"Toward the Heart of Justice" Speech Part 3

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!  

Part Three – Three Values

In January of this year, I joined 125 people to attend an event hosted by Project South and Southerners On New Ground called the Queer Peoples Movement Assembly. Here, a working definition for queer liberation was presented:

Queer liberation seeks liberation for all peoples through working for the recognition of our whole selves; the integrity of the relationships and families we embrace; self-determination in choices for our bodies in sexuality, gender, eroticism, disability, safety, and privacy; the dignity of our spiritual practices; fairness in our economic systems, our work and its compensation; full access to participating in and benefiting from society's institutions; human rights for all; and justice as a birthright for all.

This statement is powerful to me because it relates an affirmation—what a free world for queer and all people would feel like. Importantly, this definition is powerful alone because it was communicated at the Assembly. Even if you and I will never experience liberation, as defined here, we will know that this possibility exists, which I suggest to you is enough. Imaginative politics is the seed for our inspiration, and a roadmap for our work.

But, if we have opportunities to embody our visions then we should be courageous to do so. Queer Liberation, along with Hip Hop and Buddhism has yet again transformed my relationship with power in recent years. Queer leftists have shown me that it is possible to build a community based on the politics around love. Hip Hop introduced me the politicized poetry of critique and possibility. And Buddhism gave me a pathway through which to practice healing and shattering conditioned myths in my life. I am certain that each of you has or will bond with a freedom tradition, whether political, spiritual, artistic, or most likely the fusion of all of these things. In it you may discover that the power that you and we already possess is tremendous, and that the unification of our collective power is but a multiplier.

I briefly want to touch on three specific values from these traditions that have sustained me over time: embracing vulnerability, experiencing wholeness, and cultivating radical imagination.

Embracing vulnerability to me is living freely to recognize your and others unrealized power. The politics of control and domination are interrupted when we embrace our own fears and anxieties to transcend them. It requires intention, honesty, support, and above all, gentleness. In the VRRP work, this means that I openly explain to every group that I train that there is a great deal that I don’t know, but through sharing information I hope not only to learn, I want to serve as a repository so that I can share with others with whom I come in contact. I try not to worry about being perceived as inexperienced, lacking confidence, or ceding “authority.” In the end, I think that I am striving toward justice when I can shed my ego for the benefit of the work.

By identifying my fears and routinely practicing to overcome them, I find that I am creating an opening for experiencing wholeness. I try to be aware in my life when I am internally separated—when I am feeling “small” because parts of me are ignored, repressed or neglected. In the day-to-day grind that means remembering to live in my body, as I can get stuck living in my head as an intellectual person. With political work this often means avoiding spaces where all of my identities or experiences—happy or sad, neat or messy, known or unknown—are not welcomed. Whether I am in Black Baptist Church in the state capital, Richmond, Virginia or at rural county fair at the far southwestern tip of Galax, Virginia, I will have on gender ambiguous clothing and will publicly name Golden Girls as my favorite TV show of all-time, if I’m ever asked.  Experiencing wholeness is a barometer of the balance of power around me. The more free I feel, the closer I am to the heart of justice. 

And the ways in which we are able to shake away from our own ego-driven desires, burdensome expectations, pernicious myths, and senseless conventions, inside and outside of ourselves, the easier it is to live in the world that we imagine, the world that we are striving toward. Some dismiss radical imagination as the stuff idealistic kids chase vainly after. On the contrary, iconic feminist thinker, and progressive Buddhist, bell hooks, explained in a 1996 interview:

"...my mother in Kentucky always used to say, 'Life is not promised," in the sense that boredom is a luxury in this world. Where life is always fleeting, each moment has to be seized. For us children, that was a lesson in imagination, because she was always urging us to think of the imagination as that which allows you to crack through that space of ennui and get back going." 

bell hooks’ memory is not about childhood naivety or escapism. Rather, it is recalling a survival strategy against complacency, a way to remain steeped in realities that are exhausting and harsh. Possibility can be the present if we willing to call upon our hope to thrive as people. After all, in a traditional place like Virginia, there will be no reason to do the work for a freer democracy, absent a daring—audacious—imagination. For without the unthinkable there is no thought, and without the unattainable there is no spirit to endeavor.

Conclusion

In this room some of us will become public servants who will make decisions, big and small, that will affect our collective well-being in a political environment. Others will similarly make decisions affecting our collective well-being though perhaps in less formal and less public ways. Regardless of how we engage with powerful institutions, we maintain capacities to interact with people who make up these institutions, and to re-shape our relationships to their power and therefore, its power. For all of us, fleeting moments of choice, feeling, and imagination will define our course toward or away from the heart of justice.

Fully experiencing the “in between-ness” of living within but striving toward the heart of justice resonates with our present struggles and our manifested dreams. Power drapes our everyday outlooks, is sensed in our bodies, and resides in the recesses of our mind, which, upon acknowledgment is an opportunity to transform. We are much more than parts of a whole, we are power, and choose to either share it generously or hoard it selfishly.  I hope by sharing my own formative experiences with power, explaining the ways in which my current work engages with law and electoral politics, and offering values that have sustained me to live more freely so that I can resist and build, that you too can envision and embody a world where we practice supreme bigheartedness and love. Because while there is an infinite supply of power, our experiences as humans during our lifetimes are remarkably finite.