Shame and personal responsibility

I just finished re-reading You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame, Resilience, and the Black Experience.

This is an anthology curated by Tarana Burke and Brené Brown. I found it moving, but then I was not sure that I had absorbed what I needed to. I went through again, breaking down the twenty essays and journaling about them.

Previously I had not really liked Brown, whom I know to be very popular among friends. I didn't relate to her experiences, though I found her analyses good. (I was drawn to the book because of Burke.)

That made it interesting so see how many of the contributors consider her to be a friend, but also interesting to learn that in her research she has been criticized for oversampling Black and Latinx populations. She was surprised to hear back from Black readers that they had to work to see themselves in her books, but her stories do come from a very privileged position.

That is from the introduction, shared as a conversation with Burke explaining the genesis of the product and the need it fills. Then it goes into the essays of the different contributors, some of whom I was familiar with, and some not.

It resonated more for me, and yet many of the problems presented are specifically rooted in racism. That may be why I did not absorb it enough the first time. I care about this, but I do not suffer from it.

I think where it started hitting more the second time around was noting the effects of poverty and the stigma on fat; those are familiar. Being white (and perhaps college-educated, though many of the contributors also have degrees, often advanced) has shielded me from some things, but there are other areas where I am vulnerable, and I have felt shame.

I needed to go back for more than one thing. (One of those was a referral to Audre Lorde's A Burst of Light.) The quote that I needed most may have been from Yolo Akili Robinson in "Unlearning Shame and Remembering Love".

He writes, “Systems of white supremacy teach us shame because they have no guilt.”

Something I think of a lot is a focus on personal responsibility. I take it very seriously. I know the planet is warming, and that water and soil is not being treated well, so I recycle and conserve energy and try to reduce my footprint.

How many millions of people doing it would it take to make up for corporate polluters?

It's not that I shouldn't be responsible for my use, but that individual responsibility cannot be enough. 

Apparently Jeff Bezos thanked his employees for his space flight. 

I think it's great that Wally Funk got to finally go into space, but was the flight itself that much of an accomplishment? If so, would it justify the employees abused and the businesses destroyed by Amazon? Even more, given the vast wealth Bezos has, couldn't a great deal still be accomplished with reasonable working conditions?

These things may not seem directly related to white supremacy, but they all fold into dominator culture, with greed and racism feeding off of each other in a cycle.

I have noted before how greed kills guilt; I can see where racism does too, and really any other reason for deciding someone is less. Others are clearly lazy, or incompetent, or in some way inferior where their suffering is justified, but mine would not be; I am not like that.

That's not how it works, and nothing good can come of it.

I saw a comment on individual choice for masking and social distancing, that people need to choose to protect themselves. Well, if the mask were as good at keeping disease out as it is in keeping it in, that might be a reasonable statement.

As it is, globally over 4 million dead, over 600,000 in the United States. Mitch McConnell and Fox News may be starting to feel guilty (or vulnerable to lawsuit) based on recent statements, but there are many who have contributed, and are still going strong. No guilt.

Here is another line from Yolo Akili Robinson:

“Rejecting shame for Black lives means rejecting individual responsibility for structural failures.”

We may not all be included in that statement, but when there is a structural failure -- and there are many -- we need to be able to recognize it. 

It is not rejecting personal responsibility to know when it is not enough.