.
There are only really two awful ways to wake up.
The first is when you're late for something, and you know it in your sleep, and while you're dreaming you hear this subconscious voice screaming through the fog: "Late! Assholewakeup! Youarelate!" And it gets progressively louder, and louder, until all of a sudden subconscious-screaming-you, and dreamy-not-paying-attention-you smash into each other, and that crash wakes you the fuck up, and you jump out of bed and have to run around for the ten minutes you inevitably only have left before you have to be at whatever it is that you're late for, psychotically trying to get your shit together, with the imprint of your hand still embedded in your face and your hair cowlicked on one side.
The other awful way to wake up, is when you're blissfully asleep (and by blissful, I mean effectively dead to the world) and you gently wake up, listening to the quiet of the morning, connection and awareness slowly reviving... and you remember something really awful that happened the day before. And you open your eyes and grimace and just say to your ceiling: "FUCK. FUUUCK."
(Like, for instance, waking up and remembering how cold it is outside.
Whenever it starts getting warmer I feel spring returning, and I get disproportionately excited -- like twelve year olds and ice cream trucks excited, like a surprise party where everyone you've ever liked in your whole life shows up, like an entire desk made out of solid chocolate excited.
When warm weather starts to return, so does Spring, and with it, the return of my will to live. Cause when I wake up and remember that just going outside makes me lose feeling in my hands and feet, I feel like that's a good enough excuse to never leave my room again, instead of being a legitimate part of the world. And its not. A good excuse to do that, I mean. Which brings me to number two.)
Sometimes I wake up, and right away, remember that my thesis is still not done. I'm so exhausted today, and today was supposed to be a day where all I did was write. But a lot of things have been happening this week that I couldn't just push aside and say "I'll deal with after". So I engaged with those things, and didn't touch my thesis at all. The thing is, every time I do that... or every time I'm reminded of situations that I need to address, I get a little more stressed. And that stress... it makes it harder to work on Div III, because I just want it to be finished so badly, I guess. So it gets stretched out. It takes even longer, because it becomes increasingly harder to focus on it so single-mindedly. That stretch... its like running a marathon where the terrain is getting rockier, the finish line feels like its getting farther away cause now your legs are tired and you're starting to trip.
Like being asleep and hearing that voice in the fog telling you that you're late; you can't ignore it forever. The longer you ignore it, the worse it'll be when you finally wake up. You'll be later, you'll have less time. The longer you take to wake up, the harder you will have to hit the ground running just to catch up.
There are things, that for me to ever feel 100% again, I need to turn to and fix. Things with people, personal things... things that have seriously been eating away at me, eroding all the walls I erected to block out noise and zero in on finishing school. These things were just whispers at the beginning of the marathon, but now they are fullyblown and in my face. If I could just stop for a second, I could deal with them, and come back and run this race a whole lot better. But you can't stop a race.
One of those things I had to engage with this week, wanted to and needed to, had to do with racism at Hampshire (and in life). I don't want to say too much about this week because its not my place to (yet?). But I want to say some things about it...
Learning/hearing about, and engaging with racism, has changed everything. And it should. The more I become aware of it, the more I learn, the more I see how it structures my world and the systems within that world, it changes all of that more and more. I can't look at the world anymore in the same way. I can't look at choice or privilege or academics or activism or education or health care or myself or anything in the same way. And slowly, slowly at first, but then with an insane burst of acceleration, it has changed my studies -- this year especially, it has changed how I'm writing and what I'm writing about.
When I'm writing about health care and culturally scripted identities, racism obviously plays a role in that. But not just in obvious ways... in assumed ways, in subliminal ways, in ingrained ways. Part of what I'm writing about has to do with the cultural and public health focus on individuals being responsible for being healthy, getting sick, and getting healthy again. If I start going in-depth as to all the problematic factors/ideas at work in that focus, then I'd have to retype my thesis here. But one things that has really struck me this week is that focus in terms of really hard-to-pinpoint ways that it is inherently racist (and classist, sexist, etc. too) by how it ignores privilege.
Putting the full responsibility of health and "success" on individuals glosses over and willfully ignores all the socio-political factors at work historically and presently. The focus on "taking care of yourself" and all the messages of eating organically and "healthfully" and getting enough exercise and getting regular mammograms and getting tested for HIV regularly all ignores a hella privilege at work behind those statements and what they imply.
First off, those statements assume we all have equal access to health care, education, information, prevention, etc. Second, they assume we all have the privilege of being able to place our health as a "priority". Third, it ignores who is exposed to what; what exposure people have to information and resources, and more literally, geographically and environmentally, who lives where and why, and what they are exposed to because of that. Lastly, those statements assume equal access to, and the equal quality of, all medicine and treatment.
All of the assertions about personal responsibility and health assume equal footing to begin with, and equal footing to end with. They ignore those other factors at work. And when it so happens that someone does become ill, or can't get well, it transfers responsibility onto them for that "failure" as well, again ignoring the extrinsic socio-political factors at work which might prevent them from doing so.
This all reminds me of fucked up arguments I hear about affirmative action -- that students should get into college based on "merit" and "hardwork", aka the more subversive idioms for the deeply entrenched culture of good ole culture American individualism.
What does "merit based" mean when not everyone has the same access to resources/academia and when systems/structures are designed to preserve privilege (especially white privilege)? When educational institutions are were designed by white men, for other white men?
And again, what do those ideas imply about fault and blame when someone does not "succeed" (in school and in resisting illness)?
Sometimes I feel really pressured by my committee to "keep my objectivity", and to "not be too passionate". I don't know... maybe they're right, and I should keep my implied crazy conspiracy theories about 'isms and access and privilege to myself. Or... maybe to me, "objectivity" has become synonymous with apathy and the very privilege it is to BE "objective" about this shit. Cause I don't really want to be objective, or dispassionate. I don't want to only interrupt, I want to interrogate.
This week, this has all been making me think really deeply not just about racism, but also about becoming "actively anti-racist"... a fellow student made this analogy at a teach-in about becoming aware of racism and about being actively anti-racist; they said that as white folx, we are all on one of those airport moving sidewalks, being carried forward by our privilege towards and into racism. You can stand on that moving sidewalk and be completely passive, you can not budge at all, but you're still still moving, you're still being carried forward. Becoming aware of racism, that's turning around on that moving sidewalk. But being actively anti-racist? That means you have to turn around and start walking. Really fast. Because otherwise, you're still going to be on that moving sidewalk, going in that direction.***
Some people were wondering, when do we reach the end of that sidewalk, when do we reach the end of the race to get there? And another student said that maybe the way we have to think about it, is that it will always be about running -- that we will/must always "be becoming anti-racist, and will never arrive".
For the past few years, waking up to how pervasive racism is in my life and the lives of those around me is not only really disturbing because I'm seeing it, but because of how long it took me to BE seeing it.
This week specifically has made me think about it all as if I'm already running one race, and now I'm waking up while running that, and realizing I'm running another at the same time. Like I said before, the longer you take to wake up, the harder you will have to hit the ground running just to catch up. I think about how many years of my life I have been not been becoming actively anti-racist, and how hard and far I have to go to even start getting there. And how tired of running many, many other people already are...
I don't know if this makes any sense... this entry has kind of degraded into cross-metaphor and analogy which I'm not sure makes any sense to anyone but me.
Whatever; either way, there's no returning, no going back to sleep. All of this is moving, going, not stopping -- and every morning I have to wake up, and deal, and start running the races again, even if the finish line is farther away than it was before, or even if there isn't any finish line at all.
***note: I'm pretty sure that analogy is from Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum.
0 comments:
Post a Comment