Personally Speaking

You don't have to know everything to do something. Or, writing while caring.

Oh, to write about Margaret Sanger as a so called Mixed Race woman.

There are two little boys on my lock screen phone. They are not my children, in a biological sense. They no longer spend extended periods at my house. But that day, we had a little poolside reunion. One of them Sanger would have called “dysgenic” and the other would have been the exact type of child she would hope would populate the country. They look like biological siblings, but they are not. They are settled happily into their respective homes now, with loving families. I find less and less of their belongings in my home now. All I have left is a scar on my right palm, a thick line on the inside of my middle finger where I shoved my hand out to prevent some breaking glass from hitting one of them. That was two years ago. I love those boys in an irrational, biased way.

I have been warned, in writing on the topic of everything we’re not so supposed to talk about (race, religion, and politics), that a sort of rational professionalism is key.

I have in some ways already failed at this, in my use of “we” and “you” and in inserting my thoughts as to what might be done with the information this “we” has discovered. This publication is independent and committed to the facts unearthed by other careful, credited researchers. And at the same time, it exists because I was inspired in my teenage years by many, many women who put themselves and their thoughts online.

Women who spent a good bulk of their days doing domestic or ministry work. Women who post their thoughts on electoral fraud and their knitting patterns. Women who write about theological hypocrisy and what slow cooking recipes would best feed a large family. I grew up during a blogging boom, where people who had been traditionally, forcefully silenced by their religious and political communities found an outlet for the valid, worthy thoughts they had about themselves, their world, and their place within it. In my time out of school and the traditional workplace, caring for the two small boys who came into my life, I appreciated the example of women who made time to contemplate and report on their mind’s inner workings as they changed diapers, cooked meals, and did everything women do that holds society together. I came to value the worth of that invisible work. I came to value them, as they started to sharpen in front of me, their formless “momness” falling away to reveal complex people who were on the front lines of what policy and religion had made.

While trying to figure out how to address the theological and racial narratives that continue to block people from accessing better care, I have run headlong into this sentiment that the real answers to these problems and the real way to attack them require a kind of detached corporate tone, a dismissal of any form of “mommy blogging”, and the correct resume of academic and professional experience.

I would never deny the usefulness of that kind of experience or education. We cannot read our way into understanding the kind of gene technology used in order to take a vaccine. We cannot strap ourselves into home made rockets and expect to hit the International Space Station. We need scientists and experts and academics and thinkers. We need people who dedicate their lives to study an aspect of the greater human knowledge.

To mother through ecological, racial, and social crisis is no small thing. It has been the honor of a lifetime to do so in the capacity I was allowed. Mothering in any shape can change your vision. I felt like my very eyes transformed, in how I viewed threats, the architecture of a place, other people passing by, and the many laws that shaped my foster child’s day to day movements. The immediacy of policy is felt within the home, and it is not intellectual but physical and practical. I have sat with grandmothers and mothers in my women’s league, who are deeply and expensively educated and privileged women with extensive professional careers. The majority of them came to advocacy work because of their relationship to their children and neighbors. They do not have time for theory that cannot be practiced. Their politics are practical. They do not have time to waste.

Last week, when Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film came out, I was struck by the scene in which a Lawyer Barbie confidently and successfully argued her case, and then just as confidently expressed her feelings on what she just did. And then she said of her emotions: “And I am expressing it. I have no difficulty holding both logic and feeling at the same time and it does not diminish my powers, it expands them.”

Off the bat I struggled to start to draft Margaret Sanger’s legacy without bringing myself into it. Like every other American, I am a genetic mixture of lots of different ethnicities. Sanger probably was too! I highly doubt she was 100 percent related to one particular European ethnicity. I was introduced to Sanger when I was about nine, and told she would not have wanted someone like me to exist. Because my ethnic heritage includes Afro-Caribbean genes and European ones, I am in this society considered “Mixed Race” as if I am two kinds of races which I find to be false (the human race is one race with many ethnicities) and “Black and White” but not just “White” because I am brown looking and you can’t be considered “White” if you don’t “look” “White” but you aren’t just “Black”, and depending on what people need from me I get to be more or less “White”. When I was younger and couldn’t say much, people considered to be “White” claimed me less. Now that I am talkative about annoying topics like White Supremacy, I find these same people appealing to my “Whiteness” and trying to remind me to “protect” them (us! ) and not push too hard. I am supposed to remember that I stand to gain from these prejudices. As a woman, Sanger striking blows to legislation that banned birth control is something I could benefit from. The personal and the political are inextriacbly linked to this history. How could I possibly work through it without that coming to mind?

If we communicate that the main people who can make a “real” difference in the issues we face today have to attend an Ivy League college and major in Gender and Race studies with a doctorate in African American History and speak in a certain way, we are setting ourselves up for failure. The majority of the society, in any capacity they work in, are capable of self examination and empathy. Those are the real prerequisites -that anyone can cultivate at home- for creating a more just and kind community. Hearing people, and their personal lived experiences, and celebrating the fact they can be shared, matters. If we have seen anything in our time with Harriet Washington’s research, it is that the high towers of academia and professional institutions can be easily corrupted with the personal prejudices of the men who run them. That information alone does not save or create just practices and policies. So much of the information that could lessen the pain of marginalized people or everyone affected by the issues of ecological and racial disaster already exists. But what unlocks it and brings it forward? Empathy. Care. A sense of community. Respect for people different from you. And to put the future of the world simply in the hands of experts is to rob the general society of their agency and power to demand better, to live better, and to do better for themselves. For people who have seen across time every single institution be weaponized as a cudgel to advance racism, greed, or patriarchy, that kind of delusion hardly stands. There has always been value in the grassroots, the ordinary person, and the average neighbor who just cares. The changes we have seen across the years did not come from institutions waking up one day and reversing their policies, but from people telling their stories to other people and wanting better for themselves.

I live in a state that has and continues to denigrate the stories of people who overcame prejudice to simply live. I will not apologize for not putting full trust in those very institutions and organs of power ( that have done wrong by marginalized people) to be the only voice to tell that history. The lens from which we view the world matters. The subjective care and love we have for others can be the very impetus to examine the history and truth. We have, as a generation, more access to information and data than ever before. But what does any of that mean out of context? Divorced from our day to day lives?

No matter who you are, or what you do, the perch from which you sit and experience life has value. And for women especially, how we feel and think and express that has been and continues to be heavily policed. Your background can expand the same information sitting around for everyone. You showing up to your school board, your town hall, your voting booth, and your street as you are matters. You do not need to have read every book or have a degree in your office to care and to think. I am very proud of the “mommy bloggers” who have made time in the middle of their work to sound the alarm on how the ideas in traditional institutions of power affected them and their children. The only small being dependent on me right now is America’s Worst Behaved Frenchie. But I would love to be included as a mommy blogger. I really like them. I care for them and dislike the easy dismissal of these women and their writing style. We write, because we care. And we care for many things, in more ways than one.

And for that?

You’re welcome, world.