There’s an elderly woman in our neighborhood who put her scrapbooking skills to considerable use this election season, supplementing her campaign signs with homemade posters full of scripture, conspiracy theories, and pleas to vote for our sitting President. I’ve almost taken pictures several times and stopped myself, because it felt mean-spirited.
But I drove by on Saturday and someone had vandalized her signs, and I did feel that warranted a picture.
And a note.
I’ve rankled at the rhetoric to just get along with folks who voted differently. I don’t feel I have to give space to someone who believes that law enforcement shouldn’t be held accountable for policing people of color differently than they do white people, or who argues that life begins at conception and yet doesn’t extend that same care and fervor to a child born into circumstances beyond their control. I get angrier about it every year.
But I’ve also been thinking a lot about how we do the work to heal, and a lot about what my role as a white woman of privilege can and should be. And in talking with a friend - and frequently my therapist - about how to productively spend what emotional capital I have on conversations with the people in my life that may lead nowhere, do nothing, and just raise my blood pressure because they’re not ready to have those conversations. Because I’m not.
But I have to get ready.
In that same conversation with a friend, she shared a talk with bell hooks where hooks is asked how to push allies to examine their privilege - and I found her response so genuine and so measured. I strongly encourage you to listen because I’m just going to miserably paraphrase. But it’s a process, coming to terms with privilege. I can’t force someone to be where I am. I can’t enter every conversation with an agenda. I can’t fix people or change people or cancel people (unless they really deserve it, and some of them really do).
I cannot and should not decide for others how they do this work but I can decide for myself.
Without productive dialogues, we will be in four years where we are today, where 55 percent of white women voted for a man who has demonstrated time and again that he has no respect for women, and whose active agenda has been to disenfranchise women, immigrants, and people of color.
I don’t understand it. I don’t know why they did it. And I also 100 percent understand every single person who isn’t ready to empathize with them - I don’t know if I am and I do know that I’ll never be, for the hateful and the cruel among them.
But when so many of these votes were cast out of fear, I find I want to use what energy I have to reckon with that fear. These women are easier for me to reach than they are for others because of where I live, because of the color of my skin. For me that means I need to do the work of listening, of respectfully challenging, and when I have to, setting boundaries with acquaintances, with friends, and with family. This does not mean I have to provide a platform for hateful ideas or tolerate intolerance. But I am not in danger. I owe it to the people who have been, who are, to create opportunities for understanding where they are possible.
I don’t want to know what my neighbor did with the note I left for her. Maybe she’s devastated. Maybe she’s angry.
But maybe she has someone in her life she’s a little bit closer to having a conversation with.