An Exhilaration Beyond the Whirlwind
Jess St. Louis | April 2021
“If I have come to the point of consciousness where I have begun to understand that I am trapped as a woman, not just by the sexual fears of the men of my group, but also by their racial and religious terrors; if I have begun to understand that when they condemn me as a lesbian and a free woman for being “dirty”, “unholy”, “perverted”, “immoral”, it is a judgement that has been called down on people of color and Jews throughout history by the men of my culture, as they have shifted their justification for hatred according to their desires of the moment; if I have begun to understand something of the deep connection, between my oppression and that of other folks, what is that that keeps me from acting, sometimes even from speaking out against anti-Semitism and racism? What is it that keeps me from declaring against and rejecting this ‘protection’ at every level? … But when I passively witness the repetition of old ways of doing things, and do nothing, I feel my rigid circle close around me, tightening, painful: I feel myself closing into a narrow world, away from the friendships and the creative possibilities of a place where diverse women live. In my inertia and ignorance, I do not always speak or act: when I do, there is fear but also the exhilaration of going forward toward that place.”
– Minnie Bruce Pratt, “Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart”, 1984
Four summers ago, I was in a whirlwind where violence and intimacy where the realities of white supremacy and rape culture swirled alongside my grief and longings for a different way of dealing with harm.
That humid July night in 2016, I was in the holding pen of the Atlanta City Detention Center. The cop stopped and arrested me because of a broken headlight on my car, hoping to stick me with a DUI that I was well under the legal limit of. That evening, the tools of anti-Black and anti-poor “quality of life” and “broken windows” policing came for me — a white trans woman with class privilege caught in the violent contradictions of privilege and oppression.
It was grief season, the summer air heavy and humid, skin and emotions tender and raw and hard all at the same time. Hours before I was in the holding pen, I was over at my parents’ house to celebrate my father’s birthday, trying to still make space for celebrating life amidst the wreckage of our hearts as we inched closer to the second anniversary of my little brother Mark’s suicide — and for me, the first anniversary of the death of my comrade and fellow organizer at the Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative, Juan.
My parents’ house was, and remains, different in the years after Mark died. The air, especially during those first Julys, carried an emotional charge, crackling with the ever-present contradiction of beauty and life amongst the loss. Despite the chickens clucking, bees buzzing, and the loud chatter of crickets on a summer evening, I felt the noticeable absence of Mark’s voice that would punctuate the air with jokes and laughter bolstered by a cocky confidence and a disdain of all things awkward. I remember thinking: he would always come home in summer.
That evening, like many evenings before, my father got drunk over the course of our dinner. It wasn’t an uncommon experience. For years, evenings were spent sitting around the dinner table and the bottle of wine would get emptied as we argued and debated politics, science, and philosophy for hours on end. I forget the detail of how our conversation got there, but we began talking about Mark and his suicide. In his grief and heartbreak and rage, my father believed that since Mark shouldn’t have died, he must have been wrongfully accused of sexual assault and wasn’t responsible for his death.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a parent woken up in the middle of the night by police officers knocking on the door and told their youngest child is dead, see him lying lifeless on the morgue table, and figure out what life looks like afterwards. I can only imagine you want someone to be accountable. But what if the person responsible is a person you love more than you can put into words, the person you are now grieving? How do you hold a ghost accountable? One way is to lash out, I guess.
The problem is, lashing out doesn’t land on the ghost. It lands on yourself and the people around you, opening old wounds and making new ones.
“As a survivor of sexual harm, I think we can hold that Mark both did harm and also was able to transform. I don’t think we can blame anybody else but Mark for his death,” I shared. It was the first time I’d disclosed to my parents that I was a survivor. I didn’t tell the full story yet: a deaf trans girl who fell through the cracks of sex ed in which lesbian trans women don’t exist, who had trauma reactions from adults with bad boundaries, my leg muscles tightening to disassociate my presence from my body and be silent as a boundary I didn’t know I had was crossed by an ex-partner who would have listened if I had spoken. I just said that I was a survivor.
“You are?”, my mother whispered, leaning over the table toward me. I nodded.
“- If you believe that, that’s the thinking that’s responsible for Mark dying. His blood is on your hands,” my father shot back.
My muscles tightened at the violence of words meant to cut to the bone. “Wait, what the fuck?” I responded. “I’m not the only survivor who believes that we can hold that contradiction. I’ve talked with people who loved Mark, who grieve Mark, who are survivors too. Survivors that have been loved and believed by him — and believe that both things can be true.”
“I don’t care, I don’t give a fuck about that,” he responded.
We both cursed each other out, filling the room with grief, rage, and heartbreak. I naively hoped that by sharing that I was a survivor, my father would listen to me and take what I said more seriously. I knew our relationship wasn’t always healthy for me, that he tended to be most emotionally abusive when he was drunk, but I wished that showing my vulnerability would be received as an invitation to meet me there. Instead, that night it was a target for all the rage that a ghost could never receive.
My dad eventually fell asleep at the table, whisky on his breath. Separated by the table, my mom and I talked quietly, sharing with her more of my story as a survivor and how hurt I was by my father’s words. Time passed, until I was sober and could drive home. Before I stepped into the car, my mom and I hugged. As she said goodbye she shared, “You know your dad didn’t mean what he said, right? He was drunk.”
My heart broke, feeling into all the ways that harm in my life was minimized and glossed over, for the sake of holding the complex truths that people who love us can hurt us, and if we can’t say anything nice, we shouldn’t say it at all. The anger at knowing that the harm I experienced was facilitated by systems that left out queer, deaf, and trans sexual existence from in sex education inside of a culture of coercion that minimizes and downplays sexual harm experienced by what feels like most of the people I know. The bitter awareness of how patriarchy and white supremacy organizes us in our intimate lives — by aligning our actions with its values through violence, unconscious practice, and leaving us unskilled in other ways of being — that leads us to minimize harm and betray ourselves and our loved ones, as we conflate holding people accountable with throwing them away.
I just wanted to get back to my house, get in my bed, and cry. About five minutes from my parent’s house, not far from the Majestic Diner on Ponce de Leon, a cop stopped for a broken headlight. I was asked to step out of the car for a balance test, and I explained to the cop that my balance is not good because I was deaf, as my heart raced with the fear of experiencing violence from all the stories I had heard from women who were trans like me but also weren’t like me, who were stopped for being Black, poor, and walking down a street at night. Not long after, a second cop pulled up. After asking me if I consented to a breathalyzer test, which I did, the officer handcuffed me behind the car.
I had my cellphone on me and was able to call my mom and tell her I was being taken to the jail, stopped for a traffic violation. In the minutes while the officer was doing his paperwork, I was able to type into facebook, behind my back and while handcuffed, that I was being arrested and taken to jail, and that I was okay and would post when I was out. I learned through my time in movement work that it’s better for more people to know you’re in jail.
My phone was taken from me, and the rest of the night was one of anxious waiting. I took the breathalyzer test which confirmed I was well under the legal limit. The officers didn’t seem to know where to put me and placed me in a big main holding area somewhere between the men and women. It was clear who the Atlanta Police Department were choosing to arrest and put into the jail: people who were mostly were Black and/or struggling with mental illness and/or addiction and/or being poor. That was the reason why the organization I was a part of, the Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative, organized for pre-arrest diversion and to shut the city jail down. As time went on, my cochlear implant speech processors were slowly running out of batteries. I didn’t want to be deaf, trans, and unable to communicate in jail.
After five hours, I was let out. My mom had driven around the city with my father asleep in the car, going to ATM after ATM to get over $2,000 out in cash to bail me out. One of my speech processors had died while I was in jail, after one of the batteries had run out of juice. Not 30 minutes after being out of the jail, the other battery went out. I posted on Facebook letting folks know I was out, that I was okay.
But I also wasn’t. I was back in my parent’s house, bleary-eyed and in adrenaline overdrive in the kitchen where my father’s words cut like knives six or seven hours before, drinking coffee because I couldn’t sleep. The bitterness of the coffee was accentuated by the fact that I was only out because my parents had enough money to collect and put up over two grand in five hours so I could be released.
My dad walked up to me, patting me on the shoulder with an eerie familiarity, and said “I know things got heated last night, sorry about that.” He walked away, leaving me in the wreckage formed by a land of contradictions: harm and love, privilege and oppression, safety and precarity. Another memory arose to the surface: the time when I organized my parents to donate to the fund I pulled together to get one of our members out of jail. Even though I told them that every second our folks are in jail means they are put at more risk of violence, they responded telling me that the priority should first be a securing lawyer, then getting our member out of jail. When the trans woman locked up was me, they got me out as fast as they could. When the state violence was knocking on their daughter’s door, they understood.
My understanding and sense-making of these experiences didn’t come because I am uniquely smart or brilliant or kind-hearted. It came because of the Black, Brown, and white organizers that organized me into believing a different world could be possible and invited me to join organizations that took action together.
The violence that I experienced and my parents and I’s fear of the possibility of experiencing worse was because of the vicious policing in Atlanta that targets Black and Brown folks, working-class folks, people with more visible mental health issues and navigating addiction, and regular folks trying to survive. The same police force that arrested me killed my friend Oscar Cain almost three years later, his murder captured by body cameras that he organized for. I first learned about this reality when I was 18, when the Atlanta Police Department’s REDDOG unit raided the Atlanta Eagle — a gay leather bar — in 2009. That unit that was infamous in southwest Atlanta for years and years of police violence, including murdering a 92-year old Black grandmother in 2006, but didn’t elicit the same level of collective outrage by white LGBTQ people until the Atlanta Eagle raid. For these reasons, that unit was a key target of the first base-building organization led by women of color I was ever a part of, Building Locally to Organize for Community Safety.
It was in those relationships, born out of organizing and shaped by life experiences, that I learned that white supremacy deceives us white folks into thinking that silent complicity means the tools white supremacy uses won’t be used against us or our loved ones, when in fact they’re used against us day after day. The way that many people — across race, class, and gender — are organized into fighting for precarious false “choices” of private insurance and schools rather than ensured human rights to healthcare and education, hoping in the safety of precarious solutions over the painstaking work of building power that can give a certainty that we have access to all the things we need to thrive.
Holding Contradictions: An Anti-Racist Competency
“Settler Capitalism: a racist system of private ownership built on the ongoing occupation of indigenous land; the violent exclusion of people of color, women, and queer people from full citizenship; and the exploitation of all working people’s labor.”
– Sendolo Diaminah, Co-Director of the Carolina Federation
“It may seem paradoxical — but in this racist society we who are white will overcome our oppression as women only when we reject once and for all the privileges conferred on us by our white skin. For the privileges are not real — they are a device through which we are kept under control.”
- Anne Braden, “A Letter to White Southern Women”, 1972
From 2014–2019, a not insignificant amount of my time was spent in generative somatics trainings or retreats for the organization I was a part of that partnered with generative somatics. In those spaces, my teachers used a concept called Sites of Shaping, Sites of Change as a way to understand how we became who we are. The concept is used to help clarify that our own lives, our family dynamics, the wider communities we’re a part of, institutions that govern and impact the communities we’re a part of, the historical forces that shape those institutions, and the land and spirit of where we all play a role in making us who we’ve become over time. If as somatic teacher and healing justice leader Prentis Hemphill said, “oppression is actually how society organizes itself to control and distribute trauma”, then Mark’s life and death and the ripples of trauma from Mark’s actions that live in of all of us who were impacted suicide is situated in a political context that serves a handful of people at the expense of the rest of us.
Last summer, sitting on my front porch in Greensboro in the evening as it was cooling off, my mom and I had a conversation that I will think about for the rest of my life. The sun was gone, and the crickets and fireflies joined us, filling the sky with the sound and familiar flashes of light that lets you know it’s July again.
It was the day after my 30th birthday, the sixth anniversary of Mark’s suicide, and four years since the summer I was arrested. My mom and I started talking about what it means for us to have stake in the work as white women who’ve benefited from and been harmed by settler capitalism, whose lives have been shaped by privilege and violence, longing for something new.
“Part of my stake I have in this work is that the racist ideas that shape the prison industrial complex were some of the ideas that had Mark think the solution was to kill himself,” I shared, talking about how settler capitalism is gendered and how it shapes rape culture. How it has created a world where he could do such harm, despite him wanting to have such a different impact on others and the world. How his longing was not enough on its own.
Earlier in the evening, my mom had shared that Mark reached out to the woman who he had harmed, but that he did so unskillfully, making the situation worse. He didn’t have the skills of how to apologize, be in centered accountability, and how to make amends in ways that don’t escalate the harm. Where would he have learned that?
That lack of skill highlighted the contradiction between what he did and who he wanted to be and saw himself as, the logic of policing and prisons filling the crevasse between his beliefs and actions, leading him to internalize the belief that he was fundamentally untransformable. That his existence would cause more harm. He couldn’t imagine living, working to be accountable, and re-gaining self-trust. Mark believed survivors, but I don’t think the person he had assaulted wanted him to kill himself. From what I know, she wanted Mark to be accountable for the harm he did to her.
My mom agreed. In the initial days, weeks, and months after Mark’s suicide, it felt like an impossible contradiction to hold: that Mark was this incredible, brilliant, sweet young person we knew and loved who also harmed another person in a way that he felt like it could never be repaired and continue to live with integrity. How could both of those things be true? But they were and are. Those of us surviving are left with the wreckage, the work of holding these contradictions, to make sense of a fucked-up world.
Later that evening, my mom told me of what it was like growing up as a young white woman in the small town in South Carolina where her two sisters still live. She remembers about how her neighborhood was “integrated” but also clearly not. Across the street two houses over, there was a Black family, E’s family, who was living in a small one story house with a dirt yard while my mother and her family lived in a two-story house with a green lawn. Like my late grandmother, E raised five children, except she was also working as a domestic worker for my mother’s family. The intimacy of their lives was in a context of white supremacist and gendered violence.
My mother shared that when she was young, she remembers overhearing story about a Black girl in her neighborhood who was raped by a white man and got pregnant, a white man who no one identified. Like in many towns across the South, the violence as covered up, and there was no investigation into the violence. My mom remembers that it was one of those things that was never talked about again and how no one was ever held accountable. After 30 years of being her child, it was the first time that I can recall that my mom talking about what it was like to grow up in the segregated South, naming the violence of white supremacy in her childhood.
If there is a context to the harm Mark did and his suicide, it is a context in which rape culture and white supremacy sit alongside each other, in a whirlwind of intimacy and violence, attempting to tell us that domination is impossible to escape and imagine a life outside of. It is in the millions of stories we keep quiet, the ones we tell in hushed tones to the ones who we can trust might believe us. It is in the lie that the unearned gains from white supremacy are worth all the harm settler capitalism does us whether that is intimate violence, underfunded schools, or denying our human rights to housing and healthcare.
In this world, privilege is disguised as meritocracy. One outcome of that is unearned sense of individualism, a story of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, conveniently ignoring the structures of violence and unequal distribution to basic human rights. Another outcome is people believing they are solely responsible for their own failures and mistakes, internalizing it as their own inherent failure and unworthiness.
In the US, the suicide rates for white men and women are much higher than for Black, Latinx, and AAPI communities, second to Indigenous people. Settler capitalism and the harm it creates leads far too many of us to take our lives by our own hands, and the 1% and right-wing governing leaders look at these numbers and tell us that these deaths are our own moral or mental health failures instead of how they’ve structured our economy, culture, and political systems in service of their wealth and power.
James Baldwin once wrote, “As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you”. If that’s true, then it means we must transform ourselves and our world so much so that we and our descendants are no longer are white as an identity. It will take defeating settler capitalism, as it has power to shape us and shape the lives of future generations. Whiteness is a vampire, nearly impossible to destroy, reliant on harm against ourselves and the complicity of harm towards other people, spirit, and the land. It will always take more than it will give us.
I look into my mother’s eyes with awe at what staying in inside of conflict with love can do and with so much rage for a world that has taken from us and the system that has tried to buy us off. In pause to feel how this conversation is so different, how my dad is sitting in the corner listening to us, not attacking me. We can feel a shared stake in the fight, know that what whiteness has given us is unearned and a bribe in hopes that we forget the context and culture that has allowed for so much harm to happen to us, our loved ones, and people we know. It’s the culture that made it possible for Mark to commit harm, for him to to not have the tools for accountability and repair, and to believe that the solutions for stopping harm was to eliminate his own existence.
As white people who believe in a world beyond white supremacy, rape culture, and settler capitalism, we have to learn to sit in the messy contradiction between who we are and who we long to be. We can’t take shortcuts and claim that we are no longer white without a fundamental change in cultural, economic or political power. That’s escaping accountability at worst and at best, an individualist effort to not let white supremacy erase our legacies and ancestries prior to whiteness. But if we just assume we are forever white, then our work to become better people becomes a practice of trying to become “good” or “better white people”, rather than fundamentally shifting the balance of power and the distribution of life chances. If whiteness is consistent in anything, it is persistently adapting to changing conditions, organizing us to think it and settler capitalism is inevitable, and maintain on power.
Whiteness has us hoping for simple and easy answers, an easy binary like European settler colonial ideas of gender or sexuality — a clear right and wrong way to be — in hopes that we can trust that our actions are aligned with our values; but healing and liberation are messier than that. Learning how to sit in this contradiction and not have that collapse us into hopelessness is a skill and an anti-racist competency. It requires us imagine a different future and extend our trust in ourselves and in each other: that we can lead, follow, flank, and make changes for people far beyond those we know and are in relationship with. The kind of changes that we can all feel, victories that remind us that deep transformation is indeed possible.
Like stakes to vampires, those competencies join time-worn tools that help us win like the spadework of organizing and storytelling like our favorite song on repeat, shaping meaning and a new common sense. The kinds of tools we can use to give more than they take and imagine a future outside of the whirlwind.
Beyond the Whirlwind
“What I am saying is that our organizers… need to have constantly on their minds this necessity for getting at the question of racism; they need to be looking for the opportunities to make it real to the people they are working with. We all know that white supremacist attitudes change fastest not by logical argument, but when people have new experiences. We need to be on the lookout all the time for ways in which we can create those experiences for people. We need to look for the situations in which white people need the strength that can come from alliance with black people on issues of common concern. And we need to encourage them to seek these alliances.”
— Anne Braden, “Black Power and White Organizing,” 1966
“To under write it with my life: Whatever conclusions I arrive at in language must find its expression in action in the world. If I am serious about friendships with women of color, I will keep working to transform the conditions of our lives. I will assume my share of the danger of living in a racist world.”
– Mab Segrest, “Mama, Granny, Carrie, Bell”, 1985
Last summer was marked by the largest protest movement in US history, protests in defense of Black lives and for Black liberation sparked by the incessant murders of people’s loved ones by police officers. I was doing one-on-ones over Zoom and the phone with a new members of the base-building organization I’m a part of. This afternoon, I was talking to a white person, who learned about our organization through the latest round of local protests. After inviting them to share what they long for, I asked them: “What’s your stake in this work?”
I’ve started asking this question to other white people in my one-on-ones. They have often been politicized to some degree, acknowledge white privilege, and know that racism is real. But like most white people I and others ask this question to, their eyes darted around as if searching for an answer. They turned to me and said, “I’m in this work because I want to step in between the harm that’s happening to other people. I think part of our privilege is that we don’t have to have a stake in this fight,”, their voice earnest, uncertain.
I pause. I felt for my own stake in this fight in the gut-wrenching grief of Mark’s suicide, in my heart racing with fear as the officer handcuffed me and my cochlear implant batteries dying in the holding pen hours later, in my pelvis as it widens with a longing to be a parent one day and shrinks as I remember the reality of climate crisis and our local underfunded public schools with moldy bathrooms. Then I think to myself: I wasn’t asked this question in my anti-racist education either in the trainings that left me clear on what was wrong but didn’t explicitly organize me into joining with others to fundamentally shift the balance of political, economic, or cultural power.
We talk more, and of course they have a stake in this fight too. They just hadn’t thought of it or been organized into thinking of it in that way before.
My politicized somatics teachers have taught me that we’re always practicing something, so what are we practicing? Everything we do is a practice, even if it just feels like what we do: whether it’s the way we know how to make our coffee just right because we’ve done it that way every morning, or if our reaction to political crises is to ignore what’s going on, read, or join an organization to build power. Just like individuals are always practicing something, so do collective groups of people: families choosing to fight in hushed tones, so neighbors don’t hear. Institutions like police departments choosing to protect officers who murder and kill Black people rather than hold them accountable. Government leaders choosing to bailout the rich and wealthy in the name of ‘business’ over people who lost their jobs and might lose their homes as a result of an eviction as part of a mismanaged response to global pandemic.
Settler capitalism and its governing leaders doesn’t work for most people or the planet, leading to constant population-wide crises that leave people searching for the solution to the problems that arise. The thing is, settler capitalism continues to position its governing agenda as the solution to the problems it creates, and its leaders have the power to enforce it, over and over and over again. What is practiced is practiced so much that it feels unchangeable.
That over and over again shapes a life laden with grief, heavy with our pasts and the big and little violences that litter our days. In a million and one ways we are told that this existence is inevitable and unchanging, from the cop’s loudspeakers down the stories that play on repeat in our minds. Those big and little violences make pathways for privilege and oppression to weave themselves into our bones and muscles, shaping our survival strategies. It leads us to believe it is our own creation, when in fact, we had no choice in the matter.
Rather than our own individual heads governing whiteness — a shaping to make uneven and precarious access to basic human rights from the State as a central aspect to a person’s identity through being seen as and understood as white — there are governing forces of settler capitalism that maintain it, distributing life chances and trauma through controlling the things we need to survive and thrive in unequal and violent ways. Governing institutions like policing and the military along with the meaning-making cultural networks that they rely on, work to make the hierarchies of our lives seem inevitable, unchangeable, or even natural.
Practice becomes practiced, each time we fail ourselves and our comrades, each repetition feeling like a self-fulfilling prophecy that hopes we internalize this untruth until it feels as inherent to our existence as breathing, all while it chokes the breath out of others. Sometimes I worry that white people on the Left can believe that whiteness is as inherent to our existence as breathing. But it isn’t.
Pause. Breathe.
I think about the simple relearning of feeling at home in my body and my longings while being connected to others in my practice of somatic centering. Feeling into dignity — my inherent worthy for just being, just for existing, just as deserving as every other human being of the full range of my human rights, to experience liberation in this lifetime. Feeling how that worthiness is connected to the worthiness of all, from my comrades to the neighbors down the street who I don’t know but wave at me as they walk by. Feeling into belonging and connection, no shrinking or dominating, in my rightful place, with boundaries and not alone. Feeling into past — all that life that came before, my aliveness in the present, and the future I want to shape and long for. Feeling into self-determination and purpose. Who am I are promising to be for myself and to my loved ones and my comrades? And then moving that promise into action, into relationships and work, for the sake of our collective power.
The practice can feel like short-lived but a deeply felt reminder to these bones, to paraphrase Arundhati Roy, that another world is possible because we can feel her breathing, coursing through our body. What if we built enough power so our external world was able meet this internal world with affirmation? What institutions, what governance, and what culture would make that possible?
That will require me and you and all of us to move skillfully and powerfully — providing compelling visions of the future, inviting more and more people to step into their power and what they can offer our movements, and win changes people can feel — in the moments of crisis and the ones in between. We must do it even as we sit in the messy contradictions of who we are and who we want to be, as imperfect people who work hard to create experiences that allow the future we’re declaring to be felt by more and more people as possible, as we do the slow, rigorous spadework of remaking this world.
Taking risks towards my own trauma healing — holding firm boundaries with my father, feeling old triggers and practicing centering in those moments, and re-entering a conversation that led to emotional abuse just four years prior — gave me a felt sense that transformation and another way of being is possible. That leads me to believe that being brave enough to risk leading in multi-racial organizing projects for abolition democracy — a democracy that works to abolish settler capitalism and its discontents of whiteness and the gender binary — is a practice that of believing we are collectively transformable. It earns trust in the vision and each other, allowing us to feel for the edges of our skills and where we want to grow. In those moments and the ones in between, we will learn where we are skilled and where we aren’t.
Without risking, we will never know. Our declarations for what we long for may become pretty words, like an old letter jacket that we wear way past its prime, a nostalgia for a past hope in faith of things yet unseen, a soothing comfort in a never-ending whirlwind.
Instead, what if we had the power to transform the whirlwind into wind currents that make a liberatory distribution of life chances possible for all of us?
I learned from Staci K. Haines that the components of trust are shared intention, competence, and reliability. If that’s the case, of course multi-racial organizing is hard. There are no shortcuts to earning trustworthiness, no magic bullet to load or perfect book to read as white people committed to racial justice staring down a vicious white supremacist right wing and neoliberals who are forever trying to win over or retain segments of the people we organize. The work of generating and earning people’s trust to stay in an intentionally multi-racial organization that is committed to Black liberation, to working-class people, to the thriving of queer and trans folks will be a continual one.
But the cost of not trusting ourselves or each other to do multi-racial organizing even as we haven’t fully imagined a new way of relating to others and the world that abolition democracy will require of us, is that the people in power will stay in power and unequally distribute life chances to more generations of people who are just as deserving of liberation as we are.
I think back to Mark, and his belief and his fear that he was untransformable. I wonder if as white people who dream of a different world if many of us believe that we’re individually and/or collectively untransformable, that whiteness will forever be a force working to have us betray our loved ones. But we are transformable. I know it because I’ve felt it. It hasn’t been quick or easy or always felt good. But practice becomes practiced, and we can’t do it alone. But as we take these risks, we just might feel an exhilaration beyond the whirlwind.
this is not the time
to get small
this is the time to get big
to know we are worthy of the safety
they tell us is impossible
let us usher in the world
we have always needed
and always deserved
About the Author: Jess St. Louis is a lesbian femme-identified trans woman who finds home in the US South. She enjoys long conversations on a porch over a glass of whiskey and works as a communicator in social justice movements, is a learning somatic practitioner, and the deepest joy of her life so far is being an auntie/titi to some incredible young people.
Acknowledgements:
Thank you to my mother, who sharpened my thinking through months of conversations on transformative justice, acknowledging harm, and how we are making sense of life after grief.
Thank you the many people who read it and offered edits and feedback to different drafts and iterations over the months of writing and re-writing this piece.
The thinking in this essay was immensely sharpened inside of conversations with fellow organizers: Casey Thomas, Isabell Moore, Hannah Jones, Xochitl Bervera, Evelyn Lynn, Cayden Mak, Sendolo Diaminah, Theo Leubke — to name a few, but there are far too many of you to name. That thinking was strengthened through the embodied knowledge developed through somatic practices I learned from teachers such as including Spenta Kandawalla, Chris Lymbertos, Alta Starr, Nathan Shara, Prentis Hemphill, MawuLisa Thomas-Adeyemo, Staci K. Haines, and many others.
Last but certainly not least, this thinking emerges out of the study and wisdom of white women organizers who grew up and organized in the US South — both alive and ancestors — who have come before me, put pen to paper, and spent decades of their lives in service of ending white supremacy so we all get free, such as Anne Braden, Faith Holsaert, Mab Segrest, and Minnie Bruce Pratt. Thank you for leaving evidence for a young southern queer trans woman to study and be nourished by.
