"Toward the Heart of Justice" Speech Part 1

Yesterday, on March 24, I had the honor of serving as keynote speaker for the Women's Diversity Conference (note: my bio info isn't updated) at Adrian College. This conference is a rarity in a conservative, rural Michigan town, spearheaded by a few courageous female staff and faculty members whose roles at the institution and community are to inform, enlighten, and challenge. There was a subversive quality to this conference--it was cool to be connected to it. Enjoy!  

Introduction

Let me begin by thanking Cari Massey, Idali Feliciano, Nathan Goetting, and the Women Studies and Multicultural Programs Office for allowing me to speak today. I appreciated the time it afforded me to reflect, and I feel that it is an incredible opportunity to share these reflections with like-spirited people. I am very grateful to have witnesses on this journey of mine.  

During our brief time I want to share some reflection about power. I chose this topic because I believe it aligns with this year’s conference theme of encouraging and preparing women to run for public office. I also believe that it fits within the conference’s tradition of bringing women together to discuss our diverse histories and visions, which I am proud to recognize enters its fifth year.

Power is at the center of all spheres of life. It is the force that I constantly investigate at all levels of my own life. And it is a quality that I experiment with, to learn our abilities to transform it toward the heart of justice.  In my experience with powerful institutions, the test is to learn who and what can change the most toward the heart of justice, or in many more cases, how can we become less distant from it? If we cannot permanently reside in the heart of justice, we live and strive in between where we presently are and where we dream of being.  It is my experience occupying the “in between” space—of living between but striving toward justice—that I know very well, and that I wish to share with you in my brief remarks.

I have organized my reflections in three parts. First, I want to share some formative experiences in my life that have led me to this point where I am speaking with all of you. Second, I want share about my current experience as a community-lawyer working in Virginia with disenfranchised people, as it relates to engaging powerful institutions—law and politics. Third, I want to share about three foundational values that have sustained me while living “in between” but striving toward the heart of justice: embracing vulnerability, experiencing wholeness, and cultivating radical imagination. Finally, I want to leave time for a post-remark discussion with y’all. 

Part 1 – Formative Experiences

I want to begin by telling you about formative experiences that help explain the ways in which my consciousness around power has been shaped. 

Like many of us I learned about power in my early life. I was born in Washington DC but lived with my great grandmother, great aunts, and second cousins in Columbus, Georgia for my first six months, as a favor to my mother. Though it broke my mom’s heart to separate from her first born, she later related to me that she had little choice after she left an abusive home, lived in her car, worked three jobs, and had two babysitters who threatened to take me from her. Before I was a year old I had witnessed at least four expressions of power: 1) my mother’s tenacity to survive, 2) her deep instinct to protect her child, 3) various social and economic conditions that diminished her choices, and 4) the reenactment of a devastating history of forced separation between Black mothers and their children.

I was directly confronted with racism for the first time soon after returning to my mom’s care, during which time she met my father and was pregnant with my little brother.  Our DC-family uprooted to Billings, Montana, for my father’s new work assignment, which was still Klan country during the late 80s and early 90s.

A couple of months into kindergarten I gathered the courage to ask another little girl why she always moved when I sat next to her for story-time. Her explanation was surprisingly simple: she didn’t want to sit next to me because I was a nigger. I was stunned and horrified. I immediately understood the power contained in this word because more than her act of uttering the word, I felt the contempt in her voice, which sprang from her lips like venom from a snake. At the same time, as a pensive five-year old I was equally confused—what did this have to do with story-time? Where did she learn that word? Did other children feel that way? What I understood the least was why this girl—herself as Latina—harbored such strong feelings about me?

Of course, after my mom heard about my day at school she fulfilled every angry Black woman stereotype. My parents went on to re-activate the town’s NAACP, appear in local newspapers about our experience with racism in Billings, and organize a diversity parade with indigenous, Latino, and other Black families. As many resistance stories go, my parents fought hard but were forced back to DC. We moved cross-country to Centreville, Virginia, an affluent suburb outside of DC, where my parents felt that if their children had to deal with racism, my brother and I could at least earn a good education in one of the well-regarded school districts in the country.

My beginnings in Centreville were more similar to Billings than not. While, I had fewer overt encounters with racism, I quickly detected the serious contradictions of privileged suburban life as an outsider.

I also held profound contradictions in my life at school and away from school. For example, in second grade, I waged a playground campaign so that I could play basketball with the boys who didn’t want me to play for no other reason than that I was a girl. I eventually won, beat many of them, and gained enough respect that they would become disappointed when I didn’t play, but it would become one of many battles to gain visibility. 

Away from school, I was self-aware that I was really drawn to girls, especially ones in flower dresses, in ways that most other girls were apparently not. More present with me, however, was being responsible for myself, my brother, and other little children on our block. I grappled with anxiety and shame as my parents struggled with addiction, despite our best efforts to maintain nothing-wrong, middle class front. At the same time, I remember similar plights of other neighborhood children, who, like all those who live with adults and therefore deal with adult problems, were experiencing hard things—from severe physical, sexual and emotional abuse to economic insecurity. Through all of these experiences, I came to appreciate who we are as humans—sympathetic, complex, and resilient.

My high school years were awkward. I transitioned from being a serious, multi-sport athlete to a card-carrying geek. I had loved sports because in playing I learned how to healthily exist within a team. However, I quit my primary sport, soccer, just before junior Olympic qualification trials, in protest of the team’s hyper-competitive culture. With much more time on my hands I accidentally found politics.

A few other geeky friends and I founded our school’s Gay-Straight Alliance with the naïve hope that we could have a space to identify other gay students and essentially talk about gay television shows. Apparently, according to numerous angry parents, we started the club to talk about our sexual fetishes and convert other confused teenagers into our sex cult. That would have been more fun. A handful of us stood up against fierce parental opposition, threats of violence, vicious rumors about inappropriate relationships with faculty members, and a Fellowship of Christian Athlete campaign to end our club. In the end, the GSA survived, and still exists, but I was tired of Centreville.  

I left as soon as I could to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Once I left, I understood both the attractive and ugly sides of privilege. On one hand, Centreville instilled an upper middle-class culture in me that has proved invaluable in giving me access to, and allowing me how to navigate powerful institutions. Yet, acquiring these qualities came at a high cost because I felt throughout my life that I was deeply misunderstood, harshly judged, and violently reacted to, not merely because I was an outsider, but because I was a non-conformist. I learned that genuine non-conformity is dangerous to dominant culture and institutions because it contains the power to uncover their fragility. Importantly, I found language to describe these experiences in college. There were even entire disciplines dedicated to studying these social forces that shaped my life for eighteen years. Classes in sociology, history, women and black studies, anthropology, and other programs impressed onto me a memorable theme: institutions exhibited as much power as we, as individuals, invest into them.

I also discovered my own intellect in college. It was not affirmative action that made me feel inferior to my rich, white peers—it was the consistent subtly biased messages that I was smart, but never the smartest, that I wrote well but never the best, that I was thoughtful but never the sharpest. At William & Mary, I found incredible female mentors who affirmed my abilities to read, write, and think. Not only did they reinforce that my abilities were among the best, but they challenged me to shed the lie to be afraid of my own power, which I had been imperceptibly taught. Their confidence in me fostered an understanding that I was simply seeing things and speaking in ways that were unfamiliar in my old environment. I finally developed a trust that my future could be driven by my own power, not merely depend on others’ shortcomings. 

At the same time that I was experiencing my own quiet transformation at school, I was introduced to community organizing as a means for collective transformation. I connected with a multi-issue organizing group, called Virginia Organizing Project, during my second year. I joined a statewide racial profiling campaign, local affordable housing campaign, and spent a summer organizing a new chapter for the group before I graduated. The model of undergoing a strategic group process to expose what is hurting a community, what will help, and create a long-term plan to address the harm is undeniably powerful. Issue campaign organizing transformed my beliefs about the origins of political change and scale of movement-building. I went on to become a staff organizer with Virginia Organizing Project (now Virginia Organizing) for a year after college.

My transition out of college was a seminal period. My politics evolved as I came to know different styles of organizing—community-building organizing and healing justice organizing—through a group called Southerners on New Ground (SONG), a queer liberationist group based in Atlanta, GA. I love SONG because they were the first organization to tell me that queers and other outsiders should stay and claim their homes in the South. And in this group, I found a home, where I did not have to privilege parts of myself to participate or compete for precious political space and resources. A place where laughing, eating, and forming deep relationships was the political work.

Discovering SONG and its sister organizations inspired an inner-revolution within myself, leading me to loudly resign from a board position at Virginia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocacy group, after a protracted battle over racism, trans-phobia, and wealth elitism within the organization. Interestingly, the board with which I separated myself was full of rich lawyers. I can partially credit them with my decision to attend law school, because I saw no reason why people like me and those close to me should not share the same levels of power as these other board members. So, I spent months emotionally and intellectually preparing to attend law school, and entered American University Washington College of Law in 2008.

Before moving on to share about my fellowship, I want to briefly mention two non-political events that transformed me before law school. First, I came to know Terrell Jackson through a pen-pal program, who was an amazing young man who was sentenced to death-row. We eventually called each other “brother” and “sister” after four years of being in each other’s lives. He was murdered by the state of Virginia in August 2011. Second, I discovered meditation, then Buddhism, which is teaching me about impermanence—the inevitability of separation; compassion—that which gives us the capacity to transform; and selflessness—revealing the self-imposition and self-censorship that reinforce the illusion that our interconnectedness is not real. These developments, and my law school experience, led to my political radicalization and current practice as a radical lawyer.

I share all of these experiences to demonstrate that they are not wholly personal. I hope that there was resonance with, or reactions that arose, based on your own experiences. I also intended for them to demonstrate our intricate, simultaneous relationships with power. Power is not a foreign force that controls us—it is a pervasive site of struggle that we control as people.