"I am not a racist."

White people, listen up: If even the Klan claims not be be racist, think of how hollow your protestations might sound in the face of overwhelming statistical evidence that the United States has a race problem. 

Over the summer, someone said to me: "White men are the bad guys for everything now. You can't even talk about race if you're white without being called a racist." I found this hilarious, and was stunned to find, upon sharing this ludicrous statement, that it is actually a fairly common opinion.

Allow me to clarify: This is bullshit. I talk about race all the time, and have never been accused of being a racist. To add a wrinkle to this, my husband and I openly converse about racism and racial prejudice, and acknowledge that there is always a risk and a likelihood that we unknowingly bumble into racist behaviour in the course of our lives. We don't get accused of being racists, even as we admit that there are unthinking things we do that probably contribute to these social ills. We are likelier to accept that we might be racist, on some level, than the KKK. Such is the warped state of this national conversation.

If no one is a racist, then where is this racial bias coming from? We can see it in national statistics, anecdotes and evidence, and yet, somehow, everyone is blameless.

All of us have prejudices; it's one of life's great challenges to remain real with yourself, and discover what your own flaws are so you can take action to root them out and be a better person. This an everyday endeavour, the practice of refinement and open-mindedness and education. This is looking at patterns in the world around you and being really real that not everyone gets treated like you do. It is not claiming to be colour-blind as you negotiate a blame-shift because the situation is uncomfortable.

If you are protesting that you are not a racist, or that you can't even talk about race without being accused of racism, knock it off. Seriously, you are probably saying racist things, and dressing it up in some conversation about class, culture, behaviour, economics, affirmative action or any number of excuses that allow you a little distance to judge others without directly filling in the blank that you're talking about race. You are being judgmental, loud and ignorant, and that is the problem.

If you want to talk about educational achievement gaps, you need to talk about the impact poverty has on educational outcomes. You need to talk about urban food deserts and the PTSD-like symptoms that kids in rough urban neighbourhoods often exhibit that prevent them from being able to concentrate in school, leading to disparities in academic performance relative to their better-off peers. You need to talk about how relentless testing, failing scores and de-funding of schools drastically affects kids whose parents cannot simply move them to the suburbs or put them in private school.

If you want to talk about economics, you need to talk about the biases amongst employers that mean a black grad with no criminal record has similar odds in the job market to a white ex-con. And then you need to talk about how the people making those hiring decisions are disproportionately white, and how the crucial component of an inside connection for a job posting cuts along racial lines.

If you want to talk about prison populations and absentee fathers, you need to talk about disproportionate arrest rates between races, especially for minor crimes, and the fact that your white teenage son or daughter is lucky they aren't black, because if they were they'd be getting thrown out of school for minor offences, sent to prison over small amounts of marijuana or shot because they looked threatening. 

And your kids are not special. They are doing this stuff, too. I know from experience. Their skin colour alone is improving their odds of finishing high school, going to university and getting a job, even staying alive, because authority figures are not watching their every move like they are criminals waiting to happen. Instead, the police are likelier to be lenient with them, perhaps because they relate to them more as their own sons and daughters.

All of these problems are fixable. We just have to properly identify them at their source, and with kindness. There is systematic discrimination, and it is wrong, and it also breaks down into smaller, still-nasty pieces that can be attacked bit-by-bit. But you have to see that the problem is there, acknowledge your part in it and start to fix it, both within yourself and in the world around you. A huge part of that, the most important part, is listening to the people who are being hurt by this. Understanding what someone's going through, rather than telling them. So many people are experiencing the sharp end of racism, and I'd bet that each of them has some solution to the problems they encounter.

From my informal polls, it appears that no one wants to be a racist. We are not yet colour-blind, however much we might want to be in that post-racial world. We live shoulder-to-shoulder in this injustice and violence, and defensive posturing does no one any service. Soften your heart, listen, and embrace the possibility that you have been wrong, or misinformed, or you didn't know. We can all be better.

From One White Bellydancer to Another

This post is in response to an opinion piece which made waves in the bellydance world this week: Randa Jarrar's "Why I Can't Stand White Bellydancers," for Salon.com.

Imagine your uncle broke into someone's house on the other side of town, and stole a very beautiful necklace, among other things. Years later, someone gives it to you. You treasure it. One day, while you're walking down the street, the daughter of the woman who was robbed sees her mother's jewellery around your neck. She comes up to you to tell you that the necklace is a priceless family heirloom that was stolen. It had been in her family for generations, passed down from mother to daughter over decades. Would you try to suggest to her that you should keep it, or that she is crazy to try to tell you that she has a greater claim to it? Would you try to compare your love for it to hers?

As white women, we all have that uncle, or appear to. We look like the wives and daughters of the soldiers and foreign heads of state that played a part in carving up the Middle East and helped perpetuate conflict there. The impacts of that violence are not past but present, and the ruptures manifest in the looting of museums, the endangerment of women and minorities, and the erosion of cultural autonomy. We, as dancers, might not have done this, but we have to imagine how it looks to take on a certain costume and dance style and proclaim ourselves protectors of an art form that originated outside our borders.

Even if you are not from a country that directly colonised anywhere, we should remember a few facts. Baghdad has been sacked. Cairo remains tense. Throughout the Middle East, people are dealing with the aftermath and ongoing damage to cultures that have been ripped open partly by white people. Did they do that to each other, too? Yes. Does that exempt us from consideration of our appropriation of their arts? No. 

I think we need to be extraordinarily cautious about dismissing Randa Jarrar as cranky, racist, or bigoted, which has been the tendency of some. She is having the experience of something that is culturally near and dear to her being rewritten, by people who look nothing like her and mostly do not have the history of their culture being exploited that she does. The dance she loves does not belong exclusively to her, but it is woven into the fabric of her childhood and family life in a way that is very different from the experience of most Western dancers.

There is a difference between people adopting the dress and customs of a dominant culture that is actively exported (as in the cases of European dress or American music) and people from a dominant global culture feeling entitled to adopt or adapt the folk arts of another region. In one instance, the originators of the cultural form happily expect to be leading the way, and are validated by the uptake of their trademarks. In the other, people often feel that they are fighting to retain their identities and ways of life in the face of massive pressure to assimilate to "modern" expectations, largely from the global West/North.

The circumstances surrounding who has the luxury of dabbling in what art--including day-to-day discrimination based on skin color, historical facts of empire, wealth and power imbalances, gender politics (and how those are affected by race, nationality and context)--must be taken into account. It stings to get hit between the eyes with racism. White folks are generally not used to that. After we're done feeling our feelings about it, we have an obligation to acknowledge that our attempts to artfully borrow may have collateral damage. And, we have to decide if that changes our approach, or if we're okay with some people feeling the way Jarrar does. She is not alone in her feelings, either. 

It is a mighty privilege to be able to buy another region's priceless cultural heritage and try it on for fun and experimentation. That's what appropriation is. If other cultures feel respected when we do that, we help grow folk arts into global arts, like ballet. If we leave people feeling violated, then it undermines our cause, in my opinion. 

No one can be blamed for finding dance beautiful and becoming enamoured by it, regardless of context. One can, however, be held to account for failing to deepen one's education of context and history, especially in reference to a region where there has been ongoing conflict and war with Western nations, through our lifetimes. Art never happens in a vacuum--it is surrounded by facts and vagaries of history, and the tensions within those. 

If you are not comfortable with the weight of responsibility for other people's interpretation about your interaction with their cultures, I would suggest, as Jarrar does, that you find another hobby. There are some uniquely American dance forms that risk dying out right now--any one of them would appreciate your attention and participation. If they are not as appealing, I invite you to ask yourself why that is. Less amazing jewellery to wear? Not as worldly? Fewer opportunities for personal authorship in dance? 

Because, honestly, many of the things that make this dance shine to newcomers and audiences hinge on motivating common ideas we all have about the exotic, which derive from moments when Western culture became enamoured with the real and imagined worlds "over there." And, while we might once have felt far apart, those worlds are rapidly growing together, ever more mixed up in and exposed to each other. The heady appeal of that opportunity to craft one's own artistry, literally from the pieces of another place's cultural treasures, comes with the great responsibility to not just feel like you are respecting that with your intentions, but to deliver on that respect. 

We can't expect anyone to read our minds and hearts, and interpret our enthusiasm as appreciation. Execution is crucial; it is what defines art. If we intend to honour peoples' traditions, then we have to check to make sure that they do, in fact, feel honoured. The practices we reference in bellydance don't belong to long-gone people of the past--they are borrowed also from their descendants, who have the right to be respected when they speak up for their cultural integrity. If they don't feel loved, we might want to re-evaluate whether what we're doing just feels good to us, to the exclusion of their feelings on the matter.

In the case of Middle Eastern dance, we can choose to engage--artfully and considerately, and hopefully by invitation--with the injuries of conflicts we have directly or indirectly been party to. Or, we can keep blindly dancing in that wound, without regard to the feelings of those closest to the thing we claim to love. I know what I'd rather do.

None of us will get it right all the time. The failures sting, and they should. We should learn from that, and refine our approach. From there, we can begin to integrate the great diversity of opinion that matters outside of our own, and gain a sense of the perspective. We find our audiences, and we lead them somewhere. We can do better than presenting a cartoon of "elsewhere."

Violet Silver Moon

The moon was beautiful tonight. I caught sight of her as I was walking along on errands around 6pm, when the sky was indigo chasing twilight, and I kept seeing bright flashes between treetops. And then, there she was: suspended, elegant, in that rich blue infinity, shining silvery white in a sliver of a crescent with a crisp violet disk of the shadowed portion of her face. 

Only moments before, I'd unpacked my bag from hiking in Berkeley, and left my camera and sunglasses behind to lighten the load. I figured that I'd have nothing to take pictures of that would be demanding enough for me to risk getting caught unawares with a big fancy camera around my neck in the dark. So I left it behind. And then, there was the moon, daring me to try to steal the moment for a little longer by committing it to pixels. My phone never stood a chance. 

Dance and the Ephemeral Moment

Years ago, after a breakup, I observed that the weird rough edges within myself--all of the hanging questions and unfinished lessons, emotional scars and unwanted reflexes acquired in less healthy times--would not work themselves out fully until I found myself again in a similar context. Being alone and introspective was good, even essential, but only when I re-entered the world of relationships would I be able to feel all the demons rise to the surface. Once they came out to play in a new encounter, I would be able to see them as they were, and I could single them out for eradication. Until then, I realised, I wouldn't really know who I was in a partnership; the best I could do would be to work on all of the day-to-day rough patches and get to know myself.

In dance, I feel there's something similar. Or maybe it's just that my approach to life has a pattern. I always feel like the real moments of learning about performance are extraordinarily fleeting, maybe five or six minutes of going out into a particular environment that has been crafted by all the participants to create specific experiences for everyone involved. While I think there's clearly great value in rehearsal, the repetition in a studio doesn't get to the nuances of what it feels to perform. To get at that stuff, I feel that one needs to be in that rarified space, get a feel for its contours and observe how sensations bounce around within it.

I'm a largely improvisational dancer, and so I may be especially sensitive to all of this. I don't take a lot of comfort in a routine; in fact, I sometimes find choreography distracting in performance, because my memory and muscles have a tendency to surprise me, and I'd rather integrate that into the flow than find myself outside the program. Even when I'm learning choreography, I often feel like I'm chasing after a train as it accelerates away from the platform. Sometimes my body gets it, but I don't feel or really know where I'm going next. I'm sure a lot of this is down to practice, and nailing down a way to drop into choreography is perpetually on my dance to-do list. So far, though, dance just feels like it's made of something different to me. 

Rather than coming from a place of familiar combinations and common language, I feel dance at a nearly molecular level. I teased apart the movements I learned from my teachers through a lot of obsessive self-observation, expanding and experimenting with the nuances of my own musculature.; it's not for nothing that these are called isolations. I actually think of the movements I do, when I think about them, in this way: pinpointing anatomical impetus and chasing it down connection points to transfer energy through cascading contraction and relaxation. I do these things over and over again, until the movements that are in my body are mine, as reflexive as my own use of language. It's not that I don't want to learn combinations and choreography, it's just that I'm a weirdo and I get hung up on the details. To borrow the analogy of not being able to see the forest for the trees, if choreography is a marked trail through the woods, then I find myself admiring bark patterns and climbing up into the canopy to see what the view's like up there.

My days of being frustrated with this are mostly past me. I think I've largely succeeded in making peace with the fact that I approach dance in my way, and that while it's greatly expanded my interior universe and interaction with the world around me, it also makes me difficult to work with and slow to pick up things that are second nature for other dancers. I aspire to develop these other skills; in the meantime, I enjoy learning what I learn and absorbing it in my sloth-like way. As a teacher, I enjoyed developing choreographic ideas and sharing them with a group, working with the symphonic arrangement that simplicity can build to with many people working together. But, when I dance alone, I tend to slip into that natural language, feel a moment and encounter that strange interaction between myself and the music of the world around me.

Performance sometimes feels like a cocoon I can only enter for a few minutes at a time. The transformation is gradual, the conditions and test very brief. I try to access that transcendent space to let dance happen, and I can't be on the outside at the same time to assess whether my interpretation of what's transpiring gets through to the audience. It's a strange art form; there's no thing to hold outside of time, to turn in the light and get a finite sense about. Video flattens it. The animal bits of us can feel the strange sensations of another person's poise, and similarly primal parts of our busy brains can be held hostage by a suspension of physics and animation of intent. In each of those dances, I breathe into that expanded space, feel the presence of the people around me, and try to be open to that big mystery before the song ends.

In Honor of Exchanges

I've just come back from a wonderful expedition through Spain and Morocco, and I have lots to share about that very soon. However, something major has happened today here in the United States of America. Our government has ground to a halt, and, at the same time, we went live with a new, nationwide system of healthcare. This is a very big deal, indeed.

Despite this ridiculous government shutdown business, the United States took major a step toward joining the rest of the civilised world today. I have friends who can now access coverage, and treatment, for anything from chronic, life-threatening illness to minor maladies that would otherwise escalate into a debilitating issues requiring emergency room visits--and potentially permanent disability. People I know who have addiction issues can start to seek help, as mental health services and substance abuse treatment must be covered as "essential health benefits" under insurance plans and publicly funded treatment programs become more widely available under Medicaid. 

All of these changes come as a result of pooling risk, which one could argue we were already doing, albeit in a haphazard, cruel and expensive fashion. Leaving the people who most need medical care out in the cold to favor those who are already better-equipped to deal with emergencies has meant that we all foot the bill for care--at inflated cost--in a strained network of hospitals, left to provide all of us a level of treatment inferior to that of a country that would prioritize early, inexpensive and non-invasive preventative care.

This insurance-based solution is imperfect, but it was implemented in the name of bipartisanship and preserving choice. Our status quo has been shitty and harmful: ongoing market failure to provide adequate and efficient solutions to healthcare needs, because there's no money to be made in providing basic care to the poor. Aside from the moral failures of our previous shambles (I am reluctant to even use the word "system" for something so disconnected, ineffective and unpredictable), what we've been doing in this country with regard to healthcare is expensive--on federal, state and individual levels. We've spent more out of pocket and through our taxes than other countries that allow people to simply walk into nationalized hospitals and receive high-quality care for free.

For all of these reasons, we should resist letting perfect be the enemy of good. We can keep working on a better answer, even as we get more people out of lives of illness and fear by starting on some sort of solution.

One consistent tendency among developing societies is a commitment of resources to gains in health and education. This is us trying to live longer, healthier lives, gain wisdom and really reach farther toward the horizon of our human potential. And that transcends any fitful starts we have on the path.

Thinking about Trayvon

I was out with friends in a trendy bar in San Francisco's Tenderloin on Saturday night. (The contrast in that statement is sharp; one walks past a lot of sadness to get to this chic spot, safely inside frosted glass that lets in light but not scenes of desperation.) A smoke break for my friends made space for me to check the news on my phone and read the verdict of the Zimmerman trial. I fully expected to be reading that he was not found guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin, but I did expect to see that the manslaughter option had stuck.

Foolishly, I was not prepared to read that a jury would have acquitted Zimmerman. Or that an expert witness would have stated that it was time to drop this, and let the man get back to his life and family.

I really was not prepared to have a verdict land that so soundly stated the difference in value between white and black lives. Really, race relations in Florida were on trial in this case. The only positive outcome is that now, people are talking about what an outrage this is, what a joke the legal system in Florida is, what white privilege is and what can people do about this widening gulf that should sicken us, where on one side sits poverty and all the social ills that come with a highly insecure life, and on the other are all the people who never even have to notice that this kind of structural inequality exists. And persists, thriving on just that kind of ignorance.

I've been reading so many things: the account of a grey-haired astronomy professor driving through Florida, who in a moment realised that white people feeling threatened by their own racism could have resulted in his jailing, or death. A young black man writing that he gradually came to appreciate, rather than resent, the ways that his mother made him aware that he was different than his white friends, even if he was multi-lingual and well-educated. White authors imploring white audiences to fight back against that urge to say that they are not racist, and instead see how pervasive these problems are and that we must resolve to push back.

In some ways, we are beyond the big actions on racism. We have largely eliminated from the books those laws which explicitly draw lines between people of different colours. (In some cases, prematurely--the Supreme Court's action on the Voting Rights Act imagines an America where Southern states, blithely unaware of themselves as anything worse than "accidentally racist," are fit judges of how to equally protect an electorate from themselves.) We are now mostly down to cultural changes, self-examination and demands of righteous anger when racism and excuse-making hijack our public institutions and turn them into vessels for antipathy.

I think of my own experiences, living in neighbourhoods where I've been followed home or harassed by black men, and also see where I am in this, as a non-threatening target for rage or reaction, a less-dangerous representative of a portion of society that disproportionately controls the fates of others. I am also reminded at regular intervals that my life, and my control over it, are valued less highly than others. In this sticky matrix of race and gender and judgment, being blithely unaware is abusive. Humiliation can be deadly, though not always for the one brought low. Those moments of exercising power over people have ramifications that vibrate through this web, and that shaking undermines some more than others. The lifelines become detached and drift away in places, those formerly strong, invisible cords cut away until gradually there's not much purchase for anyone.

This backsliding and blindness is detrimental to all of us. The paranoia and privilege of white males, insecure in a masculinity built on nothing but flailing hierarchy and damaged pride, is perhaps the greatest example of how corrosive ignorance is. The fabric of society is rent asunder, and the opportunity opens for those bullies doing the tearing to scramble to the top of the heap and demand fealty. This isn't good for anyone.

So what do we do? We talk about this. A lot. We should keep talking. We have reached the point of being able to resolve a lot of these things by deepening our awareness of them. We have succeeded in tearing down the worst bastions of discrimination before this moment, and now we need to keep talking about why we did that. What we're walking away from. How these moments of judgment, ignorance and avoidance add up to destitution and violence. The conversation about Trayvon's end is about how paranoia and ignorance kill. And we're having the same conversation if we're talking about women's rights, or discrimination against people who don't conform to the someone's idea of the right way to do sex or gender. 

We need to push back against this moment, in which a certain contingent finds it useful to declare that some lives are worth more than others. This is embarrassing, and it's not what America should be about. We were built on higher ideals than this, and failure in this regard is more than a moral matter--the anger and abuse perpetuated by discrimination makes all of us poorer, in so many ways.

We have to see. And to listen. We have to become sensitive to the world around us, and the way that people live in the world around us, and stop judging and start helping. Anger is useful when it impels us away from ugliness and gives us energy to move toward something better.

An Ugly Day

I'm having an ugly day. This is the third day, and there are some less attractive ones to come. I'm perfectly healthy, and, in a seemingly infinite number of ways, my life is very good. I know that.

And yet, I would rather not show my face right now. The worst outbreak of cold sores I can remember experiencing has taken over my lower lip. Even without looking at my face in a mirror, I am reminded of the presence of this nasty little virus; my face hurts, burns, where these blisters have erupted to the surface of my flesh. 

It's a little thing. My lip is swollen and ugly. I have my legs. My fingers work. My brain is fine.

And yet… I would rather not go do anything that I could conceivably put off until later, when maybe I won't have to deal with unwanted attention or commentary about this painful thing I can't control. Maybe it's my fault I have this now; maybe I out-funned myself in the blessed spot of summer sun we got over the long holiday weekend. Maybe hanging out too long in the ultraviolet rays that burned my legs weakened my defenses enough for these minuscule creatures to do their dirty work on a nerve in my face. I don't know.

I do know that this is not a big deal. But it feels like it is. And that is, in large part, because I am used to having a sort of superpower. Usually, my face is quite easy. It's younger than its years, white and female, with oversized blue-green eyes and cheekbones that come from just enough Native American ancestry to add some intrigue. Whether I want to or not, I reap a daily dividend from this face. And, even though there may be days when I would rather leave my face at home and pass unnoticed through the city, I can feel the abrupt pivot that happens with this temporary disfigurement. I don't like it.

I spend so much time trying to re-inhabit this feminine face with more depth, less judgment. To use whatever superpower this is to bring my intelligence into situations that might not otherwise welcome it, or to talk to people who might not otherwise care to engage. It doesn't always work. I've been told before, by colleagues and eventual close friends, that my initial appearance said to them that I would be difficult, disinterested, and dismissive. People carry their assumptions into situations that sometimes stick around long enough to develop nuance.

And yet… The interactions I want to avoid right now come with extra judgments. Disease. Sexual promiscuity. Cover it up. Does it matter that most people have been exposed to the virus that causes these nasty little blisters in some of us? No one will know that I've had them since I was a child, long before I ever had the chance to do some dirty thing that would have earned me a scarlet letter on my face. Or maybe some people won't know that cold sores are another manifestation of herpes, which causes colds, chicken pox, small pox and shingles. That these bugs live in almost all of us, once we're exposed, and our immune systems fight them down into invisibility most of the time.

Sometimes they make their mark. And all the marks are interpreted differently. Chicken pox are childhood. Shingles are stress. And the big "H"--herpes--are taken to be a sexual death sentence and a dirty mark against the bearer. None of them have a cure. All of them are simply waiting for the right mismatch of immunological memory and exposure to experiment further in our species. They are ancient, adaptable, and omnipresent.

Really, this is no big deal. But I might just wait to go out until the journey is less laden with monkey fears about plagues and human judgment about appearance. Not so ugly days, when I have a little more choice about how people read my face, and fewer painful reminders of what we can't control in this social universe.