Another Step In A Long Journey

After being deservedly taken to task for my admission of some major faults , I wondered what I could possibly do next. 

I’d like to apologize for it.  The audience I assumed for it was homogenously modeled after myself; in my attempt to do some good, I did the exact opposite by saying things that no one should have to hear.  But I don’t expect an apology to be enough.  Because it’s not.  Hopefully I can amend my behavior satisfactorily in the future.

A major clue as to what my be better came in the form of Restructure!’s post, Declaring your anti-racist intentions may make you more racist. 

When I took a good look at myself, I knew that Restructure! was right.  It is easy for me to claim a pro-justice identity – and to think that I’m acting on it just because I claim it.  It’s not so easy to actually live a pro-justice life. 

Taking the related link by Scott Meade into account also, I’ve figured out a few solid goals and begun to implement them as much as I can:

1. Make eye contact with everyone.   I am not the best at eye contact with strangers in general.  But in trying to lessen my obvious discomfort in general, I have left people who are different from me behind.  So when a woman with a cane asked me a question at the post office, I made sure I looked her in the eye when I answered.  When a black man who I would have instinctually cringed away from opened a door from me, I pushed against that instinct by looking him in the eye and thanking him.  It sounds so cold and clinical here, but in real life, it forces me to acknowledge our shared humanity and treat them with the same respect that I would treat anyone.  It is a very concrete action that I can do when I find myself behaving a particular way with someone. 

I am tempted to say that it doesn’t change the way that I think – my initial reaction was not the best – but I find an alteration in the way I think about them when I have made sure that our eyes met.  They become A Human Being with a difference, rather than Different.

The one unanswered (unanswerable?) question is whether or not it means anything to them – not in the sense of them feeling some gushing gratefulness towards me for treating them the way they should be treated but in the sense of not being looked down upon by me.  Which is to say that, as belledame222 mentions in the comments here , I hope that it works for them.

2. Don’t let myself or others get away with saying or doing anti-justice things.   This is another hard one for me personally, considering both my Western European cultural aversion and abuse-induced personal aversion to rocking the boat.  It is also difficult for the sheer fact of how much abuse goes on in everyday life and how much we are conditioned to dish out. 

But it’s also silly for me to use those as excuses, as I have done so much in the past.  I need to spend less time arguing with privileged trolls on blogs and more time arguing with the people I know and love that they need to treat other people with respect or lose mine. 

I was thinking recently of an instance one spring when I was riding my bike along the drainage ditch here and spotted a young boy chasing after a mother duck with a huge brood of new ducklings.  Though it terrified me to do it, I stopped and barked at him to leave them alone.  He stopped… and then began to chase them again.  I yelled even louder, honestly pissed off at that point, and the poor birds managed to get to safety.  The boy was obviously angry with me – his companions were staring at me wide-eyed – but my only concern was the health of that duck and her babies.  Revisiting this moment, I thought to myself, If I’m willing to do that for a duck but not willing to do that for my fellow human beings, what do I really think of them?

3. Push myself to go out of my comfort zone.   My comfort zone is predominantly white, heterosexual, male, able-bodied, etc. 

This is the first year that I truly recognized the importance of Juneteenth and I wish I could have gone. 

There are a few local clubs with truly diverse makeups that I would like to try to attend once I have my driver’s license. 

I would also like to do some more volunteer work; my volunteer work with homeless kids years ago erased all assumptions that I had about them, including an unrealistic homogeneity.  Plus, I simply want to do something good for someone else for awhile.  I miss that.

4. Don’t speak for people when they can speak for themselves.

5. Stop assuming that I know what it is like.   This has manifested itself in outward ways that I still cringe at, as well.  It has inspired such ridiculous statements as "I think all artists are perfectionists in some way" to a friend with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  Even my brushes with particular experiences, like the delicate year I spent in a plastic shell, don’t qualify me to tell someone else how or what they think and feel.  I soundly reject being told how I should be reacting to something; I should likewise soundly reject my attempts to project myself onto others.

6. Continue to listen and learn.   Which leads me to ask for recommendations for further possible concrete activities or if there are any adjustments that I could make to the above that I didn’t see myself.