Wow! I found five-twenty-dollar bills lying wet in the grass on my morning walk. When I arrived back home, they were ready for yoga. I asked if I should report it to the police. Unfortunately, the police don't have the best reputation. Yvette told me that it would be unlikely that anyone would call the cops to claim their $100, and equally unlikely that the police would return it to me.
Yoga gets easier. The hour passes quicker with every session. The rest of the day didn't go so well. I tried to do some work on the article. I couldn't read a word. I was so done with it. I feel like I used to when I had smoked more than two packs of cigarettes in a single day. I felt like the inside of an ashtray.
I chose to do some gardening. I pulled the weeds lining the strip by the front fence. If I let them go unattended, they will break down the rock wall. I pulled them up and sprayed the area with vinegar. I didn't have enough vinegar to do the whole length. I was going to have to buy more tomorrow and finish the job.
I called Jean M. She was able to talk to me. She was feeling pretty good. It was delightful to have contact with her gain. She hasn't been feeling well enough for phone conversations. While I was on the phone with her, I continued trying to dig a hole in the front yard to plant the ground orchid. This ground is worse than New England soil. I hit rock after rock. They're all small but hard to dig out. I stopped after I hit an unusually large one. There is only so much time I can spend on my knees digging. My knees, my back, and my hands gave out.
I managed to get two loads of laundry in. After I hung it up on the outdoor line, it poured. But that's the weather here. It dried quickly when the sun came out. Darby joined me for my before-dinner walk.
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Musings:
I have been struggling with the White Fragility concept. It is not that I don't believe it to be accurate; I believe we have institutional racism in the country; if not the world. I think it is psychologically complicated.
I see white fragility as only one manifestation of a much greater human fragility. No one likes to hear a) they're wrong, b) they don't know what they are thinking, and c) their thoughts are not of their own making.
My mother would verbally assault me: no one liked me; I was mentally defective in one way or another; I was unattractive either because of some fault she had passed on or one I had acquired through some different source. When I told her she was hurting me, she went full bore with this human fragility. She argued I wasn't hurt at all; after all, it wasn't her intention to hurt me; ergo, I couldn't be hurt. Better yet, she accused me of saying I was hurt just because I wanted to hurt her. In other words, she had no intent to hurt me, but I did intend to hurt her. I am fully aware of human fragility in my mom and in myself.
I know when my buttons have been pushed by how I feel and how I respond. It is never a calm response. Sometimes, I am truly the victim, and I'm defending myself. Someone spontaneously offers me a negative evaluation of my character or my role in society. Man, that hurts. I think I do better when someone tells me that I have stepped on their toes.
I thought of a parallel example to white fragility: Here's the scenario. I say to some women that I think she looks pleasingly plumb in what she is wearing. Does anyone want to guess what her reaction might be?
Then I could say, "I don't know why you're offended. I complimented you." And then I start saying how hurt I am that she has so misunderstood my comment. "I have no prejudice against people with extra weight. I think it looks good."
If I were in a group of Americans, I believe I would be judged as insensitive and the villain. People would be rushing to the side of that poor plump woman to comfort her. Why?
Our bias against 'extra' weight is institutional. Heavy people are judged negatively. Unless this woman were morbidly obese, in which case the others in the group might have thought she needs to hear criticism for her current condition with both barrels, everyone would have been on my case. They would have judged me as being insensitive rather than the pleasing plumb woman as being overly sensitive.
This doesn't happen in racial discussions. If a black person tells a white person they are hurt by a comment, the white person becomes the victim. No, that white person isn't racial. No, that comment wasn't racial, whatever it was. Remember, my comment about the woman's extra weight wasn't negative. Why should a white person be considered the victim in this exchange instead of the black person? Racism is as institutionalized in our culture as bias against weight. Only the bias against race has been in the culture longer, and people of color have been killed through violence or medical neglect for longer.
I don't have a simple answer. It's the narrow path between the needs of two sets of people I know I had people in my life, i.e., my mother, who was traumatized by childhood incidents and is 'overly' sensitive. It's PTSD all over again.
I have limited tolerance for their demands to accommodate these folks if they make no effort to heal their wounds. Mike had sensitivities. He was sensitive when I giggled about something he did. I thought it was he was cute, but he took offense. I believed in respecting his perception of the situation. Unfortunately, it wasn't easy for me to make the necessary changes because my comments came out of affection, not a negative judgment. We both had to make changes.
All to say, the problem of respective 'fragility' is a universal one. Sometimes it is well-grounded; it isn't just something that happened to us once and now is over. Racism and sexism are not over in the real world. These are not something that happened and no longer does. They happen over and over and over. The fear that black people have of being killed just for being black, as they were during slavery and in the postbellum south, is not over. When they hear any hint of bias, alarm bells go off. I think that is perfectly understandable—these folks are living the trauma day by day. We have made some strides, but racism and the consequences of it are not over.
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