Sh*t To Help You Show Up July 15, 2022

Where do you source your wisdom?

Jul 15, 2022

Here’s the funny thing about hierarchies of power. More often than not those with the most power in a hierarchical system have the least amount of insight into how the system works and how they function within it.

They don’t have to have any particular insight about the nature of things in order to continue to benefit from the system. In fact, the system itself benefits more if they do not pay much attention to the system at all, but instead interact unconsciously with it, as if their experience of it was simply “normal” and “natural”.

Anyone further down the ladder (or further out from the central seat of power if you prefer to think horizontally) is, by necessity, going to have more insight into the way the system works and how different individuals function within it. To have that understanding increases the likelihood of survival physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

Women are always going to understand patriarchy better than men. We have to. People of color are always going to understand white supremacy better than white folks. Queer folks have insight into homophobia, trans and non-binary folks into traditional gender constructs, and disabled folks into ableism. You get what I’m saying.

The notion of intersectionality, first introduced by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, necessarily complicates the analysis further by pointing out what might seem obvious to many of us now but was not a reality accounted for in law until fairly recently: individuals with multiple, overlapping oppressed identities have particular experience of systems that must be acknowledged and addressed.

What Crenshaw never argued, but has been misapprehended by people using the term intersectionality since its introduction, is that oppression is cumulative. As if a Black, queer, disabled trans woman is more oppressed than, say, a Black queer ciswoman. It doesn’t work like that. All oppressive systems are interlocking and simultaneous, not some progressive avalanche of suck.

Prentis Hemphill via prentishemphill.com

Why does this matter to our conversation here? Because, though much of the daily practice of our integrity is done privately, and many of our private lives are fairly homogeneous (meaning, we tend to create community with people who are like us identity-wise), we still function within a wider, more complex, and diverse social whole. And there will inevitably come a day when each of us must figure out how to interact in that wider, more diverse social context with some integrity.

Though oppression is not cumulative, insight can be. The more ways in which someone is pushed further down the ladder of power the more opportunity they have to directly confront the various interlocking, hierarchical systems that make up the larger whole. Coming to understand how the systems function, individually and in concert, is critical in order to survive with their souls intact.

When I want to truly understand what is going on in the world, when I want to source what feels like the deepest wisdom about what the next steps might be that would bring the world back into integrity, I seek out thinkers and writers who are living more intersectional lives than I am. They will, by necessity, have greater insight than I do. They will know things— see things— that I do not. They will suggest alternatives that never would have occurred to me.

In my discernment about how best to move through the wider world, I can only benefit by integrating their wisdom, even, and sometimes especially, if it challenges me to consider my position in the systems of power.

Recently I came across a podcast hosted by Prentis Hemphill, called Finding Our Way. Hemphill is a therapist, somatics practitioner, conflict mediator, activist, and writer. They are also non-binary, trans, queer, and Black. Since 2020, they have been hosting on the podcast some of the wisest current thinkers around change-making, who are interweaving the work of personal healing, integrity, and social justice.

Last week I shared at length with our paid subscribers about Hemphill’s recent conversation with Indian-American, non-binary, trans performer, writer, and activist Alok Vaid-Menon. Afterward, I went back to the beginning of the podcast and started working my way forward. I listened to an inspiring conversation with Sonya Renee Taylor, author of My Body is Not An Apology, in which she explained power hierarchies:

…all of the things that put us in a relationship or greater than or less than with other human beings is the ladder of hierarchy and all the systems that reinforce and hold that experience of greater than or less than all represent that ladder. And so in a Western industrialized, you know, imperialist, colonialist construct, the top of that ladder is white able-bodied, cis, heterosexual, masculinity. It's the top of the ladder and consequently somewhere at the bottom of the ladder is Blackness. And then there's all these ways in which folks are scurrying up and down… am I able bodied? Is that ladder also, you know, am I thin versus fat? Am I young versus old? You know, am I straight? All of the other, what we call in The Body is Not An Apology "default bodies", bodies that, that we use to stand in for human. When I say, "Oh, a human", we have an imagination about what that human's body looks like. All the things that are the default imagination of the human body are the default system… the rungs on that ladder. And so the most powerful way to destroy the ladder is to destroy the ladder inside yourself. Is to look at the ways in which you, we, have embodied the tenents of this ladder.

I also listened to a conversation between Hemphill and adrienne marie brown, author and pleasure activist, who I have written about here before. If there is a patron saint of integrity, brown is that for me. In their conversation brown offered:

… we have to recognize that we're actually not a fragile people. And for myself, it's like a claiming that I'm like, I'm not fake strong. I'm really strong. I really have done a lot of labor of healing myself, of turning and facing who I am, looking at my oppressions and looking at my privileges, looking at my work and looking at my calling. I am strong in that. And if there's something that I have done wrong, I'm strong enough to admit it and to learn. And if there's something else that comes along, I want to be strong enough to change. And my responsibility to my people and in that, I mean all my people, I mean that at a species level is to remind us that we are not a fragile people, but that we are an adaptive, resilient constantly changing species in a constantly changing world. And we are strong enough to change now. And it requires, this moment requires us to be strong enough to change, and willing to change and dare i say, excited to change. And if you’re gonna be excited to change you’re gonna have to deal with, being visionary at times, is to be wrong at times. The mess of it all.

Finally, I listened to Hemphill’s conversation with Mia Birdsong, author of How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship and Community. Birdsong articulated exactly my feeling, that I can learn more about the systems that exist in my life from people who are further outside of traditional power structures than I am. In her case, it was learning more about the nature of family from queer folks than she could from heterosexual folks. Birdsong says:

… in my marriage, I tried to be clear with myself about what are the things that I'm, that I'm trying to get from my relationship with my husband and what are the things that I'm getting in other relationships. And it's not about diminishing the importance of my marriage, but it really is about like elevating the importance of all these other relationships… I feel like there's a way in which I would say, especially when people… have children, there's a way in which, um, we have these weird boundaries that make it hard for people to like push inside of the little, like bubble that people create. Like it requires so much intention, um, because you're working against the, the kind of norm of our culture… let me be clear. I'm straight. I feel like straight folks are particularly susceptible to that way of being, and family. The most powerful kind of examples and lessons that I've gotten about how to do family in a different way, and also like specifically raising children, is from queer people. That's just, that's just true.

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