The Pain of Belonging — Frances Lee
By Frances Lee
Notes: This is a written version of a spoken piece I performed for Performance & Belonging: Citizenship, Culture & Identity, a graduate class taught by Professor Jade Power-Sotomayor at the University of Washington Bothell.
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One night, my partner and I were on the couch looking at data about the overrepresentation of East Asian students at top universities in the US.
I brought it up because I was just told that as a Person of Chinese descent, I couldn’t be part of my campus organization for Underrepresented students of color.
My partner, who is white, leaned over and joked, guess you’re not oppressed anymore.
She smirked.
I panicked.
Somewhere beneath the cemented layers of analysis, I knew I was more than my politicized, raced identity. But I had internalized the oppressed status as a capital P Person of Color and grew attached to the special underdog comfort it provided me.
The crystallized realization:
I don’t know how to be a part of my communities anymore if I’m not performing oppression in some culturally recognizable form.
“How do subjects become invested in particular structures that their demise” — Or even alluding to their demise “is felt as a kind of living death?”¹
In one breath I demand justice and equality for myself and my community members. But in another, I put forth a stereotyped, minoritized persona as a stand-in for self.
“Fitting in is when you want to be a part of something.
But belonging is when others want you”²
What are the things we do to be wanted? I’m worried that we’ve internalized damage-centered narratives of ourselves.³
Social justice cultural movements have been overly dependent on
strategic essentialism as a political tactic. (Taking on negative stereotypes about our groups in order to gain power and resources.) It worked… too well. So, these false claims bled into the personal understandings of ourselves.
There is a twisted, implicit belief among us that one’s value is based upon how much structural oppression you experience or have experienced, that only People with enough credentials of being oppressed™ are allowed to speak, participate in, or contribute to cultural conversations and knowledge making. Although this is a restorative model of social relations that provides some immediate consolation, a long-term adoption merely reproduces the same logics of supremacy and domination.
I wanna dig into that backwards shameful feeling of not being oppressed enough that I encountered within myself earlier and consider other, deeper ways of being together that don’t involve conflating harm with value and belonging, and power with un-value and un-belonging.
You see, I am uneasy about the spiritual effects of always presenting as the Other, The Sufferer, The Wronged. We are more than a receptacle for injustices doled out by society. We can now publicly name our painful, traumatic common experiences as “Oppression,” “Injustice,” “Inequity, ” and it feels rather normal and expected for us to do so.
It is not, however, a golden ticket to be complacent, to turn away from offered connection, to insult and condescend. For those of us who still hurt and have moved beyond surviving, we are responsible for much, much more. We can consider our hurts and hollows for what they are, fully and truly. Nothing less, nothing more. Some of us have always known this. We must tell the other true stories about ourselves.
Do we believe we are worthy of love and belonging even when we no longer suffer?
I am interested in who we are becoming as people as we continue to perform oppression-first activism that antagonizes the oppressor.
Every single thing we do when trying to change the world also changes us.⁴
Every act of anger, rejection, flash judgment, and malice I unleash on another person carries an echo that reverberates inside of me. Over time, this accumulates in a barrier to fresh new shoots coming out of patched up wounds. Every time I tell the same, one-sided story about myself as an oppressed Person, I am shutting out other stories about my multitudes, including my complicities, contradictions and responsibilities.
We now live in a world where whiteness is no longer essential
In the way that it used to be.⁵ The default Position is under intensified scrutiny and rightful condemnation. Relief! (At dodging the scorching laser beam) And yet… Today it’s white people. Tomorrow it’s gonna be me.
I think we’re all gonna find ourselves at this existential crisis of meaning if we keep clinging to the ruined,⁶ reversed hierarchy of belonging, identity rightness, granted through shared oppression. Yes, speak openly about your harm and seek redress, but do not let that be your whole story. Otherwise there will be nothing left to do, nobody left to be once society has been transformed and justice and equality has been restored.
I do not want to spend the majority of my waking life complaining about privileged white feminists, mocking straight men, silencing TERFs, regulating cultural appropriation, policing people on their pronoun usages, or whatever is the next collective reflex to discipline.
I want more for all of us. We are meant for much greater work.
You could say, it’s an exciting time right now as many our movements for justice are finally beginning to get the wider cultural recognition and traction they deserve. But… I mix celebration with skepticism, refusing to settle into the fleeting comfort of unprecedented representation in a society that is swiftly figuring out how to commodify our narratives of Oppression.
Our over-investment in damage-centered narratives is a deeper reflection of what we feel compelled to perform to prove to others, to prove to ourselves that we belong here, that we belong to each other, that our suffering has earned us our demands and a seat at the table.
Instead, let us perform vulnerability; showing off our messy and ragged edges, our contradictory desires, our abiding need to be loved and accepted that drives our dysfunctional bristling behaviors, the old and new ways we’ve failed each other and continue to do so. Our commitment to do better and make things closer to right because a revolution starts in the heart, and then, moves in between hearts.
Instead, let us perform humility; firmly knowing what we know while also knowing there is so much we don’t know. We have much to learn from people not like us, people who don’t fit our definition of “woke,” people carrying wisdom acquired from other journeys, people who inflame us.
To push through our frustration and urge to turn away and instead ask, “what can I discover from this interaction?” Admitting that brandishing the most flawless, blistering analysis will not save us or our people from anything. Because language, wit, and precise arguments are not the primary vehicle of change.
Instead, let us perform openheartedness; never stop trying to locate the goodness in others. I honor my own dignity when I choose to see the inherent worth, the redeemable parts, rather than what I assume to be seared shut in someone else. Leaving the entrance ajar to not be surprised when they join me, to know that “opponent” has the inherent potential to be transformed to friend, member, comrade. Just as I once had.
I want to keep on acknowledging that sacred space between the political and the personal, and the life-giving work that can spring only from that opening. The next time someone crosses my path, I acknowledge that our well-beings are intimately tied. I know that when I dare to reach across difference without ignoring its material and historical realities, I am building something that could sustain me and everything I touch.
To be whole activists- whole people, we must allow the fullness of ourselves to eclipse our political activism. I want— no, I need an ethics of activism that speaks to the necessity of this.
Footnotes:
[1]: A quote from Sara Ahmed’s 2004 book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, about how our collectively held emotions and the way we repeatedly affirm them creates a specific social reality that guides our actions.
[2]: This is what a group of middle schoolers told research professor Brené Brown when she was interviewing them about the difference between fitting in and belonging.
[3]: In this piece, I am riffing off Indigenous studies and urban education scholar Eve Tuck’s term “damage-centered research” from her 2009 article “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities”. She deploys this term as a way to caution indigenous and other marginalized communities against internalizing damage as a strategy for political gain.
[4]: In Octavia Butler’s 1993 book Parable of the Sower, she introduces the Earthseed religion. Its first tenet: “All that you touch / You Change. All that you Change / Changes you. The only lasting truth / Is Change. God Is Change.”
[5]: Black elder activist and theologian Ruby Sales did an amazing interview with On Being and talked about the current spiritual crisis in white America and how it affects us all.
[6]: A reference to the frustratingly accurate statement, “The grids used to define the intersections for identity are already in ruins”. From the editors’ introduction of the Spring 2017 Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, co-edited by Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang.
References:
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2014. pp. 8–12.
Brown, Brené, and Krista Tippett. “Strong Back, Soft Front, Wild Heart.” Podcast. On Being. On Being Studios, 8 Feb. 2018. Web access: https://onbeing.org/programs/ brene-brown-strong-back-soft-front-wild-heart-feb2018/
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing, 2000. Web access: https://godischange.org/god-is-change/
Sales, Ruby, and Krista Tippett. “Where Does It Hurt?” Podcast. On Being. On Being Studios, 15 Sept. 2016. Web access: https://onbeing.org/programs/ruby-sales-where- does-it-hurt/
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Editors’ Introduction.” Critical Ethnic Studies Vol. 3, №1 (Spring 2017), pp. 1–19. Published by: University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved 1 April 2018. Web access: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ 55807861e4b0847ced606181/t/594ad758b11be1154188e99a/1498077017383/CES +3–1+Late+Identity+Editorial.pdf
Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review Vol. 79, №3, 2009, pp. 409–428., doi:10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15. Retrieved 1 April 2018. Web access: http://pages.ucsd.edu/~rfrank/class_web/ES-114A/Week %204/TuckHEdR79–3.pdf
