White silence, white noise

Last Wednesday, first protest in years, a rally that meant standing an hour and a half in the hot sun: My feet hurt, my back ached. We had our bikes with us which felt awkward, standing in the center of the growing crowd at the rally for #blm and #defundthepolice at Grand Army Plaza last Wednesday. We didn’t even have any signs. The loudest voice in my head said: What right do I have to be here? Shouldn’t I at least have a sign? But what sign? I looked around and was struck by "White Silence is Violence." The slant rhyme, the implication of blood and bodies torn apart, it’s been stuck in my head since. I’m attracted to it, but also I’m scared of it.

If I were to reason with “White Silence is Violence,” I might say, does that mean that White Noise/Voicing/Loudness is Peace? Of course not. Similar as with the fallacy of the “All Lives Matter” retort, of course we need to recognize the intent of the statement and the context it’s being used in. White Silence is Violence indicates that doing nothing when you can do something causes harm, and the next step is to deepen the “something” I do. Or maybe I am skipping a step. First, I need to understand my “nothing,” my “silence.”

One thing I’ve only been able to admit to myself since this recent surge protests started is that, over the last decade, I’ve consistently blocked the anti-racist efforts of white friends and peers. I’ve dismissed hard work by my department colleagues to include more anti-racist material in our classes as irrelevant to my International students and my vision of myself as teaching process and not content. Both implicitly and explicitly, I’ve shut down calls for specifically anti-racist language in organizing principles for groups and events I’ve participated in. I have said such language and such work is outside of my skillset, as well as--my favorite tactic--saying that the language of “diversity and inclusion” is b.s. speak to make white people comfortable.

Instead, I have opted to keep ideas about harm we perpetrate and receive based on perceived identity personal and close, to trust I can battle the ills of discrimination in my own, private ways and, somehow, that will reverberate out. Maybe this is true. A little teeny tiny bit. But, I have reasoned and intellectualized my way out of things. Something new and much bigger I can see clearly now is that my dismissal of organized efforts has served to make me, a white-passing person, comfortable, and to avoid the hard work of engaging in collaborative efforts to shift the tide against White Supremacy and Anti-Blackness.

While in many cases efforts around “diversity and inclusion” may be empty exercises of posturing empathy, there are myriad efforts and resources out there that I have access to that can help me to create and use language to truly advance my own anti-racist pedagogies and practices, and instead of turning my gaze from them in fearful, lazy, embarrassed silence (which it turns out is actually quite loud), it’s time to look towards them with trust and quiet, to work to turn discomfort into patience, to accept the riches surrounding me… I turn with gratitude to all my friends and colleagues who have been doing anti-racist work with others and seek to learn from them with an open heart… I look back over all your emails and posts and resource lists and conversations, and I begin again...

On Saturday, I rode my bike past a disbanded protest and saw a woman, sitting on a bench, holding a sign with that same slogan again, "White Silence is Violence." It raised that feeling of discomfort and attraction in me again, and this time I had the wherewithal to take the picture.