Episode 02: Surrendering Fear
“Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power—not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”
We must be deliberate and unafraid.
This week Brendane is back to talk about surrendering fear in order to get free. We start by defining the colonial practice of fear, which is rooted in oppression that lives in our bodies. Then, we listen to the testimony of Audre Lorde, aka Gamba Adisa, to learn how to transform fear—and the silence produced by fear—into language and action. In the last segment, Brendane discusses internalized white supremacy in our movements and why simply calling for a “ceasefire” or “Free [insert nation-state here]” will never be enough to bring about the world we wish to see.
Listen to the episode here. The transcript will be uploaded below.
Read
The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde
“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, Audre Lorde
Body Rites: A Holistic Healing and Embodiment Workbook for Black Survivors of Sexual Trauma, Dr. shena j young
Psalm 27
Psalm 23
Listen
No Evil - Mpho Sebina
Not Nice - Megan thee Stallion
Scary (feat. Rico Nasty) - Megan thee Stallion
Unapologetically - Mayyadda
Reflect
When we surrender to the truth, that it is our fear of death, our fear of loneliness, our fear of ostracization, our fear of alienation, our fear of poverty, our fear of all of these things that drive us to create this distorted view of reality, what do we let go of?
From dr. shena j. Young:
Are the values I practice also tools that have been used to oppress me and my communities?
Where did it come from–that belief, value, energy, judgment? Where did I learn this?
Where did the fear come from? Is it mine or was it left with me? If it was left with me, was it to protect me or to protect them/others/oppressors?
Why am I so afraid of remembering what has been forgotten?
Do my values and practices dilute my authenticity and truth?
Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Mayyadda, The People’s Psalmist, for allowing us to use her song On My Way for our title theme. Check out her newest album, Try&Remember.
Transcript
[Introduction 0:07] Hello and welcome to black.loved.free, a spiritual political podcast dedicated to black spirituality, healing and black liberation. I am your host, Brendane. A reluctant anthropologist, a student of Black and African indigenous spirituality, and an energy healer.
Before we get started, I want to say thank you to everyone who has donated to the podcast so far. So thank you, Charlotte, Naomi, my Aunt Michelle and Crystal for your donations. And if I didn't mention your name, but you did give, please charge it to my head and not my heart, honey. Please know that you are appreciated. And if you would like to give to the podcast, please visit our website at BlackLovedAndFreepodcast.com to donate. Your donations help us pay for software, they help pay our audio editor, they really keep us going. So don't be shy, even if it's just $1 or some good energy to give us please do. I also want to say a very big thank you to everyone who has texted, dm'd and/or called me about the impact that the first episode had on you. I really struggle with being publicly vulnerable and visible because of what I've experienced in the past. And so I was so afraid to share my truth, being vulnerable in that way is not easy for me. But I figured if my testimony could encourage even just one person to grow closer to themselves, then I've done my spiritual assignment. And I'm so incredibly grateful to everyone who has listened who has shared. Thank you so much.
And if you want to give us feedback, or suggest topics for a future episode, please write us at Blacklovedandfreepodcast@gmail.com.
[Clearing the Air: Fear] So today, we will clear the air by defining fear. I will read the testimony of our beloved ancestor Audre Lorde, who changed her name shortly before her death to Gamba Adisa. So you'll hear me use both of her names interchangeably in this episode, and will also receive and discuss some collective wisdom about dealing with fear in our lives. So without further ado, we're going to get into this episode because it's a lot of juicy things for us to get into. And y'all know, I'm a Gemini so I could talk all day and all night.
As always, we'll start by clearing the air. So join me in a deep breath.May this deep breath help us to integrate a new understanding of fear and reflect on how fear might show up in our lives. Fear lives in the body. And we often hold fear and it's cousin anxiety in our chest and in our hips, sometimes in our stomach. So where do you feel fear? When you are afraid, where does it show up in your body? If you would like breathe into that space. So one more time.
So as always, we'd like to start with the white man's definition - or the colonized definition - and work our way from there. So the Oxford Reference Dictionary defines fear as, quote, "an emotional state evoked by the threat of danger. It is usually characterized by unpleasant subjective experiences. physiological changes, such as increased heart rate and sweating, and behavioral changes, such as avoidance of fear producing objects and situations." dictionary.com defines fear as "a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc. Whether the threat is real or imagined, the feeling or condition of being afraid. Fear can also be defined as a specific instance of or propensity for such a feeling of being afraid."
Now, of course, there's nothing wrong with being afraid, right? I'm not one of those spiritual bypassers that says that you can only feel joy and happiness, right, fear is part of what makes you alive. And I'll say that the dead have fears too. But we'll get to that in a different episode. It goes without saying, there are different kinds of fears that animate the world. So I'm not here to judge you if you're afraid of spiders and or snakes. Because judging you would be judging myself. Or things that have holes in them, I don't know what it's called, seeing things with holes in them be freaking me out. So that's one of the one of the fears I have. But some fear is like actually healthy to have, right? It shows that you have a regard for your life. And if you don't have fear, then, you know, how do you know that you're really moving and processing the world? And so one of the things that we'll do on this podcast right is to actually resist this kind of white man's definition of things as colonial definition of things. By accepting that there are many truths and many definitions of words. And one of the things that we also note right is that the violence of the English language is that often we have one word to describe actually many feelings, beings or states. So most of us might be familiar with understanding fear as that protective emotion, right, that condition of being afraid. Fear lets us know when danger whether real or perceived is near. Right fear as an emotion might make itself known or felt when we're facing the unknown. Fear can also be embodied, though.
And so one of the ways that we might come to understand fear as we expand this definition is to think about who might embody this condition of fear. And fear can be embodied in blackness, in transness, in queerness, in disability. And this is, of course, a marker of oppression, right, to be marked as fear in and of yourself, but we'll talk about that a little bit later. And we can also recognize fear as a practice of colonization, of white supremacy, and of settler colonialism. And if we think about our connection to our ancestral knowledge, right fear was, is a feeling that our ancestors definitely felt in moved and lived through, right, but the practice of fear as a way to know and understand the world is really rooted and stems from white supremacy, and colonialism. So decolonizing requires us to release fear in all of these different ways. So some of you might know, if you know my scholarly work, that I studied fear as part of studying emotions. And particularly, I studied how fear manifests in black women's and non binary interpersonal violence survivors lives. And in my dissertation, I argue that fear is a condition of black life. Meaning that part of what makes us black as black people is that fear shapes our lives. So we as black people must know how to live in and with fear intimately, right, we don't have the luxury of avoiding fear producing objects or situations because many of these fear producing objects like police, or schools, or even other groups of people, are a part of our daily lives. Right? We don't have the privilege of avoiding the things that make us afraid. Like not having that privilege is a part of what it means to be black. And also another component of what it means to be black right, is that we are often that fear producing object for other people, and for society. And so we'll return to this in the testimony section when we think with Audre Lorde.
But one scholar who talks about this is Patrice D. Douglas in her article "On (Being) Fear: Utah v. Strieff and the Ontology of Affect". And so I would suggest that you take a look at this article if you're interested in reading more about how being fear and fear itself have been constructed to justify gratuitous violence against black people. And of course, we're going to come back to this in our "Living in alignment" section. White supremacy is a belief system that is based on fear. The fears of white people become the tenants of this belief system and become the justifying logic for a lot of the violence that they enact around the world. Right white people - particularly white women - weaponize fear, especially of those imagined threats to manipulate the world. Christianity as a religious belief system that is deeply connected to white supremacy, especially evangelical Christianity, uses fear as one of its principal logics; the fear of death, the fear of sin, the fear of hellfire and brimstone, the eternal separation from a God who created you.
Which, if you think about it doesn't quite make sense. Like, what kind of loving God would create you and then cast you away to die? Cast you away to hell, right, if you don't accept that he abandoned his son to die. And the fact that Christians are kind of gaslit into thinking that this is the ultimate act of love, really undergirds how fear works in our lives, particularly through systems of oppression like capitalism and patriarchy. Let's think about it, right? Like capitalism uses fear to keep us in its grips. We consume things out of fear of seeming not a part of society, out of fear of not being trendy enough, or not having enough. The fear of death is largely what keeps society going. It keeps you afraid of aging, it keeps you in the gym, and anxiously watching the scale and are hopping on to the next diet fad. The fear of death is part of what undergirds anti blackness. The fear of death also is what fuels ableism by marking disabled people as close to death and thus making them disposable. Patriarchy, right, as part of this system - this interlocking system of white supremacy and capitalism. Patriarchy, right, actually creates a life where the dominated - who are usually women and children, queer and trans and gender marginalized people - live in fear. That is part of what makes us the dominated, right? We live in fear. Whereas cishet men, particularly those who are white, can move freely throughout space. Their lives are kind of marked by this fearlessness, right. So to be a real man one must be afraid of nothing. Except, of course, your own feelings, your women's self determination, gay people, gay things, eating brunch in a pink sweater is apparently scary if you're a real man. And really anyone or any belief that might challenge your power. So we think about these interlocking systems, right, it is white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, that connects power to being able to instill fear in others through domination. And it tells us that to be powerful, is to be feared. But when we decolonize that definition of power, we open ourselves up to other ways of living. So if we think about this colonial fear, which is rooted in white supremacy, and anti blackness and other forms of oppression, this colonial fear produces a perfect being, for which we all kind of strive to be, right. This being is white, is cisgender, is heterosexual. He is able bodied, he's wealthy, he's got an unrestricted claim to the category of human and produces imperfect beings to fear being or becoming. And so fear becomes something that we internalize and act upon. And it's almost always located in the individual. And the individual is a white supremacist capitalist invention that is different from the self. And I don't have time to go into the difference in a detailed way in this episode, but let me know if you want me to define the individual versus the self in a future one. Well, for now, we'll just think about the individual as the person who has rights and can have humanity, right. And this person is ultimately responsible for how they deal with their own fears through a kind of neoliberal construct and framework that frames the individual as responsible for their own problems and successes. And so we must decolonize our definition of fear if we are truly going to be able to achieve liberation.
So when we think about this decolonize definition of fear, I want to lean into this definition that I found in this workbook entitled body rites: a holistic healing and embodiment workbook for Black survivors of sexual trauma by Dr. shena j. young. Now, I just started the workbook, so I can't provide a review. But she puts fear up front and center and the introduction by telling the reader - presumed healing seeker - to question everything. And sometimes we resist healing and asking questions, because the answers that we might get to these questions, challenge all that we've learned about ourselves in the world, particularly if we move through the world that is created by white supremacy, anti blackness and other forms of oppression. And so she defines fear as a practice. And she says, "the practice of fear is oppression working. Fear is oppression spreading outside. It is the embodiment of colonization." And so let's look at how to decolonize our own practice of fear with Audre Lorde's testimony.
[Testimony: The Cancer Journals and “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action 16:41] Audre Lorde went by Gamba Adisa before her death in 1992, and Gamba Adisa means "Warrior; she who makes her meaning known". She was an Aquarius, born on February 18 1934, to Grenadian immigrant parents in Harlem, New York. And Lorde defined her place in the world as a black lesbian poet warrior mother. And she was a librarian, a pedagogue and an activist. She wrote many collections of poetry and several books of prose. One of which is my favorite of hers, "Zami: a new spelling of my name", which was published in 1982. And I remember reading this work alongside Assata Shakur's autobiography in my early 20s. And I stayed up all night, y'all readings Zami and relishing her words like, it was really doing something for the baby queer in me. And it is partly through Lord's work that I began to accept and to appreciate my queerness and my voice.
Reading it with Assata Shakur autobiography unlocked lots of thinking around what it means to be queer, what it means to be free, and what it means to kind of struggle for that freedom. And so I highly recommend that work and reading them together. But today, we are actually reading her testimony in her essay, "The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action", which she first gave as a talk in the Modern Language Association's Lesbian in Literature panel in 1977. And this essay would later be published in her book, The Cancer Journals in 1980.
Reading the cancer journals changed my life, and I highly recommend that you read it as well. We'll be drawing some of the context from her testimony from there as well. What we see in The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action is that we actually enter Adisa's life after she has received a cancer biopsy. In the three weeks between her surgery and the benign diagnosis of the biopsy. She rearranged her life, she began thinking about her death in her legacy and things that she regretted over her life and she actually mentions that the thing that she regretted most were the things that she was silent about. In "Cancer Journals", we see that she faces death again. And this time the tumor that the doctors discovered in her breast was cancerous. She undergoes and a mastectomy where they remove her breasts and she faces death again. She writes her journals and this essay in thinking about the ways that silence, fear, and anger actually work together to keep us oppressed, right? But she also wants to think about how can fear and anger allow us to understand how to decolonize our own practice of fear, that usually manifests through silence. So she starts "Cancer journals". With this, "I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence. Nor to rob me of what strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined. For other women of all ages, colors and sexual identities, who recognize that imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation, and powerlessness."
So this impose silence is oppression, right? We can think about oppression in this kind of way. Right? Like what it means to oppress is not just to violate, but also to impose a silence onto someone else. And so she doesn't want to allow her anger and her pain and her fear, to push her into a place where oppression has already placed her. Right. She wants to open a space for women of all ages and colors and sexual identities, to begin to examine their fear, and their silence. And she does that through her own lessons of living beyond cancer.
So she says, "I am learning to live beyond fear by living through it. And in the process, learning to turn fury at my own limitations into some more creative energy. I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I was sending messages on a ouiji board. Cryptic complaints from the other side. When I dare to be powerful to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid."
She continues, "I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the task of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have - myself - and taking joy in that battle. It means for me, recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women's work, of reclaiming this earth in our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth, nor will it end with my death. And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love, and my work has particular power and meaning relative to others."
And so this is the kind of context in which we enter the essay. And is these battles with cancer battles with despair and with depression, and the struggle that she took, as a black lesbian poet, Mother, warrior, to recognize the enemy outside and the enemy within. And not just to recognize these enemies, right, in truth, but then to also reclaim her own power, and the earth from those enemies. So she begins the essay with this revelation, "I've come to believe, over and over again, that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood." And she continues the essay by talking about what this fear and the silences have cost her. She looked back over her life, and she noticed that while she had experienced pain, while she had faced death, the thing that she regretted the most was her silence. And she says that, she began to recognize a source of power. And I'll start quoting her here, "within myself, that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable, not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective, gave me great strength. I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me in your silence, will not protect you." The reality of death gave her the perspective that speaking in and even through her fear would ultimately empower her and provide her a kind of defense against her enemies.
So then she turns to this mostly white woman crowd at the Modern Language Association and says, "What words do you not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies that you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own until you will sicken and die of them still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself, a black woman, warrior poet, doing my work come to ask you, are you doing yours?"
So, she flips this panel on Lesbian in Literature onto the audience to say, for those of you who are here, right, who claim that you cannot speak or teach about others experiences because you are white, or you are not a woman, or you are not a warrior poet. Right. These are excuses that are born from your fear. And so she's pushing them to transform their silences around racial injustice, around injustice against women, to make change. And she talks about this fear, right, the true source of the fear with this, "In the cause of silence, each one of us draws the face of her own fear. Fear of contempt, of censure, of some judgment, or recognition ,of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the very visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country, where racial difference creates a constant if unspoken distortion of vision, black women have, on one hand, always been highly visible, and so on the other hand, has been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism."
And so this visibility and invisibility, that black women constantly deal with is part of the source of our own fear. All right, and I want to be clear here and say that visibility is different from representation. Alright, capitalism through its distortion of humans, and their relation to labor, right provides us representation. And it says that representation is a substitute for visibility. And representation is seeing yourself, possibly, reflected in another based on their identity, right. But visibility is about being seen for who you are. So not refracted through celebrity or through some other kind of force. But here, right here as you are. We all need visibility to live. We need to be seen to live. And I'll say for myself, I have a fear of visibility, because visibility has brought me pain. It has brought me contempt. It's brought me judgment. It's brought me the threat of annihilation by those who would want to see me silent and dead and encountering these people that have found my voice or my presence, or even just my very being and existence threatening, pushed me to be very reluctant to be visible because of the exposure to pain and abuse in my past. So I learned time and time again, that speaking out might bring me pain and hurt. So I minimized myself and I began seeing myself as a bright background character to other people's lives, like the friend that's always there to help and support. But I would shy away from the spotlight because when attention was placed on me when I was distorted through other people's visions of me, I would experience violence. Being bullied and being abused, changed how I saw myself. I remember my mother telling me that when I was a young girl, I was very bold, I was very audacious. I was, I loved to read and I would run around like telling people, anyone who would listen that I could read and would try to read to them. And then over time, I was surrounded by people and was in environments where I was, space was too small to contain me. And I figured that if I had to stay there, I would need to shrink. And so I did. I allowed fear to bind my tongue. And I allowed myself to be crunched up and others imaginations of me. Over time, I've come to understand exactly what bell hooks meant when she said, quote, "sometimes people try to destroy you. Because precisely because they recognize your power, not because they don't see it, but because they see it, and they don't want it to exist."
And so the attempts to destroy me have obviously failed. And as an adult, I can break free. I know that I can be myself, even with the fear of pain and scrutiny. And so what visibility allows for me to do now is to live, to be healed and to allow my life to align with that healing. And hopefully, to give others encouragement to be visible, and to heal. And so now I look at the trauma that I've experienced as kinds of initiations, right? Whether I deserve to experience a trauma or not, right, I see it as an initiation into a deeper portal of self love and self compassion. A way to actually live and move through the world and not as a traumatized being. Right, but as someone who's experienced trauma, and who made the choice, to feel and to grow, and to evolve.
And so what that has done for me, much like Gamba Adisa, much like my ancestors that I call on, right, it's empowered me to speak and move outside of fear. And so we'll think about what that looks like in our next segment on Living in Alignment.
[Living In Alignment: Reflection 32:47] I want to say today that I did not pull any cards for us. So I'm just going to share some collective wisdom from Audre Lorde from other things that we've read and offer some questions for compassionate reflection, and some affirmations at the end. Part of the reason why I chose fear for this episode was one because, you know, I meditate and think about what to talk about on each episode and fear seemed like a natural extension of what we had discussed last week. Which was thinking about truth and surrendering to truth. And fear could be one of those impediments to doing that. Fear is rampant in these times. We are at the you know, the end times, as they say, and there are entirely too many reasons to be afraid. And for black people, our fears are not necessarily imagined. Right. And as we've discussed earlier, our lives are conditioned by fear. And if you don't believe me, right, all we have to do is really think about how the afterlife of slavery manifests itself. Right? If we think about the main justification for police killings, right, it is the fear of the police officer, that some harm might be done to them by the unarmed black person in front of them. Whether that person be a child, a woman, an adult, a trans person, a queer person... this black person always instills fear in them in thus, must die. We can also think about segregation and gentrification, as justified by the fear of this kind of violent black figure. So even the ways in which we are housed, right and the way in which cities are built, fear is a primary logic of that kind of white supremacist capitalist construction of our environment.
Another reason to fear this episode is being taped on the day that the Supreme Court Justice decision came out about Trump, and Trump is on the ballot, right. And so those of us who might have been in denial about where this country is going, where it is, let me say that where it is, and what lies ahead of us, we have to start facing these realities. We must resist denial and prepare for the world that is. Christofascism is already here. We're already experiencing that under Biden. And I said years ago, when Biden was elected, that we would actually see the largest expansion of the police state and have fascist rule underneath him. So the reality is that no matter who was elected in November, we are going to have to prepare ourselves. And we can no longer live in the kind of relative discomfort and delusion that comes with denial. We cannot live in our fear. We must choose to love ourselves and each other by healing and preparing for the world that's coming. We must prepare for revolution for the nation state will not save us. Right? There is no nation state that will save us. There is no government intervention that's going to come and liberate us. And if we really think about this, right, because I think there are the call for a free Palestine the call for free Congo. And I think this also kind of leads me into something that might be kind of controversial for me to say, but I don't think that we are calling for enough when we're asking for free insert nation state here. Because again, the nation state is a tool of white supremacist, settler colonialism. Borders and citizenship are violent tools that will only continue to enable genocide. And so when we call for a free Palestine or free Congo, we're not calling for the end of genocide. We're not calling for the end of white supremacy, we're not calling for freedom. And I think that fear, particularly fear around how we frame our demands, right, and what our quote unquote oppressors will, quote unquote, accept from us, keeps us and limits us from actually being able to fight for what we want. Liberation is not a free country. Even if the people who are indigenous are able to lay claim to their land there. That's not liberation. We must be unafraid to move outside of our oppressors language for our demands.
So a ceasefire is not enough. And if that's all we're calling for, then we'll continue to have these bouts where, okay, we'll stop the killing. Right. We'll stop the killing. We'll stop this, we'll stop that, right to appease folks. But the long game the long goal here, right is to annihilate, to dominate and to instill fear. As we watch the Zionist claim for whiteness, right? The the kind of that's rooted in this idea of a special oppression that white Jewish people face, right, what we're seeing, and actually witnessing is that our oppressors don't give a fuck about what we want. They don't give a fuck. They don't give a fuck. And so it's time that we also inhabit that space of not giving a fuck, right?
We're not here simply because we want a free nation state for people to live in. We want a world in which white supremacist, capitalist imperialist violence does not destroy the Earth and does not destroy living and nonliving beings on the earth. That is what we want. And so when we allow our fear of being labeled as anti-semitic, or any of these other kind of labels that are oppressors would throw at us in order to make us be afraid of this fear of not seeming like we're good enough, or radical enough, right? When we're actually using the language and the tools of the people who use violence to create the worlds they want. Like, if being anti-semitic means that I care about the lives of people, then okay. You can call me that. If being an anti white racist means that I absolutely oppose white supremacy and power that is doled on to white people at the expense of my people and others, then okay, that is who I am. I am no longer - Well, I've never been afraid of that being labeled as that - but we must move outside of fear.
Because that fear pushes us into silence. And we have to think about our own language, to describe our demands and what we want. And until we do that, we are limiting the power and the force of our movements. In order to do that, we have to have knowledge of the enemy within and the enemy without, liberal movement, right, that sometimes will recast itself as radical but wants you to believe that you can integrate your enemies through proper arguments. Through the use of their language and their tools, you can bring them over onto your side. But your enemy is your enemy for a reason.
And so while we're over here, begging for our enemies not to kill us, our enemies are arming themselves, with knowledge with power and with actual weapons, to annihilate us, to dominate us by any means necessary. And so we have to surrender to the truth, right? That our enemies, our enemies, and it does not make us any less good, any less kind, any less radical or powerful to name them. And to stand 10 toes down, even if they threatened to take their money away, or their time or their attention away from us for doing the right thing. Because if we don't, we actually do ourselves and our movements, the dis justice, of incorporating white supremacist, liberal, and sometimes Republican values into or liberal or right, or whatever you want to call it, values into our movements. When we aren't defining ourselves for ourselves, we are then succumbing to the status quo. And I'll talk about this in another episode. Probably the next episode, we'll talk about death. But I really wanted to kind of put this up front and center by thinking about how we're incorporating white supremacy, by the way that I've seen black and non black people center that white man's self immolation as protest.
It's almost as if folks expected for the only people to die in these kinds of conflicts are non white people. The way that he's receiving glory and praise for taking accountability. And I won't say that this is like the proper way for people to take accountability. I don't think that, you know, self immolation is the best way to show or to protest. I'm not saying that by any means. But I'm saying that the kind of praise and the uproar around it all has really left me puzzled for so many reasons. One of them being right, that, of course, I believe that there's this latent fear that non white people have, that we believe there'll be some kind of backlash or consequence if we don't praise white people for doing the right thing in our movements. And again, I'm not saying that self immolation is the right thing in what white people should do to take accountability. But if you think about it, right, this white man, who was in the military was already doing killing, stealing and destroying as part of his job, saw what was happening in Palestine saw his participation in that and that was the buck that stopped him. So much so that he didn't want to live with his actions and what he did. He could not live with the accountability so he chose to die as part of that. And to see people of all colors, all races kind of lift his name up alongside the names of Palestinians. It was horrifying to me. To lift his name alongside the names of our ancestors who have died because of violence that his ancestors had imposed upon? Horrifying. Like, what the f--? What the fuck is going on? Have we have we forgotten our own values? Have we forgotten what it means to pursue freedom? And so by putting his death in the spotlight of this fight against Zionist oppression, and settler colonialism reaffirms the kind of upfront centeredness of white supremacy, because, again, we're also watching all of this happen, and even getting knowledge of all this happening on devices that have components that were enabled through the genocide of African peoples. And yet, these peoples are disappeared from these conversations are giving second tier treatment in these conversations, if they're even mentioned at all. I just, I just, it's ridiculous to me, I just... I don't know somebody, please explain it to me. And if this makes me a bad leftist, or doesn't make me radical enough, I'm cool with that. I'm okay with that. But I think that we should really be thoughtful about how we're framing what it means to resist violence in this time, so that we are not continuing to put the same old people who've always been on pedestals, who've always benefited from our praise and admiration, and our dehumanization, there upfront and center at our own expense.
And I'll say it again, right. White people don't deserve kudos for doing the right thing. The right thing is the thing that they're supposed to do. Taking accountability for their actions is what they're supposed to do. And that's all I'm gonna say on that.
[ Mayyadda music interlude]
But I want to get back to thinking about the ways that we internalize white supremacist values or carry them with us in our healing journeys by actually returning to the words of Dr. shena j. young, who I mentioned at the beginning of the episode. And in the introduction to the workbook, she actually ends by now talking about fears of practice, by giving some questions for reflection.
So I'll share those questions here.
There are five of them.
One, "Are the values I practice also tools that have been used to oppress me in my communities?"
Two, "where did it come from that belief, value, energy or judgment? Where did I learn this?"
Three, "Where did the fear come from? Is it mine? Or was it left with me? If it was left with me? Was it to protect me or to protect them, others, oppressors?
Four, "Why am I so afraid of remembering what has been forgotten?"
Five, Do my values and practices dilute my authenticity, and truth?"
So I think these questions really give us space to reflect on our healing and our fears as practice and begin to decolonize them. Because sometimes we hold practices and values, whether they be from Christianity, or from capitalism, from white supremacist movement, and from liberal movement that is steeped in white supremacy, or kind of multicultural white supremacy, that actually go against our liberation and our healing and our freedom. And so if we can look at these things unafraid, right, we can think with Audre Lorde, as well. And she says, we take all this truth, we take all this work, and we do something with it. And so what do we do? As Audre Lorde reminds us, we can learn to work and speak when we are afraid. In the same way that we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition. And while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. So for those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only that you truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it for others it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us, but primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths, which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone, we can survive by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing. That is growth. So even if we choose to be silent, out of safety, we will still experience death, even if visibility brings pain, scrutiny and judgment we must choose to speak, for death will come anyway.
We might as well choose life, according to the values that truly set us free in that truly serve us. We have an obligation to our ancestors, to our communities, and to ourselves to not allow our fear and our silence to choke us. We must speak truth, we must reclaim our power.
[Affirmation 51:00] And so with that, I say affirm with me:
I recognize, revel, and live in my power. I am victorious, I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
[ Outro 51:16] Well, that's all I got for you all today. Thank you for taking the time to listen. I hope that this episode gives you permission to release your fears.
I want to express my deepest gratitude to my elevated ancestors and spirit guides and to the Most High God for giving me the inspiration and the fortitude to do this work. I don't take this shit lightly.
I also want to thank Andrew Viñales, black loved free's audio editor for all of their work. Thank you, Audrey Lorde, and Dr. shena Young for your wisdom today. I honor you.
If you want to keep up with future episodes, follow us on Instagram @blacklovedandfree. And visit our website blacklovedandfreepodcast.com
If you want to donate to the podcast, please visit the link on our website.
And lastly, may you find a sacred soft place to care for yourselves and for each other. May you radiate in the truth that you are the one who saves you. And may you find the strength to be black loved and free. Until next time, bye.
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