How will you fight white supremacy today?

I realize this title may seem aggressive. Before I get really into it, I want to share some news items:

Asian-American woman kicked on bus, January 22nd

https://www.koin.com/news/crime/asian-american-woman-kicked-on-bus-man-faces-bias-crimes/

 

Man faces bias crime charges after destroying Portland store, harassing worker with anti-Muslim slurs, January 22nd.

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/portland-bias-crime-anti-muslim-slur-destroys-store/283-3cb7cc17-0f20-4e07-bba9-d90fdf9c5cfd 

 

Man faces bias crime charges after assault at Portland Safeway, January 27th

https://katu.com/news/local/man-faces-bias-crime-charges-after-assault-at-portland-safeway 

 

While the skin colors, genders, and ethnic backgrounds of the people attacked varies, there are some strong common denominators between the attackers, though we get that from the photos, not really from the descriptions. 

 

There is a certain conditioning where it feels rude to mention skin color. In these incidents, it feels very clear that the victims were targeted due to their skin color, so we get more information on them. It seems reasonable that the color of the attacker was a factor too, but that doesn't need to be mentioned, because white is the default. 

That has its own problems.

A good starting point for your own fight might be to examine whether your reaction to the first part of this blog was dismay at the escalating violence and unfairness of it, or a desire to ask about crimes committed by Black people.

These three events are in the same city, within a single week, and that is a lot. They are probably also only the tip of the ice berg. 

 

All three of these assaults rose to the level of criminal activity, involving physical injury or destruction of property, and they had a public aspect, with witnesses or video footage. There are probably a lot of verbal assaults and dirty looks and smaller things that don't get reported. It makes sense if many people of color hesitate to contact Portland police about indisputably criminal encounters, based on a history of various offices having friendly communications with white supremacists and the alarmingly high possibility of the wrong person getting shot.

It is also worth pointing out that in searching for links to these articles about these incidents - which I had mostly heard about on local news - I had to keep adding "Portland" to the search because similar assaults are happening in multiple other cities.

 

If you are still in the quibbling stage, you have homework to do. If you have reached dismay, keep reading.

 

As we were getting closer to the election, and then the inauguration, I had this fear that things like this would happen. Biden would probably win, he would probably successfully take office, but Trump supporters would be angry and lashing out. While the Capitol Insurrection did happen, it would be more incidents like this, individuals getting attacked in what you could call isolated incidents, but they are part of a larger pattern where thinking of them as isolated is not helpful.

 

I didn't know what to do about it, and I still don't. 

 

Maybe caring is a start.

 

Then, after caring, maybe educating. Have you looked inside yourself?

 

Our church is not great on race. Sure, we have now officially refuted that Black people born before 1978 were less valiant in the pre-mortal life, but I suspect that some white members were still sort of assuming less valor in 1998, and that in 2028 we will still have some who have never gotten the memo.

It's not just that this is terrible and gross; it gets people injured. It gets people killed. 

Let us not forget that if Portland police had listened to one Black woman harassed on a train one day, it might have prevented the attack that killed two white men (and nearly killed a third, and emotionally scarred a lot of people) on another day. 

Look inward, and then look outward. When people talk about the bigotry they experience, don't write it off, assuming things can't really be that bad because you never notice racism. It's there, and if you are not seeing it then you need to look harder. 

You may be able to save someone. It may end up saving you.

A good starting point could be the book I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown. It covers more the microaggressions than the outright assaults, but that's where a lot of us are.

I don't care how white you are; if you have any aspirations to following Christ, fighting white supremacy is your fight.

How will  you fight it today?

 

Related posts:

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2020/08/mormons-and-racism.html

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2019/01/possibly-thing-i-hate-most.html

Don't be that guy

I am going to tell stories about two people, and then see if I can make a point with that.

Recently I told an anecdote on Facebook about blocking someone who was constantly argumentative so blocking was the only way to get peace. My point in the story was that clearly that person was picking fights with a lot of other people, and maybe they would be happier blocking too. 

The funny thing about that is that two different friends asked if it was someone else, a different argumentative person we all knew. No, but then when I told them who I meant, they all got it.

Sadly, there are lots of people like that.

That made me curious, so I checked and I only have three people blocked. I know other people with similar quirks, but usually engaging with them respectfully but relentlessly either caused them to unfriend me, or I unfriended them but that was enough, or probably more often they muted me so they don't have to be annoyed with by the things I say that they don't believe. Sometimes things work out.

I am not telling that story today to demonstrate the importance of the block, though sometimes it is really important. It is more that so many people - and not coincidentally so many women - can have this common experience of multiple men loudly and obnoxiously telling us how wrong we are, that when we hear about someone being that kind of a jerk, their face comes to mind.

Do you want to be the face of sexist harassment?

It seems worth pointing out that they haven't convinced any of us. They have annoyed us, and probably other people have felt very frustrated or sick or like Facebook isn't worth it - that is when blocking is valuable - but they have not successfully made their case.

Let's move on to the other person. 

She was a supervisor I had in a retail job. She wasn't particularly high-ranking, but she made the most of the authority that she had in squashing ideas and squelching good feelings. Around Halloween one coworker referred to a witch in the office, and another coworker replied completely seriously, "I thought she was off today." Then she realized she had said too much, but it was cool. She was in fact off and we had solidarity.

The trait that I remember most about her is that she never gave a compliment unless it was to do a negative contrast with someone else. She was thoroughly unpleasant, and she gained nothing by it.

I am thinking of them because post-election many people - including many in our church - are disappointed with the results, and expressing themselves in obnoxious ways. Sure, some people are saying rude and stupid things, but often they don't even come up with anything to say; they just add a laughing emoji, not having a single thought to add but still wanting to mock.

Surprisingly, this post is not about how it is fine to unfriend them, but if you have people treating you disrespectfully, no, you do not have to take it.

I will tend to engage first: questioning, contradicting, or attempting to set boundaries, depending on what is going on and how our relationship has been previously. That feels important to me, but the most common result is that they unfriend me and continue disrespecting other people. So, if you want to cut out the middle part, I can't blame you. You will have plenty of times when you can't avoid jerks; you don't need to give them your leisure time too.

However, this post is really more for the "jerks", or at least for the people heading in that direction but who still have a chance of being better.

If your goal is to make everyone grit their teeth when you show up and eventually find ways to not deal with you - whether by blocking you, leaving Facebook, or hiring an assassin - then probably no changes are necessary.

If your purpose is to convert everyone to your beliefs, aggressive contempt for everyone is a poor strategy. I know they have changed the missionary training materials, but they didn't change them that way. 

Maybe you need to decide your goals before you can decide how to pursue them. I am only going to give you a few ideas for not being obnoxious.

• Give people credit for things, even when they are not on your side. If they are smart, or they accomplished something, or they are trying to do something good, then give them that credit.
• By the same token, if people whom you agree with are doing bad things, acknowledge that. Whether it is a policy causing harm, or dishonesty, or deliberate cruelty, admit that. 
• Don't just repeat things. Even if you believe a concept, find your own way of saying it. Phrases that get repeated over and over may give you that dopamine hit, but they tend to discourage deeper thought. We need deeper thought.
• Finally, since this is a religious, Christian blog, remember that Christ preached kindness, charity, and service, and condemned greed and mercenary behavior. If your policies run the other way, they are not Christian. It seems obvious, but somehow that one keeps getting missed.
  

But also, for those on the receiving end, your way of serving does not have to include putting up with these jerks. There are other ways you can contribute.

Mourning with those who mourn, and judging

Over on the main blog I have been reviewing not just the last year but also all of the years of my care giving. 

That time period is hard to define, and there is a lot that becomes messy in it. As I move forward, I want to make sure that I am letting go of baggage as far as possible, while not losing any lessons. 

One post bothered me as particularly messy: 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/01/my-2020-reorientation.html

Now, a definite part of the messiness is that there is still a lot that is not defined for going forward. I have said - and it was accurate - that there is an element of illusion to thinking that a job and its paychecks will last, and thinking you know how the next few months or years will go. I still believe that, but being a job seeker still feels very different from being a job holder.

For all that is unsettled, it was a bulleted list a bit past the middle of that post that bothers me most. In it I list things that "should" have helped with the depression but that didn't.

Most of the post is more about what I don't yet know and the unease that comes from that, despite feeling that things will work out.

That list is something I know pretty well already, but it felt very important to say and it also felt defensive. Understanding that meant realizing that it belongs on the religious blog.

Firstly, I wanted all of those things out there because of how bad we are sometimes at comfort. I didn't need any additional knowledge or perspective where someone could say an encouraging thing and make it all better. It wasn't a matter of unrighteousness where the answer was repentance. It was just a hard time in life that hurt and wore me down, despite reminders and small blessings and lots of prayer.

I need to put that out there in case someone else going through a similar situation might find it and feel validated and comforted. I hate that there are people who, in addition to dealing with the vicissitudes of life, also have to question whether they are doing something wrong. 

I mean, we are told to mourn with those who mourn. 

We aren't told to encourage them to hush their mourning. We aren't told to shun them because they are kind of a drag and we feel bad not being able to change that. Maybe sometimes we can help bear their burdens, but we usually can't fully remove the burden. 

That's life. We accept that. We also get weird about it too. Not facing that leaves a shallow faith; you want faith with deep roots.

Then there is the other thing.

Focusing on caring for my mother instead of making money was a choice. I knew it was the right one, and therefore I knew that the sacrifices that came with it were also the right things to do. 

It is also a choice that looks very wrong to a capitalist society. 

Oddly, a church that believes in consecration and tried United Order seems to sympathize greatly with capitalism, at least among its members.

We did not get a ton of help from our ward. There were a few bills that they did pay, and we were grateful for that. Most of our survival came from what we gave. 

We got some judgment for that. 

There was judgment for small things that wouldn't make a difference financially, because making house payments take a lot of money and there is a limit to how much selling things you already own or never doing anything fun again can help with that.

Most of my anger comes from a suggestion that we didn't need so many pets. I mean, obviously taking the most comforting creatures out of our lives and shattering their security is a small price to pay for the extra money that would be saved on pet food! Forget that we had them before. Without saying that pets are just like children, that... it's not a matter of forgiveness, but there is an opinion there that was irretrievably lowered. That's all.

This kind of judgment may also relate to a shallow, or at least uninformed faith. We believe that if you pay your tithing, you will always have enough. If you need help, surely you are doing something wrong. Well, surely that sounds more like Evangelicals (who - by the way - hate Mormons) than it sounds like Jesus.

We are all full tithe payers here, and we have always had enough. Other than about six months of being paid a part-time salary for caring for Mom full-time, I have been unemployed for going on five years now. 

It has taken a lot of paperwork and the full sacrifice of my 401K and a partial sacrifice from Julie's and some use of care credit and much gratitude to the Oregon Health Plan, but we are still here. There is a roof over our heads, food in our fridge (I am a very skilled shopper), clothes on our back, and everyone has gotten the medical care we need, including the pets. We have even had some fun, along with lots of tears.

Yes, tithing works. It doesn't always work the way you think it should. It definitely doesn't always work the way you want it to. If it did that, what role would faith play?

That's what I really needed to put out into the world before I could move on.

The company you keep

This may seem like a fairly tame post given the events of the last week (mostly Tuesday), but it turns out that it is all related.

I suppose I am thinking of it more as I mourn Alex Trebek and viewed his final episode of Jeopardy!, because I know that Ken Jennings cannot take his place.

That was initially what I thought would happen, after Jennings was brought on in this "ambassador" position after Trebek's cancer diagnosis. It had seemed like a logical safeguard, then people started highlighting Jennings' Tweet history.

That is bad in itself. At first I only saw a handful of ableist Tweets, which I didn't like, but the non-apology apology probably would have worked for that, based on how things usually go. That non-apology was duly delivered on December 31st.

More kept surfacing. I am not going to dive into them here, but I am providing a link to an explanatory article that is not very hard on Jennings, and then a long thread that has a lot of screen shots and tells you much more.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/31/entertainment/jeopardy-tweets-ken-jennings-trnd/index.html

https://twitter.com/AMan4AllSaisons/status/1345870969160740864

I am not calling Jennings evil here. He is a privileged white man who doesn't have to worry about a lot of these things and who is not used to being criticized. 

I am a little disturbed at how frequently anti-Asian jokes come up. He spent 15 years in South Korea and Singapore, just getting declared 2020 Alumnus of the Year for Seoul Foreign School. He may think of the mockery as affectionate, but it's very condescending, and may be taken more seriously by people who assume he knows.

So much of that is typical privilege, but I think he also reveals a mean streak.

Again, all of that would probably not have sunk his career, but the association with "Bean Dad" -- with whom Jennings shares a podcast -- might do it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/bean-dad-john-roderick-apologizes-twitter-thread-about-daughter-racist-n1252832

If this sinks Ken Jennings, it won't be because John Roderick is a bad father, but because he uses really offensive racist terms instead of satisfying himself with Jennings' more casual racism... and also because Jennings insists on defending Roderick in ignorant ways. 

(For one thing, there could be whole dissertations written about how support for Israel does not automatically rule out Antisemitism.)

For all of those things that I am only skimming on and not getting into, this is my point: being okay with casual racism and having a slight mean streak where you think punching down is funny, combined with not taking correction, is exactly how you end up not noticing that you are casting your lot in with someone who is going to damage your career, hurt your reputation, and lead you down bad paths.

Do you know anyone who was at a rally this past week? Did you see that coming for them? Were there signs there that you ignored because you didn't want to be rude, or you like a cheap laugh, or you were just glad it wasn't directed at you?

There has been this veneer of civility over a lot of twisted practices, but it has never been right to ignore the rot underneath, and it is becoming increasingly possible to ignore it.

Which side are you going to choose?

Christmas cards

Last time I mentioned doing Halloween cards, and being led to something else.

Actually, there are some things I believe I need to get to that I have not yet, but I want to go over what did happen.

All of these things have been about reaching out. The specific way I felt called to reach out was to put an offer on Facebook if anyone wanted Christmas cards to send me their address. I then put it on Twitter too. That was around December 5th.

I only got five requests: four on Facebook and one through Twitter. It should have been really easy to get that done quickly.

I won't deny my historic tendency toward procrastination, or that a perpetual failure to get my desk and supplies organized held me back, but there was something else.

One nagging thought was a question about what to send whom. The Facebook post had indicated that there might be some homemade art or an original poem. Twitter's character limit abbreviated the message, so there was no reason for the one to expect anything other than a regular card. Not making one didn't feel quite right either.

Meanwhile, my sisters had a long list of cards to write, especially the sister whose career means she encounters new sets of parents every year. She had to do those on her own, but I ended up writing cards for many of our mutual acquaintances.

I was ready to force myself to make the four cards for sure, but stuck on whether the fifth would be handmade. I had the paper out; I tried to start, and yet I couldn't. Then I knew.

The issue was not these five cards; it was all of the cards that I had not been planning on at all. 

I had known going in that I might get a lot of responses; that quickly changed from a worry to a disappointment. It did not mean that there were only five people who might benefit from cards.

At first that meant going through my address book. Sure enough, there were some people that I had not thought of and that my sisters had not thought of. Okay, I can write out those cards.

Then I realized that I needed to go through our ward directory again. There were names that stuck out, and not the same names that stuck out at Halloween. Okay, I wrote those out. It was fine!

I was finally going to get started on the homemade cards. I went to Facebook to check addresses, and a name on my feed popped up. I realized that I needed to go through the directory of our previous ward too.

We did a lot of cards. Most were sent reasonably on time, but of the homemade ones probably only the most local one arrived before Christmas (especially with DeJoy in charge). Someone else needed a letter, I felt, and that didn't get mailed until the 26th. There were phone calls I needed to make, and that happened too.

It was comforting when one of my sisters would suddenly remember someone, and I could say, "Yes, I sent them one." Usually they are great at gift-giving and they sign my name, but they are the ones who know what to buy and can drive to the store and buy it (I have been broke for so long), so I don't feel like a very big part of that process. This year it felt more like we were all a team.

That was nice, but it is also not the reason I am telling the story. Other posts have talked about the importance of remembering people, and that we can get help with that, and the importance of staying open to inspiration. That is not new.

What has come to me more this year is how much need there is. 

1.84 million people have died from COVID, including 351,000 in the United States. Blink, and it will go up.

That doesn't just mean that there are many people in mourning, often without being able to go through some of the usual goodbye rituals. It also means that emergency rooms have long waits, and even if you would be better off admitted into the hospital there might not be room for you, and non-emergency but still important surgeries are being postponed.

It means many people who have survived are still not truly well.

It means people are worried about money, and the people not having their work hours interrupted are likely in danger performing their job, even when there is not someone bullying them about masks and social distancing.

It means that isolation is greater than ever, and there are cumulative little losses that are impossible to tally.

You have needs, but you are also needed. Notice that.

Answers will come, and it will bring you joy.