I’ve been married for almost 30 years. The most important thing I’ve learned might be how to monitor my own communication, how to watch my tone and choose my words from a place of love first. It took a long time to learn this, and I often fail at the tone part. I can be petty and snarky, especially when tired or hungry. But my spouse and I trust each other, and that’s really crucial for any of it to work.
That trust grew over time, evolving from an intent into a lived reality. Like all evolutionary change, it was failure that taught us as much as anything else. We are taught a dangerous lie as children, that sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me. But the first time we are devastated by hurtful words flung at us, or the first time we scream in rage at another person, we start to realize that this isn’t true. That words can cause a great deal of pain, and that once something is said, it cannot be unsaid.
Now, this is always true. Once something is out there, it’s present. Once words have been said, concepts named, ideas fleshed out, they cannot be put back into nonexistence. Sometimes, this is a terrible reality. I forget that we have enough nuclear and atomic weaponry to destroy the world many times over. Arms races are a great example of this oft vicious cycle.
But this is also a wonderful reality. Concepts become more and more normative as we use them. It’s June, which is generally seen as Pride month in the US, and of course all of the language around sexuality and gender is a dynamic and fluid example of this. Straight binary existence as the only way of being is a culturally dominant concept but this is fading as our language around personhood itself has grown, our understandings expanded.
Something has slowly happened here in the US around race and white people. I am a white woman from the South, and I have always talked openly about race, said the out loud things we aren’t supposed to utter. But I used to be the only one, and now I find that I have other voices joining me. And not just people I know, or who share a background with me. White people all over are speaking up more and more about the reality that race in America is our problem, white people’s, and we’re the ones who have radical change to make. It’s been years since I’ve been called a race traitor, which may mean I need to step up my game.
We are experiencing a massive wave of reactive public policy that attempts to shut down all talk of race, class, and gender in our national education systems. While Critical Race Theory is the term of the day, the big bad to be stopped, it is the IDEAS that are so dangerous. And I’ve read my Faludi, I understand the inevitable Backlash that attempts to thwart these changes, swing pendulums reactively away from progress.
But like the idiotic accusations yelled in anger to a loved one, or the spilling of a family secret, or the introduction of the atom bomb, once it’s there, it’s there. It can’t be unsaid, it can’t be undone. And so it must be transformed, used, and managed.
I’ve certainly been told that I caused a thing by naming it. Sexual misconduct, fiscal mismanagement, legal complicity, racial tension -for all of these things, I have been scolded in anger for naming them aloud when I’ve seen them. But I don’t make those things real when they are named, these things are already far too real. I make them visible to those who cannot see.
That is part of what is happening around race, our national history, and education. The reason Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” became so popular so quickly was its point of view, of course. I know I had never read history through the eyes of those who WEREN’T the winners, those on top, the victors of whatever conflict we studied. His work started white dominant culture onto a path of recognizing the voice of the ‘other’ as valid. It shouldn’t have been as groundbreaking as it was.
Our national narrative is a white-washed mess. And when we don’t teach the real stories -WHY are there no Cherokee, Chickasaw, or Choctaw in places that bear all those names, HOW Black GIs didn’t gain the same household wealth post WWII that white veterans did, WHERE violent retributive attacks have happened -we cannot know any of our own stories either, because we are all a part of what has come before.
We will continue these conversations. Not only because we must for our own survival -all of us- but also because it cannot be stopped. The ideas are circulating, the concepts becoming known. And too many of us are hungry for truth, healing, and real knowledge that we will demand it.