power play

So, it's been over a year since I've been told that I ought to start blogging more. I did a couple about six months ago (or gosh, nine months ago now. This year has gone by so fast), but I haven't dug into the stuff that I'm afraid to write about--what I'm learning by living in the Rainier Valley, about race, about privilege, about how to communicate with people who have experienced different levels of social power than I have.

In fact, talking about power at all is inherently distasteful to me. I am learning to do it, and recognize it, but it still just makes me ill. Why is that? I guess I want to think that we really do start from the same basic place, my friends, the people I talk to, the people who I love and want to engage with--I come in to most conversations (I think) with the basic assumption that the person sitting across from me has just as much confidence (or more) than I do, and feels that they're just as good as I am (or better).

And yet, one of the main things I've struggled to learn this last year, as I begin to talk to people about racism, and Christian faith, and how to work for justice for all people, that I don't walk into conversations as "just me". I don't enter a conversation just as Dan, who thinks the Bible is really interesting, and can't stand putting academics up on pedestals, and who thinks that the most important things I've learned spiritually have come from friends and from prayer and from journaling, and who really wants to be on the right side of the racism issue, and who doesn't have any desire to see people of color put down, and who wants to be liked by people of color and who wants my friends of color to see me as someone on their side, who they can trust and want to be with.

Nope, I don't enter into a group, a conversation, or a church, just as that person--how I see myself. I enter as a tall white guy, who has a graduate degree with four letters (M.Div, the stupidest degree name on the planet, by the way--I guess they used the word 'divinity' a little differently back then, but now it just sounds like I'm mastering God. Which is funny.) I enter conversations as someone who never had to learn a second language, unless I felt like it, for fun, who never had to experience being 'the minority' at school, and have teachers of a different skin color talk about how they should all be really nice to me now because just a couple decades ago my parents couldn't get a drink of water at the same fountain as people of the same color as all the people around me. To put all this short, I enter into a conversation as someone with power.

That ugly, ugly word again. What does it mean? When I walk into a room I can tell people of color what to do, and for some reason they have to do it? I don't feel that kind of power. Does it mean that I have all this confidence, this great sense of self that comes from having all of society's privileges open to me? I sure don't feel that. My own experience of childhood was one of intense insecurity, and often when entering into new social situations I still feel that insecurity.

What does it mean to have power that I do not feel? That I do not know how to use? That people tell me I am using when I had no conscious intention of using it--this power that I don't know I have?

Most of what I know at this point is only intellectual--I don't really feel any of it, still don't really KNOW (in the biblical sense, heh heh) what it is. And I still have no idea how to write about it.

I'm getting that it is completely intertwined with culture. And that because people of my culture and skin color have kicked out, kicked down, made laws against, moved away from, people of other cultures and skin colors for generations, that means that my culture has become 'a norm'. So ways of speaking, (for example, speaking very explicitly about a desire, something I want from someone else), ways of learning (going through a process step by step, definining each task along the way), ways of operating in groups (wanting to see a community come to a quick, specific decision, perhaps), these things that I take all for granted as 'just the way people work'--is actually just the way that certain people work. So I can be in a conversation where the other person and I are using the same words in different ways, and there is serious misunderstanding.

Here's the rub. When that misunderstading occurs, I am much more likely than a person of color to just assume that my thinking is right. Because I never had another, dominant culture living around me and over me teaching me that my way of thinking isn't right. Because I grew up in an environment where my culture was taken for granted, so my approach, when encountering thinking radically different from my own, is to retreat easily to "well, he or she just doesn't understand".

But when people do that to you, you feel invalidated. Here's a different rub, because being part of a multicultural community, I have felt that kind of invalidation a few times. This sense that I only think the way I do because I just don't get it, and if I spend some more time here, and pay attention, then I will just get how my thinking is off. So in those situations, I feel like the one without power, because I want these people of color to like me, I want to feel respected, I want to feel like my beliefs and ways of thinking are valid and valuable.

So pretzel it back (is 'pretzel' a verb? It is now)--where is all this power I supposedly have? I have it because I can go anywhere else in the broader society and receive confirmation for my views and my emotions from people who are more like me. What I am experiencing in the Rainier Valley is what people of color must experience, constantly, in the overall culture. But for them, going through that cultural stress, and going through those feelings of they're just forcing me to 'get it' like them, is necessary to get a job, buy a home, get any kind of education--it's like society-wide required culture stress, and coupled with the conscious or sub-conscious discomfort that people of the dominant culture have towards them.

Even as I write this, it seems extremely paltry. This is fairly basic stuff in the books and the classes and the everything else on cultural competency, and yet I'm needing to keep writing it out and analyzing it because it's not sinking in on some level. How does the 'system' operate? What is 'the system'? After a few years of reading and discussing, I still don't feel like I have a solid answer to that question. The main reason that learning about racism and privilege and power is so scary for me is that it makes me feel so dense. Truly, truly dumb.

And I don't like that.

But I have to keep going.