Untamed - Glennon Doyle Page 0,63
planned to share all of this on the webinar. My hope was that it might prepare participants for the early stages of racial sobriety and that this preparation might serve the larger social justice efforts of our activist group. We sent the plans for our webinar out to the leaders of our group for feedback and approval. We made their suggested adjustments, then posted online about the seminar. Thousands registered. I went to bed.
* * *
The next morning, I woke up to a text from a friend that said: “G, Just checking on you. I’m watching what’s going down online. Let me know that you’re okay.”
My heart sank as I opened up Instagram. There were hundreds—eventually thousands—of comments, many of them from people calling me a racist.
What I didn’t know back then is that there are several valid and contradictory schools of thought about how white women should show up in the racial justice movement. One view: White women—when accountable to and led by women of color—should use our voices and platforms to call other white women into anti-racism work. Another view: White women should only use their voices to point to people of color already doing the work. Those who subscribed to the latter philosophy were furious with me about this webinar.
Why would you try to teach instead of pointing toward women of color who are already doing this work? Why would you take up space in this movement when so many women of color have been doing this work forever? You offering a free course is taking money out of black educators’ pockets. Offering a “safe space” for white women to talk about race is wrong—white women don’t need to be safe; they need to be educated. You are canceled. You are a racist. You are a racist, Glennon. You are nothing but a racist. Everywhere, the word racist.
I was stunned.
I am not new to criticism. I am a woman who announced her engagement to a woman during a countrywide Christian speaking tour. I have been publicly ridiculed by and excommunicated from entire religious denominations. I’m used to the “other side” hating me; I wear that kind of backlash as a badge of honor. But friendly fire was new and excruciating. I felt idiotic and remorseful. I also felt terribly jealous of every single person who had decided to sit this one out. I thought of the quote “It is better to be quiet and thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it.” I felt defensive, hurt, frustrated, and afraid. I could not think of a single thing I was more terrified of being called than a racist. This was rock bottom.
Luckily, I am a woman who has learned repeatedly that while rock bottom feels like the end—it’s always the beginning of something. I knew that this was the moment I’d either relapse with a couple shots of self-pity and resignation, or I’d double down on my racial sobriety and carry on. I told myself: Breathe. Don’t panic and flee. Sink. Feel it all. Be Still. Imagine. Let it burn.
Eventually, I started remembering.
* * *
Each night when I was growing up, my family would sit down on our basement couch and watch the evening news together. It was the time of the War on Drugs. I lived in the suburbs, but in the cities things were clearly terrible. The news insisted that crack was everywhere, and so were so-called crack babies and welfare queens. Night after night we watched young black bodies thrown to the ground, rounded up en masse, pushed into cop cars. After the nightly news, the show Cops aired. Along with millions of other American families, my family would sit and watch Cops together. Every night, I’d see mostly white cops arresting mostly poor black men. For entertainment. We would eat popcorn while we watched.
* * *
Thirty years later, after the Charleston massacre, my parents’ rural Virginia town buzzed about how to respond to the racial issues agitating Americans’ consciousness. A local church invited the community to come together and address it. My parents decided to attend.
They sat in a large room with about a hundred other white folks. A woman stood up to bring the meeting to order. She announced that she and a few other women had decided to respond by sending care packages to the predominantly black school across town. She suggested that they break up into groups and choose items to collect. The room exhaled in