This piece was supposed to be about art. I want to create a space in which to have the conversations that I have always hoped to have about a subject that has demanded my time, my focus, my love, but about which I have many questions. The blog post that I began to write was my first step into that conversation. But right now, I feel tongue-tied. That conversation will have to wait. There is something that I must do first—a deep cleaning, if you will. I have been busy sweeping, scrubbing, sorting and folding. Perhaps that analogy is only partially right. Perhaps I should say what I mean, without analogy. I am subjecting myself, my thoughts and my words to the physician’s oath to abstain from doing harm. But I doubt my ability to discern between poison and sustenance—that having consumed the two together through my life like strawberries—covered in pesticides and picked by unpaid labor—I disguise that which I should know to be deadly with cream and good intentions.
I had begun this blog post before the veil was dropped from my eyes and the emperor stood before me in his massive, naked, orange truth. To say that the veil dropped isn’t really to say very much. The veil was made of an insubstantial material like cheesecloth or fishnet stockings, printed with the American flag. I could see through it. Embarrassed by the fact that the emperor showed no shame, I sometimes looked away, as though my shame might be a counterweight.
This embarrassment was not new to me. I felt something similar once when I was eight. I had changed into my leotard, tights and ballet shoes in the bathroom in the basement of the local library where we had our dance classes. Walking out of the women’s bathroom, I had to pass by the men’s room. In the doorway there was a man with his pants around his ankles. Oh my, I thought, poor man. He forgot to pull up his pants! I looked away so that he might not have to see that I had noticed anything amiss. I didn’t know at that moment that his nakedness should be construed as a threat. Adam and Eve noticed they were naked and felt shame. Surely then, this man must not have known he was standing in the doorway showing his penis to a dozen young girls who were trapped in the corner of the hallway without a grownup anywhere in sight.
At twelve when my father hit me in front of my classmates, I felt embarrassed again. Or rather, I felt it when I looked into the eyes of my classmates, knowing that the veil was torn and my father had been seen as he was; shameless, naked and ugly. I did my best to repair the veil that time.
And again when I was seventeen, taking my first solo cross-country train ride. The elderly gentleman sitting next to me bought me a tuna salad sandwich that I had not asked for nor had I wanted. When I fell asleep in the darkness, I was embarrassed to wake up with his hand cupping my breast. I changed my position in my chair, batted his hand away, and stayed awake until my Chicago train reached Albuquerque. This time, I knew the appropriate response would have been to challenge him or to holler and call for help. But, looking at him through my poorly repaired veil, I felt embarrassed for the man. He was old. The trespass had not been violent. He probably felt ashamed? that ought to be enough.
Why does a girl wrap herself in the shameful words and actions of so many men? Why protect men from facing the truth in their own reflections by pretending to them that their actions were not what they were? It’s not love or reverence. It’s not belief in the patriarchy and racial supremacy. It’s not ignorance. Indeed, I think that I have never been innocent as to who these men really are. I have always seen them, sometimes challenged them, voted against them and often worked against them. But for some reason, I accepted this mantle of shame passed down through generations of women as though it were my duty to carry it. It isn’t heavy, but it sticks to the skin like someone else’s sweat and it stinks of fear and resignation. I imagine women the world over carry the shame that rightfully belongs to the words and actions of the men they have loved and despised or not known at all. I will not speak for women, I will refrain from asserting knowledge of another's soul—but for myself alone.
This mantle of shame is not simply woven of the trespasses men have made against me as a human being with my own personal autonomy and integrity, that is but the weft. The warp is the knowledge that I am of a family that has historically, purposefully and under the protection of law and tradition denied personhood, autonomy and integrity to fellow human beings. I know it from personal violence and I know it from family stories and I know it from examining genealogies. The twin genocides that are the source of the land and wealth of this country were committed by my ancestors. One might follow them from Pennsylvania to Virginia, Virginia to North Carolina, North Carolina to Georgia. With each move, my family received from the federal government a tract of land stolen through wars, “skirmishes” and the removal of the people who lived on the land, in violation of treaties and morality. On each tract of land, a plantation followed. Even the desperately poor sharecroppers in my family history are said to have asserted their own value to be higher than that of another man by claiming ownership of another man. That this is not my whole story is desperately important to me. That this is part of my story is a truth that I have hardly known how to confront, though it clings to me. That is my genealogy, facts I could not help, the source of the shame that I wear and resent. And yet my chosen education fares no better, subjected to examination.
My values were planted in soil tilled and fertilized by white privilege and liberally sprayed with the pesticide of white supremacy. They have been nourished by an education devoted to the philosophy, history, literature, science and art that underlie the claims of white supremacy—at least as it presents in the gardens about ivory towers. Pesticides kill those things that compete with the gardener’s plan. I have glimpsed moments in my education in which something—an idea, an expression, some beautiful form; a nascent possibility or fully matured concept—seems to have been silenced, disappeared, made infertile, asphyxiated. Mostly, I have not followed the urge to understand the thing that was killed off or passed over. Mostly, I have been busy learning to be a good student—a good girl? Bearing witness (because I lie for the sake of propriety and not to protect myself) as I politely avert my eyes—embarrassed by and ashamed for those whose outsized egos and power have already protected them from my searing judgment, making the expression of it feel as futile as I have sometimes been advised it would be unwise. And in taking on that mantle of shame while pretending —by allowing others to pretend—that what is clear may be muddy, that Aristotle’s natural slave was a philosophical concept having nothing to do with slavery, that the Civil War was about state’s rights and had nothing to do with slavery, and that the hundreds of federal troops deployed into Albuquerque and other cities across the country yesterday are tasked with solving gun crime in poor neighborhoods plagued by drugs and have nothing to do with stealing the November election by suppressing the vote—I have made myself complicit.
And to be complicit in this society today is to be guilty of murder. And to feel that is to feel shame indeed. Useless, sticky, paralyzing shame. Strawberries, anyone?
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