beckyclai

Mostly optimistic with a chance of isolated melancholy.

[sockparade]

unintentional, unconscious

For better or worse, there are a lot of Asian immigrant stereotypes that my family didn’t fit into when I was growing up. My parents didn’t ever seem too concerned about my grades and pretty much stopped checking my report cards at some point in middle school. Neither of my parents would ever be described as stoic. In high school, my mom watched a few Dr. Phil episodes and insisted we all started saying “I love you” to one another more regularly. Sadly, I didn’t have a close relationship with either set of grandparents. Happily, my sisters and I never competed with each other for my parents’ approval. And as a family with three daughters, I think we were largely shielded from the patriarchal culture that a family with sons might experience more acutely. And there’s also just little things, like I didn’t know gifting knives or clocks to loved ones was bad juju in Taiwanese culture until I was in my twenties and was brainstorming gifts to give my mother in law.

One stereotypical thing my parents did do was cut a ton of fruit for us. For those who’ve never experienced it, lemme tell you, it’s super luxurious. It’s so nice to open the fridge during the hottest part of the summer and find a watermelon pre-cut for you in little bite sized cubes all neatly stored in tupperware containers. I know people make fun of the pre-cut fruit and vegetables that Whole Foods sells in their produce department but man, I think there are probably worse ways to waste your money.

Okay but the less discussed byproduct of this sweet “immigrant parents who cut fruit for you” stereotype is that for the longest time I couldn’t cut fruit for shit. When I was in elementary school, we owned one of those metal apple slicers. It looked like a small wagon wheel with thin metal spokes. You lined it up on the top of an apple and then just pushed down with all your 3rd grade strength. The slicer would cut the apple core out in this neat little cylinder and then slice the rest of the apple into perfectly consistent wedges. It breaks all the conventional rules about not having a single-use tool in the kitchen but it was super handy! I could eat all the sliced apples I wanted while my parents were at work. That apple slicer went missing during a move right before middle school and I think I stopped eating apples for a few years before I realized I could just bite directly into an apple.

So I hadn’t honestly thought about any of this, my fruit cutting deficiencies, until Lincoln was old enough to start eating solids. I bought no less than 3 books on homemade baby food recipes (why?) and every recipe was like “peel, cut, steam, and blend”. The adventurous ones were like, sprinkle cinnamon so the baby gets used to spices and doesn’t grow up to be a picky eater who coworkers avoid when making lunch plans.

I worked a ton when Lincoln was little and making homemade baby food made me feel really good about doing something extra for him. On weekends, after Lincoln was in bed, I’d make big batches of apples, pears, sweet potatoes, green beans, and carrots, and freeze them into tiny ice cube trays. I didn’t know it at the time but it was also a wonderfully meditative task during a highly stressful time in my career. Cutting the apples and pears was truly the hardest part. The context is that I survived my twenties by eating out and occasionally putting random things in a tortilla and calling it homemade. So I had no knife skills to speak of and I only had a set of dull steak knives that I inherited from my mom’s kitchen after moving out of her house. But it was also kind of nice that I was never in a rush to cut the fruit and I knew it was all going to be steamed and blended so it didn’t have to look good. I just had to make sure I didn’t cut myself in the process.

The other day I was cutting apples for my kids and I was suddenly taken aback at just how good I’ve gotten at it! How many apples have I cut in the last eight years? I marveled at how little thought I needed to put into slicing the apple halves into quarters. I admired the muscle memory in my hands as they completed this mundane but previously difficult task. I smiled at the ease with which I cut the notch in each quartered apple to remove the tough, seeded core– applying just enough pressure to do the job but without any danger of cutting my hand. I was in awe at the way I deftly removed parts of the stem while still preserving as much apple as possible. How pleasurable it was to slice the apples extra thin just for a bit of after-school snack flair.

Okay, in full disclosure, a few years ago I also upgraded my primary fruit cutting knives to these Victorinox Swiss Army serrated steak knives with cheap plastic handles (thanks for the tip Mary H.K. Choi). I love these knives so much I often pack them with me on weekend road trips or to dinner parties because I simply don’t want to cut anything with any other knife. But consider yourself warned, they are sharp AF so be careful!)

But like, my point is, I’ve gotten really really good at cutting apples. When did this even happen? I can’t get over how delighted I am to find this tiny example of unintentional skill building in my life.

As a recovering reformed evangelical Christian and a former social worker (double jeopardy!), I'm heavy into casting visions of the future and setting clear intentions for growth. I probably always will be. I’m a big believer of directly naming things that need to change and I’m equally invested in taking concrete steps towards a defined outcome. But lately, I guess I’m starting to see the limitations of acting like that’s the only way we evolve.

If most of our narratives about growth require intention, discipline, and technique, what does that do to our relationship to change? Being surrounded exclusively by intentional change sets us up for being overwhelmed in the face of big problems and seemingly insurmountable odds. It suggests that change is only worth pursuing if we can prove that we meet an intimidating list of prerequisites. I can’t manage to floss on a daily basis so who am I to think I can make a dent on climate change? etc. It also demands that we have a clear vision before we move. What if the vision stays blurry all the way until you start to move?

What I rarely hear, and maybe this is a real-life algorithm thing, are anecdotes of gradual, mundane proficiency and slow, unmonitored change. I mean, if anything, I feel like maybe we’re taught to have a fear of unintentional change. “You’ve changed!” feels like a timeless, soul-crushing insult. Allowing your environment to change you is framed as a mistake or a failure.

“Something like that happened to me. I saw this pattern… and it was everywhere. We can’t see it, but we’re all trapped inside these strange, repeating loops. Somehow I saw it in the mirror. Just a flicker, but it was like you said. And suddenly I understood.” - Morpheus, The Matrix Resurrections

Watching The Matrix Resurrections (as awful as the fight choreography and dialogue was) sort of made me realize that I’m probably still holding on to an adolescent fear of waking up one day to realize that I’ve become a sell-out. That unwittingly, I’ll become someone who just wants to be comfortable and no longer cares about the truth, love, or justice. Watching the first Matrix in high school, the idea of being rescued from a fake world seemed so damn compelling! Who wants to live a lie? And yet, 22 years later, I think I understand now, more than ever, just how appealing it would be to stay in the Matrix. Or to avoid revolution, hunker down, and grow some hydroponic strawberries in collaboration with the bots, shit, I don’t know.

But like, maybe I’m ready to let go of that adolescent fear. It’s not like I was ever that brave, but I think I always hoped that with age I would become braver and not more scared. What if I am admittedly more scared these days, and feel like I have more to lose, but I am still moving towards truth, love, and justice? That the people around me and the divine are leading me that way, sometimes, maybe often, in spite of myself?

I continue to obsess over Jia Tolentino’s essay, The I in the Internet, and this quote of hers in particular has frequently come to mind these past two COVID years. She reflects on those early years when the internet was really taking off and people were exploring what it meant to have an “online presence”.

“As more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist.”

As a long-time defender of social media, I smirked when I first read the quote a few years ago. Sure, in my teens and twenties I loved updating AIM away messages, writing blog posts, sharing articles on Google Reader (RIP), and sparking interesting debates on Facebook. In my thirties I enjoyed inviting old friends and family to watch my kids grow up on Instagram even though they were miles away. But I’ve always had a vibrant and busy life offline and many of my close friends either didn’t use social media or were so sporadic in posting that it was hardly representative of their existence.

So it wasn’t until I stopped working and most acutely during the stay-at-home order in 2020 when our family paused all in-person interactions, that for the first time, I kind of understood how posting on social media could feel like sending up an emergency flare into the sky. It felt kind of like shouting into the void, “Hey everybody, I’m still alive! Here’s photographic evidence! I’m over here still washing vegetables, reading books, trying to wrap my head around abolition, looking at my cute kids, and eating lots of snacks…”

“If your phone dies, do you die?” - Jeevan, Station Eleven

In recent years, I’ve made a focused attempt to develop a meditation practice and increase my mindfulness throughout the day. Somewhere along the way, did I start to foolishly believe that if I could minimize the unconscious in my life I would somehow be more human? That I could somehow stop being surprised by pain? When did I start to believe that eradicating unconscious living was a good goal? That it would make me less afraid?

And then, damn, have I been treating my consciousness like the way our society treats the internet? If it’s not conscious, did it happen? Does it matter?

Jia Tolentino is an excellent writer but she’s maybe an even better curator of quotes. In the same essay I mentioned above she quotes the sociologist Erving Goffman who says,

“All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.”

What a joy to discover the ways we grow and change without intention.

I am humbled by the reminder that I’m not solely in charge of orchestrating my human experience. I am relieved to remember that I do not dictate my evolution.

I just recently started using a floor lamp when we watch TV at night instead of turning on the overhead light attached to our ceiling fan. The vibe is infinitely cozier and I feel like our lives are probably improved by at least 3%. So needless to say, I will continue to pursue intentional change in my life, both big and small. But I now also have a growing curiosity about the way the world, the people around me, and the divine are shaping me, beneath my consciousness.

As I enter middle age this year, I feel like my goal is no longer to become less afraid– by whatever mental gymnastics, spiritual disciplines, or wellness strategies I might employ. I think what I'm moving towards is less clear but still compelling. I'm becoming, as James Finley says, less afraid of being afraid.

[sockparade]

Solidarity with the poor is not the same as empathy. Many people feel sorry for the poor or identify with their suffering yet do nothing to alleviate it. All too often people of privilege engage in forms of spiritual materialism where they seek recognition of their goodness by helping the poor. And they proceed in the efforts without changing their contempt and hatred of poverty. Genuine solidarity with the poor is rooted in the recognition that interdependency sustains the life of the planet.

- bell hooks, where we stand: class matters

[sockparade]

Freedom is not a goal, but a direction.

- Ai Weiwei, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

[sockparade]

hope in horrible times

I was at a dinner party when someone asked whether there was a difference between hope and optimism and what it looked like to be hopeful when the world feels utterly hopeless.

A few days later I came across this wonderfully haunted excerpt of Dr. Emilie Townes's article Displacement and Trauma (via enfleshed):

allowing hope to shape our acts of justice and mercy in displacement and trauma is a bold thing to do

I think

because it can, and perhaps must, conjure up the ghosts, the terrors in our lives

that come as dancing specters

haunting goblins

moaning trolls

who remind us again and again

that we are far too human

to try to do this life all by ourselves

and we cannot always be in control or seek to be in control

you see I think lament can be a good thing

because lament is often the sign that we are seeking

yearning

chasing hope

not just a hope in the divine

but the hope that God loves us

God rocks us

God cares for us

God will heal us

but perhaps not in the ways we expect or want

hope means we have opened our eyes, hearts, minds, souls, very spirits

and now see and feel and touch and smell

the joy and the agony living in the fractures of creation

that is the irony of hope

for in our yearning for it

we often walk far away from it as we try to come home to it

we often live into the small and narrow spaces of life that stunt our growth

and demand far too little of us

because far too little is expected from us

or far too little gives us comfort

hope is one more piece to the fabric of the universe

one more way to signal this restless journey we are on

one more sign that Emmaus is not the end of the journey

but its beginning

you see, I don’t think hope is the end product on the assembly line of our lives

no, I think it is simply a part of the journey

part of the way in which we come to know God’s way in our lives with a richness that ripens and ripens and ripens

a richness that often disquiets us when we learn that there are things we can do to humanize our nation’s response to migrants

and not only migrants, but the great variety of who we are along lines of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, theological view point, political persuasion, ableness, and so much more

this richness often disrupts our comfort and our certainty

and this richness that lets us know that that we are not alone as a child of God

and an enormous part of our task as members of faith communities is to make sure that no one is alone or caged or marked as less than because we must be there as witnesses and disciples

perfect and deeply imperfect

and we demand restored humanity

[sockparade]

on interruption

A few weeks ago I was reading a book on my phone when I accidentally hit a footnote at the end of a sentence and it led me to this speech.

The context is sort of random, well, I don't know, maybe not. It's 2014 and Laurie Zoloth is giving this passionate speech to the American Academy of Religion about climate change. She talks about interruption in such a different way than I am used to. Not just a nuisance or an inconvenient pause in the show of my life. She talks about interruption as theology. She insists that interruption makes us confront the power of the other on our being. She asks the question, "What time is it?" I stayed up devouring every word of the speech.

This speech has made me reconsider the interruption of COVID and even the cruel interruption of the lives of those who were killed in Atlanta last week. It feels timely to reflect on interrupted plans and trajectories in this lenten season.

Here are a few of my favorite parts but I really do recommend the whole speech:

To be a being is to be a being living in the illusion of a life that is a continuous, busy process. We are committed to continuity, to historicity, to plans and prospects, to the order of things, their repetitions, patterns, and sequences. We expect, rather touchingly, that we live in a consistent, progressive narrative, and the interruption of being is a break in the story that we want to resume—we have made promises, we have bought tickets, we have a book contract, we are on the way to salvation, we need quiet for our mindfulness and not that noisy kid, or that cry in the dark.

To some extent, we resent interruption because of this narrative ideal. We have an important product to produce, we tell ourselves, and even if the product is some unit of reflection or some ephemeral conference paper, to be interrupted is to be taken, snatched from our work to some other call, some other's need. To be interrupted is to be broken-in-to. It is to have one's view blocked by something one does not want to see—say the beggar, say the warming air, the acidifying ocean—to have one's talk stopped, the speech act, the professing, a declaration in your own voice, your own needs, your own story, stopped: a disagreement, perhaps, or someone calling out for help, a question, a story orthogonal to your own.

But if we are to understand the character of our being as temporal and located, and if we are to create a theory that can ground a decent response to the question of how we ought to live, how we ought to live in a world that is burning, it cannot be based on this idea of the pristine journey, or the next new thing. The arc of the universe bends toward justice, we learn from Martin Luther King, but it is not a smooth resolve: it is an unbroken line, and our pulling makes cracks and fissures—we live in the spaces between the rupture, and if we are to do anything as scholars, it is that we work to repair that arc.

The world as we know it is not flat, yet it is altogether flattened into a series of ceaseless falsities that present as actual challenges, and, in their quotidian necessity, make us despair. It is a world of totality (to take a term from the title of Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity ), and we are told and we tell ourselves a story of seamless desire, each little event, each little trial, each little flattery presenting as if we were the only one in the room with our particular victory just ahead. Here is what it means to be modern: we believe that everything can be under control, ordered in advance, the costs and the benefits weighed up. But into our lives, and utterly out of our control or our will, comes the complete otherness of interruption. Is it a surprise that we understand interruption as a problem, the distraction of being within a world of necessity, and not, for example, as we would if we were medieval scholars—as the voice of God? Is it surprising we do not see the necessary order or disorder? The chaos of the utter otherness of being—all that is not-self coming knocking at the door; all that is not-work come calling, just when you are writing your big idea.

For what are we interrupted? There are the thousand small serious interruptions; there are the questions of students, and their needs; there is the constant interruption of cleaning and clearing, which goes by the name of “administration” in institutions; there are the petty calls of email, the cascade of media noise, the sense of news constantly on a crawl beneath the actual work of our lives. There are bodies that need ordinal tending: children, the old, everyone who needs us to look at the drawing, to attend to the wound, to lift them up in our arms, just now .

For what are we interrupted? For the grandest dramas and greatest joys of human life. For the befallenness of illness, the birth of children, for true love, for desperate need, and, of course, for death itself. This is the deep praxis of interruption, and if you are a moral being, you will have done well to be a being who has broken off, who has stopped. This is so vividly true about our lives that is obvious, but unseen, “something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it is something we need to remind ourselves of,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein ( 1973 : 89) noted in describing the task of philosophy.

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Here is what a theologian might say: We are interrupted by the insistent call of God, and when we respond rightly, it is prayer, it is action for the widow and the orphan, it is standing and saying— hineni, I am here. Yet, it is hard to respond rightly, and from this we flee in terror, not, as moderns, to be sure, into fish, or Tarshish, or deserts, but into work, meetings, parking applications, email, Netflix, grant applications. In my field, bioethicists seek out ever more unlikely cases or misguided desires. We consider obscure fears, cool movies, read the New Yorker about improbable technologies—all the places we go when we are in flight. We are in flight and the world is tiny, distant, far away. Here is the image I mean: it is George Bush, staring at Katrina, that first great climate disaster, from his airplane window, and we know it, because it is our own gaze. We are in flight, even people who know better, people who actually read the Prophets; we are off to the metaphorical caves. Who wants this interruption, this reminder, this challenge, this politics ?

A theology of interruption demands that we attend to the interruption in a different way, which is of course to say, to act as if the interruption were the Real, and the other stuff of our lives the Distraction. How to live such a theological ethics—attention to the call of the other, and alert, always, to the call of God, without seeming like a madwoman or a religious fanatic? What would such a life look like?

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What do narratives and practices tell us about how to be good, about the worth of our lives in a burning time? Why do the rabbis worry about interruption and its protection? Why do I say: you must interrupt your life?

To be interrupted is to acknowledge the power of the other over your being, to see the interrupting, messy, needy other as entitled to your full attention. But because we do not have a clear account of how one ought to live, to live as a good person at a time of climate chaos, and because full attention is so hard, we struggle to defend what looks like a series of affections or hobbies—we recycle, we bike. Is there a way to articulate a foundational theory behind actions of this sort?

To argue for the need for interruption is to advocate for a moral chronology. We are beings who not only live in particular locations; we live within a time that we order and sort, another sort of accountancy. How we order time, how we understand ourselves as having a past that leads to a present that promises a future, is always an interpretive moral choice, albeit one that seems to us utterly invisible, given. The clearest advocate for this recognition is Walter Benjamin, who alerts us to how we see time, how we experience it as “empty space” along which we endlessly travel, which aligns us with a sort of secular passivity.

Progress, economic growth, more units of things, the storm catches up our desires and our stuff. Benjamin sees that empty time exists “as an homogeneous continuum of moments which have no goal and finally no subject. . . . This sort of time has to be arrested; the thinking that it enables, indeed, necessitates, has to be interrupted.”

How unlike the radical breaks of religious texts—the sun that stops in the center of the sky, the Prophets who unmake history and its narrative of subjugation. How unlike the Jewish view of time, Benjamin argues, where “every second was the strait gate through which the Messiah entered.” Empty time colludes with institutions that say “it has always been like this; this is impossible to change.” It creates people who only yearn for things to stay precisely like they have always been. Yet we know that sustaining a world of endless, repeated injustice, an always unthinking movement ahead, is problematic. Argues Benjamin, uninterrupted time “expels any substantive expectation and thus engenders that fatalism that eats at the souls of modern women and men.”

That fatalism, and the acceptance. But time can be interrupted at any point by redemption—an exodus can begin, slavery end, a bush can burn, a Messiah can be revealed at the gates of the city, hanging about with the lepers. This is not only a Jewish assertion. Our late AAR President, Otto Maduro, argued it from the very podium where I delivered this address. Scripture calls us to live as if at any moment, we could be surprised, awed, ready to rise to action and to grace, ready to welcome the Messiah, ready to appear to one another, in public, because our interruption could alter what we have come to think of as “the course” of history. Moral chronicity is an account of interruption as cessation, and redirection, and of ourselves as creatures with pasts, presents, futures, and as moral agents with the capacity to be ready.

[sockparade]

make it make sense

This essay might be a little too inside baseball for some. But I also recognize that a lot of the people who read what I write have some kind of orientation to the Christian faith so I think it’s worth taking the time to write this all out.

The 2020 elections are still several months away and yet it’s already unearthing all kinds of feelings for me. Politically, Christians in the U.S. are kind of all over the place. I should note here that white evangelicals as a subset of Christian voters tend to be pretty... consistent. *cringe emoji* I imagine the lack of cohesion can be frustrating to those outside of this particular faith tradition but let me tell you, it is also highly upsetting to those who live inside of it. 

I think the inconsistency can sometimes make people conclude that Christians are just being manipulative. The assumption is that Christians weaponize religion to protect their political power and their personal interests. And sure, that’s certainly the case in some places. But also, I think for many Christians like me, who never went to seminary and who have no political aspirations, the inconsistency in politics is quite understandable given how our theology tends to be all over the place. There is a lot of variation in what someone means when they say they are Christian. This is true not only because it’s the culturally dominant religion of this country and not only because of the differences in interpretation of an ancient text, but also because the tenants of the Christian faith exist largely in a complicated collection of paradoxical beliefs. Lately I just keep reminding myself that Christianity is a weird ass Eastern world religion and I can’t keep shoving it into a Western mindset.

So here’s the thing. If you find yourself on either pole of a key paradox, it means that you are essentially subscribing to a very different belief system than someone who leans towards the other pole. Over the last four years, so many Christian friends have scratched their heads at why a fellow Christian could support Trump or hold some other political view that feels abhorrent to them. But it’s actually quite predictable once you do the work of tracing their political views to the foundation of their beliefs.

About a decade ago, I realized that if Christianity was going to continue anchoring my worldview, I needed to take greater care in attending to what I actually believed. For many Christians, faith is something they point to as the bedrock of their lives and yet it often remains a big amorphous blob of thoughts and feelings (and random childhood Sunday School artifacts). It’s often not a set of clear values, intentions, and principles that we are committed to. I’m not advocating for more apologetics or more systematic theology here. But I do think clarity (distinct from certainty) is important. Given the ease in which people have historically interpreted the Christian Bible to suit their own opinions, the Christian faith can quickly become less of a meaningful lens or life compass and more of an extended experiment in propaganda and confirmation bias. That’s probably true of most religions. 

In taking a good hard look at Christianity, I have deconstructed a lot of things, relearned some things, and completely thrown out some things. There are some things I am still wrestling with and will continue to wrestle with -- probably for the rest of my life. And I’ve learned to find beauty and meaning in that unresolved, uncertain place. In the last year I’ve embraced the more mystical side of the Christian faith tradition and I have invested more of my time in contemplative prayer, meditation, and reflecting on God’s choice to be bodily present with us through the incarnation of Jesus. But even in my exploration of mysticism, I still maintain a firm belief that continuing the intellectual pursuit of truth and understanding is worthwhile.  

In this essay I want to identify just a few of the key paradoxes within Christianity and provide some reflection questions for the purpose of prompting you to examine how you’re doing in holding the tension of each paradox. When you review the questions, resist the urge to recall proof texts. This is a heart/gut check, not a bible quiz. 

To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of paradoxical beliefs. I’m starting to think that part of the challenge of being a Christian (or maybe just a mortal, sentient being) is learning how to exist in the discomfort of life’s many paradoxes. I mean, what is life but a series of fortunate and unfortunate opportunities to humbly acknowledge our limited understanding of how the world works and how the divine moves? Our westernized sensibilities make it difficult to hold paradoxes well. Instead, we rapidly cycle back and forth between the poles or more often than not, we end up repping just one of the poles. Every now and then I have to check myself and see if I’ve lost track of the paradox. While you’re here, It’s also a good idea to check if a pole is still valid for you or whether it’s something that you’ve just become acculturated to. I’ve personally let go or altered some poles in this process (e.g. I no longer believe in eternal conscious torment-- another essay for another day). 

If you are dreading political discourse with the variety of Christians in your life this Fall, consider digging underneath a hot topic and spend some time locating where the person lives on the spectrum of these paradoxical Christian beliefs. It might be illuminating. No less upsetting, but maybe less confusing.

For anyone that’s not Christian and reading this, I wonder if this walkthrough might shed some light as to why it’s so confusing to understand what Christians actually believe and why there seems to be such different Christians in your life. 

And lastly, I recognize that some of these questions are going to come across as blunt and possibly condescending. I have only written questions here that I have been asking myself over the years. So if you find any of them offensive, I hope you take some measure of comfort in knowing that they offended me too. I hope you don’t stay there. Also, I know I undoubtedly show my bias in writing these questions but I don’t think my goal here is to be unbiased. I’m very much revealing my bias in hopes that it’ll be helpful to you in identifying where you are.

Okay let’s go.

humans are inherently evil v. humans are inherently good

The creation poetry in the Bible says that God chose to make humans in their image and likeness (peep the gnarly “we/us” language in Genesis -- God’s triune nature really disrupts my tendency to rationalize my faith). God then declares that all of creation was very good. But then there’s a plot twist, humans become inherently evil. This is primarily through the story of Adam and Eve and the proverbial “fall of man” fruit-eating incident, but really, throughout the Bible, the theme of human depravity is consistent. People suck bigtime. So we get this basic setup that we are designed to be good and we’re also told that we come from a legacy of very ungrateful, selfish, and blatantly evil ways. The Bible’s pages are filled with anecdotes, advice, and self-flagellating poetry about fighting our sinful nature. And yet we also learn of a very curious arrangement where the God of the universe loves us and has chosen to partner with us super problematic beings to bring about redemption and a radical new way of flourishing for the created world.

Reflection Questions

When you think of peak human behavior, do you think of the best stories of people loving and helping one another or do you think of the worst stories of people hating and hurting each other? 

Do you mostly think about how people are doomed to be broken, selfish, and depraved on this side of heaven or do you think about how people are ultimately designed to be good, loving, and communal? (Note: I know the “answer” here is that with Jesus, a person could potentially live a life that is good, loving, and communal. But consider the impact of believing that all people outside of the Christian church are broken, selfish, and depraved. That would heavily skew any worldview and certainly feeds/fuels the fear-mongering rhetoric we often find in many political conversations.)

When you see a person doing something kind and good, do you see it as a rare exception in the horrible cesspool of humanity or do you see it as a person living closer to their original God-intended purpose?

When you imagine new ways for people to live together in society, do you get discouraged because you tend to think humans will inevitably destroy everything and are simply incapable of enduring goodness?

How does your belief about your inherent evil or your inherent goodness impact your ability to love, forgive, and take care of yourself? How does it support or hinder your ability to feel loved by others and by God?

everyone is created and loved equally vs. Christians are special

At times, the Bible makes Christianity seem like the most radically inclusive community. Particularly in the New Testament, there’s a recurring theme of all being welcome and loved. Jesus is witnessed spending much of his time with the outcasts of society and offering healing and acceptance seemingly without much of a prerequisite beyond a person’s vague belief that Jesus is divine. The account of Jesus asking God to forgive the Roman soldiers who were beating him and who ultimately murdered him can be a bit of a head scratcher because the soldiers do not ask for forgiveness, they do not change their ways, and they certainly don’t conform to any kind of Christian lifestyle as many churches might prescribe today. At other times, the Bible uses very exclusive language suggesting that those who are known by God are actually quite limited in number, there sometimes seems to be a “personal responsibility” theme, there’s talk of being part of a special, separate group, and perhaps most challenging, the out group is doomed to some kind of hell and separation from God. So all the language about God loving us and drawing near to us, is that just for Christians or is that for everyone? Your answer to this question might be something you want to reflect on as this country wrestles with figuring out how in the world we could have grown so comfortable to one group of people being more valuable than other groups of people in our country (read: white supremacy). Please don’t @ me about common grace. For the folks who subscribe to that theology, they’ll also be the first to admit that there are many of God’s promises that simply don’t apply through common grace to everyone, namely salvation. 

Reflection Questions 

Do you truly believe all humans are made in the likeness of God? Think about all the marginalized groups in our country: Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, incarcerated, undocumented, queer, trans, disabled, uneducated, etc. Do you affirm that everyone bears the image of God? 

Do you believe that some people are more special to God because of their faith? Do you believe that God loves people who aren’t Christian as much as he loves Christians? 

Do you believe God loves babies but as people grow older they accumulate a spiritual debt through their life choices? Do you think there’s an underlying debit/credit system that makes people more or less favored/loved/protected by God? Like, you can’t earn God’s love but maybe there are degrees to his love? 

Do you believe there are limits to a person’s worthiness and dignity? If someone commits particularly heinous crimes like murder, rape and pedophilia, do you think they deserve less dignity and should not be treated with the same care as other people? 

When you count your blessings from God and trust God to provide, how do you explain why some people face more tragedy, death, sickness, and poverty than others? Do you believe God has a reason for why he chooses to bless some people? 

When you read John 3:16, do you read it as God loving the world, or God loving the people who choose to believe in God?

The gospel is happening right now vs. The gospel is focused on the afterlife

It has been eye opening to see the white evangelical church squirm as our country is forced to reckon with its history of white supremacy and its continued oppression of specific groups of people. In the last 3 months, a confusing cacophony of sermons, articles and social media posts have cautioned Christians to proceed biblically in fighting for civil rights. Unfortunately there is little consensus. Should we just pray and trust God to bring justice to this world? Should we participate in advocating for social justice but not so much that we place too much hope in things actually changing? Was social justice just part of a broader ethic of love or was it mission critical in Jesus choosing to draw near to us and to suffering? Is focusing on social justice too humanist and not focused enough on eternal, heavenly things? What was the good news of the gospel to those suffering? That we need to wait for healing and justice on the other side of death? Or was this good news for our current existence? 

Reflection Questions

When you think about your Christian faith, do you mostly feel the comfort and security of eternal life or do you press into the difficulty and labor of bringing kingdom thinking/living to this world?

What do you mean when you say “sharing the gospel”? Is it explaining to people how they can get into heaven or is it explaining a way to live and move in the world?

When you say salvation, what are you being saved from? Some kind of hell afterlife? Or is hell an existence that is devoid of connection to divinity, spirituality, and interconnectedness with others?

What aspect of your faith do you treasure the most? Making the *right* choice in your beliefs? Your ticket to heaven after you die? Your personal relationship with God? Your faith community? Psychological comfort in hard times? A purpose for living? A sense of superiority?  

Do you think about Jesus’s mission mostly as sacrificing himself to solve a spiritual conundrum or as a reconciliatory model for how humans could live in the fullness of our intended purpose? To show how humans could be in communion with God and each other? If it’s mostly just to solve for the distance between God and humans and secure an afterlife in heaven, why do the authors of the Bible seem to insist that Jesus’s life’s work was so important to record and bear witness to?

God is love v. God is justice

This one is a doozy. Even the words “love” and “justice” have such different meanings to different people. I think the narrative arc of the Bible has compelled me to consider broader, more expansive definitions to these words that aren’t primarily based in the typical experience of human relationships. I mean the most obvious shift is the way God’s love is presented as unconditional. Unconditional doesn’t even quite capture it. God is described as a divine being that pursues connection with humans in the face of persistent rejection and pervasive spiritual death. This stands in sharp contrast to the way humans struggle mightily to remove the conditions in our love for others in ways that don’t result in unhealthy, abusive, or toxic relationships.  

God’s justice as described by the life of Jesus is also astonishingly merciful and unexpected. It rejects the idea that justice is a matter of fair exchanges of pain and it ruins our instinct for retribution. I’ve been studying the work in the Transformative Justice space this year and it has been so helpful for me in imagining what God’s justice might be like. Mia Mingus describes Transformative Justice as asking: “How can we respond to violence in ways that not only address the current incident of violence, but also help to transform the conditions that allowed for it to happen?” Isn’t that what Jesus did? Beyond absolving us from our brokenness, there’s evidence of a desire to transform who we are and how we live. Jesus loves us unconditionally AND he wants to change the conditions in which we are harming ourselves and harming one another. 

Reflection Questions

Do you think of God as more loving or more judging? Do you resonate with God’s power or do you resonate with God’s gentleness?

When you think about Christian values in society do you mostly think in terms of bans on certain behavior or do you mostly think in terms of upholding the fruit of the spirit (love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control)? 

When you think of the cross, do you focus on the idea that God’s wrath needed to be “satisfied” to uphold a retributive justice model (I no longer believe this) or do you focus on Jesus’s willingness to be human and endure suffering with us? 

When you think about the end of the world do you think about God’s vengeance against wrongdoing or do you think about God’s peace?

When you think about conflict and harm do you think mostly about how the victim might forgive and offer grace or do you mostly think about how the perpetrator of harm can make it up to the victim?

Do you feel your faith is motivated by wanting to “repay” God for the sacrifice on the cross or is it motivated by radical love and generosity? 

submission v. rebellion 

One more thing, this isn’t a paradox but it’s something that I’ve felt conflicted about for some time now because it’s a topic that is discussed so inconsistently among Christians. Would you say that Jesus’s life was marked by submission or rebellion? Many will use shorthand to say Jesus submitted to death on the cross but it often also gets muddled and then talked about in reference to our posture towards government, empire, and just everyday difficult circumstances! There is a sparkly, made-up Christian badge of honor that some folks associate with “suffering well” and it sometimes morphs into the glorification of suffering, overwork, and outright abuse. 

I think the story of Jesus is one that unmistakably says that God stands with the oppressed and rejects injustice, exploitation, and abuse, and yet in America, the evangelical church weaponizes this idea to excuse systemic injustice, saying things like, “Why fight oppression if it’s an honor to suffer in whatever circumstances you were born into?” 

How often have we heard references to this Martin Luther King, Jr. quote? 

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, "Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

I understand the exhortation to live with excellence and joy but how far do we take that? What’s the takeaway for the unemployed individual who is unhoused? Beg for food so that heaven remarks at how excellent their begging was? Or should we fight for fair living wages and affordable housing? Beyond that, should we demand that those who can’t find employment should still have the dignity of food and shelter? Is Christianity just the means in which the oppressed can supernaturally endure horrible things like slavery, apartheid, incarceration, rape, poverty, trafficking, etc.? 

Finally, just a clarification. I would not characterize Jesus as submitting to the Roman Empire. Like sure, he didn’t strike them down with lightning bolts. But to me, submission would have been admitting that he wasn’t divine. Jesus was killed because he refused to deny who he was and what he stood for. Jesus was killed because he threatened the hierarchy of power and religion. So yes, Jesus was a model of submission, but that submission was specifically to his own character of radical love and radical justice (or God’s will, if you prefer). He did not submit to the government in his willingness to die. And even then, if you believe the story, he also rejected and rebelled against death. 

These days, I am asking myself: 

How am I following Jesus’s model of rebellion? 

How do I sometimes confuse the idea of submission to God’s way of collective human flourishing with submission to capitalism, racial hierarchy, comfort, and fear?

What questions are you asking yourself as a Christian?

[sockparade]

mint, anise, and cumin

Over the years I’ve read the popular excerpts from Frederick Douglass’s speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” delivered on 1852, thirteen years before Juneteenth. I sat down to read the entire speech today and was so challenged all over again by his call out of the American church’s active role in slavery. 

Here’s the link to the transcript of the entire speech: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/

The condemnation of the Christian church in America seems incredibly still so relevant today as people here in our country and around the world continue to fight against the oppression of vulnerable people. 

Here’s the excerpt about the American church: 

“At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the “mint, anise, and cumin” — abridge the right to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church, demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal! — And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to solicit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.

”But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines. who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation — a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.”

 I hope all church leaders and members alike take some time to reflect on how we are choosing to demonstrate God’s love and how limited our faith is when we refuse to believe widespread change is possible. 

On a related note, I read this quote today from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at the National Book Awards in 2014 and feel heartened by it. 

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” 

Maybe this is what the Fourth of July means to me this year. A reminder that human power can always be resisted and changed.

[sockparade]

“Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous? So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” 

-- The Laborers in the Vineyard, Matthew 20:14-16 (NRSV)

[sockparade]

over and over again it becomes known the peace we seek is seeking us the joy a full bud awaiting our attention justice in our hands longing to be practiced the whole world learning from within this thrilling mote in the universe laboratory labyrinth internalize demands you are the one you are waiting for externalize love bind together us into a greater self a complex movement a generative abundance an embodied evolution learn to be here critique is a seductress her door is always open so what if you get some we are going further past reform, to wonder this requires comprehension that cannot fit in words out beyond our children beyond the end of time there is a ceaseless cycle a fractal of sublime and we come to create it to soil our hands and faces loving loving and loving ourselves, and all our places

– “a complex movement”, adrienne maree brown, 10/25/12, detroit

[sockparade]

fractals

Since the pandemic I’ve been revisiting adrienne maree brown’s book, Emergent Strategy. The role of fractals in our life and in society is maybe the most influential *new* concept I’ve had since adulthood. In my spirituality I’ve had the mantra “get smaller, get bigger” and fractals guide that first part of the mantra.

Here’s a few excerpts from amb on the topic of the relationship between small and large:

“And this may be the most important element to understand—that what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system. Grace [Lee Boggs] articulated it in what might be the most-used quote of my life: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.

I thought I was awesome at multitasking. I would say urgency, obligation, and specialness were the driving forces in my life. I was using food, drink, sex, and work to numb my way through life. My work was reactive; there was often a sense of time scarcity and sprinting, of hopelessness, of not being appreciated, feeling no trust, of working with a confused vision.

In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose. This has meant increasing my intentionality about being with others. Adapting to the changes of life, yes, but with a clear and transparent intention to keep deepening with my loved ones and transforming together.

One major emerging lesson: We have to create futures in which everyone doesn’t have to be the same kind of person. That’s the problem with most utopias for me: they are presented as mono value, a new greener more local monoculture where everyone gardens and plays the lute and no one travels… And I don’t want to go there!45 Compelling futures have to have more justice, yes; and right relationship to planet, yes; but also must allow for our growth and innovation. I want an interdependence of lots of kinds of people with lots of belief systems, and continued evolution. Right now we don’t know what’s right so much as we know what’s wrong, and what we’ve tried. And based on how constantly surprised I still am by life every day, I suspect that will likely continue to be the case, and hopefully, perpetually resolving these major issues continues to be interesting.

Nothing that has existed so far was the right way for everyone, but there are pieces out there we can begin to imagine together. This is why Gar Alperovitz’s writing speaks to me—what’s between capitalism and socialism? Because whatever we build will stand on the foundations of those economic experiments. This is why Gopal Dayaneni’s work appeals to me—what are the strategies we need to learn, with appropriate fear and wonder, to move our movements into right relationship with the planet? Let’s learn. I want a future where we are curious, interested, visionary, adaptive.”

[sockparade]

“Liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design.”

- Erica R. Meiners, For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in Carceral State

[sockparade]

the gap

(CNN: Minneapolis Police Department's Third Precinct was set on fire by protestors during the night of May 28, 2020)

This is maybe a mark of my persistent immaturity, but I’m slowly (probably too slowly) realizing that I’ve mistaken my individual god-given ability to form an opinion to mean that I’m the actual audience for everything. I don’t know if it has to do with the exorbitant number of hours in my childhood that I spent watching TV and reading books instead of living in real life. Or whether it’s my self-centered nature that I just never grew out of. Or perhaps it’s the unshakeable result of my young adulthood being bathed in the explosion of social media where every platform (AIM, AsianAvenue, Xanga, Geocities, Wordpress, Yelp, Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) seemed like another microphone specifically designed to help me share my reaction, review, or analysis about everything I could possibly encounter in my life. 

Part of me wonders if I am maybe too eager to be off the hook, but Jia Tolentino makes a pretty compelling case for that last reason in her delightful but at times painful collection of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion. 

Here are two incredibly insightful excerpts from her essay, “The I in the Internet”:

“In part out of a desire to preserve what’s worthwhile from the decay that surrounds it, I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.”

“In the run-up to the 2016 election and increasingly so afterward, I started to feel that there was almost nothing I could do about ninety-five percent of the things I cared about other than form an opinion-- and that the conditions that allowed me to live in mild everyday hysterics about an unlimited supply of terrible information were related to the conditions that were, at the same time, consolidating power, sucking wealth upward, far outside my grasp.” 

I think regardless of where an individual is on their personal journey with experiencing racism or becoming anti-racist, the events of the past few weeks have surfaced various realizations. That has certainly been the case for me. 

I want to make an effort to write more about my process in hopes that it’s helpful to others who are also processing. I’ll start by sharing four of my realizations here. 

The first one is really basic. I value my own opinion too damn much. 

This sounds kind of embarrassing to say out loud but I had to take myself aside last week and give myself an earful. Haha, I know, that sounds like someone who’s been sheltering in place for too long. But in all seriousness, I really did have to chew myself out. It went something like this.

Why am I trying so hard to decide which parts of a protest I am okay with? Why am I trying to figure out where I land on some kind of protest supporter likert scale? It feels like I need a 50 question Buzzfeed quiz to tell me what kind of protest I fully support so I can feel less hypocritical and internally consistent within myself. It feels like I’m mentally creating some kind of Pantone color card deck for political protests and then holding my brain and my heart up to each swatch, desperately trying to find a match. Why? 

Why am I treating such an emotional and painful protest like some kind of a la carte brunch menu I can order from? Was the protest peaceful? Socially distant? Were folks wearing masks? Did they obtain the proper permits? Did they cause any traffic or block any freeways? Okay but were any ambulances blocked or did anyone lose their job because of the traffic? Did the signs seem hopeful and solution-oriented or did they mostly say “Fuck the Police” and “ACAB”? Did they blatantly break curfew? But was the curfew announced with enough notice? Did they set any fires? Was it buildings or just dumpsters and trashcans? Did they destroy any cars? Were they cop cars or civilian cars? How much graffiti is there to clean up? Did it seem like the protestors provoked the violence or did the police? Do you have videos of that? Was there looting? Okay but was it just big box stores like Target that were being looted or was it looting of mom and pop businesses too? 

Like I can hear myself ordering a protest like, “Yeah, so I’m going to go with the non-permitted protest but with clearly identified local organizers who I recognize. I’m okay with you leaving in smashed windows and burning buildings but if they’re mom and pops, can we make sure it’s only places with good insurance policies? Hmmm and maybe lemme add a side of major freeway blockage but only if no one gets hurt and it’s for less than an hour. Oh, and can I substitute the graffiti for dumpster fires? Oh yeah and can you also make sure there are catchy slogans on a few signs or cute pictures of kids holding signs so it doesn’t all feel too bleak? Like, why the fuck do I do this? 

Why do I think my personal judgement of a protest is of upmost importance? Why do nonBlack people feel appointed to judge and assess the efficacy or nature of a Black Lives Matter protest? Why do we critique the strategy of a political movement? It’s like we’re that casual viewer of ice skating who gets super vocal with their crappy commentary on ice skating every four years during the Winter Olympics? Do you really think you’re qualified to judge that triple lutz? Get the fuck out of here. 

Or worse, when the judgement comes out in a protective voice? Like, oh no, I’m worried the white people in power and watching at home are going to dismiss it because of the rioting and looting, it’s going to look so bad. That it wasn’t strategic to the cause because it was a bad look. Like what the hell? Why are we still protecting and upholding the broken situation of power being held in whiteness?  

How many times have you read or heard someone say they believe Black Lives Matter and support the “peaceful protesters” but want to be clear that they do not condone the rioting and looting? Condone? Do people realize how condescending that word is? I mean, who is giving you that power to condone or not condone? Does the movement need our approval? 

I was dizzy from reading the articles my nervous neoliberals friends (of all races) were posting on my social media feeds blaming the riots on “outside agitators” and anarchists. And then I started to read all the counter articles being shared about how there’s a historical pattern of this media tactic to blame rioting and looting on outside agitators, anarchists, and ANTIFA in order to distract and delegitimize the movement as a whole. And then Trump started to blame ANTIFA! Wait, why was Trump and my neoliberal friends agreeing on something? Was this signaling the inevitable end of the Democratic Party? Haha but honestly, I appreciated that dizziness and that panicky frenzy because it snapped me out of trying to rationalize everything and helped me realize that trying to figure out whether I was “okay with rioting and looting” was the wrong fucking question. 

Delegitimize to who? What is the purpose of a riot? What would be considered the success or failure of a riot? Do we subconsciously think protests are at their core some kind of performance for us? An audition for our allegiance? A persuasive act to convince people to join their movement? A ploy to get politicians to change their hearts and minds? How have we gotten it so twisted? Since when is someone smashing a window an appeal towards intellectual persuasion? Isn’t it a clear signal that we’re past that?

I really had to scrutinize why I was reading so many different takes on rioting and looting in a desperate search to try to find a framework I could comfortably agree with. How many articles like “In Defense of Looting” (a really good article btw) did I need to read before I could feel confident in justifying my attitude towards looting? Like how oppressed does a group of people need to be in order to justify looting? Ugh. Was that the question I was asking? And was that really the best question for me to be focused on? 

Eventually I had to say to myself, “Yo, you are not actually the audience for these protests and your opinion is not the most important outcome here.” I mean, yes, let me be clear in saying that it’s important for me to form a personal opinion so that I can move from spectator to co-conspirator in fighting and challenging racism. And yes, I need to put in the work to form a thoughtful opinion that isn’t just the result of scrolling social media for a few hours each day. I do think folks can cause harm trying to do antiracism work when it’s built on emotional impulse or plain ignorance. But at the end of the day my specific opinion on the ethics of rioting and looting is not what ultimately matters in this Black Lives Matter movement. 

Why? 

This is my second realization. Simply put: The rioting and looting was effective. 

I genuinely believe that the images of people protesting in the street, the smashed windows and the buildings set on fire did something to people’s collective imagination. I wonder how much of the protests and riots were also a release of frustration towards an unjust economic system and a untrustworthy government. Was it just pent up energy or was it because as a country we saw 36 million people file for unemployment in the previous two months leading up to the protests? People will probably write their entire PhD dissertations on this topic one day. 

No matter what the analysis is of the factors that led up to the protests, the riots are the reason why the protests received extended news coverage and brain space despite our comically short news cycle and atrophied modern attention span. The rioting provoked a shockingly unrestrained display of police brutality that lasted for several days afterwards. The gross violence (tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, beating with batons, shoving, driving cars into, you name it) from police officers towards protestors (even the peaceful ones, if you’re still playing that game!) of seemingly all backgrounds was well documented on video and live-tweeted by individuals and the press (many of whom were also attacked and arrested) which I think drove more and more people to show up for the subsequent protests in their outrage. 

I sincerely believe that the shift in power we are seeing right now is the direct result of both the visceral theft and property damage that happened in many of the riots across the country (notably not sparing wealthy neighborhoods) and the documented police violence against a diverse group of protesters. This change in power dynamic is evident not only in the conversations around the role of police in our country but also in the willingness of employees (at all levels) to speak out boldly and demand high-level resignations and changes in behavior. It has only been two weeks since the protests began but folks have already begun to tally its accomplishments so far. I’ve been honestly surprised by the reach of the protests, expanding far past police brutality, to impact tech, journalism, literature/poetry, food media, sports, and even leisure brands -- not by way of so-called “solidarity PR statements” but in resignations, changes in leadership, and super specific transparency about racism in decisions around hiring, pay, and promotions. The physical toppling of racist historical statues has so long overdue. 

I don’t want to spend any more energy figuring out a way to like rioting and looting. I stand up for where it’s pushed our country.

Okay, I can already hear your pushback. But Becky, isn’t this using the end to justify the means?

Here’s my third realization. Yes, sometimes the end justifies the means. 

This feels like it’s an awful statement to make publicly and in writing. It’s usually used to shut down an argument. And usually yes, I think using the end to justify the means can lead to some pretty terrible behavior and abuse like murder, terrorism, and military occupation, just to name a few. It’s probably the most common trope for Marvel/DC villains and their nefarious schemes. So no, I don’t think the end always justifies the means. And I think I’d generally still debate against it on an intellectual level or in an ethical discussion. But I also think about other stances in which I would also uphold it. For example, I don’t believe that an abused woman should be charged with a crime if she murders her abuser in an attempt to escape. And I will for the rest of my life struggle with the harm (historic and current) that has been done to so many communities across the world in the name of “spreading the Christian gospel” even though I still believe that somewhere in the bible’s pages is a true story of the world and God. Even if it often gets lost in translation and in money/power grabs is it still worth the end? Is it worth increasing access to Christian truths? 

And if we really think critically, it doesn’t take long to move beyond these more extreme macro examples. There are much smaller ways in which we exhibit our ability to use the end to justify the means. Like maybe we wouldn’t argue with someone that it’s a defensible ethical framework, but it ends up being the de-facto ethical framework of our privileged lives. 

Think for a moment about the way we use our iPhones and other electronics with such freedom from ethical dilemma while knowing about the terrible working conditions in the factories that manufacture them. We don’t say out loud, “Having convenient and well designed hardware to access the internet and contact other people justifies x number of suicides at Foxconn factories each year.” Think about how slowly we’ve moved to break up with Amazon despite countless, well-documented reasons to do so. We don’t say out loud, “Being able to get packages in less than 2 days at prices that are cheaper than anywhere else justifies the awful working conditions for warehouse workers who struggle to get adequate bathroom breaks.” What about the way we simultaneously grieve the destruction of the public school system but continue to choose to send our kids to private schools, charter schools, or out-of-neighborhood schools that have better ratings. Isn’t that using the end (doing what’s best for your kid) to justify the means (contributing to the continued racial and economic segregation in public schools)? We just don’t talk about it like that.  

Look, I’m not saying I’m above it, I’m just identifying it plainly. We don’t talk about our privileged life choices out loud like this. It feels too shameful. But on some level, aren’t we essentially doing that calculus in our heads? Even if it’s subconsciously? Like we see the dissonance between our value system and some of our choices but then we say, “Yeah, I know it’s not great, but I guess I don’t feel bad enough to make any major changes to it? Maybe I can try to ignore it? Or make a partial concession to appease my conscience but not actually address the problem?” We certainly don’t label it as justifying the means to an end. I mean that just sounds extra shitty. But we live it, don’t we? 

Wait, there’s one more. 

Haven’t I known about police murdering Black and Brown people for years now? I know for some folks in our country the murder of George Floyd is the first one to really land in their consciousness. But for me, Oscar Grant’s murder was the first unjust police murder that I really learned about. (Sidenote: Believe it or not, I first learned about Rodney King’s murder and the LA riots because of Oscar Grant’s murder. The riots in Oakland prompted me to start reading and researching the history. I don’t know how I managed to not learn about it at any other time in my life.) 

Oscar Grant was murdered back in 2009 (rest in power), the year we first moved to Oakland. What has been my ethical framework for thinking about police for the past ten years? Why haven’t I learned or read about abolition despite working in non-profits to improve the economic and educational outcomes for Black and Brown communities for over ten years? Why is this the first time I have been considering the call to “Defund the Police?” Do you see it? 

My fourth realization. The argument against defunding the police also happens to be an example of using the end to justify the means. 

This feels really ugly to type out in detail but in the spirit of inviting honesty in dialogue-- here’s what I think has been happening with me. By not educating myself on and joining the movement to defund the police (and the larger goal of abolishing prisons, the military, imperialism), I have essentially been communicating that while I understood that Black and Brown (and trans and disabled) people were being murdered and assaulted by police in disproportionate numbers, I personally tolerated the institution of policing because I felt that the police could provide some semblance of security to me (real or imagined) in the hypothetical event that my own safety was threatened. 

I can see now that my apparent willingness to accept the status quo of policing in this country, shown through my lack of sustained outrage, education, and action was incongruent with how sick I felt about the injustice whenever I thought of it or encountered it in my work. Being an Asian female and living in a wealthy neighborhood has meant that I’ve had no personal interactions with the police. I have never had to call for armed intervention/protection. Those are my privileges and I had mastered the skill of compartmentalizing my life. And even as I supported local campaigns against additional funding being used to build new jails, as I advocated for alternatives to detainment for those in the juvenile justice system, and as I tried to build educational options and career pathways for young adults with criminal justice system involvement, I did not personally pursue a complete dismantling of a system that I knew to be corrupt, broken, and deadly.      

My opinion was that Black Lives Matter. But my lived priorities, the focus of my career, and my ability to tolerate injustice did not live up to my opinion.  

I think there was probably also a lack of imagination and trust on my part. I was far too dismissive of radical ideas that felt peripheral to immediate problem solving and I didn’t seek out diverse Black voices to inform my thinking and focused on listening to voices that affirmed my opinion. I did not invest enough time in forming an ethos for my career or for my personal life. I want to take responsibility for that.  

So yeah, I think that’s the part we are less willing to say out loud. We’ll talk about getting rid of qualified immunity or imagine the type of training we think police need instead of talking about abolishing the police department under the guise of being realistic. But I think we do that because ultimately, we are implicitly justifying the means (the police’s racist and murderous behavior), for our mostly imagined, selfish end. Now that I’ve examined it, I find myself more and more able to commit myself to the movement to defund the police. And like most paradigm shifts, I’m finding that it’s informing so many other aspects of my thinking.   

The question I want to pose to you is this:

What’s happening in the gap between the ethical framework that you espouse (i.e. your overvalued opinion that you’ll defend in a conversation or social media post) and the ethical framework that you actually live? 

That gap is sometimes wider than we’d like to admit or care to examine. (Spoiler alert: The thing happening in the gap is probably racism, mixed with some classism, ableism and a fear of losing the comforts of your privileged life that you’ve managed to build/acquire in this capitalist setup.) 

I feel like the work in studying that gap has always been important but it seems especially critical now as we’re pushed to form opinions and talk about our opinions with such urgency and frequency.

Henri Nouwen is known for saying, “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living but you live your way into a new kind of thinking.”

I believe that Black Lives Matter. And I also want to live like Black Lives Matter. 

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transcendence

I’m curious what the idea of transcendence means to you.

A sublime quietness. A wash of “I’m where I’m supposed to be.” A sense of everything, of a soup where everything can shift and exist and move, and the whole thing is warm and quiet.

I think that’s why I freaked out with the dance. I was feeling like that in my body, but with people. I thought that warmth and quietness meant I would be a brain in a tank, and I would just upload whatever I was thinking to the Internet or something, just be completely--

Disembodied. I think about that all the time.

But it turns out I can get that feeling by being super bodied. Very weird to me.

Your drive toward transcendence, toward that warm void-- how much of that is a desire for oblivion?

Like a death-wish kind of thing?

Is it possible to be attracted to the void without the death drive entering the picture? I’ll say that this question is coming from a personal place.

I guess I’m starting to realize that I can be. I want to stay here and feel everything, not just the oblivion. That’s what I thought that freedom was, and I actively pursued that when I was younger, whether I knew it or not. And maybe I’m becoming O.K. with just being at the edge, feeling the reach for it. I’m starting to realize that the reach is really what I want.

---------

excerpt from a conversation between Jia Tolentino and Mike Hadreas, “Perfume Genius Wants to Make You Feel Less Lonely”, The New Yorker

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“I was at a group dinner last year when someone made a disparaging comment about small talk, and I found myself defending it as a high art, not a nuisance: ‘It just gets a bad rap because most people aren’t very good at it!’ I don’t care that this essentially makes me a living extrovert stereotype. I miss the moments of self-discovery that come from a social experience.”

-- Ann Friedman, “Check on an Extrovert Today”, New York Times, 2020

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ill at ease

I can still picture the grin on Milan’s face that day as he walked into the office with a Starbucks frappuccino in hand. I have a hard time remembering a day when Milan didn’t arrive at the office with a Starbucks frappuccino in hand. So it wasn’t out of the ordinary. But it was noteworthy that day because the week before a video went viral of two Black men being arrested at a Starbucks in Philadelphia because a white employee was uncomfortable with them asking to use the restroom and sitting in the coffeeshop while they waited for a business associate to arrive. Something non-Black folks do all the time. People were calling for a total Starbucks boycott.

I raised my eyebrows at his drink, and he shrugged saying, “Look, I’m not going to let the actions of some racist white people take away my freedom to get whatever drink I want.” 

And like, yeah, I objectively understand how that’s an imperfect political stance and maybe an ineffective strategy to create change, but also, man, I really felt that. In order to protest Black men being arrested for sitting in a coffeeshop (read: for being Black), was I really going to try to tell a Black man about where he should or shouldn’t get his substandard (ha) coffee fix? Try to convince him about the importance of voting with his dollar? Can’t a person just live?   

I just didn’t have it in me to disagree. 

I often think about that exchange whenever I hear a call to boycott such and such corporation or a call to cancel a celebrity. I mean, listen, I do believe in the power of an organized boycott or protest. There is concrete historical evidence and contemporary examples of how people have bossed companies and the government into doing what we demand. But I don’t want to keep pretending that it’s an easy switch to flip or that it’s a cost-free way for people of color to fight against the inequity in the world.  

That Starbucks incident was just one in an endless number of incidents in which a white person says or does something that reveals their racism, forcing people of color to do the emotionally taxing, unending math, of just how much caucasity we’re willing to stomach.

This is a really old story. Marginalized groups of people have always had to bear the brunt of publicized racist behavior. For every racist incident, there are generally three major phases of emotional labor that people of color in the United States have to work through. At first I could only name two but then I realized it’s actually three. Let me walk you through them.

First, before any explicitly racist incident happens, we have to contend with the fact that there are generally such slim pickings in terms of choices that will allow us to exist ethically and stay true to our convictions. How do we earn a living? Where do we grocery shop? What authors do we read? Whose music do we listen to? Are there ANY electronics that are manufactured in an ethical way? Do we wear checks or not? Are the non-white teachers at this preschool treated with respect by the white owners of this preschool? How do I reduce my purchases on Amazon? Is this restaurant gentrifying the neighborhood? Wait which banks have divested from fossil fuels again? Can I truly be myself at this church? What athleisure brands haven’t been accused of overt racism yet? Where are the influencers that look like me? 

When it comes to the consumption of and participation in… well, almost anything, we constantly have to make concessions because we live in a place that’s simply not built for us. It is so hard to name a single sphere of life that I enjoy that isn’t dominated by whiteness or the white gaze. I think my MO for some time now has been to assume that no brand, company, restaurant, actor, or celeb is truly *safe*. I’m generally always waiting for the other shoe to drop while also trying not to think about it too much. It’s a lot of mental gymnastics. 

I was at a lecture a few years ago on the topic of the “doctrine of discovery” and the systematic oppression of Native American nations. It was a large auditorium in Berkeley full of neoliberal mostly white folks. The lecturer read a rather dismissive opinion rejecting the Oneidas attempt to reclaim land that was criminally stolen from them in violation of U.S. treaty (Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, 2005) as a shockingly recent example of how this oppression has continued. And then theatrically, he revealed the author to be none other than Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. There was a loud, audible, collective gasp from the audience. 

I mean, no, I didn’t know the Notorious RBG had that in her. But also, I’m not over here clutching my pearls. I’m not saying I’m proud of my jaded mentality. I’m just accustomed to it. As Tressie McMillan Cottom says in her essay “Know Your Whites” in Thick: And Other Essays, “I am not disappointed. If you truly know your whites, disappointment rarely darkens your door.” I’ve been seeing more and more of this language with the virality and frequency of racist actions being caught on video and circulated on the internet. People will say, “I’m not surprised, but I’m mad.” It’s too overwhelming to feel shock and pain every single time. So we steady ourselves for the eventuality, we brace for the pain. Know your whites, y’all.        

The second phase of emotional labor is related to the actual injury. We feel the deep pain of injury even if we don’t know the person that was harmed or the person who caused the harm. I think people are sometimes quick to dismiss the behavior of rich and famous people as irrelevant and reduce discussion of it as simply celebrity gossip. But I think there’s pain whether it’s a murder, an arrest, or a racial slur. I know it can be hard to tell by the overwhelming amount of white tears shed on social media after each viral incident but the marginalized group targeted by the offense carries the pain so differently than anyone outside of that group. Try as we might to muster our empathy and our vague-ass Christian lament, it’s just. not. the. same. It’s not. Sometimes it’s so painful that I don’t even fully let myself go there. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read in detail about the recent hate crimes against Asians since COVID-19. I feel squeamish about it. I feel pain when I read stories and see pictures of families being separated, detained and deported but I know for a Latinx person that pain must be so much deeper. And I absolutely cannot fully imagine the pain that Black and Indigineous folks in America endure living in this place.  

And then finally, there’s the third phase of labor. This is the part when we’re called upon to react, call it out, bring awareness, advocate for change, and make swift changes (big and small) in our own lives. Sometimes I feel judged (by others and by my own conscience) when I don’t boycott or abstain. And sometimes I just try to skip to this third phase because I don’t want to deal with the grief of the second phase. 

After this past week’s twitter feud, lots of folks are ready to cancel Alison Roman for the trash comments she made about Chrissy Teigan and Marie Kondo in her recent interview in The New Consumer. It feels like there’s a sudden clamoring to point out just how white Alison Roman is, and how there’s new evidence that she’s racist. And I guess what I want to say is, um, it’s not really much of a reveal nor is it brand new information. Right? Roxana Hadadi in her recent article titled, “Alison Roman, the Colonization of Spices, and the Exhausting Prevalence of Ethnic Erasure in Popular Food Culture” gives a pretty detailed explanation of just how unshocking it is. 

Prior to reading this interview in The New Consumer, did anyone really think Alison Roman had an astute analysis of her white privilege and her accompanying habit of cultural appropriation that she’s benefitted from her entire career? No! While certainly gross, was I shocked that she mocked imperfect English (regardless of whether it was in reference to Marie’s accent or a Eastern European cookbook)? No! Am I shocked when any person mocks an accent? No! We’ve *allowed* it in TV shows, in movies, in corporate settings, and in social settings. I cringe every time but I’ve been forced my whole life to accommodate it. I’ve heard mockery of accents maybe most often from second generation immigrants mocking their own culture’s accents! And If I’m completely honest, I still sometimes find myself guilty of laughing along. (Curiously, Alison Roman’s lengthy apology made no mention of that part of her interview. Perhaps she, and/or her PR team, realized there was no easy way to walk that one back.) Race relations are a fucking mess in our country, y’all. Let’s please stop pretending like it’s just the occasional ultra-public celebrity slip-up. 

Hear me when I say I’m not defending her fuckery. What I’m taking issue with is the lack of nuance and the self-righteousness in how we respond to these public brouhahas. Both the shocked reactions and the gotcha reactions expressed by people feel equally tiresome to me. This reflection, written by Charlotte Muru-Lanning, is one of the few three-dimensional, unflattened, and self-searching reflections written by a person of color on this whole drama. While I don’t agree with how defensive she is of Alison Roman, I appreciate the way she refuses to act as if she doesn’t exist in the world that she’s critiquing and I love that she recognizes the complexity in herself as a woman of color. 

I’ve become pretty comfortable in my understanding that everyone white in our country is racist. I say racist in the fullest, most comprehensive definition of the word. Some are hateful in their racism. And some are actively trying to fight it even as it exists in themselves. As Ijeoma Oluo explains so succinctly and precisely in her book, So You Want to Talk About Race, racism is “a prejudice against someone based on race, when those prejudices are reinforced by systems of power.” And then she goes on to say, “Systematic racism is a machine that runs whether we pull the levers or not, and by just letting it be, we are responsible for what it produces. We have to actually dismantle the machine if we want to make change.” It’s in the water. And we are all impacted by it, no matter what part of the machine we’re in. Me included. As a Taiwanese American who grew up in Houston, Texas, I wasn’t magically immune to the anti-blackness that was/is prevalent in the Asian American community. Whether it was comments made by my parents, my relatives, my friends, or comments from acquaintances/strangers, it was pretty consistent. You don’t bake in that environment for all your formative years without it damaging a part of you. It’s something I still find myself fighting to unroot and discard from my psychology and my bias despite spending my non-profit career trying to address racial disparities in education and employment. I might spend the rest of my life working on it. We can’t keep pretending it’s an occasional affliction or it’s a disease that only Trump supporters suffer from. I suspect the people who are *shocked* at Alison Roman’s racist comments are also people who believe there are good whites and bad whites. #notallwhites? 

Lots of folks have written reflections on cancel culture so I don’t feel the need to rehash it all here. Cancel culture exists for a reason. And it also has its various pitfalls. On one of my favorite podcasts, Still Processing, Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris do an excellent job of examining the limits of cancel culture in their episode about Michael Jackson (content warning: child sexual abuse). One of their most compelling arguments against cancel culture is that while it attempts to hold an individual accountable, it can also be harmful because it allows people to look away. It allows us to skip the hard work of scrutinizing our broken systems beyond a single individual and it allows us to give ourselves a pass and not search ourselves for the ways in which we are complicit. We can’t look away. We have to interrogate what we consume and why. It’s the only way things will change.

I want to attempt to do some of that hard work here. Beyond organized boycotts, I do subscribe to the idea that there’s value in the individual choices I make to abstain from something. Not just in service of a desired economic, political or societal outcome, but because of the impact it can have on me, as an individual. So let me push past my annoyance that I even have to do this when I’ve already done two other phases of emotional labor and get to work. 

A question I’ve been asking myself this week is: Did I somehow make peace with Alison Roman’s cultural appropriation for profit? And if so, why? The answer is, yeah, I think I did. And here are my thoughts on why.

I like Alison Roman’s recipes. I have both of her cookbooks and I only have three cookbooks in my kitchen so that’s something. It’s pretty rare for me to crack open a cookbook when I’m in the kitchen. I mostly just google for specific recipes I’m craving or I’ll look up what temperature is ideal for roasting cauliflower. Almost all the dinners I cook for my family consist of rice/noodles, a meat, and a vegetable and I don’t use recipes for those anymore. Each week I do like to have one “more complicated” dinner recipe and that’s when I’ll sometimes open a cookbook or scroll Instagram. I spend an unreasonable amount of time reading recipe comments (often contradicting) about modifications or adjustments they made and that’s after wading past all the comments about how excited people are to make the posted recipe-- it’s all very confusing and time consuming. 

For someone who was not taught how to cook and who didn’t spend much time in a kitchen until maybe 3 years ago, I appreciated Alison Roman’s insistence that she had figured out the “best way” to make classic dishes (usually dishes I did not grow up eating, like Shrimp Louie or Shallot Pasta), the way she suggested using spices I’ve never cooked or eaten before (Aleppo pepper), and her encouragement to use new techniques that I was unfamiliar with (slow roasting tomatoes in the oven for six hours). It was kind of like finding a cooking lifehack.  

While I found her IG persona mostly grating and self-congratulatory, I was charmed by her vision in her first cookbook for lowering the barrier to entry for making a really great meal that you can be proud of and her push in her second cookbook to host dinner parties that bring your friends together in a memorable way. For a generation that has relished mostly eating out all the time and then ordering in all the time, following an Alison Roman recipe could sometimes feel like permission to try shit out in the kitchen without the pressure to be a master at it. It was a good feeling when the recipes turned out well and it was fun to talk about which recipes I’d tried with other folks who were also working their way through her recipes. 

Okay, and this part might sound ridiculous but I sort of thought that Alison Roman was someone who could maybe teach me how to make white food. Haha. You know what I’m talking about? Like the food that might be on a menu at a restaurant tagged as “American (New)” on Yelp. I mean yes, she has a recipe for “Kimchi-Braised Pork with Sesame and Egg Yolk” in Nothing Fancy but that kind of bastardized Asian dish has been popping up on white restaurant menus pretty consistently for some time now. But a question I’m now asking myself is why I wanted to make white food in the first place? Did I subconsciously think it was fancier and would make for a more interesting menu when hosting dinner parties? 

In her introduction to that Kimchi-Braised Pork recipe she says, “I am calling this a braise, but it is really a stew (an homage to the Korean Jigae) in which meat is braised--but isn’t that most stews?” How do you react when you read that sentence? I think she avoids triggering my usual alarm bells because she doesn’t attempt to be an expert in Korean cuisine. She feints left by throwing in the homage line. She’s not aiming for authenticity in her recipe. It might actually be worse if she gave a mini lecture on Korean cuisine. I don’t know. When I read that line in the cookbook, I don’t find myself immediately questioning the proper origins of the recipe. I don’t have the same knee jerk reaction as when a white chef publishes a whole cookbook of recipes from just one specific region of the world and presumes to be the expert or the ultimate curator. 

And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I need to work harder to stay in the habit of questioning recipe creation and curation. Kind of like the way I’ve learned to question books like Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt. Fifteen years ago I wouldn’t have thought twice about white authors writing the stories of people of color. Wasn’t that the whole of literature? Or so I thought. What a gift it’s been to pivot my reading to mostly authors of color! What would happen if I demanded more from the food media I was consuming?

It gets a bit more complicated for me though. Alison Roman has a Chinese-inspired recipe called “Soy-Braised Brisket with Caramelized Honey and Garlic” that I really like. In her introduction to it she writes, “... the tangy, spiced braised beef noodles available at a few of my favorite Chinese restaurants around New York, which I’ll order every time. While not a replication, this brisket is my interpretation: salty from soy sauce, sour from vinegar, lightly spiced from a few pantry all-stars.”  

I don’t even know where to start with this one. I am personally so confused by Chinese food. What is Chinese food? What is Taiwanese food? What is Americanized Chinese food? Is that still Chinese food? What was the food my mom cooked at home throughout my childhood? It took me awhile to allow myself to just fully enjoy Americanized Chinese food without feeling hung up about it. A few years ago my mom made a new dish that I loved and I naively asked her whether it was a recipe she grew up with. I think I was secretly hoping it was a family recipe that she learned from her mom so I could check that immigrant kid fantasy off my list.

She laughed and said, “Do you know where I learned it from? I learned it on YouTube!”

I mean, this is the thing with the Asian Diaspora. Things are pretty disjointed for me. I know some Asian Americans are super locked in and schooled on their origins, heritage, and culture but I honestly don’t know much. I don’t know what region or city in Taiwan my favorite kind of Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup is from. I think I’ve learned to make a version of it that I like better than anything I’ve ever eaten in a restaurant or in someone’s home. I don’t say that to brag, I just say that to point out how confusing it is to try to connect that Taiwanese dish with my heritage when it’s something I learned how to make in my thirties using a recipe I found on a stranger’s website. I feel like I’m trying to connect with a culture I didn’t really grow up in myself. I’m chasing phantoms. 

You know what, I feel like some white lady in the Midwest on the Instant Pot Community Facebook group might legitimately be the world expert on the best way to make General Tso’s Chicken in a pressure cooker at home. After I made the Butter Chicken recipe from Two Sleevers, I looked up who authored the recipe and was so relieved to see that Dr. Urvashi (affectionately nicknamed The Butter Chicken Lady) was Indian. I loved that Butter Chicken recipe. I was super excited to try cooking more Indian food and I was happy that I could do it with a clear conscience. Haha, it’s all so convoluted, I know. 

I think maybe I feel reluctant to hold others accountable for being more respectful of food origins because my understanding of my own cultural heritage (as it relates to food, but also in many other ways) feels spotty and incomplete. I find myself feeling unsure of what I am defending. But ultimately I think this has been a flimsy excuse. It’s not so hard to google a bit more to find a chef that’s sharing a recipe from their particular culture. I think I need to confront the hidden grief I feel about being disconnected from my culture. 

In The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Anne Anlin Cheng puts it this way, 

“If the move from grief to grievance, for example, aims to provide previously denied agency, then it stands as a double-edged solution, since to play the plaintiff is to cultivate, for many critics, a cult of victimization. So the gesture of granting agency through grievance confers agency on the one hand and rescinds it on the other. As a result, for many concerned with improving the conditions of marginalized peoples, the focus on psychical injury and its griefs is strategically harmful and to be studiously avoided. But this also means that we are so worried about depriving disenfranchised people of their agency that we risk depriving them of the time and space to grieve. A final problem is that since justice based on grievance and compensation tends to rely on the logic of commensurability and quantifiability, it is ill-equipped to confront that which is incommensurable and unquantifiable. In short, we as a society are at ease with the discourse of grievance but terribly ill at ease in the face of grief.” 

So yeah, I guess the part I haven’t said is, when I read those comments made by Alison Roman in that interview, it hurt me. And when she deflected and didn’t take the initial pushback seriously, that hurt too. It was such a familiar feeling. I know that feeling because I’ve been there before. I’ve had my feelings brushed off with a laugh or a weird, unsatisfactory explanation. I’ve been told that someone was just punching up and didn’t think about it in the context I was. I’ve experienced that basic othering so many times in my life.

Okay so the theory here is that if I do a better job of facing the first and second phase of emotional labor head on… if I can somehow process the pain and grief of living in a racist society, then being a thoughtful consumer will feel less like a sacrifice. It’ll be easier for me to stand by choices I’ve made because I’ll know I’ve made them with integrity and in a way that is true to myself. And I can get to a place where that doesn’t feel like a loss of freedom but rather a true liberation. Man, I want that. 

I also want to get in the habit of asking myself whether my desires, the same desires I am so reluctant to give up, are not actually just byproducts themselves of suffering in this machine for so long. Like, do I really believe it’s coincidental that I bought into Alison Roman’s brand and that I also do a good amount of my shopping at Madewell? And then they happened to do a collab together? 

I need take a magnifying glass to the way I’ve been subconsciously trained to prize dominant white culture. It is so uncomfortable for me to even type that out because it feels like I’m admitting that I like white culture. Like I’m somehow admitting to an inferiority complex. I’m not saying I wish I were white. I definitely don’t wish that. But I am guilty of believing that my taste, my style, and my preferences are somehow invincible to the whiteness of million dollar marketing campaigns in this country. I like to pretend that my brain is somehow impervious to the terrifying industry of engineered social media algorithms and psychological branding strategies. And that’s bullshit. I don’t think anyone really wants to be white these days. Even white people themselves seem uncomfortable. But a white person enjoying wonderful things created by people of color? We eat that shit up. Why do we do that?

We have to spend time recognizing, no matter the discomfort, why our pleasures align so easily with the dominant culture. My hope is that when I start interrogating the way my tastes align with whiteness I’ll begin to cherish the ability I have to move into a place of misalignment. Maybe it won’t be so difficult to give up things I’ve taken pleasure in, because I’ll find pleasure in the process of detaching. Maybe it’ll eventually stop feeling like I’m abstaining and it’ll feel more like I’m just making powerful choices. 

I think the shallow analysis of white supremacy and consumption in this country instructs a person of color to believe that liberation means having the freedom to consume as we please, disregarding the impact of our choices. You know, a chance to live the way many white people live. But I think a more thoughtful analysis instructs us to believe that our choices have consequences in terms of whether it supports or dismantles the machine of racism -- both in ourselves and in society. 

Instead of the performative handwringing of trying to decide whether or not we buy another Starbucks coffee, hit next when MJ starts playing on a Spotify playlist, or keep cooking that Alison Roman brisket, my friend Milan has taught me over the years that it’s more important to be attentive to what we are desiring and why we’re making the choices that we make. Yeah that will often mean boycotting things or making different choices, no doubt. The difference is that it won’t be from an exhausting place of trying to achieve blameless optics. It’ll be from a genuine realignment. There’s freedom in that.          

And yes, I see it too. That our pleasure and the way we experience culture is so closely tied to consumption is fodder for a whole other damn essay. Ugh.     

[sockparade]

poetry in the time of corona

Tony recently challenged a group of our friends to write or share a poem with COVID-19 as the theme. Here's my attempt to write poetry. It honestly felt really great to think creatively.

covid-19 details

a weighted jump rope six digit zoom passwords Jo March’s letters home freezer full of meat and gelato

cash taped to the doorbell new freckles on Lincoln’s cheeks freshly steamed jasmine rice do you wanna play Goodminton?

afternoon light through the kitchen window smell of ramen on Lenny’s neck posting memes at 2 in the morning does your person wear glasses?

Super Happy Magic Forest the nine trick— one less plus ten a new spiritual financial literacy one eyed jack means remove

Zuckerman’s Famous Pig no make it take it but they can still be besties praise Mother, Son, and Holy Ghost

[sockparade]

#ahmaudarbery

I’m seeing the immediate push for advocacy in the midst of so much pain. I totally get the urgency and its importance. And yeah I do think this is where POC folks who aren’t black and claim to stand in solidarity need to shoulder the labor of advocacy. But mostly, I’m just thinking about the grief we keep stuffing down for the sake of advocacy. We’ve somehow got to find room to grieve while we find ways to take action or speak out. What’s happening to us, psychologically, when we skip the grief?

I’m reminded of a few relevant quotes from a challenging, perspective-altering book I read last month:

“How does an individual go from being a subject of grief to being a subject of grievance? What political and psychical gains or losses transpire in the process? This transformation from grief to grievance, from suffering injury to speaking out against that injury, has always provoked profound questions about the meaning of hurt and its impact. Although it may seem that the existence of racial injury in this country is hardly debatable, it is precisely at moments when racial injury is most publicly pronounced that its substance and tangibility come most stringently into question.”

“Rather than prescribing how we as it nation might go about "getting over" that history, it is useful to ask what it means, for social, political, and subjective beings to grieve.”

— Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief