The Personal is Too Political

Performance final for BCULST 587 Performance & Belonging, Performed March 8 2018

One night, my partner and I

were on the couch

looking at data

about the overrepresentation of East Asian students

at top universities in the US.

I brought it up because

I was just told that as

a person of Chinese descent,

I couldn’t be

part of my campus organization

for underrepresented students of color.

My partner, who is white, leaned over

And whispered, guess you’re not oppressed anymore.

She smirked, didn’t catch my heart icing over.

I panicked

Somewhere in there,

I knew I was more than

my politicized, raced identity,

but I had internalized the oppressed status

as a capital P Person of Color

and grew attached to the

underdog comfort it provided me.

The crystallized realization:

I don’t know how to be a part of my communities anymore

if I’m not performing oppression

in some culturally recognized form.

In one breath I demand justice and equality

For myself

and my friends

but in another,

I put forth a fastly stereotyped

minoritized persona

that gives me permission

to stay angry and raw.

I heard Brene Brown say,

(sometimes she says wise things)

“Fitting in is when you want

to be a part of something.

Belonging is when others want you.”

What are the things do we do to be wanted?

Internalize damage-centered narratives of ourselves.

I look now to Eve Tuck,

In “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities".

Tuck’s letter is a caution to indigenous communities

against internalizing brokenness for political gains.

Recognition via pathologization

Social justice cultural movements

Have been overly dependent on

strategic essentialism as a political tactic

And so, its false claims have bled into

the personal understandings of ourselves.

I wanna push into that shameful feeling

That I described having earlier

And consider other, deeper ways of being

that don’t involve conflating harm with value and belonging

power with un-value and un-belonging

You see, I am uneasy about the spiritual effects

of always presenting as the Other,

the sufferer,

the wronged.

We are more than a receptacle for injustices doled out by society.

Some of us have always known this.

We must tell the other true stories about ourselves.

I don’t trust any ideology

where the sacred and the profane are constantly shifting

Who is most oppressed and

deserves the center of public attention?

First it’s women. Then it’s Black men.

Then women of color.

Then trans people.

Then gender non-conforming people.

Then trans women.

Then Black and brown trans women.

Then disabled folks.

Then disabled trans folks.

Then disabled Black and brown trans folks.

Then intersex folks. Then… you get the pattern.

(Much respect to you, Audre)

But I wanna set aside

the quaint framework of the circle

because a circle only has one center…

Of belonging

The rest is filler, margins, and the nameless outside.

Center one group, and everyone else

has to be decentered.

That is why we all take turns in the blessed center.

There is only one.

I am interested in who we are becoming as people

as we continue to perform

oppression-first activism that antagonizes.

Everything single thing we do

when trying to change the world

also changes us.

“God is Change”

Octavia Butler, Earthseed

Every act of anger, rejection, flash judgment,

and malice I unleash on another person

carries an echo that reverberates inside of me.

Over time, this piles up into a barrier to

openness, healing, and growth.

Every time I tell the same, one-sided story

about myself as an oppressed person,

I am shutting out other stories about my multitudes,

including my complicities, con and responsibilities.

Whiteness provides me a too-easy example

To talk about this

I’m having a increasingly hard time

Contributing to the constructed realities

Of my white queer and trans friends

And folks who perform those identities online

They do this to distance themselves from their whiteness

In the US, we have to situate

The discourse of queerness and transness

into the neoliberal colonial project

of individuation

of claiming personal freedoms

And legal rights as citizens

So when unquestioned,

queerness & transness becomes less

Of a gendered way of being

And more of a politic to reify

One of my close friends is genderqueer and white

So many of our conversations

Over the past few years

Revolve around how strangers

don’t see their gender

And their sadness around that

It’s almost like

They have to keep reminding me

Of their un-belonging

Or else I’ll stop wanting them

I care about them so much

But the damage-centered narrative

They’ve built their identity around

Is a barrier to our deeper connection

Ruby Sales, black elder, civil rights leader, theologian:

“There’s a spiritual crisis in white America. It’s a crisis of meaning— we talk a lot about black theologies, but I want a liberating white theology. I want a theology that begins to deepen people’s understanding about their capacity to live fully human lives and to touch the goodness inside of them rather than call upon the part of themselves that’s not relational. Because there’s nothing wrong with being European American. That’s not the problem. It’s how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality. It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed.

As a black person, I want a theology that gives hope and meaning to people who are struggling to have meaning in a world where they no longer are as essential to whiteness as they once were.“

We live in a world

Where whiteness is no longer essential …

Today it’s white people

Tomorrow it’s gonna be me

Cause I think we’re all gonna find ourselves

At this ex crisis of meaning

If we keep holding on to

The reversed hierarchy

Of belonging

Identity,

And rightness

Granted through shared oppression.

Shortcuts like this

are not meant to be taken forever

I want to keep on acknowledging

that sacred space

between the political and the personal

and the life-giving work

that can only spring from there.

Yes, speak openly about your harm

And seek redress,

but do not let that be your whole story.

Otherwise there will be nothing left to do,

nobody left to be once society has been transformed,

and justice and equality has been restored

Do we really believe in this future?

Do I?

How can I start acting like it?

I do not want to spend the majority

of my waking life

complaining about white feminists,

mocking straight men,

silencing TERFs,

calling out cultural appropriation,

or policing people on their pronoun usages.

I want more for all of us.

We are meant for much greater work.

You could say, it’s an exciting time rn

As some our movements for justice

are finally beginning to get

the wider cultural recognition

and traction they deserve

At least in media representation

As social justice became a cultural norm

I stopped being responsible for myself,

I forgot that I belong to myself

I forgot that we belong to each other

I want a spiritual return to ourselves

A renewed commitment

To tend to our spirits

Before attending to the outside world

An effort to be in Right relationship

With those placed around me

A turn towards relationality,

Rather than empathy

(Says Jade and Ruby)

So that the fullness of ourselves

Eclipses our political activism

I want my dignity to be seen.

So, I have to honor the dignity in others.

It doesn’t matter who they are-

friends, comrades, partners, acquaintances,

Strangers, enemies, mortal enemies.

I honor my own dignity

when I choose to see the

inherent worth, the redeemable part,

in someone else.

I can be embroiled in battle against you

and still battle you as a whole person.

I want an ethics of activism

that speaks to the necessity of this.

I am essential. You are essential. This is is essential.