This is Liberation?

The unfortunate thing about seeking out health care (including in non-western medicine spaces) as a Black Woman in the Bay Area - is that not only am I navigating systemic racism, but I’m also navigating performative displays of “anti-racism” that aren’t backed up by actual care.

This combination is exhausting.

Very recently I tried to work with a new acupuncturist. I came in open-minded and excited, she had great yelp reviews. I saw on her Instagram that she also talked about liberation. It seemed promising.

In our very fist appointment she made a point of telling me that she was a white body, I was a black body, and because of that there was a power dynamic. The implication being that it was okay for me to have power there.

I felt thrown off and confused. It was a red flag for me. I don’t need someone to give me permission to have power. If anything, her doing that actually perpetuated a power dynamic. It assumed that I was without power, by attempting to give me something I already had.

This is the second time that this exact language has been used by a white practitioner to try and show me that they’re “safe”. That they’re a “good” white person. But all it shows me is that this person isn’t capable of meeting me as a human being.

By all means, increase your awareness around power and privilege! But if you need to declare that awareness to me, then I question the motivation.

There’s also no empathy being shown to me here. Because empathy would ask: I wonder how this person, who came to an acupuncture appointment, is going to feel about discussing racism with a stranger she just met? Empathy might ask how might this Black Woman, who I know nothing about, feel if I attempt to inform her that she is Black? If I call her a “black body” when she’s sitting in the fucking room.

The last time this happened, I didn’t move forward. I exited that situation immediately. This time, I was curious. Was it just misguided and well meaning? Would she be responsive if I let her know how her words had landed? I wanted to find out - so I sent her an email.

I let her know how uncomfortable her words had made me feel.

I told her that it felt weird and dehumanizing. I told her that it didn’t feel like she was making this observation for me. I even told her that this has happened before with a different white practitioner and I don’t get it: is there a script?

And maybe there is! Because she wrote back to share the anti-racism teachers she got this language from. She wrote back to say that she was being “trauma informed”. She wrote back to apologize for hurting me. But she didn’t hurt me, she just made me feel uncomfortable. She still wasn’t listening to me - she was just trying to say the right things.

The thing is, I’m familiar with the concept of being trauma informed. I’m familiar with the idea of creating safety. But in my understanding safety isn’t something that you define and project. What helps someone feel safe is as varied as people are different. In order to create safety, you have to be willing to listen.

Fast forward to a few more emails back and forth both about this and my treatment plan- ultimately this woman became manipulative, dismissive, and passive aggressive. I didn’t lose my cool. I just kept on centering myself. I kept on acknowledging what she was doing, and the impact it was having on me.

It was all so text book.

Her attempts to assure me that she was a “good” white person, weren’t actually rooted in a desire to be good to me. My refusal to validate those attempts with my gratitude resulted in punitive behavior.

She wasn’t a safe person for me. She told me that she was. But it was a performance. In some ways, the performance made the reality feel even worse. It made the reality not only feel harmful for the usual ways microaggressions are harmful, but it also made me feel lied to. I continued to assume good intentions until her behavior proved otherwise.

I left this situation feeling like she lashed out because I wasn’t interested in being a character in some anti-racism fantasy. In some play where she would say the exact right thing, and I would absolve her for whatever shame/ guilt/ discomfort she felt around me.

It’s not my job to tell someone that they’re a good person. I’m sick of being asked to do that even subtly. It’s not fair, and it does not feel liberating to me.

When someone goes to great lengths to prove that they’re a safe white person - in my experience, it’s generally because they want me to agree with them. They want me to validate them. If I don’t do that, they are quick to become an unsafe white person.

So when I go to an acupuncture appointment and I’m prompted to have a conversation about racism - I’m not only annoyed, I’m recognizing that I’ve been placed in a potentially dangerous, and volatile, situation.

In my case, the danger was realized in the form of an unprofessional, manipulative, email. It’s not the most extreme form of white supremacy - but that doesn’t mean it’s not harmful. It also didn’t make me feel less triggered when I received it. My body went into fight or flight because I knew what was happening: I was being punished for saying no and using my power in unsanctioned ways. These impulses when escalated form the very kinds of violence that anti-racism claims to be interested in addressing.

Personally, I believe that in general anti-racism is a bit of a scam. I believe that anti-racism is itself a continuation of white supremacy. It centers whiteness and white people. It prioritizes a form of liberation that isn’t really concerned about what liberation feels like to me.

If I’m being asked to sit there and hold space for some weird anti-racism performance while feeling uncomfortable, then where is my liberation?

Am I to believe that I am a spectator, or a non-playable character, in the work of healing racism? Am I to believe that this is where my love and my dreams and the work of my ancestors leads? To a liberation that dehumanizes and demeans me for not pretending? To a liberation that isn’t concerned with my heart or my healing?

Real care is felt. This same woman started our appointment 15 minutes late. She ghosted one of my emails for a week and blamed me for it when I followed up. She didn’t invoice me correctly and in fact did seemingly punitive things while invoicing me (charging me for the one herbal formula I pushed back on even when that meant forgetting the rest). All of this happened after I shared my discomfort. All of it felt passive aggressive.

Is this is liberation?

Look, people are trying their best. I get it! I mess up all the time. But if we stop focusing on performing goodness then maybe we can get to the work of healing woundedness.

What if instead of focusing on saying the right words, we focus on managing our triggers so that we’re not lashing out and throwing our pain at each other.

Safety doesn’t need to be announced - it is felt. It’s like trust - when you break it, it doesn’t need to remain broken. But it does need to be rebuilt. If someone does something that makes me feel unsafe or uncomfortable- and I inform them of that, their actions will give me the information that I need to take care of myself.

Sometimes taking care of myself means saying no to a situation that doesn’t treat me well. Sometimes taking care of myself means advocating for exactly what I need. But I won’t advocate for my needs in a space that disregards them. Because doing so is unkind to me.

In this case, this woman’s actions loudly informed me that this wasn’t the right environment for me. In this context taking care of myself meant managing my own triggers. A part of me wanted to lash out - but I didn’t. Instead I took my pain to my journal. I gave myself time to cool down and respond. I gave myself space to feel the tremendous anger that I felt, an anger that informed me; and then I moved forward with a power that never needed fucking permission.

It was exhausting! It doesn’t mean I felt good. I felt burnt out and disappointed. I felt distracted during a weekend that was really meaningful to me. But I honored my values and I was true to myself. I did my best with what I was given.

In its own way, this was also liberating. Because in the presence of harm and disrespect, I chose to love myself by getting out. I chose to not only feel my discomfort but to voice it. I chose to center myself even as this woman continually asked me to center her and her anti-racism performance. I chose to recognize that it doesn’t need to be this hard.

That’s my liberation at work. That’s my becoming in actuality.

It’s not some statement that I make, it’s not naming harm as if that somehow dissolves it - it’s the quiet and often subtle work of trying to live my values.

This isn’t my first experience with something like this since moving to the Bay Area a year ago. It’s also not just happening with white people. If liberation, and safety, and healing is the intention? Then I would suggest we have a problem here.

A small, but incomplete, sampling of my experience alone;

There was the one acupuncturist who, unprompted, lectured me on the idea that “conscious Black People” (his words) like to eat sugar.

Cool.

There was the one body worker who after working on me, excitedly asked if she could share what she was intuitively picking up on. I said yes. She leaned close to my face and said “I just kept hearing; Haile Selasse, Haile Selasse, Haile Selasse”.

Okay.

And there was one experience that if I’m honest I’m still unpacking. I was at a practice run by two white doctors in an Oakland neighborhood that’s being gentrified. This is also a space that talks about healing and liberation and doing things differently. While leaving an appointment, I saw some young Black teens steal a car.

It was triggering for me for a lot of reasons. I took my time to think about how I wanted to navigate it. I wanted to share what I saw with the practice from a place of community care, but I didn’t want to involve the authorities. I also wanted to honor the context for what was happening. I didn’t want to be reactive because I knew that what I saw was complicated.

I got on the phone with one of the doctors and for the most part, honestly, she genuinely listened to me. But at one point she said “maybe at some point those kids will see that what they’re doing is wrong.”

That car was stolen, on stolen land, that has yet again been stolen through gentrification. Why do we only see one of these things as a crime? Why do we only see one of these things as something that might require introspection? Why is only one of these things wrong?

I’m not sure what the answer is here - but I know that we’re not asking the right questions because nothing is materially changing! Black People are still being murdered for existing. And anti-racism would have me believe, that the antidote to that is to accept being dehumanized, and objectified, and mistreated in the name of healing and liberation? That the answer to that is to center a vision of healing that doesn’t include me?

That’s unacceptable. I won’t accept that.

Anti-racism doesn’t scratch the fucking surface of what we’re talking about if what we’re talking about liberation. It just gives white people a chance to feel good about doing “something” while asking the rest of us to exhaust ourselves educating, and holding space, and tolerating well-meaning harm, and walking on eggshells on the off chance that our humanity, or our boundaries, or our truths result in punitive behavior.

This is happening in healing spaces! In the Bay Area!!

This isn’t working. So if this isn’t working, then where do we go from here?

We might not have that answer yet.

But I’m inclined to believe that the response to systems of oppression is likely to be found in the truth of our shared humanity. I don’t make that point lightly or without deep appreciation for all that our humanity holds. We all have different wounds. We all have different work. But if humanity isn’t being centered in our attempt to heal those wounds, and do that work, then what are we working towards? What are we fighting for? If we’re not telling the whole truth, then what are we healing?

You can’t heal a lie. These alternative healers must surely know that you can only heal the wound if you confront the root cause. The symptoms are information and there is no shortage of symptoms here.

As I attempt to navigate this in my own life I keep returning to Love as my compass.

When I saw that car get stolen, I just kept on asking myself; what would love do here? And I knew that love would see that those kids were hurting. Their community has been taken from them. They are trying to survive in a world that treats them poorly. They are doing their best with what they’ve been given.

If a healing space needs to punish them in order to continue or protect the work of healing, then I would suggest that healing is not what’s actually happening there. It’s just more harm. It’s just pretend.

When I was standing in that acupuncture room hearing this woman pontificate about our bodies - I knew that it didn’t feel like love. It didn’t feel like care. It didn’t feel like a medicine that considered what my wounds actually needed. Maybe she was truly doing her best with what she’s been given. I can honor that, but I refuse to call it healing or subject myself to her behavior.

I keep bringing myself back home to: what do my wounds actually need?

What do our wounds actually need?

I deserve to find that in a healing space. We all do. And the reality is that many of our healing spaces are unwell - because they are a product of the environments that surround them. They are a product of the unconsciousness that informs us all.

I think we need more than a performance to address this. We need more than pretend, a script, or a check list. We need real people who are willing to not only be vulnerable, but to be wrong. Who are willing to put our goodness, and our good-enoughness, to the side long enough to just be open to what life is showing us.

We have all been raised by systems of supremacy. We have all been raised by inhumanity. It is no surprise that we bring these beliefs into the environments we create for ourselves - even when those environments promise healing!

And yet therein lies the actual work of liberation. It is not about posturing or performance - but about answering the question; who would I be, if not for the lies I’ve been fed?

How would I show up in the world, if my intention was to free myself from pretending.

The world has always held this cruelty. It has always held this harm. This isn’t some trend that started when the world looked in 2020 - harm has been a foundational part of what humanity has created with our time on this Earth.

That is a heartbreaking truth to confront.

Let it be.

Once we can let ourselves be honest about that fact - then maybe we can do something real with it.

Maybe we can do something that doesn’t feel like a performance of healing - but the real thing.