Guiltless, and Riskless People

Why are we so (willfully) ignorant to the role risk plays in liberation?

We cannot seek liberation without risk. It is impossible, and this should be intuitive. Liberation is breaking free from the chains of status quo. It is beyond freedom. It is more than questioning the rights we don’t have within a system, but questioning the very existence of the system itself. Liberation is being, and living in your fullness- regardless of the system that successfully suppresses us. Dabbling in liberation is to question if we as humans are even capable of imagining our bodies uncontrolled, unconstrained, and self-governed. Liberation is aspirational and ongoing; simply, recognizing the daily glimpses of it in our everyday choices is simultaneously life altering, scary, and energy giving.

Repeat, we must take risk! This is not an exceptional thought, but a very logical one.

Moreover, we cannot engage risk without engaging loss. You must give up something. You must be willing to lose something. Sometimes those somethings are the very things you cannot imagine living without. Stakes are high. You can lose opportunity, money, people, and even your life. The shifting of values and faith is one of the most significant losses some of us experience, if we are lucky enough to be challenged and pushed.

After risking and experiencing loss, we may need time to grieve to make sense of life without whatever we gave up. Engaging the bereavement process is essential in developing, and moving closer to liberation. We must make space for new ways of being. Think about the last concept, belief, or action you were traditioned and shifted perspective on. What did that feel like? How did friends respond? Siblings and cousins respond? Parents and guardians respond? Did you experience a void? How did you fill that space once that old perspective, belief, or tradition was gone? What were the consequences?

This is risk, and it’s not easy.

I am tired of privileged folk searching for the easy way out.

Honestly, at this moment, I am tired of white folk searching for the easy way out. Consistently, allowing the people on the margins to take the brunt of the risk. Us margins people, have no time for your fragility and faux concern. None. Get it together, or get out of the way.

It seems white folk are grasping for straws on how to deal with their guilt, their shame, and overall fragility. This need to be guiltless has led them to engaging easy fixes. But there are no easy fixes when we’re talking about imperialist white supremacist patriarchy. None. Zero.

I feel the safety pin movement floating around social media is a prime example of the easy way.

This initiative is rooted in white peoples need for an instant feel good. I’m not saying that identifying yourself as a safe person is all bad, but it is inherently problematic.

(1) What makes you safe? Half of you folk holding tightly to your ally card are problematic as fuck. Typically, you all lack an intersectional framework and only part-time engage oppression of marginalized peoples. The other half of you spend most of your time feeding off the knowledge of the very people you’re supposed to be allied to- creating a transactional relationship, except you’re getting paid for doing exactly what decent humans should be doing.

(2) How is the proclamation of you being a safe place helping to solve the issues you are allied to? Be honest, does the extent of your action end here? This feels like the moment someone you love enters hospice, and we all know eventually death is coming to collect, and we just make the loved one as comfortable as possible. We are not fixing anything. We accepted death, and not actively looking for any solutions. You are attempting to make the deeply marginalized feel comfortably, until their actual demise occurs.

(3) It allows whiteness to be the savior, instead of the pervasive assailant. You are spending time on a micro effort, instead of confronting your peers, friends, siblings, parents and guardians on their violent behavior. And by confronting, not just that one time you tried to confront a friend and got shut down, but engaging sustained efforts if you have the ability to.

(4) If you can wear a safety pin, but struggle with proclaiming Black Lives Matter, we have a problem. I have tracked plenty of white folks excited about putting a safety pin on their new shirt or polo, but refuse to even whisper the words, Black Lives Matter. If you can’t do that, I have every reason to be concerned with what your sustained efforts look like post safety pins. Furthermore, why should we trust you, if you can’t confront your own bias and violence?

Again, I see the intention and I’m willing to say that it might be helpful for some, but damn, this is not an example of collecting your people, white folk. The impact is that it centers whiteness. You must begin to explore what comes next, and intentionally engage risk and manage loss. If you think this is fixing any of the violence around us, if you count this as your action in fighting for liberation, then your efforts in seeking liberation is all for not.

I’ve tracked white women defend this revolutionary safety pin idea for several days now. I’ve even tracked their audacity to demand women of color be on board with it. White women stay trying to convince women of color that they know what’s best for them. And they have been successful on many occasions, but times are a changing.

There is nothing that will replace risk-taking and lost, but taking risk and losing. There is nothing that will replace the need for demolishing white supremacy, but creatively and persistently finding ways to demolish white supremacy.

There are no easy roads.

• Traditioned — The act of passing on behaviors that maintain the status quo from generation to generation. By status quo, I mean imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

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This is the work of Cody Charles; claiming my work does not make me selfish or ego-driven, instead radical and in solidarity with the folk who came before me and have been betrayed by history books and storytellers. Historically, their words have been stolen and reworked without consent. This is the work of Cody Charles. Please discuss, share, and cite properly.

Bio:

Cody Charles went deep undercover to study Hotepology at the University of Distinguished Hoteps, where he successfully slayed numerous colonies of Hoteps on nippy Saturday evenings- accompanied by the occasional libation and a Popeyes two piece and a biscuit combo. He is the author of The Radical Friendship Contract: 10 Expectations for Loving People Fully, 10 Common Things Well-Intentioned Allies Do That Are Actually Counterproductive, Ten Counterproductive Behaviors of Social Justice Educators, I Will Burn My Name Onto It, and CLASS is in session: The Spinning Wheel of the Poor. Join him for more conversation on Twitter (@_codykeith_) and Facebook (Follow Cody Charles). Please visit his blog, Reclaiming Anger, to learn more about him.