on hate

There are parts of me right now that are at war.

Before last night happened, I was prepared to say this: I went to the forum that was held three weeks ago after posters were defaced in the Science Center. There were a number of people in that forum expressing surprise. Then there were some people who stood up and said that there were things they felt—like hurt and anger—but surprise wasn’t one of them. I felt like these people; I wasn’t surprised. Long before my research gave me language to name these things, my personal experience instructed me that we live in a world where racism, heterosexism, and anti-Semitism do not just exist, they in fact structure our everyday experiences all the time. They structure the experiences of dominant identities as much as they structure the experiences of the marginalized. Moments like these, I was going to say, serve as reminders that we never came to the end of that. It’s not that things were great, even here at Oberlin, and then three weeks ago they got bad. Things have always been this way.

Then I was going to say that I take issue with the idea of “sticks and stones,” which always seems to suggest that physical hurt is the only kind of damage that matters. In fact, words are not just important, they—like racism and heterosexism and anti-Semitism—structure the very world we live in. Words create who we are and whom we understand others to be. So rhetorical acts of hate, wherein people use words and symbols to terrorize other people, are not to be so easily dismissed.

But then I got a phone call at 5:45 this morning. And as I listened to Caitlin O’Neill and Warren Harding tell me what was going on, the parts of me went to war with each other. The part that wasn’t surprised started battling the part that was stunned that there was a moment happening in my life when someone had appeared in the attire of the Ku Klux Klan less than a mile away from my home. The part of me that had wanted to say that words were just as important as other kinds of hurt, was all of a sudden antagonized by the part of me that felt scared in ways that I had not been feeling before a body dressed in robes entered the community where I live. Right now, at this very moment, I am one part embracing this as a teaching moment and one part pissed that I am spending my time having this conversation instead of going to my physical therapy appointment, visiting my friend’s new baby, and prepping the class session I thought I would be teaching tomorrow.

Fighting always requires labor. But when the struggle is internal to yourself, you’re the only one doing all the work. That is labor that takes up time and energy that I could be spending doing my job: reading, meeting with students, collaborating with colleagues, researching, writing. But, then, this is my job. Talking about this stuff is the work I have chosen in my life to do. And then, again, I’m not unfamiliar with this kind of work. As a black woman who has always lived in predominantly white, predominantly straight, upper-middle class environments, the parts of me have always been in conflict in this way. This labor I’m doing now is the same labor I used to do when my history teachers in school would turn and look at me during the unit on slavery, because I was the sole black person in the room. It’s the labor I did as a student any time I was the only person like me in a classroom, to decide if I wanted to do the work yet again to raise my hand and educate everyone, often including the instructor. It’s the labor I have always done whenever someone has gone out of their way to ask my immigrant parents, “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?” It’s the labor I have done any time someone has said, “You’re so articulate!” because they looked at me and expected me not to be. It’s the labor I do whenever someone mistakes me for a student and acts incredulous that I have a PhD. It’s the labor other people are doing now on campus to live with and document the daily microaggressions and macroaggressions that affect those who are queer, of color, Jewish not just in the last three weeks but the whole time we have all been here. 

That labor has always taken up time from academic and professional productivity and self-care. That labor has always been disproportionately thrust upon the most marginalized individuals and communities, so that they can continue to be called underachievers via measures established under white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Those who are privileged, the ones who establish the measures of achievement and success, do not take into account the extra labor it takes for marginalized persons just to be in the same world that pushes them to the margins, because that is labor that the most privileged will never have to do.

Moments like these, when there are people who have not yet gone to sleep since they woke up yesterday morning, it is clear that the labor needs to be spread around. Moments like these remind me of what I have learned about labor—that the power of many is greater than the power of few. Moments like these call attention to the importance of allies for just that purpose. More people to do the labor means more time for all of us to keep doing all our other work, at the same time we keep this important work going. More people doing the work means more people will recognize that this is part of the work we do and should be valued as such, the way that we are valuing it with this day of events that students, staff, and faculty had to agitate to get.

It is important to recognize that, as members of this community, we are all affected. We have been this whole time. But it is also important to recognize that, as members of this community with differential relationships and access to power and privilege, we are not all affected in the same way. I heard a quotation this weekend: “Love is the expansion of the self to include the other.” So then I guess our charge in this world, and in this life, is to keep growing as big as we can possibly be.