I read the answers to these observations and questions in Lynice’s piece when she says [Bold mine]: This is culture with meaning-creation and action emerging out of the struggle for life. It is not the supplication of protest, the futile hope for a better day, the search for love and self in the faces of the “oppressed,” the self-indulgent staking out of a political position, or the reckless descent into disorder. It is valuing different forms of power: the unabashed engagement in relationship in our fullness; the assertion of difference without apology, the creation that is disturbing by its nature, the willingness to defend those we love with our lives. This is the erotic.

To fully embrace this consciousness is to become the Other in a profound way. If you do this, you will never see white people the same again. You will feel repulsed by them. You will face exile and persecution from the system and still remain isolated from marginalized communities. The oppressed will feel that you (if you are white) are leading them to slaughter while remaining safe through your privilege. A Judas goat, even if repentant and rebellious, can never be a sheep, or at least it can’t except that in Jesus “all things are possible.”

My own lived-experience with this is best understand through the lens of class. I grew up poor. My parents came from middle class families but straddled down because the class system of American capitalism imposed dominance-submission structures over the occupation-income system; a social worker and a religious “church” lay worker are educated but paid less than a unionized working-class worker. We grew up valuing education in a rural area rife with poverty (that viewed education as upper class therefore clearly “Other”). We went to college thanks to merit-based scholarships and extreme debt-incursion. At university, it was a common experience for me being “Other” because of where I came from, the social values I’d been enculturated within the context of rural lower-income life. After college round 1 (I withdrew because I was indebted beyond the limits allowed and I was nowhere near getting a degree after four years and two transfers to different schools), without a college degree, the best I could get work-wise was secretarial or lower. I earned minimum wage mostly for the next decade and a half. I was “Other” here as well because I lived in lower class urban neighborhoods but was educated. I straddled even further down than my parents had. After college round 2 (I finally got a BA in 2006), I had a degree but the rules and the landscape had changed rendering my degree of no use for an “aging” worker now in my forties. I’m self employed as a result and make much less than $5000 a year in one of the most expensive states in the country. My wife, being a teacher, makes just above locally adjusted poverty. We still live in lower income neighborhoods but work with middle and upper class people to vary degree. No matter where we are, we’re always some form of “Other” and never part of any sort of “us.” My lived experience has been that of the Judas goat, repentant and rebellious, untrusted by the oppressed (to some degree–my neighbors “get” that I’m the “non-white, white guy”) but equally untrusted by the white/dominants (because of class mainly–”poverty” means “defective” in America even though that is patently false).

My access to “privilege” is largely in the form of how dominant authority chooses to consider me Other AND in how they choose to consider me not-Other-enough to be completely abused (just abused a little less the completely). Where other “white” people gain access to power or privilege from Law Enforcement personnel when they have need of it, I have never experienced that. The “privilege” I gain is in the form of I don’t get arrested or beaten up by default –I’m “white” enough to not get the beat down, only the threats, the stop-and-frisks because I’m clearly not middle or upper enough to gain any benefit from the power apparatus.

What really inspires me in what Lynice says comes from her “number 2″: 2. Engage in authentic and revolutionary relationships through an encounter with the divine. We must recognize that each of us is both the focus of and the gate for divinity. This step is critical if we are to do the seemingly impossible act of shedding patriarchy and racism, transcending “category” into authentic relationship with other people across lines of difference, not over those differences but in and through them.

It is indeed “not over” but “in and through” those differences that is the interculturalism we need in order for a new path, a new “way” of being to manifest itself in a transformed human world. I’ve been studying/practicing Aikido for almost a decade. Morehei Ueshiba’s “new” or novel path to the best of ancient Japanese Budo (“warrior ways”) in light of WWII and Hiroshima & Nagasaki necessarily both involves the modern “warrior” in concern for “opponents” (there are no “enemies”) as for oneself and the notion of who-we-are-that-cannot-be-other-than-we-are interacting through the Divine through difference categories. The discipline of Ueshiba’s Budo is in recognizing that we are all the same and not-the-same, the Divine is there in each other, without exception. It is in understanding that “attacks” come from when anyone becomes “out of control” with that disciplined other-not-other way of relating to one another. The goal to achieving equality where equality isn’t manifested, isn’t in “defeating an enemy” (dominance-oppression) but “helping an opponent get under control” (transformation through & in differences not over them). The goal of “defense” is beyond “self” defense, it is protecting an opponent (& thus those around us) because they are equals behaving as dominant (no-longer-equals) in the moment when an opponent is out of control. The “defense” is in turning aside the out of control behavior in a manner that helps the opponent come into control again. It is recognizing the difference and the sameness and intentionally choosing in a disciplined manner how to move in and through the difference created when another loses control. In the heat of the conflict, chaos is what the movements look like, but in reality, the nage (defender) is at peace, calm, disciplined through training and connection to the Divine in both nage and uke (attacker). It is only through this warrior discipline–that brings with it the ability to kill, to take life, but the conscious intention and choice to choose NOT to kill, but instead to preserve and protect the opponent–that allows the trained movements to result in uke giving up and recognizing where they need to be to fully be themselves again. The chaos that is not-chaos results in rest, peace, harmony, the result of a transformation from that chaos.

In class, race, dominance-oppression differences, I fully agree and comprehend that it is the trained and disciplined warrior–not a slave, not a soldier–that respects all forms of power for what they are and chooses an intentional path to move through, not over them. I only now realize, thanks to Lynice’s essay that the constant state of being the Judas goat from all others’ points of reference is normal for the warrior. It takes constant training and discipline to remain in that space. But perhaps that is the white-not-white-guy’s job–to hold the lightning in both hands, not use either lightning to dominate but instead to create the space for the brown, black, yellow and red to regain their place and step-into the space and move in the manner required for the white-dominant to come under control and regain who they are–to finally push through and not over and accept that equality of all as “us” and not “them.”

A Lakota man once told me a dream he had about “instructions and the nations”… the black, the yellow and the red nations and their instructions made sense of course, but I was really concerned with the white nation’s instructions; the white nation was made responsible by Creator for handling fire (and look, we ended up forgetting how to keep fire and ended up making all the bombs). We forgot our instructions and need to stop making our bombs and remember how to keep fire again for others. Fire-keeping in ceremony is a vital role but no less or more vital than any other, and it is best done when in service to others, sacrificially even–a fire-keeper who dominates others destroys the ceremony.

Perhaps these difference discourses (Lynice’s, Belden’s, Torbett’s, Ueshiba’s, Tatank-Mani’s) all hold the keys we “white-not-white’s” need in order to keep stepping back, keep holding space for the oppressed to step up into, and stepping-into the space to bring the out-of-control (dominant-white) back under control (becoming equal with Other-as-us again).

All of these allow injustice to flourish in the interest of a social harmony that privileges some people (mostly but not entirely white and male) while leaving others in the cold.

Plenty of people of color subscribe to these social mores because they’ve assimilated to the dominant culture. Have they assimilated to whiteness? It seems strange to say so, but maybe.

What is lost when one critiques “the dominant culture” rather than “whiteness”? Well, it’s pretty easy for those of us of any skin color who consider ourselves activists or cultural creatives or progressives to say that we’re not implicated in critiques of the dominant culture, that we’re not a part of that. When you start critiquing whiteness, though, any of us who happen to be white have to look at whether the problematic shoe fits. That’s why this feels “divisive,” as June says. It makes us white folks uncomfortable. Maybe we need to be uncomfortable.

Critiques of “the dominant culture” tend to ignore the privilege that even those of us white folks who don’t like the dominant culture have within it.

Hope this is helpful. I think I may have more to say on this soon, possibly in a post of my own.

From my perspective as an English immigrant, a full WASP in every sense, I was very struck by how different American culture was from British, and it struck me that a good deal of that was because of the influence of African culture. I recall on my first visit (1981) sitting down on a grassy slope by Lake Merritt in Oakland, and being asked by some guys who were playing frisbee if I wanted to join in, which I did. I thought, how American to be asked so easily, and how American this whole scene is, the openness of people, the relaxed bodies and ease of movement (I had always found it easy to tell an American woman’s stride on a London street). Then I had one of those sudden moments of cultural visual shift when I realized that every single person on that slope was African American. Their Americanness was so strong I hadn’t noticed that there wasn’t a white person in sight. It may have been from then I started wondering how much of Americanness, from body language and accent to music and prose, stemmed from African culture.

Later, I wondered how much was influenced by the various European cultures, the Irish, German, East European Jewish, etc. Impossible to tell by now. But it feels to this WASP that American culture is a hybrid, and has real energy, and is not a destroyed culture at all but a vigorous alive one. Yes, it has also always been ruthless in many ways, arising out of genocide, deliberate or ‘providential’, as well as slavery, which itself grew out of feudal class oppression, (and let’s not forget it American culture also arose out of efforts by oppressed religious people for self-rule, and out of efforts at democracy and free speech) and yes it is increasingly destructive of the planet in its ruthless exploitation of the ecosphere. Is this vigorous, alive and often brutal culture the same thing as whiteness? I need more examples to grasp what you are saying, I think. Why you should be patient enough with me, a WASP, to explain, I don’t know. I feel like I am just an American immigrant attempting to understand.