Enlightened in the Absence of Light
What Viewing the Total Eclipse Taught Me About Anti-Racism, Anti-Bias Work

Earlier this week, with my sister, three of my children, and several friends, I had the good fortune to observe the total solar eclipse from the perspective of a small community about 30 miles south of my hometown. Roughly forty people gathered in the parking lot of the Monroe County, Illinois YMCA, a two-story building with accompanying youth soccer fields plopped in the middle of classic Midwestern corn fields.
As many other folks have been documenting furiously, there was most definitely a celebratory feel to the gathering. Some friends had pitched a tent for shade, pizza was being delivered as my family and I arrived, and juice boxes and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were being handed out like candy to the children in attendance.
Like many observers, I was touched by several different, often conflicting, emotions in the minutes leading up to, and including, totality: wonder, gratitude, discomfort, ambivalence. It had been a somewhat disjointed morning of “should we or shouldn’t we (travel to totality),” “where to go or not to go,” “what will traffic be like,” “who will join us,” “how long will it take us,” etc. After filling water bottles, grabbing a few picnic blankets, packing some snacks to go and making a stop for others along the way, we were finally heading south, towards the path of totality.
The experience did not disappoint. It was everything that has already been written — and will continue to be written — about it. Powerful, multi-sensorial, exciting, memorable, awe-inspiring. I’m not sure I have anything new to add to the communal description of the experience. But that night, as I found myself unable to sleep, I considered some lessons I might have learned (or relearned) from the experience, and how I believe those lessons are directly related to my goals of active anti-bias, anti-racism work.
- Go to where you can participate. It might have been easier for me yesterday, amidst all of the ambivalence and conflicting desires of my varied family members, to just throw up my hands and stay home. We could have watched it alone from our yard, or in communion with our neighbors at a central location in town, which, after all, would receive 99.32 percent totality. But we decided 99.32 percent wasn’t good enough, and so we made the effort to go somewhere else. It’s a metaphor so obvious that the writer in me cringes, but in order to confront racism, bigotry, and hatred directly, I actually must GO TO that kind of work. I’ve been subconsciously supporting white superiority (supremacy) all of my life, and so now I must take specific, concrete steps to dismantle it. I can talk about wanting to participate in racial and social equity all day long, but until I put myself (with some effort) in a postition to do the work, I will never do anything other than talk about it, and my inaction will continue to support our white-privileged society.
- Be open to the experience. My 9-year-old daughter, on the drive to the path of totality, admitted to being scared. She had heard lots of legitmate concerns — “Don’t look at the sun” — as well as goofy, apocalyptic kinds of predictions. She struggled to sort out what was real and what was hype. Looking back, I am impressed by her willingness to be honest. After all, her older sister was present, whose current teenage self finds many reasons to mock displays of vulnerability. Yet my youngest daughter honestly articulated her concerns to us, and I did my best to address them, without lying to her, because, of course, even I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I identified what I understood about science and astronomy, umbras and penumbras. I recounted vague memories of my school-aged self, fiddling with my shoebox viewer in 1979. But I couldn’t tell her what she specifically could expect to feel, or in what ways her unique self would experience the eclipse. And yet we went: as it is in life, even in the face of not knowing exactly what awaits us, we show up. We are all, at some time or another, frightened children, wishing for a crystal ball to announce whatever fate awaits us at the end of our journeys. The truth, though, is that we don’t get to choose the outcome; we can only decide whether to participate or not. It is critical, in anti-bias work, to share goals and ideals— racial equity for all, the absence of bigotry, the dismantling of socialized barriers to advancement — but those are the long-term goals. Each of us must be responsible for doing our particular work on a day-to-day basis, without knowing definitively the impacts of that work. When I show up to a Black Lives Matter vigil, I don’t know that I will or will not be welcomed warmly. I don’t know that there will or will not be encounters with the police. I don’t know that my friends will or will not come with me. When I write an anti-bias article for public consumption, I don’t know that it will or won’t be read, that it will or won’t inspire action in a reader. But I go to the vigil. I write the essay. I try to let go of my attachment to outcomes.
- Protect yourself. I know this sounds counterintutive — after all, if we are to do any good work in dismantling racism and bias, must we not center the people who have the most to lose in our society today? Well, that is true. But it is also true that we must take care of ourselves. Yes, we must go to the path of totality if we want the full impact, the full experience. Yes, privileged white folks must show up at vigils, we must use our voices to amplify the voices of the oppressed and marginalized, of those less privileged. But if we do lasting damage to ourselves in the short-term, then we will be unable to carry on the work in the long-term. As someone who has already had more than my own fair share of eye and vision problems, I was quite ambivalent about looking at the eclipse, even with my NASA-approved glasses. (I’m glad I did, though!) Sometimes, a degree of self-protection is necessary in any/every situation. Burning my eyeballs, or winding up with increased vision problems down the road, when there were readily-available precautions, would have been an unnecessary complication. Yes, we must continue to prioritize the needs of others, but taking measures to protect ourselves — our mental, emotional, and physical bodies — is no small concern. We must all remain strong for the work that awaits us.
- Trust your community. This is a hard one, I know, because many people are feeling discouraged and let down by their communities. Neighbors proudly display signs or flags that cause pain and fear. Parents, spouses, children, and friends disagree fundamentally on the problems in our country and the path to healing. These concerns are real, and I don’t mean to diminish their import. On the flip side, though, sometimes we just have to broaden our lens in order to have a new or overhauled idea of community. I stopped attending my local Catholic church years ago. I had hierarchical concerns at the time, yes, about women’s rights and oppression and homophobia and lack of transparency/accountability, but at the end of the day, I couldn’t tolerate the elitism, the sanctimony, and the unwillingness to extend grace that came directly from the pastors in my life, to say nothing of my fellow parishoners. But while I’m not quite ready to call myself an atheist (I’m more of a questioning agnostic, I think), my connections with other atheists have given me entree into a receptive community that provides support, critical inquiry, and self-reflection. Likewise, my community of anti-bias activists has been rewarding in ways I never would have imagined. When people share a vision for the world, when they are collectively inspired to change the status quo, great things happen. For me, one of those great things, in addition to my microscopic contributions to the great work of changing the world, is that I myself feel happier. I feel more supported and supportive, more productive, and more grounded as an individual and in the many roles that I fill. I am a better wife, a better mother, and (I am trying to be) a better friend.
- Be willing to go with the flow of like-minded peers. I observed something powerful while viewing the eclipse with other enthusiasts. At the moment of totality, almost all of the forty-odd people around me started moving in unison — walking forward towards some invisible yet mutually-agreed-upon destination. When I made this comment on a friend’s Facebook page, I described them “trying to walk through and across the corn fields as though they might actually reach the sun.” I didn’t mean it humorously, but the comment received a lot of ha-ha emojis; I was not careful enough with my words. It is not that those people actually thought they could reach the sun, nor did they want to. Rather, what was powerful to me was that there was movement! The experience was too great to stand still. And it was shared movement: they were moving together, at the same pace, with a common desire to travel, albeit just a few hundred feet. No one said, “Hey — let’s all walk to the edge of the corn field.” To the contrary, it was spontaneous, organic, and life-affirming. I do not discount the need for planning in our anti-bias work. We must, in ways large and small, have plans for our work, be accountable to that work, and share those plans with others. Yet I think there is also something to be said for putting ourselves (see almost all points above) in a position where something extraordinary can be allowed to flourish, and, when we find ourselves there, to be willing to embrace the movement without second-guessing our steps.
