Decompiling Oppression #156
Sam McVeety
This past weekend, I was given the gift of joining a group of organizers at an in-person retreat in California. We were participants in Breaking the Mold, a program convened with the goal of organizing white men in the work for justice. Although we had met a few times virtually, the retreat felt particularly ripe with possibility, and though we had received a rough agenda, none of us seemed to fully know what to expect. The days that followed were profound: filled with beauty, vulnerability, and power.
Perhaps it's saying something about the felt sense of this experience that it is still so difficult to write about, days afterwards. Certainly part of that is because so much of the experience was about getting out of our heads and into our bodies, to ask what we are feeling rather than just what we are thinking. "What is on your heart?" was the question that began many of our discussions. Sometimes the answer came easily, and sometimes it didn't; something to be curious about.
As I think about my time at the retreat, one sensation that is particularly alive in me is one of care. Care that makes your shoulders relax, your face soften. This was a space where we were encouraged to practice care, for ourselves and for each other, in a way that nurtured the seeds of our collective liberation. We had the space to slow ourselves down, to offer invitations like "how did that feel to say?" with curiosity and gentleness.
It was also a space where I could practice holding power with care and intention ("What does it look like to take up 10% less space? 10% more?"). I could reckon with the fact that I have learned to fear my own power, fear the harm it might cause. I could dig into the memories of being a big kid growing up, one who had to be careful what shape his body took. Someone with a quick wit, that could just as easily cut down as it could lift up. I had the spaciousness to hold this fear alongside its twin, the reality that holding myself back can also cause its own kind of harm: by rendering me unknowable, by holding me back from contributing my full self to the task of building a more just world.
We looked backwards and forwards, too. In a landscape shaped by quarterly earnings reports and vanishing attention spans, we looked forward, to the futures that we yearn for, not a few years down the road, but generations beyond today. We dared to imagine not just the "what" of the future, but the "how": how people might live differently from today; how they might feel in a future that has finally healed the wounds of patriarchy and white supremacy. How everyone might have access to shelter, sustenance, and ease; how everyone might be able to create, thrive, and love.
We looked backwards, to those who came before us, especially those who fought for justice. Not for nothing was there a poster of Myles Horton on the wall (next to Audre Lorde), a white man who dedicated his life to building a cross-racial, cross-class movement for liberation. Rather than accept a culture that relentlessly aggrandizes individualism, we instead remembered how even the greatest champions of liberation were themselves shaped by a kaleidoscope of teachers, mentors, and supporters. In today's world, remembering history and seeing it in our own shapes is itself a subversive act.
Worth noting, too, is how all of this is profoundly opposed to the forces of authoritarianism. A movement that remembers that leaders are made, not simply born, is a movement that is resilient in the face of brutal repression. A movement that invites men to heal is a movement where people can be whole, where the loneliness and anger of men isn't a void that supremacy rushes to fill.
The present state of our world serves to underscore the vital importance of having spaces like this. Men, and white men in particular, have been successfully organized by the right under the various guises of paramilitaries, Christian nationalism, and other supremacy ideologies. Some of these same men are now patrolling the streets as ICE agents. Rather than cede this organizing terrain, it is of the utmost importance that we create spaces where we can realize and nurture a positive, liberatory culture for white men.
Leaving, my heart felt full.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: What is on your heart?
Communal: What are healing spaces that you yearn for?
Solidarity: Support Highlander and their work to incubate the movements that drive us from the world we inherited to the one we deserve.
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