On taking responsibility amidst fear
When I was going through the main part of my deconstruction journey of racism and what it means to be Pro-Black,
One The Whole Man podcast this week I shared a little bit about the Art of Taking responsibility and how I think the biggest fear I have with taking responsibility is the fear I feel for what the possible consequences are going to be. I weigh the anxiety and stress I am holding in my body with what my mind is telling me my punishment is going to be and normally decide to just hold onto my stress.
I will give you an example. When I was going through the main part of my deconstruction journey of racism and what it means to be Pro-Black my biggest fear of admitting to my racism, ignorance and continued support of systems of oppression was that Jas would leave me and forever look at me as a schmuck piece of shit.
But the truth is when I took responsibility I had an onslaught of memories that were heavily weighing me down and I wasn’t even aware of it in my conscious mind. I processed these memories through journaling, meditation, and talking with Jas and I was able to forgive myself and also make amends with the involved parties.
I wrote this excerpt as a form of outwardly taking responsibility for my actions in my blog Visions of a Wanderer in 2017,
“You can’t truly hear another until you know yourself– was the breakthrough I needed after having repeatedly beaten my head against the veiled wall of systematic oppression and the fact that I was racially ignorant. I always attempted to fix my ignorance through reading and listening to others' experiences instead of just looking at myself first and the things that have happened in my own life. It wasn’t until I looked at my own fuck ups and loved them that I was able to move into a new space.
I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit—a byproduct of the redlining and strategic measures to keep people of color at arm’s length. Needless to say the 89.1% of white people that surrounded my daily existence left me comfortable, ignorant and unaware.
When I stole a sizable amount of money from a fellow classmate in 7th grade and the person blamed for it was the only brown male in the 30 students in our class, I stayed silent subconsciously hoping that he would remain my scapegoat so that I wouldn’t have to own up to my wrong doing.
When I was on a Road trip for a soccer tournament in the south with my childhood friends Kyle and Oliver, we stopped at a rest stop in the late hours of the night to use the restroom. As we walked into the gas station and saw that there was only one unisex bathroom and it was occupied, we decided to be the thirteen year old assholes that we were and repeatedly pound on the door. Pretending not to hear the loud grunts, “I’m in here God Damnit”, we lined up single file and acted as if we had been quietly waiting our turns, but as the door unlocked and an angry older white gentleman emerged from the bathroom, our snickers and wily grins quickly turned to fear as he began to berate us and tell us we weren’t worth a damn. The eery thing is he only looked at Kyle and Oliver –looking back and forth, back and forth with this energy that presumed them to be nothing. My only thought during this episode was one of gratitude for not being yelled at.
During my senior year when I began my first interracial relationship and a white girl that I had previously been seeing texted me, “Really Alex??? A black girl…..” My only thought was, “At least she is jealous”, completely bypassing the racist comment.
After college I moved to downtown Baltimore and about six months after having lived there, my brown girlfriend at the time, along with another white friend of ours got into a discussion about the current state of the city and the groups of citizens that inhabited its different Burroughs. When we started talking about the epidemic of homeless people that littered the city, my white friend said, “It is isn’t that I don’t like black people, it’s just that I hate laziness.” Again I said nothing and justified it with the argument that he is entitled to his opinion.
I share only a few of my thousands of moments of ignorance in the truth that every time I share one I am closer to uncovering the true way that I was created to look at the world. When I suppress or shame myself– the anger and frustration only grow and get to the point of being unmanageable.”
-A.D. Verville