Last day to register to vote in my state, and many other states!
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More money thrown. Biden plus a surprisingly competitive Senate race.
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My husband and I have both officially voted 
I’ve been texting for Biden and really enjoying it. It’s much easier than I feared, and people are in general nicer.
I put my Biden sign up and turned my porch pumpkin into a political pumpkin:
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Shipmates,
I’ve been reading the Aljazeera.com series “American Voter” with rapt attention. It’s giving me viewpoints and insights I haven’t considered. However, this question, posed to Alexandra Nicole Salazar Vasquez has really made me wrinkle the old noggin.
I think it captures an issue the DNC is going to have to tackle, if they are going to build a momentum that’s “pro-democratic party,” instead of “anyone but Trump.” That issue is shame.
Brené Brown wrote all about it, and it’s not good for the human psyche. According to the master, guilt is “I did something bad,” and shame is “I am bad.” Frankly, the “I am bad,” is rife inside the social progressive platform that many neighbourhood-level democrats are fronting. A real life example recently happened in my journal, when people said on of their personal moments of racism was living on land stolen from indigenous tribes.
No one here has stolen land from First Nation tribes. No one here owns, or has owned slaves. Yet people are confessing to the crime, from shame. And any party that builds a political pillar on it being morally correct to bear 244 years of race and genocide a party that is going to lose.
Before you smother me in my bed, the shame is pretty obviously an unintended consequence. Yet, an consequence it remains, because our rallying cry forgot to add a ‘what’s next’ section. We left people all alone, under the weight of their psychological reckoning, and it kind of fuckin’ backfired. If we don’t fix it, the blue wave is gonna falter.
So say me, at the very least. Discussion?
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I did not steal land, I did not enslave people. I am still, however, occupying stolen land and benefiting from my ancestors actions. I don’t believe in punishing a child for their parents’ sins. I can’t, however, deny that I benefit from privilege that I didn’t in any way earn, and that others don’t have access to. It has taken me several years to come to this conclusion and to not feel guilty for it.
The democratic party is a hot mess that is right of center when compared to the world stage. I agree that if it doesn’t change, it will fail. I have never identified with it as being representative of me, but the republican party is even less representative.
So my focus is local. Make good change on the local scale that will eventually change on the federal level.
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That’s an excellent recap of what I was trying to post, but with many fewer words. Brevity is sometimes far better than more words.
I’d simply add that we who want privilege to be acknowledged, should also be offering resources on how to grapple with generational shame and guilt. Without that, people have to flail through to their own solutions, and the wheel is continually being reinvented, instead of rolling forward.
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For me it’s absolutely not shame to acknowledge and speak openly about the fact I live on stolen land. It’s a simple fact. I don’t think of myself as a criminal for living where I do. I don’t think of myself as complicit in the treaties that were broken.
Acknowledgement itself does not equal an expression of guilt.
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I agree. The difficult part is that the problem is systemic, and the system worked very, very hard early on to make it quite easy to bulldoze over efforts for learning and support along these lines.
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Agreed that it doesn’t have to. Yet, there are many who do feel that the two have been linked w.r.t. race. How would you guide someone who did feel guilt and shame?
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I do think what helps someone grow is going to be individual to their past experiences and current circumstances.
I tend to prefer action over thought exercise in my own path, so I often refer people to other friends who are much better versed in discussion, or to resource lists like racialequitytools.org where they can search the term “guilt” and find an article about moving past white guilt, or to anti-racism workshops I’ve done in the past that might be a good fit for them.
I often try to do something small, like bring people with me on mutual aid runs where they can talk to people and get to know their stories.
In my limited experience in my social circles, the feeling of guilt due to systemic inequities has so far only been expressed by white socioeconomically-comfortable folx who have very limited racial diversity in their own social groups or families.
Feeling guilt or shame about anything, really, tends to have the effect of making us stuck. Which has the effect of stopping us from taking action.
Bringing someone along for a very very small action that has a noticeable effect doesn’t necessarily help in their own big picture of needing to reframe their relationship with the world, but it can at least help provide new stories based in the present to counter their narrative about the past.
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Took me a while to find it, but Cheryl Strayed’s last comment in this piece aligns with my feelings.
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I enjoyed reading that. Thanks for digging up the link.
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I will read the article once I’ve eaten food (so that I can engage with it). This is where I find the books on White Fragility and so forth helpful, in learning how to bring people along to the point where they’re ready to try action and then have their emotions follow along.
ETA: I haven’t actually made it all the way through the book either. I have a long to-do list.
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I found White Fragility interesting, but it’s really only a primer, written for a very specific sort of person, who is in a very specific point on their journey of consciousness raising. It’s essentially an entire book on what an unconscious shit the liberal elite white person has been, without offering many suggestions for praxis. Some of DiAngelo’s points are contradictory, and end up blocking off all routes of ethical forward movement. One of those points had become national discussion. It’s something of a perfect environment to breed shame.
It’s a cool book, no argument. It’s just not a message that I see working for a national political party that wants to win on the basis of being the progressive party.
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I think I remember why I haven’t made it through the book.
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Colorado has a new system that emails every registered voter who has provided their email address when their ballot has been sent, when it has been received, and when it is accepted. It’s such a cool idea!
I just got my “accepted” email, which reminded me to post it here 
My husband, apparently, is a weirdo who “didn’t want to give the government any contact info”, so he doesn’t get awesome emails like me.
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I don’t know if this is new, but I just saw this adorable Biden campaign ad on Twitter and remembered what it was like to have a President with a sense of humor ( 
Obama)
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I’m listening to a podcast I thought might be useful for others: How To!: Talk Politics Without Wrecking Relationships
They have a guest who is liberal now but raised by very conservative parents she hardly talks to any more because of politics, and their expert guest is “Bill Doherty, professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota, and co-founder of the non-profit Braver Angels”. His approach is based on marriage therapy and having difficult conversations. Twenty minutes in they do some role playing which I thought seemed especially useful.
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Related to understanding each other, I found this article from a Filipino American about his experience attending a Trump rally and the thoughts and concerns of those who are voting Republican.
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