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.