Outsider Grief Relief

As my own story of illness and dying takes the focus here, I'm going to retire the page, OGRe Home. But she will not go gentle; she must be heard before she cedes. 

"OGRe Home is a community for Outsider Grief Relief. Grief arises from exclusion. We try to exclude what we cannot accept, but we fail because the unacceptable always pushes its way back in. If we can't accept our weakness or dependency, we diminish our crips and our mothers. If we fear our unbounded sexuality, we punish or mock our queers. Then, we're shocked when the crips and queers take to the streets, or that nice woman of color who was supposed to stay on the other side of town actually marries our sister."

I have long longed to be included and I've carried the idea that those of us who have been excluded can understand and support each other. Now I'm not so sure. It turns out to be rather dangerous to mingle trauma. Self protection, or you could call it identity protection, rises up with just a whisper of threat. 

My first Zen teacher, almost 20 years ago now, was a piercingly truthful Black woman who also disabled by Lupus. She came to give a talk at a "Psychology and Zen" meeting and I felt an instant recognition when she talked about her experience entering White Zen groups. I begged her to teach me and she finally agreed. I wanted to understand how she could so resolutely express her true self in communities who seemed so different. From her I began to understand how racism really works and how difficult it is to have a conversation about it. She told me about how her White women friends cried when she expressed anger about centuries of oppression. Eventually she stopped sharing with her friends. She didn't see the benefit.

Is there any alternative to sheltering our fragile selves? If so, how do we share? How do we listen? This is my Koan.

More than a decade ago I remember telling a White gay male friend that, inside, I felt like a gay Black man. Now after considerable but not enough anti-racist education I understand that I had not earned the right to say such a thing. I am not perceived or treated as either, and I cannot generalize about the inner experience of people in the category. But here is what I meant: I wear an acceptable personality and am afraid of being discovered as a fraud. I am flamboyant and sometimes provocative. I like men, sexually, and I am a bit like a man and a bit like a woman and I feel more gay than straight, meaning that I challenge normative relationship expectations and normative presentations of gender. And I have often been perceived as dangerous, and also a bit fun. 

Does my weird racist identification help or hurt the cause of changing structural racism? Both, I think. I may have more empathy for gay Black men, but I might be so into how groovy that is that I don't do enough to shift inequities. 

At our last White Work on Racism meeting I made the mistake of showing a clip from Atlanta, a skit about a Black guy who said he was trans racial; he had always felt like a White guy inside and wanted to be recognized as such. It was hilarious partly because it was impossible. He would never be seen as White. Unfortunately, I learned that the skit was both offensive and dangerous in ways I had not forecasted and could not control. The skit itself was a vivid exemplar of our limits. A Black man scoffed. A trans woman criticized the Black man. The trans racial man opposed gay marriage and everything trans. 

Social science tells us that the more privilege we have the less empathy and generosity, but also that trauma makes it harder to empathize with The Other. Our working zone is as thin as a razor's edge. We need courage and good shoes. 

June 18, 2021