On writing

About one year ago, I started this blog as a way of sharing my perspective on racial and climate justice. In some ways, it is a self-indulgence for one more white man to project his voice into the world. At the same time, I believe it is important for us white people to advocate for justice, to raise our voices in the face of oppression. Just one more contradiction to explore in moving towards a more beautiful world.

In the time since I started the blog, it has become my opportunity, my routine, my exercise. I started writing because I wanted a place to regularly communicate my beliefs in and enact my stance toward justice, or the lack thereof, in this nation. But this weekly ritual of writing has also become a responsibility — not a responsibility to a readership, because few of you are regular readers — but a responsibility to myself. This blog has allowed me to articulate in my own mind the reasoning and feelings that bubble up inside me. It has allowed me to clarify when I am foggy, to amplify when I am quiet, to quiet when I am noisy. There have been several times when I wrote something which I intended as a dismantling of racist ideas, then I looked back at my writing to realize that I myself was articulating a racist idea. This writing and that reflection has given me the opportunity to examine myself to determine the source of that idea inside myself, to grow.

I am grateful that I have been able to maintain this rhythm of writing and reflection and that I have had the opportunity to speak words of racial and climate justice into existence, no matter how few or many people might read those words on a given day. I am grateful to those of you who know me, and those who do not, who have taken the time to read something I have written. I am grateful to those who have offered their reactions.

In many ways, of course, the world has changed very little since I started this blog. We still live with the same oppressive systems. But in some ways, it looks and feels very different. In the midst of a global pandemic, we have all been driven inside, and this crisis has made the need for racial and climate justice even more apparent to those of us who are looking. Unfortunately, for some the COVID crisis has become a distraction from these longer-term struggles rather than an amplifier of them, but mostly those who are distracted never wanted to look too closely anyway. The current uprising for racial justice has brought these issues into even clearer focus for some of us.

I hope that white people as a whole are truly waking up to issues of justice, in a way that will push us to advocate for that justice at the side of our siblings of color. I hope that I have gained and will continue to gain more clarity about the interconnectedness of us as people and the various crises we face. I hope that I can continue to write these essays, poems, and songs and put them out into the world. And if the only person whose thinking I change is my own, then this effort is worth it, because it means that I show up differently in the world than I did before. And I believe that is the way we make change — from within each of our selves.