A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

Racism, for many people, seems to occupy space in very much the same way as dark matter: it forms the skeleton of our world, yet remains ultimately invisible, undetectable. This is convenient. If nothing is racist, then nothing needs to be done to address it.

In this age, the natural world is spared only if it can be photographed; if its beauty can be sold; if it doesn’t get in the way of more pipelines and more profit.

It’s hard to let go of control, to stop trying to be the architect of not only our own lives but the lives of the people around us as we single-mindedly work towards our own flawed constructions of "perfection." Once we do, though, we might actually be able to recognize the beauty we’ve missed.

having empathy is not dependent upon understanding the social, political and historical circumstances that made that empathy necessary in the first place. And yet we continue to expect empathy alone to create change, as though empathy would rethink our priorities, rewrite our laws and restructure our society for us.

Our love was a process of unlearning the bad love we'd been given.

Maybe our single-minded focus on the light makes us unable to see the dark that’s all around, always.

Love pushes us to believe, even when reason tells us we should stop. Love compels us to move carefully, to consider the consequences of our actions. Love reminds us what’s worth fighting for, what isn’t. Love begs us to stop being passive and finally act. If you can’t write about us with a love for who we are as a people, what we’ve survived, what we’ve accomplished despite all attempts to keep us from doing so; if you can’t look at us as we are and feel your pupils go wide, rendering all stereotypes a sham, a poor copy, a disgrace—then why are you writing about us at all?

Corn, beans, and squash were once all my people needed. They were so essential to our everyday lives that we referred to them as our sisters. We would preserve each plant's seeds and pass them on to our children, knowing that with this gift, they would be able to provide the same nutritious food for their families that we provided for them. This was an act of absolute, undiminished intergenerational love. And if intergenerational trauma can alter DNA, why can't intergenerational love?

He was obviously hurt, but his face was calm. His face showed no fear, no pain. It was the face he always wore. It wasn’t until I was older that I considered what this could mean. Maybe I couldn’t map the pain on his face because he was always in pain.

This world does not belong to you; you are merely borrowing it from the coming faces.

Our parents were far from perfect, but their main barriers to being better parents were poverty, intergenerational trauma, and mental illness- things neither social workers nor police officers have ever been equipped to address, yet are both allowed, even encouraged, to patrol.

Trauma and silence flanked me like foot soldiers, only they weren’t doing my bidding; I was doing theirs.

Foie gras is more than just two French words I can barely pronounce, more than just a meal certain people sometimes enjoy. It is a test that separates the high from the low, the rich from the poor, the worldly from the ignorant. The white from everyone else.

And if intergenerational trauma can alter DNA, why can't intergenerational love?

diversity,” as Tania Canas so succinctly puts it in her essay “Diversity is a White Word,” is about making sense of difference “through the white lens…by creating, curating and demanding palatable definitions of ‘diversity’ but only in relation to what this means in terms of whiteness.” It’s the literary equivalent of “ethnic” restaurants: they please white people because they provide them with “exotic” new flavours, but if they don’t appease white people’s sensitive taste buds they’re not worth a damn.

Sculpt people into the archetypes we prefer to imagine instead of the people they are? Isn't that why it offends us so much when those we love do something that makes no sense to us, even when to them it's an obvious and perhaps inevitable choice?

In the meantime, I’m proud to say I’m no one’s Noble Savage and I’ll continue to write what I please. Though maybe I will learn how to powwow dance—alone, in the privacy of my living room. It looks like good cardio.

No, “diversity,” as Tania Canas so succinctly puts it in her essay “Diversity is a White Word,” is about making sense of difference “through the white lens…by creating, curating and demanding palatable definitions of ‘diversity’ but only in relation to what this means in terms of whiteness.