At a performance a few years ago by the feminist theatre troupe Vox Feminista, I watched one of their signature, always confrontational, short films. Their theme for the evening was “white privilege,” and the film involved members of the troupe asking passerby on the street to say something about white privilege. Many declined, hurrying by as if embarrassed by the subject, but one African-American woman stopped for several minutes and offered some thoughtful commentary. I will never forget one of the things she said. “You hear it in the way some white people talk,” she mused, “when they say, you know, everything will work out. Especially around here.” She and the interviewer laughed.
“Here” was Boulder, an affluent town full of New-Age Caucasians.
I knew exactly what she meant.
Lately, I’ve been scared. Honestly scared. We’re in a recession, food and gas prices are climbing, and I’m underemployed, over budget, and under deadline to find a new place (probably a tiny studio) to call home. I am currently surrounded, in my work and personal life, by well-meaning but mostly middle- to upper-middle-class white people who reassure me daily that everything is going to be fine, that what needs to happen will happen, that the universe will take care of me, and so on. My roommate, who with her mother co-owns the condo where I’ve rented a room for a year, is certain of this.
Such faith does not come easily to me, having lost my very dramatic fundamentalist faith very dramatically in my youth. One moment I was secure in the (warm, if somewhat oppressive) bosom of home, family, church, and God; the next, I was thrust into a boundless black hole, floating like the proverbial inconsequential speck in an indifferent universe, unspeakably alone, my existence and actions apparently as meaningless as those of Camus’ unsympathetic Stranger. No wonder, I thought, I had never felt the presence of Jesus, purportedly walking alongside me all the way; no wonder my fervent prayers, often delivered on my knees while hitting my chest with my fist, had never been answered. It was all an elaborate racket, a comforting lie to keep people complacent and obedient. Squaring my jaw and my shoulders, I told myself that everything was now up to me.
I was not at all sure I was up to the task.
And I must say, it’s been a struggle most of the way since — living on the perimeter at a subsistence level, and learning to make do without. The profound sense of abandonment I felt when I lost my Christian community and beliefs is still very much alive in me. Eventually I did come to believe that a spiritual dimension exists, that there is inexplicable depth and mystery to our conscious and unconscious lives, that everything is interconnected. At certain extraordinary moments I’ve felt I’ve touched upon something numinous and eternal. Rumi and Rilke are two of my favorite poets. But there’s still that doubt at my core.
Part of me (a big part, that is perhaps just a big kid) really, really wants to believe the Intenders and the Manifestors and everyone who embraces what the scientific materialists would call magical thinking. I’ve seen The Secret. I’ve read some of the more involved of the “new physics” books like Lynne McTaggart’s The Field. Her latest work on meditators affecting remote plants is actually exciting to me. I’ve so rarely made anything I really wanted to happen happen, and never for long. I’ve wished upon a hundred stars. I’ve forwarded the chain e-mails. And now all around me, in the holistic community where I work, there are voices reassuring me that the universe is looking out for me.
Of course, these are all Caucasians, most of whom can afford to shell out for the high cost of yoga.
And I go back to our Woman on the Street, puncturing the bubble of our possible cultural complacency. Do our beliefs reflect our undisturbed privilege? The casualties of Myanmar and Beichuan — hell, the (mostly nonwhite) victims of the New Orleans flood in our own country — how, pray tell, did everything work out for them? (I have to say I’m offended by some of the more materialistic aspects of the Secret craze. You want a fully loaded Hummer, and over here this Haitian can’t even get a spoonful of rice. What’s wrong with this picture?) Vox Feminista’s anonymous commentator, with a laugh, refuses to play along. Maybe she, from her differing vantage point, has seen too much that conflicts with the majority story, the way James Baldwin had when he spoke in The Fire Next Time of the “innocence” of white Americans. Or the way unrepentant firebrands like Jeremiah Wright have, who then say things that offend the sensibilities of the mythologically correct — those who, to borrow from Baldwin, insist on believing that our unimpeachable republic’s founders were all “freedom-loving heroes.”
…
Of course, then there’s Oprah. Oprah, the alternately admired and maligned evangelist of reality-creation. I refuse to say anything bad about Oprah. She had no such privilege; she was born black, and female, into poverty, and endured horrific physical and sexual abuse as a young child. That she would turn out to be one of the world’s wealthiest women was unlikely to say the least. She gives away millions, and spurs a TV nation to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If she wants to tout the power of intention, more power to her. Bully for Oprah, I say.
She most have done something right along the way.
…
The other day a good friend of mine with survival struggles of her own introduced me to her remarkable friend Pablo. Pablo is from Spain, has traveled the world on a shoestring, and carries a different set of life experiences and assumptions than many of the middle-class white Americans in my social circle. For this reason (as well as for his infectiously enthusiastic and affectionate nature), I listened attentively to this diminutive middle-aged gentleman when he decided to expound upon the topic of success.
“I arrived here on a Thursday. By Friday I was working. You know how you get the job? You go where you want to work, and you say, ‘How long until I can work here?’ And when they say, ‘We don’t have anything,’ then you say, ‘Okay, then I will wait, I will come and sit here until it’s time for me to work.’ And then you go, and you sit, and you wait. And you ask them, ‘Is it time yet?’ No? Then you go and you sit some more…”
My friend tells me that Pablo is fond of offering the choice, “Is the answer yes, or yes?” He said to me, “Everywhere I go, people help me, because they know I have love in my heart.” For Pablo, things do indeed seem to “work out,” and he sure ain’t your typical Boulder-ite living anything close to a typical life. Talking to him was like a whack upside the head. He doesn’t do things the usual, conventional way; he disregards the rules we unthinkingly live by, like how to go about getting a job, and makes up his own. He assumes that strangers will want to be helpful. (“Everyone is amazing,” he says, “it’s just up to you to find out.”) I love this. Especially since he seems to make it work.
I don’t know about Rhonda Byrne, but I’d sure love to be more like Pablo.
How long until I can work here? Until I can live here? Until I can be your girl? Mind if I crash on your sofa — in Tokyo?
I don’t have money, but I have love in my heart.
Is the answer yes, or yes?
When the book comes out, I can put you in the Acknowledgments
Fear, Faith, Privilege, and Pablo May 13, 2008
Tags: faith, fear, intention, race, social commentary, The Secret, white privilege
At a performance a few years ago by the feminist theatre troupe Vox Feminista, I watched one of their signature, always confrontational, short films. Their theme for the evening was “white privilege,” and the film involved members of the troupe asking passerby on the street to say something about white privilege. Many declined, hurrying by as if embarrassed by the subject, but one African-American woman stopped for several minutes and offered some thoughtful commentary. I will never forget one of the things she said. “You hear it in the way some white people talk,” she mused, “when they say, you know, everything will work out. Especially around here.” She and the interviewer laughed.
“Here” was Boulder, an affluent town full of New-Age Caucasians.
I knew exactly what she meant.
Lately, I’ve been scared. Honestly scared. We’re in a recession, food and gas prices are climbing, and I’m underemployed, over budget, and under deadline to find a new place (probably a tiny studio) to call home. I am currently surrounded, in my work and personal life, by well-meaning but mostly middle- to upper-middle-class white people who reassure me daily that everything is going to be fine, that what needs to happen will happen, that the universe will take care of me, and so on. My roommate, who with her mother co-owns the condo where I’ve rented a room for a year, is certain of this.
Such faith does not come easily to me, having lost my very dramatic fundamentalist faith very dramatically in my youth. One moment I was secure in the (warm, if somewhat oppressive) bosom of home, family, church, and God; the next, I was thrust into a boundless black hole, floating like the proverbial inconsequential speck in an indifferent universe, unspeakably alone, my existence and actions apparently as meaningless as those of Camus’ unsympathetic Stranger. No wonder, I thought, I had never felt the presence of Jesus, purportedly walking alongside me all the way; no wonder my fervent prayers, often delivered on my knees while hitting my chest with my fist, had never been answered. It was all an elaborate racket, a comforting lie to keep people complacent and obedient. Squaring my jaw and my shoulders, I told myself that everything was now up to me.
I was not at all sure I was up to the task.
And I must say, it’s been a struggle most of the way since — living on the perimeter at a subsistence level, and learning to make do without. The profound sense of abandonment I felt when I lost my Christian community and beliefs is still very much alive in me. Eventually I did come to believe that a spiritual dimension exists, that there is inexplicable depth and mystery to our conscious and unconscious lives, that everything is interconnected. At certain extraordinary moments I’ve felt I’ve touched upon something numinous and eternal. Rumi and Rilke are two of my favorite poets. But there’s still that doubt at my core.
Part of me (a big part, that is perhaps just a big kid) really, really wants to believe the Intenders and the Manifestors and everyone who embraces what the scientific materialists would call magical thinking. I’ve seen The Secret. I’ve read some of the more involved of the “new physics” books like Lynne McTaggart’s The Field. Her latest work on meditators affecting remote plants is actually exciting to me. I’ve so rarely made anything I really wanted to happen happen, and never for long. I’ve wished upon a hundred stars. I’ve forwarded the chain e-mails. And now all around me, in the holistic community where I work, there are voices reassuring me that the universe is looking out for me.
Of course, these are all Caucasians, most of whom can afford to shell out for the high cost of yoga.
And I go back to our Woman on the Street, puncturing the bubble of our possible cultural complacency. Do our beliefs reflect our undisturbed privilege? The casualties of Myanmar and Beichuan — hell, the (mostly nonwhite) victims of the New Orleans flood in our own country — how, pray tell, did everything work out for them? (I have to say I’m offended by some of the more materialistic aspects of the Secret craze. You want a fully loaded Hummer, and over here this Haitian can’t even get a spoonful of rice. What’s wrong with this picture?) Vox Feminista’s anonymous commentator, with a laugh, refuses to play along. Maybe she, from her differing vantage point, has seen too much that conflicts with the majority story, the way James Baldwin had when he spoke in The Fire Next Time of the “innocence” of white Americans. Or the way unrepentant firebrands like Jeremiah Wright have, who then say things that offend the sensibilities of the mythologically correct — those who, to borrow from Baldwin, insist on believing that our unimpeachable republic’s founders were all “freedom-loving heroes.”
…
Of course, then there’s Oprah. Oprah, the alternately admired and maligned evangelist of reality-creation. I refuse to say anything bad about Oprah. She had no such privilege; she was born black, and female, into poverty, and endured horrific physical and sexual abuse as a young child. That she would turn out to be one of the world’s wealthiest women was unlikely to say the least. She gives away millions, and spurs a TV nation to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If she wants to tout the power of intention, more power to her. Bully for Oprah, I say.
She most have done something right along the way.
…
The other day a good friend of mine with survival struggles of her own introduced me to her remarkable friend Pablo. Pablo is from Spain, has traveled the world on a shoestring, and carries a different set of life experiences and assumptions than many of the middle-class white Americans in my social circle. For this reason (as well as for his infectiously enthusiastic and affectionate nature), I listened attentively to this diminutive middle-aged gentleman when he decided to expound upon the topic of success.
“I arrived here on a Thursday. By Friday I was working. You know how you get the job? You go where you want to work, and you say, ‘How long until I can work here?’ And when they say, ‘We don’t have anything,’ then you say, ‘Okay, then I will wait, I will come and sit here until it’s time for me to work.’ And then you go, and you sit, and you wait. And you ask them, ‘Is it time yet?’ No? Then you go and you sit some more…”
My friend tells me that Pablo is fond of offering the choice, “Is the answer yes, or yes?” He said to me, “Everywhere I go, people help me, because they know I have love in my heart.” For Pablo, things do indeed seem to “work out,” and he sure ain’t your typical Boulder-ite living anything close to a typical life. Talking to him was like a whack upside the head. He doesn’t do things the usual, conventional way; he disregards the rules we unthinkingly live by, like how to go about getting a job, and makes up his own. He assumes that strangers will want to be helpful. (“Everyone is amazing,” he says, “it’s just up to you to find out.”) I love this. Especially since he seems to make it work.
I don’t know about Rhonda Byrne, but I’d sure love to be more like Pablo.
How long until I can work here? Until I can live here? Until I can be your girl? Mind if I crash on your sofa — in Tokyo?
I don’t have money, but I have love in my heart.
Is the answer yes, or yes?