When the Cha-Cha Slide Makes You An Erotic Jesus: A Multi-Media Sermon on Being Vulnerable

1. Blessed are those who are Fierce, Extra, and Slay, for Ye are Gods

Watch this video, it's the point of this entire blog:

source: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bhvh_IHlmIJ/

Is this fierce betch being extra or divine? WHY NOT BOTH? I believe this is divine, and maybe it's time to *own* being extra. Because that word can be used to dismiss somebody, but being "extra" can also mean going above and beyond. When we're not doing that, when we're only doing what we’re supposed to be doing, often it's because we're not being vulnerable enough to take a risk to add our own unique spin, or to do what we really want.

Often this lack translates to "going through the motions," on "autopilot," or just "doing the bare minimum." When people do only what's expected that they're supposed to do, nothing changes, the element of surprise gets lost. If most of our activities our done like this, stagnation is what's left. But, in the words of Julia Barnes,

heaven is eager to learn how we will add to the growth

of existence. To become divine, we have to be vulnerable and extra.

Or, in the words of Martha Graham,

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium: and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

She continues:

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatsoever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Audre Lorde talks about this channel for the creative life force we all have in "The Uses of the Erotic." But she would disagree about there being no satisfaction whatsoever. For her, it may or may not matter whether one is satisfied with the finished product, but at least the doing should involve some level of all-in-it pleasure. For her, the "erotic" is the joy infused in doing something for its own sake. It’s not a mere “means to an end.” Erotic leads to excellence because it involves going beyond what's simply required, and it innately involves joy. It may not look like joy to an outsider watching us while we're "in the zone," but I would argue that the absence of thoughts about the past or future while absorbed in the task is itself a form of joy.

Look at her (using "her" as a term of endearment) dancing in the Cha-Cha slide video. I see Jesus in this right here, giving us an erotic revelation to be excellent, to be extra. Because, like those who saw Jesus do his thing and still found a way to demonize him, you can try and dismiss her, but you only convict yourself in doing so.

This being is doing to the Cha Cha Slide what Jesus did to the Torah, remixing and reinterpreting something we already know (or *thought* we did), while setting the bar *high.* (“Be perfect, as God is perfect” Matthew 5:48). Be excellent. And whereas Jesus says in Matthew 5:17, “I have not come to abolish the Torah law, but to fulfill it,” this fierce betch said “Don’t think I’ve come to abolish the Cha Cha Slide. I have come to fulfill it.” This gives us permission to be extra in our own lives, to tap into the part of ourselves where our gifts are.

In John 10:34, essentially, the following story happens. When Jesus was being so audacious and extra as to call himself a god, some of the conservatives threw stones at him. He cocked his head over his shoulder and, quoting from their own Scriptures to defeat them, said “You better look up your own Law, does it not say ‘Ye are gods?’” Here Jesus was slaying the Hebrew Bible, quoting Psalm 82:6 in a remixed way. But in the eyes of the uninitiated, who repressed their own divine erotic power, this was blasphemy. He too, like this erotic Cha-Cha slide god, gives us permission to be extra in our own lives, to tap into the part of ourselves where our gifts are, so when we act out of a fully-resourced place, it comes across as MAGIC in the eyes of the uninitiated.

II. The Magician

watch until 3:20

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVV3kBJvWDs

Not just "she who slayed the cha-cha slide" or "Jesus" - but *anyone* who gives us permission to be eroticly extra in our own lives, to tap into the part of ourselves where our gifts are, is like Jesus to us, awakening our inner god. When you act out of a fully-resourced place, it comes across as MAGIC in the eyes of the uninitiated.

When the opportunity to use your best talents arises, your performance will seem like magic to those around you. When you have a set of plans and enact them to perfection, quickly accomplishing your goal, people will be shocked. Your accomplishments will seem ordinary to you, as if they should have happened without question, but others will look at what you do like it is a new form of magic. All of these circumstances summon forth The Magician card from the Tarot deck. This is the card of making things happen, being in control, getting what you want because you understand how to earn it … and impressing everyone in the process of doing what comes natural to you.

The Magician Tarot Card at Keen.com

My favorite memories watching my bff George Moore perform demonstrates that he knows about magic when he performs and does familiar genres (comedy, piano, rap) in a new way. George is a self-described god and 7th-dimensional being. I believe it is because he gave himself permission to try something new. He came to an open mic and caused a little boy to look at him like, "whaat, you can *do* that??" This permission, it either infuriates the repressed, confuses the perplexed, or inspires the rest. There's really no in-between. Outside of certain contexts, people label his extravagance dismissively or pathologize his magic as compensating for something, just as they did to Robin Williams, saying he was being over the top out of a place of depression, being so silly just as a mask.

But sometimes people, however complicated they are, are just bringing the light.

Notice how George, like the cha-cha slide slayer, starts out as a spectacle but eventually gets people cheering, but also like the c-c-slayer, he invites others to participate.

His audience begins mostly silent, likely due to his novel way of doing things. Then an audience member would shout something funny out to George, and George would then improvise a reaction on the spot, like you see in the video. This showed other people that his goal was engage the audience and make it participatory, not just to be a spectacle where people stare and gawk and feel awkward. There is always an audience member who needs to recognize that this is a divine moment- there always needs to be an apostle Peter to recognize Jesus as a divine figure ("People say I am all sorts of things. Who do you believe I am?" "The Messiah," replies Peter. "No one told you this, you just knew. That is why I am giving you the keys" Matthew 6:13-19).

Here is one more example of a magician harnessing their erotic power, also demonstrating what I'm now calling the Peter principle (and I'm never going to use that silly phrase again). It is someone dancing with every fiber of their being in a freaky way while at a concert. They are alone in being so bold. Their dance is initially is met with the silence of spectacle, but then ends up creating a giant craze of erotic life force, and it all unfolds before your very eyes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk

III. The Bride Stripped Bare: Crucifying the Erotic

Jesus was told that he could not have authority to talk about God because he did not learn formally in school. "Who are you trying to be?"

Hearing "Who are you trying to be" often means that you're being vulnerable enough to try something new in a way that scares others who don't give themselves permission to experiment. Experimenting is going outside of control. It scares people and turns them into police officers, enforcers of the so-called "rules" we inherit on how we need to act/perform our sexuality and our spirituality, the two most sacred parts of us.

It's why magicians and mystics were hunted down at one point- they were just trying to bring the light, to increase our imagination, but they were misunderstood, feared, and the haters projected their own issues onto them. LGBT people, flamboyant people, sex-positive people (notice I'm distinguishing between these groups because one does not insinuate the other), magicians and witches (healers and medicine people) are often hunted down, a lot of times for the same reasons. That's why I believe, along with many others and for similar reasons, the X-Men superheroes are queer, and the mutants can represent LGBT people: they are feared and misunderstood. They could represent any community marginalized for being different than the dominant culture, yet lives into their magic. If we live in to our uniqueness, *we each have superpowers* when we empower ourselves to keep our channel to the erotic divine open. To be magic, to be divine, to be in god-mode. As Jesus had said, "Ye are gods."

George is a real life X-Man repressed by the dominant culture for his superpowers. He was once tapped on the shoulder at a school dance, just when he was really getting into it. George turned and looked back; the person who tapped him told to cut it out. George wasn't doing the boring, mundane "leaning and rocking" the rest of the guys felt they only felt they had permission to do. There was a sacred magic in his moves that expressed something unique about him, and it triggered his puberty-hitting peers who were busy trying to conform to what it meant to "be cool." They were afraid to express themselves so freely.
George was a magician, he was Jesus to them, and he could grant permission for others willing to touch the hem of his garment, to become electric too, but people were too afraid to join him. They were envious and gave him a cross to bear. They turned potential salvation into a stumbling block, because they were too immature to deal with their own issues. It was too alien to them to learn how to come to terms with their fears and desires. They stand in stark contrast to the first person who is brave enough to step out onto the dance floor and freak out.

The image beginning this section includes two drawings - one of a woman being stripped bare and beaten, the other of Jesus in her place. There is a very erotic book in the Bible called Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon). In it, a woman sees an-Other who awakens her to see the world and behave in it in a new way. In Song of Songs 5:2-5, our narrator is restless in bed, trying to sleep, when her lover comes by, presumably for a tryst. She goes to open the door-latch, she is perfumed as she does so. However, the climax comes in 5:6 when she finally opens the door and he is gone. She, our narrator, then has the erotic audacity to go out into the city streets searching for he who was seemingly just there. Our narrator is found, and beaten up by, the city guards, and stripped bare: “they took away my cloak!” (5:7).
This follows a common theme of young people in Ancient Near East poems willing to risk danger for love’s sake, but this artwork shows that Christian interpreters sometimes saw the woman in Song of Songs as prefiguring Christ's suffering at the hands of the authorities. I like that interpretation, because it makes Jesus heir to erotic women who had audacity in their bones. She was doing what we all must do - seek the face of the Other, who can remind us how to integrate, who gives us permission to be our own unique selves regardless of the social norms. As with the boys tapping on George’s shoulder at the dance, and Jesus being brought low by the authorities, these are three examples of what happens to us when we give ourselves permission to follow our hearts: people mock or attack us, or both. And we unfortunately learn to internalize these authorities/police and begin to censor ourselves. Our outer cross to bear has an inner corollary. We police ourselves, on the lookout to squelch the erotic.

In his book The Erotic Word, David Carr looks at ayncient Near Eastern love poetry to show that feminine poetry was often subversive to the patriarchy. The men’s descriptions of sex was usually “graphic,” “perfunctory” (focused on getting the job done, not caring if it was well done, the opposite of Lorde's "erotic"), and often, violent. The female poets, on the other hand, often situated sex within an emotional context, and lingered around the sensual experience. In Song of Songs, our narrator centers the foreplay of tender touch and kisses, on the charming with feagrant smells, and honoring consent and nurturing instead of force (the refrain of the poem is “Do not awaken love until it is ready”). She is occupied with being really extra with her descriptions of her beloved; and she's being extra for a reason. Commentators say that her choice of imagery- apricots and wine- stand in intentional contrast to bread and water. These are needed for basic human survival, but recall, women's poetry would go above and beyond what is required. The divine is in doing what needs to be done and being excellent, in being erotic in Lorde's sense.
Our narrator in Song of Songs the agency to pursue her heart’s desires, even when the repercussions seem to inevitably involve some confusion and repression. And that makes her a god. She herself becomes an Other, a model for the women of Jerusalem to emulate and the men of Jerusalem to accept, if they could only lean into their vulnerability and act on their erotic power, regardless of their fear.

My seminary classmate and friend Shakira Henderson writes “The imagery of the guards stripping the young woman bare and her willingness to face a dangerous situation for her love, speaks to the power of vulnerability. For the young woman and for Jesus, the subversive power of the erotic lies in their willingness to take the pain which is almost guaranteed and transmute it. Whereas the 'perfunctory agenda of the society' is to fear that bareness, those who embrace the vulnerability are able to experience the heights of connection that eroticism can give us."

IV. You Don’t Want to Pick From My Appletree

“They play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they do not understand. … They feel most comfortable in groups, less guilt to swallow. They are us. This is what we have become. Afraid to respect the individual. A single person within a circumstance can move one to change. To love herself. To evolve.”

Erykah Badu, “Window Seat”

“I don’t walk around trying to be what I’m not,

I don’t waste my time trying to get what you got

…

And if you don’t want to be down with me

You don’t wanna pick from my appletree”

Erykah Badu, “Apple Tree”

I don't know who you are, you fierce betch, but you slaying the Cha-Cha Slide like this makes me want to touch the hem of your garment-

that is- as my pastor Kevin E. Taylor says,

to walk in my joy
and my authority.

Which means being audacious enough to do something that scares me.

Something new, as Pastor Taylor says, something not "on my resume"
Being authentic is scary because of vulnerability, vulnerability because of fear of shame.
And so I post a video of me dancing, having fun in the doing

When I go out on the dance floor at a club, I've had people come up to me just to learn my moves. Yet if I try dancing in certain spaces, people misunderstand and some even hate. They don't give *themselves* the permission to let go so I become a painful reminder of this fact. They'd rather attack the reminder (me) than deal with their own issues.

I don’t waste my time trying to get what they got because they don’t have anything for me.

Sometimes they might think I'm "trying" to do or be someone I'm not, because they're afraid if *they* did what I do, they'd be afraid of people saying that about them. (But reconnecting with estranged parts of yourself is only awkward at first). I struggle when I'm around these people with giving myself permission, however. I play small, and that is a cross society tries to force me to bear, and one which I have internalized as self-consciousness, as my inner guards who will beat me for being audacious, and steal my cloak to shame me.

We all have a similar cross to bear, or multiple ones.

I have to go back to the well of my inner god, I have to conjure the image within me of the Other who once awakened me so long ago.

We all have a similar Other or Others who can remind us to awaken.

Who are yours? What are your crosses? What is it that you love to do but struggle with permission for? What is the cost of holding back, the cost of believing those who crucify you?
What does self-permission look like for you, what does it sound like, feel like, taste like?

Abundance, Scarcity, and Zero-Sum games in Black Panther (Spoilers!)

One angle of appreciating Black Panther was its take on abundance and scarcity, and its criticism of "zero-sum games." Wakanda was great for most people due to its post-scarcity situation, but, sounding like the Boddhisatva who could not enjoy Nirvana unless he reincarnated to bring other people to enlightenment, Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) said she could not enjoy Wakanda knowing that its happy, peaceful security was happening at the expense of her neighbors in Africa going unprotected.

Scarcity in the midst of abundance should ring all sorts of alarm bells. It is an important depiction of how structural violence works: how many lives end in a premature state, or endure extra-suffering, as the cost of comfortable middle-class living? In other words, we gain success as a nation on whose backs, at whose expense?

Not that Wakanda actively exploited anyone, but then again, most middle-class families are not either; it is their passivity in the name of comfort and security which keeps them in their bubble of criminal inaction. Chadwick Boseman, who plays King T'Challa, himself said his character represents "the enemy I’ve always known. It’s power. It’s having privilege.” He characterizes T’Challa as “born with a vibranium spoon in my mouth.”

But he was always horrified by the way his father treated his uncle and Kilmonger, and as a white person I could relate to this from my experience of going from "white guilt" for my ancestors to "white responsibility" of being more like Nakia - he owns up to his responsibility. He lets Kilmonger challenge him, even when others tried to stop it. And since the beginning, T'Challa leaned more toward the views of Nakia, toward "I don't have to feel like I'm *losing* by giving up my comfort to fight for your security." He transcended the zero-sum game. Whereas people tried to convince T'Challa "we don't want refugees bringing their problems with them." This is almost an exact quote of Donald Trump saying "When Mexico sends its people...they're bringing their problems with them" (crime) and the logic of his Syrian refugee ban. Elsewhere, people in Wakanda argued that they could not both protect Wakanda's security and share its resources with Black peoples. It had to be *either* one *or* the other.

Jessica Benjamin is a therapist I learned about last semester who writes about the importance of not getting locked into zero-sum games, whether in family or romantic relationships on the one hand, or on the level of social groups on the other (she focuses on Israel and Palestine). Specifically, she looks at the false scarcity zero-sum game of "not all can be saved," which also speaks to the tribalistic ethno-nationalism in America whereby we tell Mexicans and Muslim refugees that "We need to take care of our own Veterans and homeless. We can't take you." This is a lie and an excuse to keep America white. The elite doesn't give a damn about American veterans, homeless people, and never will; and Trump, Obama, Clinton, Bernie, no one is going to save the day. It is going to take people power, the death of nihilism and fatalism, and white non-elites are going to *have to* find solidarity with people of color, especially the ghetto dwellers and refugees and undocumented peoples currently whites are taught to see as a "drain on the system," and *show up* for them, because we're all in this together.
By the end of the film, we see Wakanda positioning itself in a way that transcends the "either/or" binary, a binary Jessica Benjamin calls the "complementarity" relationship where neither side can recognize each other's concerns as valid. But how far will this go? Will Wakandans really see past their own projections towards the other's full humanity, so that Kilmonger and his father are released from their isolation in the realm of the ancestors?

Critiques My critiques of the film are best articulated in an article I will quote from, concerning the pathologizing of Kilmonger. They did not have to make him cold-blooded. The actual Black Panthers in Oakland California *combined* the desire for armed revolution of *all* oppressed peoples (including white people) with doing free community survival programs. They had Kilmonger's aims with T'Challa's methods but also Kilmonger's methods as a card on the table (minus the total slaughter, more like the American Revolution) - and though one of its leaders ended up a raging bully (his time in jail may have made him into a bully), there is also the example of Malcolm X (see about his third-world internationalism) who kept this balance of revolutionary-with-a-moral center. Some context: you must know there was a post-WW2 "first world" (USA/Western Europe), "second world" (USSR) split, where each "world" tried to be leaders of the world; they were challenged by the NAM (non-aligned movement) of the "third world". Read The Darker Nations by Vijay Prashad for a look at this.
Trope Number One: Lacking Internationalist View

"The animating principle of the Nonaligned Movement, a struggle for Third World autonomy and power endorsed by the “Afro-Asian” conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. The spiritual heirs of Bandung, including Malcolm X, rejected the United States’s self-proclaimed status as “leader of the free world.” They viewed the US as a violent empire and they insisted that “the darker nations” must acquire the power—military and otherwise—to resist American aggression. Killmonger, it seems, is a fictional grandson of Bandung, though he has clearly failed to digest the movement’s emphasis on peace and human rights as alternatives to expansionism. However, the real American power structure still fears any global alliance that might present an ideological counterforce to US hegemony. So Killmonger is depicted as deranged and his plot to arm people is cast as a bitter crusade for vengeance rather than as a rational response to the horrors of white supremacy and imperialism. In this manner, defenders of empire are able to distort the historical project of the Third World left while equating with terrorism any vision of globalization not managed by US capitalism and its allies.

Trope Number Two: African American Pathology

"Portraying Killmonger as demented does not merely smear radicalism. It also recycles racist themes of black corruption and immorality. Ironically, this aspect of Black Panther has been largely ignored amid delight over the film’s more auspicious representations of blackness. In truth, though, the flattering depictions are uneven. Black Panther sets African virtue against African-American vice.

"The juxtaposition is pernicious. For assertions of black degeneracy often accompany narratives of cultural decline, including the idea that the traumas of slavery or urban life permanently damaged African Americans. As the historian Daryl Scott has shown, such myths have long generated contempt and pity for black America. What they have never done is honor the resilience that enabled black folk to survive the nightmares of the New World.

"Cloistered and provincial, Wakanda lacks a revolutionary heritage that might help shape its social institutions or foreign relations. Oakland, on the other hand, possesses a legacy of radical struggle enriched by the irrepressible spirit of African Americans." Professor Russell Rickford

February 2nd - Do America's Actions towards Mexicans Make us Hitler?

Honoring Imbolc on the Day the Mexican-American Deportations Began.

How to honor Imbolc, the European pagan holiday, as a white* American while holding it in tension with the fact that Feb. 2nd is *also* one of the worst days in Mexican-American history (both the official day America stole Mexico in the 1840s and the mass deportations of the 1930s)? As an antiracist, I cannot in good conscience just celebrate Imbolc this year without acknowledge the best and worst of my ancestors that February 2nd lays bare. I'll do the more fun, ancestral stuff tomorrow.

February 2nd is a day of purification. Pre-Christian European pagans would engage in "Spring" cleaning because of the first signs of spring (the sun returning, crocus flowers blooming, etc.), and February is named after the purging of sweat (fever = feber in Latin). Europeans and those in Catholic Central/South American/Caribbean nations take down their Christmas decorations. Today, neo-Pagans are celebrating the holiday Imbolc. Witches, get out your brooms - for cleaning your rooms, but also your cast out things in your life that are holding you back (there is attracting and repulsive magic, acquiring and letting go, and today we let go).

But there is another kind of purification associated with those of European descent - a very evil kind - that my fellow white Americans need to recognize, and to take responsibility for. America has committed crimes against Chicanos, and does what it always does - waits long enough for historical amnesia to set in. But the wounds remain, and the least I am asking you to do today is to bear witness to the human cost of "Make America Great Again." Purity is an illusion, but we should engage in trying to purge in the sense of healing - to go through the discomfort like a fever - and sweat off our illusions about American nationalism being anything other than white nationalism. Then we can ask the question, "where do we go from here"?

Hitler's program of aggressive territorial expansion was called "lebensraum," a German word meaning "living space." Hitler's purification program was part of a larger European trend called a "pogrom," which was essentially a riotous "purge" of Jews. To do this, he enlisted the work of “stormtroopers.” America, in its form of nationalism in the name of money and power for white people, with its entitlement mentality for whites, is no better than a fascist country like Hitler's. And yes, both governments would tell you they are doing it for peace.

I. Lebensraum Feb. 2nd, 1848 -- "Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends US war with Mexico. After invasion by peace-loving America, México cedes over 1/3 of its land — parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado & Texas — to the US. 25,000 Mexicans & 12,000 Americans lost their lives in the 17-month imperialist visitation led by Southern slaveholders to expand plantation slavery. Regiments from Virginia, Mississippi, & North Carolina rebel & 9,207 desert during this land grab." (quote from the Daily Bleed, an amazing calendar)
General (and future U.S. President) Zachary Taylor ordered scores of U.S. soldiers executed for refusing to fight in México. The Southern planter class insisted that the U.S. Army go down to México City and take the whole country, as well as Cuba and some Central American countries, for more plantations.
The treaty leads the American newspaper called the Whig Intelligencer to boast, with no sense of irony, "we take nothing by conquest.... Thank God."

II. Pogroms Feb 2nd, 1931: The first Chicanos that were a part of the mass deportations of Mexicans were rounded up in a park in Los Angeles. Some of the worst round-ups would later take place in Detroit. “There were deportations in states as far flung as Alaska, Alabama and Mississippi.” In the end, 1.8 million were deported in the pogroms. As if to add insult to injury, it was on the same date that México had officially been stolen by America.
The context was the Great Depression, characterized by high unemployment. From 1931-1936, Mexican-Americans were targeted for mass deportations called "repatriation" - a false name, given how as many as sixty percent of those sent “home” to México were U.S. citizen. City and county governments would go through their employee index, find anyone with a Mexican-sounding last name, have them arrested and deported, to free up job openings for whites.
"The raids were vicious. With national concerns over the supposed burden that outsiders were putting on social welfare agencies, authorities targeted those Mexicans utilizing public resources. In Los Angeles, they had orderlies who gathered people [in the hospitals] and put them in stretchers on trucks and left them at the border.”
"The efforts were equally chaotic. The first raid in Los Angeles was in 1931—they surrounded La Placita Park near downtown L.A. It was a heavily Latino area. They, literally, on a Sunday afternoon, rounded everyone up in park that day, took them to train station and put them on a train that they had leased. These people were taken to Central México to minimize their chances of crossing the border and coming back to the U.S.”
"It was not like there was a master committee mapping out blocks. It was more fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants. As in, Here’s a park where Mexicans go, okay let’s go there.”

As a social worker, I have to take responsibility for the fact that social workers were often the ones doing this. It was the Great Depression, and everyone was on some sort of assistance, no matter their race or ethnicity. Social workers cut off Mexican people's food rations to push them out of the country, leaving them to starve, rather than the cruder method of holding a gun to their head. As a socialist, I have to acknowledge that American socialist policies were for the poor whites first, and its poor people of color last, if at all. Ethno-nationalism, whether we are talking about Nazi’s national socialism or Trump’s supposed desire to increase employment through infrastructure projects, is always going to present itself as “America first/Germany first,” and you can tell who they believe their country is supposed to be - Anglo-Saxon Americans/Aryan Germans - by who they exclude - Latinos, Blacks, and Semitic peoples. Nationalism distorts socialism.
III. Stormtroopers:
"Perhaps more than anything, the humanitarian cost of the Hoover-era deportations are the specter that looms largest over Trump’s immigration policy of today. Given the burden mass deportations would have placed on the federal bureaucracy, Hoover’s administration outsourced the raids, targeting and deportation to local and state officials—persons not particularly well versed in constitutional law, nor the sensitivities surrounding deportation."
"Trump appears ready to do the same: while the administration has directed the hiring of 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to oversee the dramatic increase in deportations, the administration has also revived the controversial 287(g) program, which recruits local law enforcement and sheriff’s deputies to assist in deportations. they don’t have the training, expertise or sensitivity to enforce accurate immigration decisions.”
On ICE agents: "Two officials in Washington said that the shift [in policy]— and the new enthusiasm that has come with it — seems to have encouraged pro-Trump political comments and banter that struck the officials as brazen or gung-ho, like remarks about their jobs becoming “fun.” Those who take less of a hard line on unauthorized immigrants feel silenced, the officials said."
Will America ever take responsibility?
"In the meantime, only a limited number of Americans seem to even be aware of the gross mistakes their country made in the name of security. While still a state senator, Dunn successfully sponsored the Apology Act, an official mea culpa from the state of California to its Mexican residents—it passed in 2006. He also led efforts to have a memorial erected in La Placita park, the site of the first raids on L.A.’s Mexican community, where it now stands in memoriam."
"And yet, when Dunn took his apology proposal to members of the U.S. Congress, no one was interested. 'They would say, ‘Immigration is really volatile right now. We’re gonna look like we’re only fighting for Latinos.’ We couldn’t convince anyone to pick it up.'"
"Those whose families were affected by the deportations—in some cases forever changed—appear no more eager to delve into the sins of the past. “They never talked about it,” said Herrada, “there was a lot of shame associated with it … They didn’t know why they got deported. They didn’t know what they did to bring that on. The only thing they knew was that they were Mexicans—and this only happened to Mexicans.”
She added, “My grandfather still didn’t want to say he was deported. And my father, on his deathbed, said to me, You know, I never liked that word. He was really angry that I had used it.”
Quotes from Alex Wagner's article "America’s Forgotten History of Illegal Deportations," which includes information about the oral history project, “Los Repatriados: Exiles from the Promised Land.” The last quote was from Elena Herrada, one of the founders of the oral history project.
*Shep Glennon is a mixed race (one side: WASP, other/Other side: French-Afro-Cuban) neo-Pagan and a Christian-Muslim. Whew!

Me Too: Holding Men Accountable vs. Shaming Men

Do we need a parallel "Me Too" movement where we identify with the men who are abusing?

I think it's about time to say "Time's Up" on the silence around sexual abuse, and break the wall of mistrusting women, and I really don't think the oppressed hating the oppressor is bad *unless* the oppressed construct an ideology that mimics the oppressor. For instance, shaming just replicates the myth of individualism. Aziz Ansari, who was accused of pressuring a woman to have sex, should not be shamed and written off. Even Harvey Weinstein - because any man (and woman!) could have been Harvey Weinstein if they were tempted with that amount of wealth and power, because we've all been conditioned by society to think that we men can get whatever we want, and that people with power are unaccountable.

 Making Weinstein a scapegoat prevents all of us from looking at ourselves and seeing that, Me Too, I have an inner Weinstein, I have an inner rapist, I have an inner sexist, I can imagine that under the right circumstances I could have been/still can be capable of *anything*. And I need to treat this like an addict in 12-step treats their addiction: realize the urge in me to exploit someone because they are vulnerable is always there and not going to go away, that there is a selfish single-minded part of me liable to ignore body language that says "I'm uncomfortable," or a part of me that says "I always need to finish what I start" that would blind me to a look of "I'm tired," that is willing to pressure someone to give me what I want. This is a part of me, and while I cannot be "cured" of my bad me, I have to hold it responsible. I have to work on knowing my triggers, to talk to other men in recovery who can call me on my bullshit rationalizations, who won't shame me while doing it.

When the woman, hurt and angry that Ansari was ignoring that she did not want to go that far sexually, shouted "you're just like all the other men!", there we can unpack that in one of two ways: yes, and yes. Yes, all men are conditioned to think like he did, and that's unacceptable for men to act on. And yes, it's possible she was trying to shame him by saying that, but he could, and for the love of all that is good, *all* men should take it another way: as a charge, as a call to action: men's self-help groups to recover from toxic masculinity.

What I'm saying is that self-righteousness is worse than hate. I don't think it's possible to both shame someone and hold them accountable at the same time. When you hold someone accountable, you say, "there's a problem with your behavior, it's a pattern. And it's part of a larger problem in this world. You need to work on your problem, and we as a society need to work on the larger problem."

When you shame someone, however, you say, "you *are* a problem." Therefore there's nothing you need to do, to work on yourself and change, you just need to go away, because you are toxic and everything you touch is corrupted.

All the studies show that shame is related to eating disorders, bullying and aggression, depression, domestic violence, addiction, suicide, and incarceration. Guilt is inversely related, meaning the more guilt, the less of those things. Because unlike guilt, which looks at behavior, shame looks at the person and the fact "there's something wrong with them," they are "alien." That destroys agency, and it pinpoints the problem with individual actors (people, agencies) and thus stops short of realizing that society's problem deserves ultimate blame. It replicates the myth of individualism.

Weinstein didn't invent what he did - it's as old as King David in the Bible - he had tens of thousands of years of history backing him up, putting the gun in his hand and asking him to pull the trigger. I'd be more surprised if people like Trump and Weinstein *didn't* exist. We all need to see ourselves as compromised by the same system which created these people - that they are not monsters, or, they are acting on the same monsters inside of us all.

A Christmas Carol of Imagination and Chaos, as seen by a feminist Muslim panentheist

Thou hast thy mighty wings outspread

And brooding o'er the chaos shed

Thy life into the impregn'd abyss

The vital principle infused

And out of nothing's womb produced

The heav'n and earth and all that is

                                                  (hymn by Charles Wesley)

Wesley also wrote "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," but I prefer this one as my Christmas Carol, the universe being born when pregnant potential, infused by the creative life force, gave birth to quarks and leptons.

And are not you and I part of the original potential of the big bang? Are we not a dream, a promise that it held to unfold its possibilities? We've got promise, just like her, we've got potential.

We are the promise of our Mother Chaos ancestor and her dreams to unfold herself, to create on higher levels. We are born limited as a collapsing of her random possibilities, born in the midst of a different kind of chaos - humanmade, societal injustice. We are born embodying the principle that evil is a failure of the imagination, that zero-sum games are discreation, that many binaries and definitions we assume get us unnecessarily into a mess and cause massive, collective denial, and that such denial itself constitutes a crime.

But as co-creators with God, we can unlimit our imagination, and in doing so unleash the potential of our ancestors, through a daily recovery program: and I say "daily" and "recovery" to bring attention to the fact that we are addicted to our limited ways of thinking. Optimism is a crime: there is no cure here, no one-off born-again enlightenment that allows us to transcend old scripts.
Nevertheless we can learn to question ourselves, to be more receptive to challenges to our deeply held and cherished attachments, investments, assumptions, loyalties. We can learn to say "not either/or but both/and" a bit more.
We can validate things we disagree with on some level, however limited.

I open myself up to thee, Allah. In my manger of making the same mistakes over and over again, I ask that you impregnate my soul with your rūḥinā / rūaḥ. By being open to your creative coping, to your healing life force, new paths appear, where there once stood only limitations. To prepare myself, I seek to balance my moments of drive, seeking, calculating, consuming, task-orientedness with awe, slowness, not doing anything, chanting, playing (doing something not as a means to an end, not having an end-point in mind before beginning), improvising, so that I can be *listening* to what is inside of me,

I lift my open hands or put my antennas out, just to receive a message from the moment, to create a space, to see what it tells me. I certainly don't do this enough, I often run away from empty spaces. I'm afraid that they are a waste of time and I have a million things I should be doing, could be doing. I think that these spaces are nothing.

But nothing is pregnant. And that is something to sing about.


(*now PLEASE go back and click those links, to Torah-influenced process theologian Catherine Keller, and what the Torah and the Qur'an /and, separately, / James Baldwin and Catholic theologian Thomas Merton in conversation have to say, as well as various links which you can concretely apply to your racist cousins)

Fact check: Did the Pilgrims actually kill Indians, is Thanksgiving originated in oppression?

Fact check: The Pilgrims actually killed Indians, making Thanksgiving a holiday originated in oppression. Rated: Mostly False.

The Puritans committed a genocide. The Pilgrims often get blamed for it. People get satisfied with this blame and move on.
The more we blame the Pilgrims, the further from truth telling we get because now there's no motivation to investigate the Puritans, the actually guilty party behind the evil Thanksgiving. White people can't afford generalizations about our ancestors- we have to know which ancestor did what and to who. How will we take responsibility for genocide if we don't face history accurately?*

*Though this doesn't negate that the word "pilgrim" may be triggering to people of color, a generic term used colloquially as interchangeable with the Puritans (two U.S. Presidents have even confused the two groups); even in their day, lower-case "p" pilgrims was once used as a generic term for both Puritans and Pilgrims.

We need to let people know there are no sacred cows in American history. Jefferson, Franklin, they were total white supremacists who wanted America white (and certainly not "men of their time," because other white people disagreed with them). And Columbus was very much a Hitler, or worse, because Hitler didn't even rape children and help establish child prostitution rings. And just as some cities have changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day, Thanksgiving needs to recognize how New England today is the result of the systemic genocide of Native Americans. We need to use it as an occasion to give reparations that Natives want (monetary, land, healing, power over their resources and destiny, centering of voices, truth-telling, etc, not one-off and on one day but as a process, and year round). But we should not be so iconoclastic that we conflate the Puritans and the Pilgrims.

the Pilgrims didn't kill Indians for Thanksgiving, it was the Puritans. I think that's an important distinction to make. The Pilgrims who landed on the shore and fasted with the Wampangoag (that's not a typo for "feast", they actually had a three-day *fast*) were peaceful white folks, and the Puritans were bloodthirsty extremists. It's like the difference between moderate Muslims and extremists. When the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony had Thanksgiving, it was with the Indians. When the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony had Thanksgiving, it was thanking God for winning a genocidal war against the Indians. Two very different Thanksgivings, reflecting two very different cultures.
*Not that it made much difference to Natives like Will Rogers who understandably regret letting any Americans on shore.

One author quotes Plymouth Governor William Bradford, who was the Pilgrim leader, as he described the war which led to the Thanksgiving. But while the author almost makes it sound like Bradford endorsed the war, in actuality, he was only describing it. The war, led by Puritans leaders John Endecott and John Winthrop, was led by bands of Puritan butchers and it was Puritan Winthrop who was the governor which Bradford describes as declaring "a day for Thanksgiving" for winning this war. Pilgrim leader Bradford actually criticized this war as fueled by ignorance about natives; Bradford likely could have had no sway over the hotheaded Endecott, because Endecott's own men tried to stop him from raiding Indians, and they were ignored.

The Puritans and their ways eventually overtook the peaceful Pilgrims, just as the peaceful Quakers and Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had their voices drown out by the aggressive money-and-power lovers. They just weren't interested in empire, in subjugating, quantifying, and regulating bodies, and in the kill-or-be-killed world, they all ended up losing power in government. Quakers and Pilgrims sat by as aggressive and ethnocentrist factions within them took advantage of their newfound freedom when greedy, power-hungry people took the helm after the utopian leaders like Bradford died (Pilgrims) or quit politics in protest of the French and Indian war (Quakers). These aggressive mobs taking Indian lands acted with impunity in Plymouth (leading to King Philip's War), and Indian Boarding Schools proliferated in Quaker lands. And then there is the issue of those who sat passively by as potential for justice turned to self-serving silence in the face of injustice; the masses needs then, as now, to be reckoned with. But their utopian ancestors - the ones at Plymouth who protested bigoted whites going to war with Indians, the ones in Quaker lands who instead of condemning Indian religions sought to learn from them because they already saw them as "communing with the inner light," they need to be recognized and honored.

The first generation of Pilgrims at Plymouth were a mostly peaceful time, due to the leadership of Gov. Bradford and Wampanoag leader Massasoit. Pilgrims could be, and were, executed for the murder of Indians, and sometimes Indians received more lenient punishment than Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were not perfect; there were often political reasons for this fair treatment. And the Pilgrims certainly thought they were the hottest shit. According to womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, they saw themselves as defenders of their ancestor's folk culture which had been tainted by Catholicism, represented by the high Anglican Church/Church of England. There was also petty theft. They also almost starved one year soon after they landed, and went looking for Indian help. They happened upon an empty Wampanoag village (that turned out was abandoned, but they had no way of knowing this) and after realizing no one was home, out of desperation, stole from a granary and graves. One Pilgrim said "we meant to have left some beads and other things in the houses as a sign of peace and to show we meant to trade with them," but left in a "haste...but as soon as we meet the Indians, we will pay them back for what we took" (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pg. 86). (Sounds like a self-serving rationalization to me.) Despite these several survival attempts involving petty theft of empty villages, which continued, half of the Pilgrims died within the first year, including that winter of starving. This happened before the first Thanksgiving dinner, with the Wampangoag, which took place in in 1621.

In 1637, over a decade after the first Thanksgiving, the Puritans went to war with the Indians- it was called Pequots war. It was ethnic cleansing. The Puritans celebrated it as Thanksgiving. *This* isn't the one that we celebrate as a Holiday, and it's important not to conflate the two. The Pilgrims present a good opportunity to show that we can't just say "well the Puritans were just people of their time," or "well Indians were hostile so they had to defend themselves," because not all white people were getting into fights with Indians and stealing their land and slaughtering them; the Pilgrims prove this. Because of the Pilgrims, apologist arguments justifying racism don't work.
After the deaths of Massasoit and Winthrop, just a few years apart in the 1660s, the Pilgrims lost their stabilizing forces that had maintained peaceful relations, and became more like their aggressive Puritan cousins in their ways- they hungered for land, English cultural domination, and they treated Natives more harshly during sentencing. This went against their ancestral culture which told them to behave like good Christians toward the Natives, something which Puritan culture had lacked. Josiah Winslow, for instance, was the son of a Pilgrim who dealt fairly with the Natives; Josiah, unlike his father, however, undertook evil land dealings; he was thus more Puritan in his style. By the 1690s, the Pilgrims lost their charter and were absorbed completely into Puritan culture.

We celebrate and romanticize the first Thanksgiving (the Pilgrim one). We ignore the second one (the Puritan one). We should not do either. The Puritan one lays bare the violence of whites and their twisted logic, whose justifications and motivations are the inherited legacy of New Englanders' white Yankees. We inherited Puritan culture, not Pilgrim culture, and we must reckon with it. So this claim that Thanksgiving originated in genocide may not be true, but it has an important element of truth in it that we must be reckoning with. That's why I rate this claim as "mostly false."

Yet the Pilgrims who washed ashore, probably looking lost as hell (they had aimed for Virginia), offer a strain of whiteness not defined by inhumane desire for control and consumption. They represent a potential: that first generation who managed to have fair dealings with Natives all the way down to their criminal justice system. Whites must be looking at the Amish, the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Pilgrims, and reckon with this element as well [they were not perfect]. Some of these groups not only resisted slavery but on principle resisted any dealing with people or companies related to the slave trade. What made them different? How can they be a model, however a limited one? These are questions we should also be thankful to deal with, from ancestors we Euro-Americans should be thankful to have.

Sources: "The Truth About Thanksgiving" by Richard Shiffman on Huffington Post
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen
Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas

Further reading on the Puritans [must-reads for white Americans]:
American Nations by Colin Woodward [start with this easy-to-read one]
Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer [an epic]



"The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history." – James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 92.