…Our Common Problem

AUGUST 18, 2017 – Boston

There was an urgency in the air, the way you can feel the electricity in a lightning storm. Storms within storms.

I arrived late to the Alternatives Conference. As a newcomer to this group of community-based providers, I hadn’t even heard about the conference until after the deadline to submit proposals. I was an outsider on my way to becoming an insider in a group of outsiders. I was eager to connect. I could network with others trying to make a difference, still hoping to elevate and empower people receiving behavioral health services.

The conference of psychiatric survivors was made up of people who had survived psychiatric hospitalizations. They had survived the system. Now, they advocated to center the delivery of services around the voices of those being served. I wanted to support those voices. As a community-based provider, the most common question I got about our services from the behavioral health system was What do you call people who come to you for services? Are they consumers? Clients? Patients? I have this confusing habit of calling people people. The system didn’t understand that people felt labled, marginalized, controlled and traumatized by the system it was supposed to embrace.

Here, it was all about their voices. I wanted to hear.

By the time I got to the hotel and checked in, the opening speaker had finished, people had gone to their rooms. The grand ballroom was empty, napkins piled recklessly, hastily on the round tables. Plates of half-eaten deserts abandoned. I was lucky to pour myself a coffee before the hotel staff rolled away the cart. And I stood stirring my coffee in the abandoned cavern. My clinking spoon echoed. It was if everyone had fled.

The hallway was empty. Something blew through and cleared everyone out. Everything but the posters, the slogans, the rallying cries of the movement: Nothing About Us Without Us, Every Consumer Is A Provider. Voices rumbled somewhere beyond, still finding those words, still advocating for empowerment.

In a small conference breakout room, the planners and leaders of the conference huddled like a tired confused flock of birds. They slumped in a circle of conference chairs Feathers were battered. Among them were those that hadn’t been included in the planning – the youth, the people of color, the non-binary. They wanted their voices heard. They wanted to be on panels. They wanted their presentations heard.

Why didn’t you accept our workshop on Surviving Race: The Intersection of Injustice, Disability and Human Rights?

What about the panel on MicroAgressions?

Ever hear of DRAPETOMANIA? It’s the diagnosis my ancestors were given. They were called crazy, given a mental health diagnosis for wanting to escape slavery. Don’t you think that is an important perspective to hear.

The stalwarts of the movement sighed and justified the conference’s agenda. It’s really a matter of timing, You see, the theme for the year was already set, the selection…

How many people on the selection committee were people of color? How many were LGBTQI+? How many youth?

The esteemed white man trying to position himself at the head of the circle threw up his hands. I just don’t know what to do. It’s been decided.

A woman raised her head from her knitting. I’ve given the same presentation at this conference for the last 4 years. I’m happy to listen to somebody else.

A collective Thank you! sang around the circle. More concessions followed, until all the panels and workshops and presentations had been included. And as the planners typed and printed schedule changes in the hotel’s business center, I was drawn to the other storm. My smartphone buzzed and beeped with facebook notifications. My feed pumped a steady stream havoc and hate in front of my face.

The President of the United States had really said those words…there are very fine people on both sides…

It wouldn’t be the last time.

His words came in response to a reporter’s question about the Unite the Right Rally the week before. White supremacist marched openly, faces seething with rage, lit by torches as they circled the statues of Confederate leaders that were slated to be taken down. What were they protecting? White Supremacy. Those of us not directly terrorized by the granite and bronze memorials had taken them for granted, accepted their ubiquity as part and parcel of the “American” experience. They had always been with us. Only they hadn’t. They grew like mushrooms in the fear our collective voices carried through the civil rights movement after WWII. They were erected as acts of terror.

And they were still here, keeping the south alive. Keeping the idea of slavery alive, reinforcing white supremacy. The South will Rise Again. They considered themselves patriots. Wasn’t that treason? Wasn’t what the south did treasonous? Are we really still having this conversation? After counter-protestors showed up en masse, putting their bodies on the line, a white supremacist drove his car through the crowd, killing Heather Heyer, a young woman standing up to white supremacy. And when asked about the murder, the President said there were good people on both sides.

And it would get worse.

The organizers of the Unite the Right Rally had planned a second act – the Boston Free Speech Rally, scheduled for August 19, 2017. Tomorrow. The storm outside. They were coming to the Boston Common.  For what?

To prove that it was their American right to spread hate? To openly advocate for institutions that subverted the Constitution? Were they coming for us? The waves of social media posts crashed in front of my face. The gale forces of the National disaster. Memes vilifying political correctness and identity politics. A vortex of arguments against algorithms and bots and former acquaintances, fixed in their positions. Fixed in their identity. Fixed in their opposition.

I had to see what they were coming for. I trudged into the night on cobblestone built for another time. A few blocks away, the Boston Common, the oldest City Park in the US, held its verdant stature against the centuries of urban development beyond its edges. Originally, it was a public space where everyone could graze their cattle. Too soon, wealthy families bought too many cows. The Common was destroyed by overgrazing – a Tragedy of the Commons, the distinct phenomena of shared resources being depleted by individual exploitation. It’s not new in the Americas.

And here they were, the abolitionists. The ministers and orators who had pushed the country to abolish slavery stood tall in the night. Are they coming for you Wendall Phillips? Where are you now? We need you. You took on Lincoln in the nation’s biggest paper. When Lincoln told a delegation of black people that the Black race “could never be placed on an equality with the white race” and wrote in The National Intelligencer “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it,” you stood up. You called the President’s remarks “the most disgraceful document that ever came from the head of a free people.”

We need you again!

There is greater disgrace!

And Charles Sumner. You are standing again, standing forever for equality. You who represented Black parents in a lawsuit to desegregate schools in 1849. You who spoke for two days straight on the Senate floor in your speech The Crime Against Kansas, The Apologies for the Crime, The True Remedy. You stood before your nation and spoke for equality, for freedom. You put your life on the line. And your colleague, beat you with his cane on the Senate floor, within inches of your life, and you came back to the Senate after three years of recovery, and kept going. Who is putting their body on the line now?

AUGUST 19, 2017 – Boston

Change is often disorienting. As the conference attendees came into the grand ballroom and scanned the changes to the schedule placed neatly on their breakfast plates like an amuse bus, heads cocked. Whispers spread. People re-organized their day, and they brought their agitation with them wherever they went. They entered the workshop on Surviving Race with an air of indignation. What was this? Who had to survive race? They didn’t have to survive race. Did they? Within minutes a Karen started talking about how dreadful and difficult it was to hear about racism. She liked black people. It’s not fair.

Yes, it is not fair.

I had to see the Common. As I filled friends and family and colleagues in on what was gathering at the Common, all urged me to stay away. It’s not safe. Who knows what’s going on out there? Exactly.

It’s not safe.

Would white nationalists be driving through a crowd of protestors? I hurried into the storm and turned the corner. Tens of thousands of counter protestors crowded the Common. They raised signs: Make America Native Again. Make America Not Racist for the First Time, Hate isn’t a Family Value. People who would later be labled Antifa huddled with handkerchiefs over their faces, with helmets, with motocross vests to protect their torsos. They were putting their bodies on the line. Like Heather Heyer, they were putting their lives on the line. Why were they derided for covering their faces when the Klan had marched anonymously for centuries? Why were they derided for wearing protective gear when they were at the losing ends of police batons during peaceful protests?

I looked for the Rally for Free Speech people. I looked for Nazi suits or white hoods. Something distinct. Something unlike everyone else. All I could see were the counter protesters. Relief. More people had come to speak for the freedom of equality than the freedom to hate. I kept looking. Listening. I didn’t expect Santa Claus. There, confined to the bandstand was the organizer known as Angry Santa. Red nose. White hair. White beard. White Santa. The archetype political cartoonist Thomas Nast created to bring comfort to the freezing dying Union troops. Santa held his bullhorn. It buzzed and spat. No one could hear him. We kept listening. Just a crackling gravel of sound falling over the slogans of counter protesters. Maybe it was broken.

Santa banged the bullhorn against his fist. His comrades checked it out. Shrugged. They looked helplessly beyond the police line – yes, the Bandstand had been roped off by the police. The men in blue stood outside the yellow and black tape we have all come to know as off limits. We could break through it. A child could tear it. It flaps lazily in a mild breeze. Such is our obedience to civility. But why were the police protecting the white nationalists?

The answers would soon echo around me. I made my way back to the conference, back to the workshop on microaggressions. I rounded the corner and followed the gentle slope of the sidewalk to the Common’s exit, two armed police officers escorted Angry Santa through the Common. He doddled along. We were two tributaries flowing to the same river. At the exit of the Common we met, walking shoulder to shoulder. The police dropped off. Did they trust him with me? Did I look that part? Did their orders to protect and serve end at the edge of the Common? Then I saw his shirt. NO WHITE GENOCIDE. The street cleared for us. Everyone kept their distance. We parted the crowd. And I pictured myself memorialized on a hundred thousand memes an instant, on millions of screens, walking with the man in the NO WHITE GENOCIDE t-shirt. Behind us, people screamed their free speech.

Go kill yourself!

You’re a racist!

Why don’t you die!

And in the eye of that storm, there was a moment. I turned to Angry Santa, and asked, look at all these people…you got tens of thousands of people to come out here today to say something…Does this make you feel powerful?

Santa’s head snapped around to face me. His bloodshot eyes bulged with terror. 

No!!!

He screamed and turned away from me, banking left, down into an ally, climbed into an old red Chevy SUV, and drove off in his sled.

And I sat in the air conditioning, back at the Alternatives conference, on a chair jammed, locked arm to arm with all the other chairs as people spoke urgently, passionately about microaggressions…the little comments about hair, about eye color, about size, about neighborhoods, the things that belittled us for years, the things Angry Santa and hundreds of people who would never think they had anything to do with him, took for granted every day. Some people hate political correctness. Some people hate having to consider how their words and actions impact those around them.

Angry Santa, and all of them, all of us, are facing this existential crisis. The identities we grew under white supremacy are ending, crumbling, tearing away from our skin. And we bleed. And we heal. We can listen and hear and heal through the practice and process of equality as we shed white supremacy. None of us will ever be the same, and this moment of redefining who are is everything. We can turn our freedom of speech into a tragedy of the Commons, or we can turn our freedom of speech into a vehicle for healing.