ten awesome kids and a somewhat despicable me

First, stop what you are doing and freaking read this:

To single out just one of these amazing kids, I want to just plunk the picture below in front of your eyes:

Eff effing Jared. It is ALL ABOUT Denzel Thompson.

In case, I don't know, you're not interested in what's awesome, or managed to resist the siren call of my link above, or didn't make it down to #4 on this list, Denzel Thompson apparently dropped out of school in 8th grade, depressed and obese; travelled to New Orleans to help out after Katrina, where he helped construct greenhouses and community farms and gardens, came back to North Philly and proceeded to:

• co-found the Philadelphia Urban Creators, a  "group of young change agents in North Philadelphia, building relationships with local communities in order to develop our urban landscapes sustainably, and equitably, from the ground-up";

• lose 150 pounds eating the food he grows in the gardens and farms he spent his teenage years building and sustaining;

• and go back to school, graduate, and move on to Temple, where he's dual majoring in agriculture and liberal arts because of course he is, because he's amazing. 

I've been thinking a lot about why sexism and racism are so intractable and metastatic and why they seem to me to be worse, rather than better, than they were when I was a teenager. And I think some of it is because for all the various strengths of my generation and the twenty somethings right behind it, we all share a common inability to tolerate discomfort -- to delay gratification, to go without, to take no for an answer. One of the things that depressed me so much about Occupy Wall Street was the incredible myopia of college graduates who seemed intent on establishing solidarity as part of the 99% without owning, or even acknowledging, the fundamental difference between history majors from New York University who can't find work "in their field" and incarcerated survivors of domestic violence who cannot read, or families attempting to feed their children with food stamps, or disabled veterans in homeless shelters. 

But really, I am pretty much the same as they are. I respond so intensely to issues of gender because my experience of my own gender makes me so frustrated and angry; because I've been affected in immediate and concrete ways by a system that just, you know, fucks with women, even women who, like me, are otherwise very privileged. I am less inclined to look at and speak about the equally intractable and often "more damaging" -- if there can ever be any meaning to that sort of comparison -- systems that afford me privilege at the expense of other people. 

I don't think that what's holding me back from this kind of investigation is as simple as not wanting to admit my privilege -- that is, not wanting to feel guilty or ashamed about being white, or about the ways in which I participate in a system that damages others, or about the fact that the things I have are not so straightforwardly earned, not so truly mine, as I'd like to think. It's more that I don't know how to go about examining and dismantling a system to which I'm essentially blind, a system on which I can never speak authoritatively. 

I like to have opinions, and I exist in a cultural moment in which the act of saying what you think is treated as a moral good, especially if you can do so with any kind of finesse. But really, so much that needs to be done for progress to really happen, seems to hinge on people like me shutting up and positioning ourselves to hear from people not like me. 

And that's hard, because, in the first place, I'm not very good at listening, full stop, and, in the second place, the people I've been socialized to listen to -- the people whose views and faces and thoughts on everything, even issues like race and class and gender, are most accessible and most palatable -- are not the people who I need to be listening to, if what I want is to be part of making things suck less. 

There seems to be no end of white people with things to say about race and class and gender. But I've got to be honest: if I made a list of the public figures who actually are African American or Caribbean American or African or Caribbean, who I know and whose thoughts on race I've read or heard, I'd be really embarrassed by it. Same thing for class: I have lots to say about money and poverty, but I've logged very few hours listening to poor people. To the degree that it's possible to find these voices in writing, I don't know where to start; to the degree that I'd need to actually ask real live people for their thoughts rather than Googling them, I'm both unsure of how to initiate such a conversation and situated in too insular a space to do so without actively seeking out new acquaintances and friends. 

Initially, I had planned to give up meat for Lent. (I've had to modify that somewhat and eat fish since apparently Just Effing Eating, Already, remains an ongoing project for me.) But the other thing I want to do this Lent is to reset myself to listen rather than talk -- specifically about issues on which I clearly know nothing, but also in everyday life. 

One of the functions of my privilege is to facilitate my aversion to shutting up and listening, to admitting that other people have more authority and credibility than I do. However, the initial resistance to listening itself is human and intrinsic to me. I'm not much better at listening to my husband's thoughts on our personal interactions than I am at listening to those who have experience racism weigh in on what it is, the role I play in it, and how I can be useful in dismantling it. The basic skill of admitting my own limitations, of shutting the eff up, for Crissakes, is thankfully one which I have the opportunity to practice regularly in my home, while I seek out the opportunities to apply it in my community.