Unveiling the Activist Fool

Sharon Blackie discusses mythology and belonging as a woman in the world, and the Heroine’s Journey as an alternative path to the Hero’s Journey in “If Women Rose Rooted.” Blackie talks about the call to journey, which resonates with me as I look at the Fool and their position in preparing for the hard work of change. She says,

“When we heed that Call and step off the edge, thinking to firmly set foot on the path which lies ahead of us, to strike out confidently on our new pilgrimage – we may instead find ourselves losing our footing and plummeting down into the dark. Scream if you will, but let yourself fall. We have to let ourselves fall… There…the ego begins to be dismantled.”

Minis says, “It is a tender confrontation to realize how your everyday actions indisputably connect to the oppression, torture, and murder of Black and Brown people around the world.”

 As a white, privileged woman, it has not been easy or comfortable to look at how my life, and the relative ease which I enjoy, is made possible by the disembodiment of BIPOC individuals and communities. It is not comfortable to see myself, my community, my country suppressing the voices and often the lives of people of color. To wake up and see that I have said racist things, believed racist things, and perpetuated them. Ignored them. 

For years I believed that race didn’t matter to me – in a way only a white person can. My sister is a woman of color, my best friend in high school was Asian American, my best friend in college and now is a woman of color. I had a dear friend, who was a black man, tell me once that I had “no color” because I fit in and hung out with everyone – Latinos, Blacks, Whites. And for years I wore that as a badge of honor, without realising that I still had a LOT of internalized racism.

I voted for Obama. Twice. I was not racist. 

How wrong I was. Racism is not just killing people of color. Racism isn’t just calling black people the “N word”. Racism is a structural paradigm, where the people in power, regardless of color, are stuck in a system that runs on the labor and vilification of people of color. Nearly every aspect of our society in the US is built on racism. Our system runs on misinformation, and glossing over the “hard work” of reality. 

I was asleep for so many deaths reduced to hashtags. George Floyd woke me up. I read “White Fragility” and “Between the World and Me,” both of which I recommend. I started to see how much of this society is a lie. The 13th Amendment of the US Constitution assumed to abolish slavery, but instead has enshrined it in our nation’s laws. Because the Constitution says that, 

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Our justice system regularly fails when it comes to people of color. Men of color were targeted by both police and the media during the “War on Drugs.” For Black people, men espeically, Cocaine was called crack, and they were jailed for longer and more often that White people found on or with cocaine. There are more black and Hispanic people than white people jailed in the US, and they stay there longer.

Remember the lynching of Emmett Till, where a boy was brutally murdered for supposedly cat-calling a white woman. A woman who, as it turns out, made it up. Where was his justice? He was never convicted, never given a trial. He was murdered. I don’t remember ever learning about Emmett in school. 

In School we briefly glossed over Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and white people use King’s words as a shield against being judged as racist. In reality, they are not doing the work for racial justice, and often are twisting what he said. Remember white people, King was MURDERED, EXECUTED for his work. He was not popular among white people of the 60s, even beyond.

I believe that true witches are focused not only on creating a new world for themselves, but also on creating a new world for each of us, one founded on true equity, on balance and on anti-racism and activism. 

Many (perhaps even most) religions claim to believe we are all part of, or children of, the divine; we are all connected to each other. But to really believe and act on the idea that every person has inherent worth and divinity is tricky. It requires us to face that life is not simple, clear cut and easy to unravel.

We, ourselves, are contradictions, and it is imperative to be open to looking deeply at the uncomfortable, the unpleasant, within ourselves. To confront our own ego. To take stock of our privilege and the ways that structural racism is inherent in our lives, then be willing to take a stand against it, release the privilege we have. 

Minis says, “This work is not supposed to be easy. It’s not supposed to be comfortable. Especially for white people, dismantling racism is supposed to be arduous, specifically because it requires you to lose power in order to redistribute it.”