Change Your Friends, Change Your Life
A few thoughts on improving the scenery
My sports chiropractor speaks very quickly, in that way that high-energy folks can have their words tumble and jumble together in an effort to get all their ideas out at the same time. I do it, too. Pushed through a mask, that makes him hard to understand. We were discussing how he changed his attitude about life. People. Race. Lots of things.
He’d had terrible issues with co-dependency, which cost him his first marriage.
Oh, can I relate.
How do you and I change an internal narrative, so often laid in stone by troubled parents, abusive siblings and a host of negative players from priests to public relations exec’s manipulative junk that we’re bombarded by all day?
First, you have to notice that the circle surrounding you may well not support your highest self. That’s perhaps the hardest part. When we’re really good at throwing nasty darts at ourselves, beginning with when we see ourselves every morning, the question begins with us. Is this really how I want to live?
And then, what am I willing to do to change that narrative?
If you and I choose to change how we see, think and interact with the world, it begins with a fundamental reworking of our motherboard.
Dr. P began with self-help books. It’s not everyone’s cuppa tea, but it is one place to start challenging what you and I were told, taught and twisted up inside with as kids and adults. We have to begin somewhere. The sometimes sane, sober and simple advice of those who think differently can go a long way towards redirecting that internal conversation.
These things don’t happen overnight. You and I carry a bucketful of beliefs about who we are and what we deserve. That energy radiates from us, and we tend to look for validation in the echo chambers of the Internet.
Which, kindly, if you will pardon the observation, is Garbage In, Garbage Out. The Internet, depending on how we utilize it, will only reflect our bullshit back to us unless you and I have the courage to challenge what we believe about ourselves and others.
Because it’s been such a high profile issue this year, and because this issue touches my DNA around who we are as a nation, how you and I change our perspectives around race is the perfect example.
I’ve been on Medium since March 2018. Since then I’ve been gathering up friends like a butterfly collector. Happily, those specimens aren’t pinned to the board in my office, but often fly in my face about my bullshit and beliefs, showing up when I need help and in one case, becoming not only a dear and trusted friend but also a work partner. Those gems don’t just show up. They take work.
Among those people have been a number of Black writers, mostly women.
Yesterday I read this piece by my fellow Southerner, Deborah L. Plummer:
Dr. Plummer writes with her typical candor:
I grew up learning that it wasn’t wise to trust White women. They had a long history of using their passivity and victimhood against Blacks, particularly Black men. I was warned not to be friends with White women because sooner or later the race thing would get in the way and they wouldn’t have your back.
After the death of George Floyd this year, the outcry and subsequent watershed of articles by Black folks demanding to be heard brought forth additional pieces from Black writers who have pointed out, with varying levels of intensity, the importance of shifting how we see. We can’t do that unless we shift who we hang with, why, and how. Whose words we allow to land and take root in the gardens of our inner worlds.
If diving into racially diverse friendships is too much, too soon for you, you can begin by reading articles from writers with a very gentle voice, such as Rebecca Stevens and Jeanette C. Espinoza. They are extremely accessible. Their stories for me resonate with great truths about what it’s like to work, travel, and navigate a world which negates Black Excellence, questions Black people’s legitimate brains and competence, and feels it perfectly appropriate to allow their kids to touch and stroke Black bodies and hair as though at a petting zoo.
Pieces by Allison Gaines, Sharon Hurley Hall, Dorothy Hines, Ph. D. have further expanded what I understand, and my favorite in-your-face-about-race writer Marley K. has a way of saying it like it is,if you can take your hard truths neat.
To folks like Marley, who sometimes are voices in the wilderness, this piece of wisdom from Zora:
If you’re an opinionated woman or non-binary person of color with a social media profile, you will realize soon enough that your words and sometimes your life is often fodder for trolls, narcissists, and ill-intentioned people alike. Unfortunately there are people out there who do not desire honest and open conversation but rather they crave to get a rise out of you, to stretch you to your absolute mental limit as a power play.
What’s unfortunate for both our Black friends and for us is when we read such articles with absolute incredulity as if such things couldn’t possibly be true. This is of course based on OUR experience, which in the largest sense is utterly meaningless unless of course we are also Black or Brown. This is why changing what we read and whose stories we allow to touch us are so important. If you and I base our entire experience of the world only on what we experience, say, as White Europeans or Americans, then we are by definition, ignorant. Dangerously so. This is how we perpetuate bias and injustice.
Without going into detail about confirmation bias, kindly, those truths are a way of being for Black folks all over the world, whether they live in France or South Africa or next door. Or, they work for you, next to you, or are in line behind you buying toiletries at Walgreen’s.
So the first step is make space for the possibility that such truths exist. When you and I read stories by Black writers, lots of different Black writers, and we begin to see common threads among all of them, after a while it gets obvious that this many people sharing identical experiences in so many different parts of the world means that they can’t be making this stuff up.
For example, I’ve read more than my fair share of reports from Black folks exhausted by comments such as how articulate they are (as if this is a shocker) how unlike all the other Black folks they are (I won’t dignify this) and other insults disguised as compliments shred their affection for their friends. This is a year when many of these good people have shed their Token Black Friend status and headed off ISO authentic connections.
Will you and I provide that? Do we possess the courage?
Again, from Dr. Plummer:
Over time, I have learned that you could trust those White women who understood that the best way for us to connect is by honoring the nuanced racial dynamics of how White Women and Women of Color are experienced and treated in the larger society. You could trust White women who acknowledged the impact of the long history of racial injustices and who recognized the inequity patterns that exist today in housing segregation, wealth creation, education, healthcare, voting rights, and in the criminal justice system.
Black folks don’t want or need Justice Warriors, whose biggest war is within themselves, that they need to be White Saviors. Folks like that, and I’ve been on the receiving end of my fair share, are part of the problem. For in their eagerness to Instagram their claim to fame in support of BLM, they are avoiding the real work of changing the internal scenery which would make them legitimate allies. They will eviscerate others in the name of perceived slights online but don’t possess the moral courage to eradicate the racism within themselves.
This is a good example of what it’s like for Black writers to speak out about their legitimate experiences, from Rebecca:
Precisely. To Zora’s point, above. Black writers, doing their best to speak their truths, live with their life scenery populated by supremacists pigs disguised as people. With all apologies to my beloved porkers, who possess better manners. Imagine living with that kind of hate, day in and day out.
Those of us White sisters who have been subjected to this kind of trolling by men when we speak our truths about sexual assault, why is it so hard to understand that truths of our Black sisters and brothers when it’s not JUST about sexual assault, it’s also about assault based on race on top of it?
Exactly.
About that scenery, and how it reflects our beliefs and behaviors.
Beyond changing the scenery in your inbox, you can also change what you research, how you research, and what you read. For as you expand your repertoire, that changing landscape also invites you to see and experience the world differently. It also allows you to call bullshit not only on beliefs that you’ve held most of your life, those you’ve been taught. This is where it can get difficult.
If you and I were exposed to racism, hate and disrespect within our birth families, our churches and schools (and we all are, like it or not), then part of shifting that landscape is having the courage to call out what is sick and wrong about those beliefs. We aren’t likely to force others to change. Such attempts are nearly always met with brutish resistance, which we’ve seen all year long on full display.
Again, this starts inside us.
Medium is full of incredible Black and Brown writers, whose ringing voices have forced the issue for many of us. No matter how much I want to believe I’m woke, there are layers of conditioning and training I neither noticed nor realized until this year. They are the result of growing up American, growing up a Southerner, and living in a White-dominated, deeply racist world.
At the risk of using an overused word, it is my privilege not to have had to notice what others live with as a daily fact of life.
None of this makes me a bad person. None of this makes you a bad person. What it means is that we’re missing out- cruelly so- on the experiences offered us through far more diverse and rich engagements across race and culture.
That by changing how we perceive, think and feel, in this case about race, the landscape suddenly becomes expansive. Not without challenges. Not without pain or pitfalls.
But my dear, what if you fly? (Erin Hanson)
Those people who have entered my world this year have invited me to grow, to rise, to change, to shift, to shed skins that no longer work. They have forced my eyes, ears and heart to open further, to allow in deeper and often very painful truths. However in those truths are both shared pain and a shared future. Again, Dr. Plummer, on friendships with White women:
We would have long conversations about our power as women. I would share with her that because of racism, Black women have had to dig deep within ourselves to find that power and how that has made us both fiercely independent and lovingly dependent on other Black women. We would share our stories as women of power and become even more powerful. As White women and Women of Color, we would tap into the power of our sisterhood and rule the world.
As we move into a stormy fall, the beauty of October and a much-truncated holiday season ahead, this gift I would wish on all of us. Whatever happens this election, I sincerely hope that individually and collectively we elect to population our worlds with new people, new ideas, new perspectives. I would wish us all to engage, involve and educate ourselves not only with writers on Medium, but in the best ways we can, safely masked, in those spaces were we meet one another in tenuous, hopeful ways, in the face of a braver world.