Dialogue Description:
As the US grapples and often fails to meaningfully reckon with its history, what does it mean for us to reckon with our own familial and collective histories? What place do different forms of memory work have in anti-racist practice? How can we support each other to challenge the historic amnesia in the process of different European immigrant groups assimilating into whiteness and learning to uphold white supremacy? Which ancestors do we know about, from any generation – who are we ashamed of, proud of, curious about? Who do we turn away from, and what may be gained in turning towards painful and contradictory lineages, to learn from them? How does greater understanding of ancestors’ contexts and choices illuminate ours?
Here are some pre-reading offerings of wide-ranging food for thought:
Also for reflection, here is an excerpt from her “Historian as Curandera” work:
“We might not know, but it’s an inquiry of what do we imagine. What’s intuitive in our bodies that we can hold on to the light and know that might not be the truth, but it’s the way it lives in us and that is really all we can go on. We can only ever know a partial reality. Of anything, even ourselves. Of each other, of our ancestors.
History is long and wide and deep and all of us have ancestors we can be absolutely proud of, all of us have ancestors that have raided and killed and raped and burned. All of us have ancestors who participated in the subjugation of others and all of us have ancestors who stood up for their neighbors and took risks. It is absolutely certain that your people mixed. Nobody didn’t mix. You will find every possible story in your own family tree. So whatever you’re afraid of encountering, it is there. And whatever you are praying you will encounter it is there. That is true of every single one of us.
There is always far more resistance in every legacy than is documented. Never believe for a moment that your family is not full of people who resisted. I believe that every lineage holds points of pride and the more humanity that we discover in each other…the fact is that if we go looking we will find their humanity, if you go looking in dreadful heritages you will find people to love and cherish. Somewhere behind every atrocious, despicable act is the story of a wound.”
Dialogue Notes:
These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes. Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.
Check-in: ● Felt like ancestry inaccessible, wanting to start asking these questions ● Recently went through ancestral healing process – grateful for timing to continue conversation ● Recently read Homegoing, noticing ways that white people were all complicit ● Thinking about ghosts in the present, how do these patterns persist – looking back clearer how white people complicit in horrific violence ● Don’t have family in the US for long ● Come from family with mental health stuff, curious how these patterns relate ● What language is appropriate to use for the legacies we’ve inherited ● For 10 years have been researching family history, working on documentary – has been magical, scary, upsetting process that still unfolds, has life of its own ● What are we doing now – what ancestors are we for the future? ● Type of culture I inherit from our parents, not codified, not explicit lessons ● Curious about closer ancestry, from an anti-racist identity – what i take from my parents and grandparents, distinct culture i have chosen now ● Wanting to move beyond the “10 things you should do” anti-racism culture – what is a collective culture ● What teaches me how to be human in a better way ● Grew up in bay area, family is compost bin of shadows, what wasn’t spoken much louder than what was said. Part of this connected to process of becoming white – suppressed cultural legacies in order to become white. ● Who has my family become white against? Researching gold rush, reading An American Genocide (in CA against native tribes) Raphael Limpkin coins term Genocide in 1940s, based it on native american genocide and then died before it was published. Reading this altering relationship to places in the bay, understanding the depth of the erasure of history and culture and people. Dissonance between conception of CA as a free state without slaves and reality of enslavement of native people and others. ● Documentary Finding the Mother Lode – Italian immigration story about gold rush doesn’t mention genocide of native people. ● Feeling the dance of how it is now a trend/currency of the “good white person” to research ancestry – feeling a push/pull there ● A family member did matrilineal geneaology ● Working with POC who have lost some of the familial history lines & gaps ● Feeling gap that if my ancestors knew me they might not want me, and i may not want them – felt sense of disbelonging, and that i stand against what they stood for ● Grew up nuclearly isolated, so much blankness and disconnection from side of family that i was drawn towards but distant from with histories of sexual abuse ● Inheritances of angst – Looking at what reconnecting means ● Newly brought into inquiry of whiteness and positionality, intersecting journeys of moving away from southern Republican Christian family ● Grandparents in law enforcement ● Whole life feeling of vulnerability, night terrors and dreams – surfacing perpetration of both sides of the family, racist actions towards Black people ● Family gun in dream – seeing and naming released something, had never been able to sleep with back to the door ● How people work through lineages of perpetration ● Doing a lot of work with youth, wanting to deepen my own anti-racism capacity, and doing ancestral healing work – don’t have a lot of accessible info – looking towards them, and towards myself ● Encountering limitations with racial justice work, and limitations with my past – curious where this continues to overlap ● About to take time with last living grandparent, want to use time with her that’s enlightening for both of us, parts of our family that are in the dark ● Grateful to hear others’ experiences and questions ● Forms of excavation showing up as next steps in anti-racist journey, ways that trauma, addiction and mental health showing up, how related to our family’s Native displacement ● Ancestors that can’t rest well, who are holding on, unresolved ● Trying to find indigenous earth-based traditions that white supremacy severs ● Hard to connect with family who is alive – owning them and them owning me, let alone ancestors who have died and i never knew ● My thoughts are very disjointed – my family picks and chooses ● What/how to we choose that informs how we want to be in the world? ● Where’s the place that i can connect to, with many European backgrounds, and is that the thing? What is knowable? ● What am i not seeing/not knowing ● Feels like “women’s task” being the keeper of information? How am i going to pass on this information? ● Starting to look at racist migratory trajectories in my family – who are they trying to get away from, putting myself in that ancestral narrative of moving, and why moving ● Looking at white ancestry is a currency and i’ve been dealing in this extensively – trip to Ireland, getting to know Irish Catholic lineages ● Family participated in genocide, clearing land, land where i feel most alive ● We are the karma of our ancestors – here we are as resistance, you thought you were building a supremacist empire, i’m here to tear it down – that relationship helps me turn towards them ● Time is non-linear, i am an ancestor – i want to foster relationship to the people i’m in relation to: ancestral healing in both directions ● In my experience of white supremacist capitalist culture, felt unrooted in spiritual tradition, feel rudderless without following this inquiry somewhere ● Appreciate time travel aspect ● Wanting future generations to inherit best possible world ● Colonization, witch burnings and capitalism co-arising, still all alive, feeling the devastation of those ● Feeling that holding so much for so many people, grief and rage, untangling webs of disinformation, wisdom that was attempted to kill off ● I need a compass, and this a critical part of this compass ● Ghosts making themselves known at this time in our lives ● Trauma can turn on genes and get passed down – epigenetics ● In what ways in capitalism destroying the people who are winning ● By uncovering stories, can we find out more about our bodies ● Post-traumatic slave syndrome and practices to heal in the present. And the corollary of post-traumatic perpetrator syndrome people are starting to speak about. What are teh distortions to the human psyche to witness violence and do nothing or have it done in you name. Or its happening around you and what compartmentalization. ● Joy Degruy- showed a photo of the white lynching mob, and the horror for Black people. And then there is also this little girl in the front and what has happened to her mind. ● Things that happened that put me on the journey. Part of me doesn’t want to deal with the person who is here in 1655. Not gonna honor my ancestors, fuck them. And then some friends, pushed elemental on the choices they made and how I am here now. And how its impossible to know what will come to the fore. Synchronicity. ● Once you start listening a lot opens up ● How this is related to sense of joy, aliveness, connection ● Do i have the right to do this? Important to interrogate entitlement ● Underlying critique of “ancestral research” currency ● When ego is stripped away, what does this type of inquiry do for a liberatory society ● WSC: psychic lashing out, destruction of place, emotional disconnection ● Is it useful to keep a center of why is ancestral knowledge helpful for larger good? ● It can become entirely individualist ● We tend to care about who we know, who is made more human ● Hard to care about what happened in past when i don’t know them ● Some involuntary caring about ancestors, knowing who they hurt, feelings of accountability to that may arise more clearly ● Queerness is the answer 🙂 – in history, internalized transphobia, am i a freak? Just as this exists in the world of plants and other animals, it exists back through time. Where are the weirdos? Where are my queer ancestors? In my family stories the men are more central and the women are less storied. What doesn’t get noticed or passed down. ● Whiteness is very unstable, changing. Previously, KKK would have annihilated jewish community too, but now we are all in the same room inquiring into mutual participation in whiteness. ● What will be possible in the unstable changingness of whiteness. ● Alexis Pauline Gumbs speaker on “how to survive the end of the world” podcast – non linear time, we are also ancestors. ● Dispossession – distance from immediate family who is racist. Distancing from white people who aren’t up on critical race analysis. Distancing from family is a white thing, privilege to be off on our own. Perhaps better to turn toward family and use the angry opposition that arises as energetic fuel to continue to work. ● Individual healing – hard things growing up, need to know what happened to liberate ourselves. ● In order to have any repair or healing or transformation, we need to make space for the most incredibly huge harm and accepting it happened – can we hold the complexity of all people without splitting into all good or all bad ● The more that we can do to break down simplified rules, exceptions to all rules ● Shifts the ways our minds work and have been trained, to hold more space ● What we find abhorrent, can’t look in ourselves – if we can see and stay present with this complexity in others, to see and stay with ourselves ● Commitment to love all the people i’m related to ● Thinking about this metaphorically, what happens to a rootless tree? At the very least we appropriate and steal from others – feeling disconnected ● One of the calls to action that i was impacted by – Dr. DeGruy, looking at my own capacity for dehumanization, where that permission came from in my roots ● Thinking about how projection functions in race – projecting all sensuality and aggression out of white women onto black women and men, this lives in you and this is other – what this means to reclaim those parts, not needing to maintain projection ● If i dissociate from my capacity to dehumanize ● Consistent mining of unconscious bias when i walk down the street – do i look away or look toward ● Daily practice: who do i actually see and acknowledge ● Ann Moore resource we sent out, art project embodying ancestors ● My ancestors would be horrified by the apocalypse of homelessness that i pass by every day, i am horrified, talk about this all the time and do nothing because don’t know what to do, my grandchildren would not know the conversations we’ve had ● How we imprint and are imprinted ● My parents never talked with me about this, though they were conscious, compartmentalize ● Importance of political ancestors ● If we disconnect from our roots, we don’t find the people who resisted, claim the harm and resistance ● Dani West article lifted me out of ways to approach ancestors ● What helps us show up in the here and now – what makes me more capable to work for liberatory ends ● A newer curiosity coming up to understand why i am looking for awful lineages in a flattened way – important to do, and what am i needing in finding them ● Feel a lot of lineage in movement, my white queer, white Jewish, white disabled ancestors ● Activist calendar, “on this day”, helps ground in history and fight against queer erasure ● How to be held in tradition, how things get carried and passed ● Anniversaries create access to Spiral of time, where meet ancestors ● Collective project to recreate and remember ● At what point in time do we have to do that ● Forces of amnesia as a tool of empire – so so easy to forget even what is recent – Makes remembering a radical resistance. Architecture of forgetting, cultural loss. ● Systems of racial hierarchy keep getting recreated – how do we understand the broader underlying patterns to resist future reconstructions ● Land – fraught theme – our current relationship to place – loving this place and being present in ongoing violent displacement. Historical relationship to place. Moving people off of it and caring for it as a separate wild place. ● The need to forget so that we can make the melting pot ● Rootless things are easier to manipulate or move, get buy in to the military to belong, etc ● Other piece is numb and desensitized, go to work and watch TV raise kids – distracted from the deeper wounding, lack of imagination and remembering and context. ● It’s not so much our specific ancestors, it’s understanding historical context of how atrocities and oppression was enacted. Having conversation with ancestors requires imagination. Talk to them write them letters ask questions – can we imagine as a way to build empathy with historical situation and therefore also empathy for ourselves now and see ourselves as protagonists in our current story. ● Often we don’t know what the context is – painfully aware of this ● Being disconnected from our roots is a liability, tool of empire to attempt to destroy everyone’s roots ● Ford tradition of graduation of sameness ● I’ve been drawing a huge tree in a vast landscape and always drawn to picture a graveyard to the right ● Mourning – mourning something that i don’t know what it is ● What piece of experiencing this land is mine? ● Challenging the good/bad binary and how that lives in me ● Is there enough space enough resource to acknowledge certain forms of pain ● Ethics of healing with white oppressors and perpetrators of violence – in relation to the violence that POC have experienced at the hands of white supremacy ● In a fractal way, abundance of information ● Questions have to do with reconciling relationships to land – even more than with human beings, places where i feel most alive, where i felt safest as a young person – complexity is really heavy, how to hold both consciousnesses ● When ancestors have visited you, how have you known? Have you been visited by future ancestor? ● As part of Jewish diaspora, and history of landlessness, don’t relate to these relationships to land ● Individual and collective ● As granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, desperate desire for rootedness ● Feel dual relationship ● How much choice and being chosen ● Tired of ways that radical anti-racist spaces collapse our identities – blow it up, it’s not true, makes me not want to fight the fight ● When i hear Celtic music, i crystallize ● Anytime i trust my impulse to listen ● We get so caught up in our daily lives, we don’t listen, to the land, to the wind – part of this journey is learning to listen, dreams, receptivity ● The past is talking to us – when you listen you will hear that ● Grasping my family and the human family, what is our place in history – what kind of ancestors do we want to be ● Growing up in hippie evangelical context, about manifesting your own prosperity – creates an additional barrier for me to access intuitive knowing, cut off hearing