I choke up every time I read “She Should Write,” Ann Friedman’s farewell to Feministing earlier this year. (Jill recommended it here at the time.)
Being committed to social justice means, at its worst, living in defeat. Sometimes no matter how many victories I have, no matter how many wrongs I live to see righted, our capacity as a society to generate new wrongs and perpetuate old oppressions feels overwhelming.
Sometimes I despair of rising above my own failures — to acknowledge my own privileges, to speak up when I should, to “make an impact,” whatever that means.
Sometimes I get caught up in anxiety about whether or not I’m “doing enough” or “doing it right.” And sometimes, I’m ashamed to realize, that anxiety is more about myself and racking up points than it is about doing right by others or living well.
I have a housemate we’ll call Alex. He would rank pretty high on a list of truly decent people I know, but he’s also called me “militant.” I’ve gotten into arguments with him about rape culture and street harassment, and I’ve beaten myself up for not being able to convince him of my position. Which is silly, obviously, because I can’t control what he thinks.
Our household has had a kind of harrowing week or two for reasons I don’t need to go into here. Suffice to say that it all kind of came to a head a few nights ago. After the crisis passed, I sat down at the dining room table with a cup of tea and talked to Alex for a while. This time, about things we have in common. We discussed how corporate interests have warped the United States political system, and how journalism and politics have changed since 9/11. He went to school for journalism, and now he spoke with deep respect for a professor he had in the fall of 2001, who was committed to a form of truth-telling that seems to have grown scarce in this country since then. He described, almost reverently, how if there is an ultimate truth, it must have something to do with understanding the lived truths of all human beings, and finding whatever it is that we all share.
And slowly, I remembered something. Something I know, truly and deeply, but too often forget.
It is important merely to bear faithful witness.
It is vital. It is revolutionary. It is enough.
Tension rushed out of me. I thought, that I can do. I can fulfill a worthwhile purpose, and feel personally fulfilled, without gauging my success by how many people I can convince of anything. Or by how many blogs I follow, or how many online petitions I sign or protests I attend, or how many causes I adopt. I can document and represent, to the best of my ability, the truths of people and places and events and their contexts.
Which is really what social justice is about, right? Or at least, this is a way to do social justice. Because one of the great injustices, and a way that injustices are reinforced, is through narratives. Telling only a few stories, from only a few perspectives, over and over again until they become The Only Truth, is the foundation of oppression. The domination of cis, straight, white, wealthy, male, able-bodied, neurotypical narratives — you name it — is the precondition for anyone to continue believing that it’s ok to blame poor people for their poverty, or that “traditional marriage” is a thing, or that women bear responsibility for their own rapes, or that electing a non-white president means we live in a post-racial society, or … I could go on.
My telling can never contain all sides of the story. But I can acknowledge that there are more sides to the story, and more stories. I can refuse to parrot what isn’t true for me, and resist the urge to simply replace one illegitimately dominant narrative with another.
Even if I’m not perfect, faithfully documenting my stories and the stories I witness, in all their complexity and to the best of my ability, still adds another perspective. And that may be small in the grand scheme of things, but it’s also invaluable. One more story is all you need to show that more than one perspective exists.
Sometimes I worry that “just telling a story” is too passive. But the power of one more story cannot be overstated. For although coordinated messaging and unified voices have their place, social justice for me has never been about belonging to a club or toeing a party line. At its core, social justice is about finding the truth and holding ourselves responsible to it.
“She Should Write” gets to me not because closing the byline gap is important or because we need more feminist voices, though those are both true. “She Should Write” gets to me because it reminds me that what I’m doing, right now, is a big deal.
Telling the truth, whether through blogging or journalism or poetry or fiction, is the mission that kicks my butt without becoming impossible. (Even if it feels impossible to put the first word on the page, remembering that all I have to do is tell the truth usually helps.) It won’t be the same for everybody, but that’s what it is for me.
So I want to thank you all for allowing me to do that a bit of that work here for the past two weeks. Thanks to Jill and the other mods for inviting me, and thanks to the readers for your warm reception and engaging responses. Thanks for reading my truths and sharing yours. I’ve learned a lot.
As a parting gift, here’s a video of our buns fighting over a carrot. Cheers, folks!