Tag Archives: White Supremacy

Practical Details

Masks and Armor

It wasn’t the death threats that brought me to SIA (as a guy in my AA meeting said, “so it’s your fifteen minutes of fame.”) Nor was it having my promotion blocked by the senior men in the History Department. It also wasn’t the one who went back to her husband or the one who hated how I guessed her mind—or tried to.

It was the quiet after all the drama. It was the Grim. The sepia days. The question as I drove around town: this is so hard; why do it?

When the pandemic of 2020 hit, I was a newcomer in SIA. I had a sponsor. I attended meetings. I had only begun to work step one. I learned from the old timers, who had been around the rooms for decades about my powerlessness over the isms: how we were survivors of it, but how, as survivors, we had also become perpetrators of it. Life had become unmanageable. Suicide seemed like an option. For many, homicide seemed viable. Some had done time in prison. Most of us lost sleep and peace fantasizing about revenge.

One day, between the lonesome of Thanksgiving and the lonely of Christmas, I had stomped the snow off my boots and entered the fogged glass doors at the Gargoyle Church. There they were: my people.

I quickly became dependent on the community in the rooms. I looked up to the elders there: to Juno, to Dido, to Britomart and Manel. My brother Andy, leaned back and grinned when I came in, tucked his bottom lip up. Camilla, as always inseparable from Gallia, stood and took me into her rough arms, then sat me beside her from day one, elbowing me gently and winking at me as the room laughed. I remembered this from AA—stories that would have shocked outsiders. We laughed because we were no longer alone.

The other newcomers, Cly, and Xan met my eyes from within their own raw armor, a glint of hope cutting through above the shadows.

Then, the elders took us to coffee.

There were many more beautiful folks in the daily meetings. But these were mine.

I was home.

It was weird, but I kept returning to the dingy room and the cracked cushions on the seats. I drank the bad coffee, with the dried creamer, from the chipped cups.

That March, the pandemic hit and we were told to shelter in place, alone in our homes. I was pretty scared. I had seen the Italians singing to each other on their balconies. I had heard their warnings, their remorse. I went dutifully indoors. I checked the news. I shook my head in amazement at the toilet paper shortage. I waited for my government to set up testing and to provide guidance.

My AA and ACA went on Zoom, but when I called my SIA sponsor, she said, “Come on down to the meeting.”

Stephen was there planting flowers when I arrived. He smiled his gappy grin. He laughed his hoarse laugh. He had a hard time staying sober. But we had been friends in the rooms for years.

I knew not to hug him. I can still remember the last hug I had had: on March 11th at an AA meeting. Les. Before nightfall, I was already afraid one of us would get the other sick.

My sponsor met me at the door with a carton of disinfectant wipes for my hands. Then she gave me a lightweight, clear plastic, strappy gizmo with a cylindrical center full of what looked like dirt.

“Put this on.” It was a mask. “Keep it watered. Report in here tomorrow at 6 a.m. for service work.”

And that is how I learned how the SIA meetings and the quiet garbage collectors were related. The very next day, I was assigned a shift in my neighborhood.

Gloved and masked in mycelium tech, we went about in our competent way, rounding up the city waste for free.

Vision

12 Steps for Survivors of the Isms Anonymous

The Reader walked up the concrete ramp, sliding her hand along the chipped and smoothed paint of the metal railing. She passed determined roses and sunflowers on ragged plants that needed to be deadheaded. She stopped to cup one bright beauty in her hand and brought it to her nose.

“So sweet,” she whispered to the plant.

Under the awning of the old stone church with its desert pink stucco joints, which were decorated with long-necked statues of monsters that gave the church its nickname: the Pink Gargoyle Church, she was met by friends on wide wooden benches around the patio. People stood up from conversations to embrace one another in warm, chaste hugs. They looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged the coded banter they had learned in rooms like these, rooms like the one she now entered through glass doors.

She stopped to introduce herself to the grim young man sitting just inside the door, shaking his hand warmly. “Welcome home Sebastian,” she said.

Inside, against a wall decorated with two plain banners—The 12 Steps of SIA, The 12 Traditions of SIA—she sat among more friends, smiling around a fold out table in a circle of thrifted chairs. The woman at the head of the table began to read from the familiar format. So, the meeting began– over the quiet clink of metal spoons stirring sugar and powdered cream into chipped mugs at the coffee pot.

The last bits of chat quieted slowly as the leader said, “Will you please join me in a moment of silence for the still suffering, followed by the Serenity Prayer.”

The quiet came deep, willing, communal. The Reader could feel the flutter of anxiety rise and still as her breath came all the way in, all the way out. She concentrated on the words as she spoke them, trusting the one she said them to, trusting the evidence in the room. Trusting the wisdom and the freedom that they requested in unison.

“We meet to share the experiences we have as survivors of the isms of a society built on dominance: colonialism, racism, binarism, heterosexism, ableism, classism…”

The readings went as usual, read every meeting, reminding her every meeting. She let them flow around her.

“Those experiences infected us as children and continue to affect us today…

“One. We admitted we were powerless over the isms and the effects of growing up in structural violence and that our lives had become unmanageable.

“Suicide, addiction, harm to ourselves and others, anxiety, depression…

“We lived life from the standpoint of victims…

“We take our own inventories and leave the rest to our higher powers…”

And then, after the readings, in the familiar format of the meeting, wise, brave, petty, self-pitying, humble, comfortable, familiar, humorous, vulnerable, honest, and sometimes also still in denial, the people spoke for their three minutes, each as their ticket number was pulled and called from an old coffee can.

She looked out the window at the blue sky, at the tree waving in the breeze. She looked at the speakers. She nodded. She smiled. She felt moved. She felt glad it wasn’t her. She felt grateful. She opened her heart. She resisted. She checked out. She checked in. When the Newcomer Sebastian shared, choked with grief, she nodded with the room when he said, something about walking his neighborhood in fear for his life, about “being jumped,” “total isolation,” “the plundering of queer bodies,” “shame.” The hour gradually passed.

“Number 68,” the ticket person said.

The reader looked up from her folded hands and smiled. Her number had been called.

“My name is Juno and I am a Survivor,” she began.