back of my eyes. I look at Frank paddling around next to me, “I feel like I can’t take it in enough. It’s all so amazing and I can’t absorb it enough.”

“Honey,” he says, “That’s true for everything.”

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On a recent April Saturday when everything, just EVERYthing was happening in Charlottesville at once – two City Markets, the Dogwood Parade, the Tom Tom Arts & Community Festival – a friend walks by almost in a daze.

“I always forget about parades,” she says with misty eyes. “Parades always make me cry. Something about the humanity, the simplicity, the waving. All these people. They are just so dear. It’s so hard to be human and here we all are, gathering to watch each other walk down a street.”

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Sometimes it strikes me when I stand at the sink and watch a squirrel carelessly jump from one tiny branch to another. Or when I see his dirty boots outside the front door. Or when I make us a cup of tea after dinner. Or walk that same path with a friend.

It can happen in the midst of the extraordinary, sure. I mean, Grand Canyon, of course. But it’s the average, done-it-thousands-of-times, the ordinary, the mundane that hit me to my core. Someday, I think, I will miss this. I will wish for one more average, normal day.

Perhaps more than any scene from any movie, book or play, I think of the scene in Our Town when Emily, recently dead, returns to an innocuous day in her life. The Stage Manager thinks it’s a bad idea but agrees to escort her to the morning of her 12th birthday anyway. He was right, of course; it is too painful for Emily to see now what she hardly noticed when it was happening.

Emily: Let's really look at one another!...I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye, Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?

Stage Manager: No. (pause) The saints and poets, maybe they do some.

This is the scene I think of when I wash my hands in warm water or hang clothes on the line or tell my beloved he has spinach in his teeth. Someday, I will miss this so much it will bring me to my knees.

A few weeks ago, my stepson’s radiant partner and aspiring opera soloist gave a recital. Our family gathered from all around to be there. Her singing is a glorious, whole-body, visceral experience. I cry every time I hear her.

And near the end, in a Möbius strip moment, time curled back on itself when she sang Take Me Back. (It turns out Our Town is not only a play but an opera by Ned Rorem — who knew? not I. — and Take Me Back is Emily’s climatic aria.)

This beloved scene from Our Town, sung to us by this gifted young woman in this little church in Chapel Hill, at this recital to which I cannot listen hard enough.

So here she is, Lily Smith – coming soon to an opera stage near you! – singing Emily’s aria and bringing me to my knees.

Lily Smith performing Take Me Back from the opera Our Town by Ned Rorem on Friday, April 5 2024

May we all see what we might otherwise overlook. Appreciate the unbearable sweetness that resides in even the crappiest of days. Take in the wonderfulness of life as best we can, knowing that even if we are a saint or a poet we can’t really realize its exquisiteness. May we do our best to look and listen, and call it good.

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PS The day this post went up, I just happened to listen to this truly delightful episode of RadioLab about the little things. Listen to Small Potatoes here ~ I highly recommend.

It’s Just Living

“Aging is just another word for living.” ~ Cindy Joseph

Words matter. How we talk about ourselves, our bodies, our relationships – everything! – shapes our experience of it.

Feel the difference between “just a cat call” and “street harassment.”

Why “women’s fiction” and not simply “fiction”?

What about the statement, “he had sex with underage women” as opposed to, “he had sex with girls”?

What about the word “aging”?

What do we really mean when we say “aging”? Getting older isn’t something that you suddenly start doing at a particular time in your life. Everybody, EVERYBODY, from the moment we are born until we take our last breath, everybody is aging. But we wouldn’t say that that the 12-year-old Little Leaguer is an “aging athlete” or that the college freshman is an “aging woman” – even though they both are.

Think about it for a minute: when you say “aging” to describe a person what do you mean? Over a certain number of years? Having a certain condition? Looking a particular way?

In their 2020 paper What if there’s no such thing as “aging”? (Mechanisms of Ageing and Development), Alan A. Cohen, Véronique Legault, and Tamàs Fülöp question the use of the word. They write:

Because we use the word “aging” so frequently, both colloquially and scientifically, we rarely pause to consider whether this word maps to an underlying biological phenomenon, or whether it is simply a grab-bag of diverse phenomena linked more by our mental associations than by any underlying biology. ...[A]ging is not a unitary phenomenon.

What we mean by “aging” is largely culturally driven and is connected to broadly-held societal beliefs about getting older.

In her book, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live, Yale professor Dr. Becca Levy explains that those with positive beliefs about aging live more than seven years longer than those with negative aging beliefs.

Dr. Levy contrasts the negative age bias in the United States with that of many Asian cultures which traditionally hold older people in high esteem. And that negative bias or “ageism” is everywhere. She writes that “according to the World Health Organization, ageism is the most widespread and socially accepted prejudice today.”

And the ramifications of this ubiquitous ageism are significant. She explains,

“This is one of the most harmful things about negative age stereotypes: they don’t only color our actions and judgments toward other people; often, they influence how we think about ourselves, and these thoughts—if they are not counteracted—can impact how we feel and act.”

Noticing these cultural beliefs and making different choices is one way we can change these beliefs. Let’s start with these two ideas:

(1) “Aging” isn’t actually any particular biological phenomenon and

(2) Our beliefs about aging have a powerful impact on the length and quality of our lives.

The word “aging,” then, is at best vague and unclear and at worst, a conveyor of negative ageist beliefs. So what if we played with saying “living” instead? How would that change our thinking and perceptions about the whole process?

Here are a few quotes about aging from some famous folks...and what they sound like with the words changed:

Knowing how to age and not being afraid of aging is very healthy. ~ Evelyn Lauder

Knowing how to live and not being afraid of living is very healthy. ~ Evelyn Lauder-ish

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How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I'll say that. Wonder and terror. ~ Keanu Reeves

How do I confront living? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I'll say that. Wonder and terror. ~ Keanu Reeves-ish

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Aging is not uncomplicated. Creativity is an extraordinary help against destructive demons. ~ Ingmar Bergman

Living is not uncomplicated. Creativity is an extraordinary help against destructive demons. ~ Ingmar Bergman-ish

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The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over, and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous. ~ John Moritmer

The living process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over, and runs off laughing. No one should live who isn't ready to appear ridiculous. ~ John Moritmer-ish

Here’s something I hear myself say:

My aging body needs lots of care and attention.

Saying instead, “My living body needs lots of care and attention,” feels more expansive, inclusive and compassionate to me. Sure, I’m aging but that’s not what’s interesting. What’s interesting, what I want to focus on is the living.

Effervescent Again

It happens at Jazzercise classes and Taylor Swift concerts. You can feel it at in sports whether you are on the field or in the stands. Kids create it while singing and clapping together. Adults make it happen with fancy handshakes or dance moves from decades ago.

When human bodies move together we create an energy, an alive sensation that is different, somehow more than if we were moving alone.

As I prepare for teaching at the Tom Tom Festival in Charlottesville (April 20! Do come!) and for the May/June series of Nourishing Movement classes (Online! In-person! Do come!), I keep being inspired and excited by the extraordinary feeling of moving together.

Sociologists call it “collective effervescence” and about a year ago, I wrote a post on it. Below is an extended excerpt to whet your appetite for the bubbly buoyancy of moving together in whatever way you like.

When was the last time you felt “collective effervescence”?

Excerpt of Collective Effervescence ~ april 25 2023

In 1912, French sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term ‘collective effervescence’ for the euphoric unity generated when humans move together.

In their 2016 Exercising Together Boosts Performance and Forges Friendships, Jacob Taylor, Emma Cohen, and Arran Davis explain that “coordinated group movement – what we call social motion – sets the stage for the changes in brain chemistry often associated with altered perceptions and beliefs.”

The social connection that happens in social motion can provide us with what the researchers call “the buzz necessary to reverse cycles of social and physical inactivity, bringing us closer to one another, and closer to the physical and mental health we require to thrive.”

There is lots of research that bears this out. In her 2020 Scientific American piece, Marta Zaraska writes,

Many group activities boost our sense of belonging, but research shows that doing things synchronously can build even stronger social ties and create a greater sense of well-being.

And the research of Bronwyn Tarr, an Experimental Psychologist at the University of Oxford reports that

...when you synchronise even a small movement, like the tapping of your finger in time with someone else, you feel closer and more trusting of that person than if you had tapped out of time.

...the social closeness humans feel when doing synchronised activities may be because they trigger the release of a cocktail of bonding hormones, including endorphins.

Collective effervescence! (Photo: Rebecca George Photography)

It is such a human thing when we move together. Whether in the realms of religion, dance, or sport, synchronized movement is a way of signaling to our brains and to each other that we are connected. Some researchers speculate that moving together was a way of expanding our “tribe” beyond the handful of people we could connect with directly.

What I find in my work, teaching both in-person and on-line, is that part of what connects us even more is that we are moving together but not the same. Part of what moves me to tears watching these Flash Mobs is that none of us are professional dancers. We’re all just people moving our particular bodies together and in our own way.

The cool thing is that while I’m partial to group movement to music, you can tap into the power of collective effervescence in simple ways. Rock a baby, clap along with a kiddo, sway with your beloved, or simply tap your fingers to a song with a friend. Any movements that you do with someone (including doing them online) will fire up your brain with bonding hormones.

The experience of collective effervescence is the reminder that we all need and want love and belonging...even as we find them in our own way.