Honor our grief.
Happy Monday and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily! I needed to create more space for grief in my life this weekend, and dedicated some space in today's newsletter, too. I hope you find resources that can help you on your journey. We'll be holding space for processing grief over on our digital community all this week.
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Nicole
TAKE ACTION
Invest in healing for marginalized communities. Make a donation to organizations like The Loveland Foundation, BEAM, and BACII.
Listen to conversations on grief. We recommend the Finding Refuge Podcast by Michelle Cassandra Johnson.
Consider: What does it look like to center your grief this week? The grief of your community? Your co-workers? Does your organization offer culturally sensitive healing resources?
GET EDUCATED
By Nicole Cardoza (she/her)
The insurrection at the Capitol last week seemed to finally spur people into action. Tech companies kick Trump off their platforms (TechCrunch). Democratic Congresspeople organize for impeachment (NBC News). The FBI tweets for help to arrest insurrectionists. And Republican leaders resign, admonish the actions of the President while calling for “unity” (Buzzfeed News).
But, in all of this, I am missing accountability. I am missing an acknowledgment of the accumulation of harm that we’ve experienced – not just last week, but over the past four years. It makes me angry. It makes me weary. And it does nothing to address the deep and profound grief I’ve been experiencing for the past year – one that I believe many of us are harboring.
Honoring grief is quite different than acting out against our grievances, which has been the crux of our political environment. White grievance politics, put simply, is when politics play to the perceived loss of white entitlement in a diversifying nation. When power is considered a zero-sum game – and the white community historically holds power – any progress made by marginalized communities is perceived “at the loss” of white power. The fight to preserve white supremacy is justified through white grievance politics. We’ve watched this unfold throughout history, but Trump and the Republican party clearly wielded it to rally those disgruntled with the Obama administration (NYTimes). I recommend reading “Black Protest / White Grievance: On the Problem of White Political Imaginations Not Shaped by Loss” by Juliet Hooker to learn more (available for paid download here or watch Professor Hooker share more in a one-hour lecture for free).
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The political imagination of white citizens has been shaped not by the experience of loss but rather by different forms of white supremacy and that this results in a distorted form of racial political math that sees black gains as white losses, and not simply losses but defeats. As a result, in moments when white privilege is in crisis because white dominance is threatened, many white citizens not only are unable or unwilling to recognize black suffering; they mobilize a sense of white victimhood in response.
Juliet Hooker, Professor of Political Science at Brown University, in Black Protest / White Grievance: On the Problem of White Political Imaginations Not Shaped by Loss
Other interesting articles on the subject: James Kimmel, Jr. analyzes “the brain on grievance” (Politico), and Jeet Heer unpacks the difference between grief and grievance by juxtaposing how Biden and Trump address the nation (The Nation).
All citizens need to have the capacity to cope with loss, to “confront the paradox that they have been promised sovereignty and rarely feel it” (South Atlantic Quarterly). But in this nation, white supremacists are encouraged, even invited, to commit acts of violence and insurrection, while communities of color are killed and incarcerated for far less. Black leaders are asked to be more “civil” and “empathetic” to white communities, but white leaders are granted the pass to fight for power through racial oppression (South Atlantic Quarterly). This has been reinforced throughout America’s history, a familiar narrative even if foreign to our generation. The insurrection at the Capitol was centered not just as “their duty, but also as their right,” Daniel Black writes for CNN. One insurrectionist stated it themselves: “This is not America. They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots” (The Nation).
This conversation is not for grievances but reserved for grief. And I write this specifically for the marginalized communities that have so much more to bear. For all those that have experienced the racism, discrimination, exile, and oppression encouraged by this President over the past four years. For the Jewish community that had to see Neo-Nazi insignia at their nation’s Capitol (Quartz) and grapple with the rise of antisemitism during this presidency (Anti-Racism Daily). Those who have had their religious/ethnic identities unfairly associated with terrorism while white terrorism goes unchecked (Anti-Racism Daily). Those who immigrated here to the U.S. to escape the same political unrest that our nation tries to rebrands as patriotism. For everyone dismissed and diminished for warning that these days were coming, and action was long overdue.
We’re here in a new year, carrying an abundance of old grief. We couldn’t feel the events last week in isolation even if we have had the time to process the events of 2020 fully, and many of us haven’t. And in just the past week alone, the political disaster we’re facing may have drowned out stories on the mismanaged vaccine rollout (USA Today) and the significant increase in deaths related to COVID-19 (CNN). adrienne marie brown referred to this in a tweet last week as “grief debt,” the culmination of all we’ve endured “with no time to come apart and land beyond the loss.” And Marissa Evans poignantly expresses how this grief transcends generations in the Black community, carried through the trauma of enslavement to the lost opportunities of those gone too soon.
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We know, too, what the inequities mean for our future. Our pain comes not just from those we've already lost, but from those we stand to lose over time. A specific sadness emerges when you realize that someone may be denied the chance to be their ancestors’ wildest dreams.
Marissa Evans, in The Relentlessness of Black Grief for The Atlantic
But our nation’s response to the events this week also centers white grievance politics, not grief. Leaders call for unity instead of acknowledging the harm. Major media outlets continue to publish pieces to “humanize” insurrectionists. And with news circulating that more attacks are planned for the inauguration, it’s unlikely this narrative will only continue its harmful cycle (Washington Post). If this country will not make space for our healing, it is up to us. We must hold and process our grief tenderly with our community and center collective grief over reductive white grievance politics. Our healing journey may not be linear, but it’s our only path through.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
White grievance politics centers the perceived loss of power and supremacy that white people experience in response to progress for marginalized non-white communities
Our nation has consistently prioritized white grievance over collective grief and loss
We must carve out our own space to process grief as part of a laboratory movement
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