The anxiety of failing to practice (anti-racism)
Harnessing your voice for activism while reducing social anxiety
My entire life I always wanted to be something I am not. By that, I mean something that I am not already. For some people, this leads them to believe that I’m never happy, or that I’m impulsive and restless by nature. Sometimes those things are true. But growing up in an age of unprecedented anxiety for my entire generation, I am ironically comfortable with my anxiety, almost fond of it for pushing me forward when times are toughest. I realize that is not the case for everyone, as often times our anxiety holds us back.
I am sure the readers of Medium understand that people will search through millions of sentences written by thousands of authors with countless perspectives, if only to find just the exact string of words that will bring us closer to a revelation. So with my first contribution to this treasure trove of wisdom, I hope help someone take a step closer to the center of their anxiety, and come to understand it for what it is. Perhaps to even let it transform you for the better.
The events of this past June and beyond shook a lot of Americans awake from their COVID-induced societal coma. With few other engagements to consume our attention, many white Americans found they had the energy to gather a more meaningful opinion on the disease of racism in our country. Like many others who prefer to preserve their energy for more meaningful conversations than Facebook fights with people to whom they otherwise never speak, I typically keep my social politics off the internet.
Several years ago when Ferguson, Mo. was on fire, I was at the University of Illinois U-C completing my undergraduate degree. Surrounded by more diversity that I had ever been previously, I recognized then that I was anxious about how little I understood about the experiences of my black and brown friends and classmates. I wielded my anxiety for to then change that about myself through reading and writing.
Being in the cozy intellectual bubble of university, I had no issue throwing myself into the conversation. There was no shortage there in finding ways to feel I was doing something worthwhile. I attended student group meetings, speeches, vigils, and I even participated in a pilot course the following semester where we read and discussed literature examine the use of racism as a social and political weapon against black citizens. It was my first honest attempt at becoming woke.
The power of my college education, and indeed my access to education, helped to reduce the guilt and subsequent anxiety I have around how much easier it for me, a white women, to live and breath in this country than my black and brown friends. It was actually my first honest experience with white guilt. It drove my anxiety crazy, and although I did a lot of work to vanquish my anxiety, it did not transform me.
Herein lies the issue with this kind of anxiety around social issue like systemic racism. When you know your beliefs, you could spend endless hours researching and affirming them. Many have written entire books about things with much shorter or more complex histories than American racism.
I read and wrote all the papers I could on the topic just to hand them over to the audience of four receptive professors. I sanded down that guilt into a smoother surface in my mind, just enough at the time so that my other thoughts could more easily brush past it. The tectonic force of my relentless anxiety pushed up the mountains of my other endeavors around it. The sands of time eroded it away further. The drama of my life as a young professional in Chicago pushed it away further yet.
I happened to be driving cross the country to visit my mother on the West coast when my city appeared from a distance to unravel overnight. In the first few days following the initial protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, my approach — to what I suppose I was still considering a matter of politics — had not changed. Having not forgotten all I have learned through my relationships and my education, I still made no statement on my social media. That is not to say I did not feel immensely. I wept every morning and night for a week for everyone on the streets and in their homes alike.
Most intensely I felt anxiety that I was not at the side of my boyfriend, a black man who is constantly consciously fighting with shred of his energy against the stereotype that our world is constantly trying to impress upon him. I wanted to do anything I could to comfort him from 2,000 miles away. When I asked him what I should do, the only thing more he expected of me was to show my support publicly.
I was completely taken aback by how sharp that mountain of guilt had become in that conversation. All that work putting down my perspectives on the policies of government-sponsored segregation in housing and job markets, and not a word of it came in handy when I sat staring at my Instagram trying to figure out why I was so scared to speak words I believe beyond the shadow of a doubt to be true. Perhaps I was afraid of someone trying to pick a fight with me that I did not want, but truthfully I could not tell you at this point. At the end of the day, all I managed to write:
“ I stand with you. #blacklivesmatter”.
What sticks with me now is the feeling that I was afraid to change. I was fearful that breaking my generational silence would somehow disrupt my world. For any sympathetic audience out there, you might point out that this is obviously the point of protest. More to the point of this piece though, I believed I could defeat the anxiety of my white guilt by silently studying it away. But in my experience with anxiety, the only way you move through it is to let it change you.
In college, I became more educated, but I remained unchanged from the person I was in respect to this most urgent and important of causes. I built my potential for a voice, but I still did not have a voice. This is why my head was suddenly underwater when I was asked to speak my simple truth of support. In the forefront of my mind it was behind me, but that was very clearly not true.
Since making a very simple post, I realize how inadequately I dealt with this call-to-action before, and now I feel I can actually make progress on it now. I can not only write publicly, but speak more easily about it with those who need to hear from me most. If like me, and I know many Medium readers are, you are driven by the force to present a better version of yourself to the world every day.
Now there is of course a huge difference between checking off three things on your to-do list and transforming your voice on a public forum, but if you feel that drive to become something more than you are like I do, just be conscious to ensure you are practicing what you believe. If you really want to be a better version of yourself, the publication of your thoughts might even help you see you are wrong, and what a wonderful thing that would be! It happened to me. It can happen to you.
Now if you are truly someone who is inhibited by anxiety on a daily basis, I am not suggesting that you change your worldview on every whim. This piece it meant to speak to those who feel that more general and ever-present hum of background level anxiety. For those of you who identify with that, just imagine that our anxieties are telling us that we have a mission to accomplish, and that background level is a subconscious way of telling us to get going.
I am also not suggesting that education is not the answer to various forms of anxiety. To the contrary, I am a huge advocate for education when it is appropriately paired with people taking the opportunity to exercise the lessons they have learned by presenting their truth for the world to see. For it is only through practice that we can truly transform our potential into something real.
