Dear WES Community,
April is probably my single favorite month of the year. Most of this is because my birthday is in April. Though the realities of my life no longer allow for the full month of celebrations I was fond of in my teens and twenties, the month remains imbued with a sense of celebration, joy, and new beginnings. April being decidedly spring plays into it too, since by the time it rolls around days are already longer and previously dormant plants are bursting into bloom. My allergies could do without the layer of pollen that settles on any surface left outside too long, but, so far it is impossible to deny the beauty of spring in Washington D.C.
As I consider the new beginnings available to me at the start of a new year in my own life, I like to take stock of what changes, losses, growth, and newness the previous year brought. Last April, for me, began with the excitement of being invited to be your candidate for Senior Leader and ended with meeting many of you for the first time and the absolute joy of being called by you. The year between then and now has been full of transitions, growth, loss, fun, stress, and all the stuff that really makes up life. I said goodbye to a congregation I had served for four years, a city I had lived in for six years, and proximity to friends and loved ones spanning a decade. I bought my first ever new car and my first ever new couch, and learned a lot about just how complicated all of that can get. I spent more time with my biological family than I had in years, and held Caitlin through the unexpected loss of their mother. I’ve been getting to know WES, D.C., all of you, and all kinds of people from new AEU colleagues to D.C. area interfaith colleagues to new friends in the area. Caitlin and I went on our honeymoon, found several favorite farmer’s markets and Asian grocery stores, and just recently finally started putting art up in our home. It has been a big year in basically every direction, and I’m really thankful to have such wonderful companions on this journey.
It’s been a big year in our country and our world as well. I won’t even attempt to go through all of what has been in the news this past year, I would certainly forget something important. However, when I zoom in on my own longest lived social justice passions and some of the issues which impact my own life in a daily way, I see pieces of where this year has been not just big, but hard. Painful in ways still somehow new. Scary to wake up to each day. Some of you have heard me jokingly check in at a meeting with “slightly more illegal than yesterday.” Humor is one of the ways I deal with my fear for myself, for trans people – especially trans youth – around the country, for people who can get pregnant, for all of our fundamental right to bodily autonomy. It comes too fast sometimes – often – to even digest. PBS reports that in this year’s legislative session alone state lawmakers have introduced 434 bills restricting fundamentals like health care, education and the freedom of expression for LGBTQ+ people. They also report that while the majority of the general public continues to oppose those bills, support for them has risen 15% since April of 2021. Meanwhile in Idaho, the state government is moving to criminalize so much as helping a minor to cross state lines in order to obtain abortion care. Like I said, it would be impossible for me to list all the things going on in our world that weigh on me (and, I imagine, on you) each day. Some days it is really complicated to hold together the real growth and, dare I say, flourishing visible in my own life with the tragic reality of the world I live in. As I look to another of my own years, I think a lot about how to best meet the moment, what it looks like to lead from a place of authenticity around both pain and joy, and how to find a way out of the petty messes and fake fights humans get ourselves into so that we can focus on the things that are crying out for our attention here and around the world.
One way I have learned to approach social issues that feel overwhelming is to find a way to step back. Not “step back” as in disengage, but as in take a broader perspective. There are patterns and rhythms to the forces of oppression that we see evidence of in our day-to-day lives that, when viewed in the context of not just American, but global history become both more comprehensible and more able to be addressed from the root. A commitment to addressing things at their roots rather than chasing after the falling leaves is a primary reason I consider myself a radical. I’m not about burning it down and turning it over at random or just because we could. I’m interested in – and I think it is broadly more useful overall to focus on – figuring out where our problems are rooted, and finding ways to change from the deepest parts of ourselves and our society. This, in part, is why our social justice theme this month is not simply “race” or “racism” or even focused on Black life in the United States.
Our theme is Global Anti-Blackness. Anti-Blackness can be understood in simple terms as referring “…to the specific forms of racism contingent upon or cast through the denigration, disenfranchisement, and disavowal of people racialized as Black (and their attendant cultural practices and production).” It is, as a theoretical framework, related to Afropessimsim, and intertwined with understandings of misogynoir as coined by Dr. Moya Bailey and TheTrudz, a prolific Black woman thinker and creator who no longer participates in public thought due to the toll of misogynoir and anti-Blackness on her own wellbeing. In choosing this as a basis for some of our exploration this month, I hope to encourage you to consider things like: how the construction of Blackness relates to the construction of Europeanness; how race, gender, and even religion can be projects of statemaking; ways in which racial hierarchy is variably constructed but always goes back to a Black/White gradient; and what it means if understanding racism isn’t enough.
I look forward to continuing to learn, grow, think, feel, and change with you all in the coming year and years of my life, and yours. As the saying goes, may we think globally and act locally. May we find the roots of all that keeps us separate and yank them up, leaving space for the full blossoming of all people.
one love,
KC