Haunting Wholeness: Inviting Ghosts on the Bridge So We Can Transform

I Am My Worst Nightmare

I have nightmares. I have been having them since I can remember. Since I was a small child. Or I should say they have been having me. They have me, over and over. They “seize” me (Poulos, 2012, p. 324) from reality. They steal me from restful sleep. They rip me from the arms of my love, Grey. I wish I could tell you that I’m used to them by now. But coming to expect them is different from accepting them, tracing them is different from embracing them. Nights without them feel less like a break, less like progress. They feel more like a tease, like a part of a mind game, a part of the long game. If I weren’t so damn tired, if sleep were not a requirement to keep the little sanity I have left, I wouldn’t sleep. So they keep on plaguing me. Playing me. They have their way with me while I try to find a way through them, a way of healing through the haunting.

Feeling the bed beneath us tremble from my body’s unconscious fight with fear, Grey knows the routine. Without fully leaving his sleep, he is able to shake me and hold me back from mine for a moment. Maybe it feels like a habit for him now, an act of love stored in muscle memory like kisses good morning and good-bye, like a hug after being apart for a while, like making coffee and cooking eggs for me the way I like them. From his grounding touch, in the near complete dark of our bedroom, I look out with wide eyes for the outlines of the dresser covered in my clutter. In taking account of the silhouette shadows of my everyday things texturing the surface of the dresser; a make-up case; a jewelry box; a little dish beside it where I put lose change, bobby pins, and yesterday’s jewelry; a frame that has a picture of Grey and I in it from our big queer wedding; and, among it all, small gemstones and two elephant animal figurine tchotchkes my mom has given me, I slowly come to in the here and now.

Over time I have realized that my nightmares repeat because I have not seen through them or rather seen them through. They are openings, they are signs (Poulos, 2012, p. 324), they are messages “hovering in the shadowy corners of my consciousness” (Poulos, 2016, p. 465), lessons if I attend to them (Poulos, 2010, p. 50). In the liminal (Poulos, 2006) space where my conscious and unconscious mind meet, I get to be in a place where I am called upon to teach myself about myself, about my fears, my desires, and my place(s) in the world. It is in the darkness where I can be with the things that are lost in all of the light.

In most cases, once awakened from my nightmares, I can take up the slow progress of working to become more fully conscious of them to integrate them into my consciousness (Poulos, 2012) and propel myself forward with a new consciousness into the day and life. Usually I process my nightmares verbally with Grey or a friend, often my childhood best friend who also takes up a serious study of her dreams. I also frequently turn to my writing. In journaling or writing poetry about my nightmares I find myself “diving into the wreck” (Rich, 1994, p. 22) of my nightmares. Talking and writing about my nightmares and the existential anxiety (Poulos, 2012) they produce, I excavate them for their meaning (Poulos, 2012), their connection to what is going on in my life, the social world, the life world, and my beings and doings in them both. Engaging the unsettling interruption (Poulos, 2012, p. 324), the rupture (p. 324) of my nightmares in talking and writing, I begin “working my way through” (Poulos, 2015, p. 6) the openings (Poulos, 2012, p. 324) into possibility (p. 323), I move through a moment of transcendence (p. 324) and into the work of transformation.

I write this, I say this to you as if I’ve known it for a while. But the truth is I only began learning this recently, from one nightmare in particular. This is a nightmare that I have had a version of, repeatedly, for over 5 years now. And while many of my nightmares are recurring, this one is unlike the others and in a big way. With all of my other recurring nightmares, even the most horrifying, I can talk or at the very least write about them once I wake from them. But that was not the case with this nightmare. This nightmare had me waking up soaked in shame. It had me face to face with those parts of me that I had tried to bury, to dismiss. And what’s worse is, in the world of the nightmare, I am not merely seeing all the parts of myself that I do not wish to acknowledge (Poulos, 2012), I am living them. This nightmare is about my ex-girlfriend. In it I am desperately trying to get her to take me back.

The circumstances vary from dream to dream. In some versions of the nightmare, my ex is in the process of leaving her partner. In other versions, they are already separated. In some others, I am leaving Grey to pursue her. In others, I am pursuing her while still with Grey, doing so behind his back. And in yet others, it is unclear whether I am with Grey or someone else or single. But in all of them, I am pathetically trying to convince her, manipulate her even, to be with me, to love me again. Across all the variations, one thing remains the same, in the nightmare, I am telling her, promising her and trying to prove to her that I will give up everything for her, everything. In the world of the nightmare I am drowning in my own desperation. Her love, being with her, is the only thing that matters.

In the beginning, when I first began to have this dream, I tried to rationalize it away. I first attributed it to anxiety I was experiencing about moving back to North Carolina, the place where she and I had met and spent most of our relationship together. But when I kept having the nightmare years after I moved, years into my relationship with Grey, when it kept on years after Grey and I committed our lives to each other, I started to panic. Why did I keep having it? What did it mean? Would I always have it? I was haunted.

Even once I finally broke the silence around it, talking about it with two of my dearest friends and my therapist, trying to work through it with them, I could never get past just running through a play-by-play of the events of the nightmare. Every time I would try to dig into its meaning, trying to figure out, I could only ever scrape the surface of how I felt in it and how it made me feel when I woke from it. I did not talk about it with Grey because I did not understand it and was afraid that because of that he would fear that it was truly a dream in the romantic and not the bad dream, the nightmare I experienced it as. I worried that he would think I really wanted to be doing what I was doing in it, getting back together with my ex, fighting for her love. I worried that if he questioned me I would not be able to make him feel how haunted I was by it.

While I knew I did not still want or love my ex, for the life of me I did not understand why my dream self did. And that not knowing had such a hold on me. For days, sometimes for weeks after each re-run, each visit with that scene and self, I would have an emotional “personal hangover” (Dewey as cited in Boler, 1999, p. 193). The nightmare and who I was in it terrified and terrorized me. I could not get to the root of it, I could not process it, I could not find my way through it. Until one night, I did.

Follow Your Fears and “Keep Your Eyes on the Body” (Coates, 2015, p. 33): Haunting Wholeness Is Critical

The more we were willing to struggle for an emancipatory dream, the more apt we were to know intimately the experience of fear, how to control and educate our fear, and, finally, how to transform that fear into courage. (Darder, 2002, p. 37)

In discussing the work of the father of critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire, Darder (2002) argues that Freire viewed “fears and revolutionary dreams” as “unquestionably linked” (p. 37). According to Darder (2002), Freire saw our fear “as a signal” (p. 37), one that meant we were on to something in our “critical opposition to the status quo” (p. 37). To experience fear meant that we were truly engaged “in transformative work toward the manifestation of our revolutionary dreams” (p. 37). For Darder (2002), Freire’s work and life praxis serve as a living testament to how “facing our fears and contending with our suffering are inevitable and necessary human dimensions of our quest to make and remake history, of our quest to make a new world from our dreams” (Darder, 2002, p. 37).

And yet while many of us who are critical pedagogues and scholars would claim to agree with Freire, few of us actually engage it. We will echo Freire’s words, stating that we know with our “. . .entire body, with feelings, with passion as well as reason” (Freire, as cited in Darder, 2002, p. 94). We will claim that we “believe that intuition and dreaming” are “necessary human elements of a revolutionary process” and “pedagogy” (Darder, 2002, p. 94). But if we were asked to identify those fears and dreams connected to our work, I believe many of us would only identify and engage with those fears and dreams we deem as literally tied to the struggle, fears, and dreams that are obviously about our learning, teaching, acting, and building for a more socially just world. It is only these “intellectual and political” (Boler, 1999, p. 125) fears and dreams that we take seriously in “critical consciousness raising” because they are on the right side of the “emotion vs. reason” debate (Boler, 1999, p. 126).

We do this because we have learned to do this in our schools. In formal, public educational spaces, we are taught to “privilege intellectual/rational knowing” (Rendón, 2009, p. 26) over all other forms of knowing. Rendón (2009) argues that our society’s privileging of “outer knowing” is a direct result of its faith in the scientific method as the approach to knowledge production (Rendón, 2009, p. 27). And so, as students, we learn to value forms of knowing that we develop through “intellectual reasoning, rationality, and objectivity” over “inner” ways of knowing and learning (Rendón, 2009, p. 27). “Inner knowing” (Rendón, 2009, p. 27) such as “deep wisdom, wonder, sense of the sacred, intuition, and emotions” (Rendón, 2009, p. 27) that we garner through “meditating, praying, analyzing dreams, observing rituals, reflecting on one’s purpose and meaning in life” (Rendón, 2009, p. 27) is often positioned “anti-intellectual” (Rendón, 2009, p. 27). In formal educational learning spaces, inner learning is at best kept “at an arm’s distance” (Rendón, 2009, p. 27) and at worst denied (Lara, 2002, p. 434).

Despite a number of theories that challenge this “unitary view of knowledge” (Rendón, 2009, p. 27), this “mind-supremacist epistemology” (Wagner & Shahjahan, 2015, p. 244) continues to run rampant in institutions of learning, particularly in the academy (Wagner & Shahjahan, 2015, p. 244). In addition to rendering emotions and fears as more of a liability than a valid source of learning and knowing, the mind-supremacist approach also “renders the body invisible” (Wagner & Shahjahan, 2015, p. 244). Even in classes engaging social justice issues, well-meaning professors and scholars (I include myself here) tend to employ pedagogical approaches and orientations to learning that rely “solely on intellectualizing the world” (Wagner & Shahjahan, 2015, p. 244), engaging topics that “all land, with great violence, upon the body” (Coates, 2015, p. 10) in disembodied ways. Through mind-supremacist, disembodied education, we do not center the body as a locus of learning. Thus, Wagner and Shahjahan (2015) argue that a mind-supremacist approach to learning constrains our imagination, limiting what gets defined as knowledge as well as the processes by which knowledge gets created (Wagner & Shahjahan, 2015). With our minds, bodies, and spirits fragmented, our learning is reduced, effectively making our knowing inanimate, objectified.

Chicana feminist thinker, Gloria Anzaldúa (2012) taught us that it is this “white rationality” that teaches us all “to ignore, forget, kill those fleeting images of the soul’s presence and of the spirit’s presence” (p. 58), to put out of our minds (and thus, our bodies) anything that is not deemed “rational”; facts “connected with external reality”; knowledge based on sound, scientific “reasoning” (pp. 58-59); and data driven, empirical research. The dominant Western european approach to learning brought to us in public schools in the United States teaches us to deem unreal the “other mode of consciousness” Anzaldúa (2012) talks about, the one that “facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through dreams and the imagination” (p. 59). She writes of this,

We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal; intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events. (Anzaldúa, 2012, pp. 59-60)

Self-described “Black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet warrior” Audre Lorde (2009) also wrote about the power of embodied knowledge, discussing what she termed “the power of the erotic” (p. 53). Lorde (2009) described the erotic as “a resource within each of us. . .firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” (p. 53). Derived from “the Greek word Eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony” (p. 55), the erotic is a resource that she argues “can provide energy for change” (Lorde, 2009, p. 53). The erotic then is the bridge connecting the political to the spiritual (Lorde, 2009). Only through beginning to “live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves,” “allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us” can we begin to be responsible to ourselves, others, and the world (Lorde, 2009, pp. 58-59). But precisely because of its power to change us, others, and the world, the erotic is suppressed by systems of power and oppression (Lorde, 2009) and those who most benefit from those systems.

It is this “white rationality” (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 58), the white Western european ¹ approach to learning and teaching, even in the development of critical consciousness and critical pedagogical praxis, that robs us of a deep, embodied, passionate, and spiritual critical consciousness and praxis. It is “white rationality” (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 58) that teaches us to toe the critical intellectual line, that teaches us to avoid critically engaging what Boler (1999) terms “the murky terrain of the interior” (p. 130). And so, while many of us claim to value ourselves and our students as “integral human beings” (Darder, 2002, p. 94), we continue to fragment them, ignoring and neglecting “the very real and present” emotional needs of students (Darder, 2002, p. 97). We divorce being critical from our emotionality, embodiment, and spirituality and entrench what Rendón (2009) calls “The Agreement to Privilege Intellectual/and Rational Knowing” (p. 26) in our critical pedagogy, in our collective critical consciousness raising and action.

Unlike Wagner and Shahjahan (2015), I argue that upholding mind supremacy in critical pedagogy or social justice education for collective consciousness raising and action does not merely limit us in our work, it keeps us from it (and ourselves) entirely. We cannot learn or teach for liberation if we are not whole beings in our critical, political work and lives. When we “keep inner learning at arm’s length” (Rendón, 2009, p. 27), when we refuse to engage “emotions as a site for political resistance” (Boler, 1999, p. 108), and when we do not critically engage our dreams, our fears, our bodies, our relationships, and those of others in our pursuit of a collective liberation, we are doing the system’s bidding and calling it social justice work.

I make this claim because I have experienced it firsthand and by my own hand. Mind supremacist epistemology (Wagner & Shahjahan, 2015, p. 245), the privileging of the intellectual (Rendón, 2009, p. 27), and the dominance of “white rationality” (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 58) have kept me from being deeply, holistically engaged in critical pedagogy and critical social justice work. Only by beginning to abandon these approaches to learning, teaching, and living for social justice have I begun to see the ways in which my nightmare about my ex-girlfriend and the web of fears, emotions, and embodied relationships and life experiences wedded to it have everything to do with my life-work as a critical, passionate, social justice learner, pedagogue and community comrade, my place and purpose in the struggle for collective liberation. My nightmare, my fear, is linked to my “struggle for an emancipatory dream” (Darder, 2002, p. 37) because in it lies the knowledge I already know but do not want to know, that which is unknowable (Britzman, 2009, p. 5), about myself, about my place in the world, about my work in struggle, about where I am holding myself back, about where I must grow. In getting to the root of my fear about the dream I began to build a bridge, I began to heal and grow, and find that “erotic charge” for change Lorde (2009) wrote about (p. 59).

In this article, I share my journey toward haunting wholeness in the social justice work that I am beginning to take up as a scholar, teacher, and community member. I employ Gordon’s (1997) notion of haunting, defining it as an experience in which “that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities” (p. 8). Investigating hauntings that take place in our lives can take us to a “dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (p. 8). Should we dwell and work in this site, should we take up hauntings and their “ghostly things,” I believe, as Gordon does, that we can conjure “a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening,” an affective and transformative way of knowing about our moving and relating in the world with others as social beings (p. 8). This piece is my contribution to the writing and telling of stories of “exclusions and invisibilities” (p. 17) that Gordon (1997) calls for. Through writing and telling these “ghost stories” (Gordon, 1997, p. 17), we can begin to more deeply “know where we are living” to “imagine living else where” (p. 5).

Central to the praxis of the haunting wholeness that I am working to live is a radical (Freire, 1998, p. 53), critical hope (Boler, 2004, p. 128), critical in the sense that it “entails responsibility—a willingness to be fully alive and in the process of constant change and becoming,” and invites others to do the same. By centering a critically intimate engagement with my haunting nightmare and its ghosts, with the personal life events that flow into and around it, I hope to show how the emotional, erotic, spiritual, embodied, and personally relational experiences of our lives have everything to do with the critical pedagogical and social justice praxes we take up. In taking up the problem of my haunting and its relation to my critical pedagogical and social justice praxis through auto-ethnographic inquiry, I aim to write into life a “research-creation” (Manning, 2016, p. 13) that opens “existence to its perceptual more-than” (p. 14).

#WhatCurfew: A Story of Why We Are Not Together

It is Saturday night. Saturday September 24, 2016. It is the fifth night of the Uprising in Charlotte, North Carolina. The National Guard is scheduled to leave tomorrow but the police show no sign of letting up. The city government has decided not to cancel the Panthers’s home football game tomorrow. On the contrary, they have decided to declare it “an extraordinary event” (MacMillan & Blake, 2016), meaning that they have more power to mass arrest anyone protesting the game, which the leadership of the Uprising plan to have us do. What we are up against is changing shape. I can feel on my skin the turning-into fall night air coming through my car window on the drive down. I can feel in my bones that no one, not even the most seasoned organizers of the Uprising, is sure what the changes around us will mean. The only thing that we can know for sure is that it is another day in the life of the Uprising, where, when it comes to state violence against Black and Brown bodies, anything can happen.

I pull up to one of the movement safe spaces, a church located on the outskirts of downtown Charlotte, in my partner’s car. I am not alone. I had given a ride to a friend-of-a-comrade, T, a Black queer young leader coming up in Black Lives Matter (BLM) Gate City. This is the first time we have met. They ² sit cramped in my front seat with their backpack and their uncertainty about me and the night ahead. The Uprising has brought people to the movement and brought people together, with an urgent intimacy.

Relief.

We made it.

I am here.

I had been so worried that the police would have already blocked the interstate exits coming into downtown as part of their enforcement of the curfew that the city instituted to try and put a stop to the Uprising. But thankfully they have not blocked exits into the city, at least not yet.

T hits the streets to meet up with other BLM Gate City members and I and one of the folks running security at the door unload the medical and food donations I brought with me from Greensboro and carry them into the space. Once inside, I hand off Grey’s car keys to the people at the pop up front desk where people sign up for support roles:

“Give these to someone to use.”

There are “car-runners,” people on the transport team who use either their or other people’s cars to pick up protestors at risk of arrest and/or drop off supplies and medics.

I did not say much else. At the time I could only focus on finding and relieving my new friend and comrade who had been running the safe space since the Uprising began and so this is all that I can see when I look back through the clips of my memory.

“I’m looking for Hannah,” I say and they point me in her direction.

Hannah, a white queer antiracist like myself, had not left her post as the safe space point person for more than a few hours at a time since the Uprising started. We have mutual friends and so she has put her trust me. Yesterday, when she needed it, I came through for her. When I came to the safe space to help, I saw a news reporter walking around inside, taking notes and pictures, talking off and on with a white Charlotte Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) member. One of the first things I learned in grassroots community movement work was that interacting with the mainstream press often invites more challenges, more roadblocks to already difficult work. They use our words against us. They side with law enforcement and the courts against us.

And so when I walked in and saw what I saw, I knew that this naive SURJ Charlotte member made a bad call, a dangerously bad call. She had not only invited the press in, press who had been negative in their reporting of the Uprising, but encouraged the reporter to take pictures and she did, when I arrived she was taking pictures of the butcher paper folks had taped to the walls that had the core organizer’s full names and phone numbers on it. I texted Hannah immediately. And while we had never met before and I had only just arrived to the Uprising she told me to intervene, trusted me to try and stop more damage from being done, to do what I could to reverse it. Her texts back were immediate and read panicked:

“Get the reporter to delete her pictures and get her OUT!”

“NOW!”

“NO press.”

“AND NO pictures by ANYONE!”

Within minutes of getting texts from her, she called and followed up with me to make sure I had received them. I assured her I had and would do what I could to make sure this didn’t happen again.

“Ok, thank you,” she said, still tense.

“Now put me on the phone with our person who made this decision.”

The core leadership decided after this incident the safe space needed door security. To make sure, as best we could, that folks coming in and out were there for the right reasons, to direct them to the sign in table to sign up and go get trained for a support role.

It’s Saturday night.

She’s been here since Tuesday, holding this all down.

To say that Hannah was physically, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted would be an understatement. But she never let it show. And she did not slow down.

How could she. . .

How could any of us who are white . . .

The leaders of color whose lives are on the line keep going. . .

So we need to keep going.

Better than that, I need to get going.

I need to step up.

It’s the least we can do.

It’s the least I can do.

She and I sit down at circular table in what was a sort of lobby near some of the interior church offices. She takes off the lanyard she has around her neck with the keys to the space and hands me a burner phone out of her pocket. She quickly thanks me for coming and then gets right to the task at hand.

“Here are the phone numbers and shift schedules of all of the medical, legal, jail, transportation and supply support teams.”

She pushed a legal pad toward me, on it is a cluttered collection of names and phone numbers all from different hands, the old ones crossed out, the new shift freshly pressed.

“You need to call to them,” her eye contact serious but loving.

“Let them know that you will be who they talk to for the night,” her words come out in fast deliberate bursts.

“When you call” she slows herself, “find out how things are going,” a care crawling into her voice now.

“Ask if they need any support and how you can give that to them.”

“Make sure the shift changes went smoothly.”

I nod. She thanks me again, gets up, and starts slowly toward the door.

Maybe I look down too long at the black and blue scribbled ink.

Maybe my adrenaline buzzing in my ears at the sight of people coming and going, the rushed but focused movement of people getting what they needed to prepare for the streets, pulled me into a blurred space of time and place.

Maybe I just, for a moment, stowed away inside myself to prepare, having come into this world of street-mobilization-revolution after an 8-hr day at my bullshit part-time customer service job as a receptionist at a salon where wealthy white women cared more about their blonde balayages ³ and the pumpkin spice lattes comeback at Starbucks than the Uprising in the streets of Charlotte, more than the murder of Keith Lamont Scott, a Black father waiting for his son at the school bus stop.

All I remember is that I come back, I come back to my body, to the present moment, just in time to hear her last ask of the night before she leaves,

“Oh, one more thing,” she stops and turns around “Your old college friend who lives in Charlotte. The one that came to legal observer training yesterday, do you think she would be willing to host the Ferguson folks who came up last night?” Her eyes frantically searching my face for the hint of a yes.

I had heard that the folks from Ferguson were already being targeted by Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) for arrest. Hannah’s ask makes clear to me that this was true. They need a place to stay while they are here. A place that could shield them from being hunted. Staying in the home of someone white, especially a white woman, might make them harder to find and thus keep them safer.

“I will contact her right now” I reply.

My fingers fumble my phone.

My gaze scatters down.

Right then and there I call and text my old college friend. I don’t wait for a reply. I am not subtle. I am direct. As Hannah has been with me. I send a series of short blunt texts. I follow up the texts with calls that all go to voicemail.

“She’s not responding,” I surrender.

“I’m so sorry.”

In an attempt to cover up my embarrassment, disappointment, and hurt in my friend and in myself for not having a contact who could follow through on this much needed ask I say,

“I’m not surprised she is flaking,” adding dryly “the day march was more her thing.”

With a knowing smirk she lets me know she understands. From what I can gather in her drained body language, she has gotten many a “no,” many a non-response to asks from the white people in her life and those she just met over the course of these past couple of days in the Uprising. Disappearing down the hallway toward the door she calls out,

“I’ll keep asking around.”

“Do the same if you can after you make your calls.”

“For sure,” I say, nodding. I then dial the first number on the list.

After I make all the calls I needed to make, I sit and wait. The nights of the Uprising have been unruly with the police using rubber bullets and chemical weapons against folks with great regularity. This is the closest thing I have ever seen to a war zone. The first day that I came to help, multiple news station helicopters were circling overhead at the safe space. The first night I was there, while helping as a car-runner before we had sign up sheets, shifts, or even the concept of one, I saw uniformed National Guard on foot, semi-automatic weapons in hand, walking or standing near tanks that they had parked on city sidewalks. When turning a corner in Grey’s car to get as close as possible to where protesters were, navigating blocked roads, I saw a Greensboro Transit Authority (GTA) bus crowding a narrow alley, spilling out onto the street squads of militarized police officers onto the street.

Our buses.

They even use our buses against us.

But were they ever ours?

Everything and nothing is ours.

The GTA buses are ours the same way the all terrain vehicle (ATV) the police used to run down a Ferguson protestor that next day was ours, the same way an unmarked white van that pulled up next to a Black protestor on a bicycle so that they could snatch him up was ours, the same way the handcuffs they put on people were ours, the same way the bullets they killed Black and Brown bodies with were ours. They can make us all pay. For these things. For anything. They can use our own resources against us. But they cannot take away the resistance of Black and Brown and antiracist white people. They cannot stop the people still chanting, still rising up,

“Our streets!”

“No justice, no peace!”

They cannot take away our calling, the calling out for accountability.

They cannot take away our calling, the calling out for a reckoning.

They cannot take away our calling, our calling out the names of Keith LaMont Scott and protester Justin Carr at the hands of CMPD.

Not long into my shift at the safe space we hear from protesters who are coming in off the streets that the police and national guard had issued the curfew call which meant that they were threatening the crowd of protesters with pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) ⁴ (Williamson, 2016), and finally, arrest, should they not disperse. I go outside of the safe space with the burner phone. As far as my eyes can see, there are protesters filing down the street, walking toward the church. There are so many of them that at first their sheer number is all I can take in. And then I see it. I see something that makes me feel sick. My knees buckle. I feel as if I am folding at the gut. While there are a few Black and Brown protesters in the large crowd, the majority of those coming in from the curfew call and leaving due to the threat of arrest are, unfortunately, white folks. This means that the protesters of color, those most at risk for arrest and violence, are out there at the hands of militarized police and National Guard with little to no white ally presence, increasing the danger they face.

I immediately wish I had not volunteered to run the safe space and instead had joined folks I knew who were in the street. But at this point, I feel I cannot leave post as I promised Hannah, as there might be a need to answer the burner phone should the leadership and comrades of color out there need cars to bring supplies, to bring more medics, to get people who were injured or at risk of arrest out in a hurry. So I stay at my post. I stay. Beside myself with my whiteness, I stay.

But the phone doesn’t.

I stay there, all night into the morning but I promise myself that this will be the last time I am not in the streets.

A few days later, my old friend from college finally responds to my text.

“I’m sorry for not responding,” she says.

“My phone died but regardless I wasn’t home, I was across town and had no way to get back to even give you or someone my keys or let them into my place.”

“I would have helped had I not been out at this previously planned thing.”

I do my best to quell my judgment of her. There is not time for it. After my night shift at the safe space, I had spent the next day, Sunday, in the streets. The National Guard went home but the local Klan chapter came out in plain clothes, carrying concealed weapons. It was terrifying. One of the most, if not the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced. I still have nightmares about it and waking fears connected to it. And yet it is nothing compared with what my comrades, both of color and white, had witnessed and experienced firsthand, before their eyes and on their bodies the days and nights before. Gas and pepper spray clouding their lungs. The blood of Justin Carr spilled in the street and splattered on their clothes. So when I get her text, I want to go off on her and about it to anyone who will listen and care.

How could she have gone out drinking with all of this going on?

The question, a reflex, but I let it go. I am too tired for anger. I do not re-read her message let alone respond for days.

I get home to Greensboro at 3:00 a.m. Monday morning after dropping all but one of my comrade-friends off who I brought home from the Uprising. One of my comrade-friends Emma, another Greensboro white antiracist queer, and I had talked before heading back home and deciding that we were too traumatized by what we had experienced together to be separated. Grey, who had been working to make sure we could pay our bills and staying home so that our dogs were taken care of, waited up for us. When we walk into my home, candles are lit. The house is spotless. Grey had made up the air mattress for Emma. Clean towels and PJs were laid out for both of us.

I could cry.

But I don’t cry. I exhale a short but deeply sincere thank you. I fall into his arms. Emma showers first. I shower. Clean and in clean clothes we sit in my kitchen while Grey cooks for us and sits with us while we eat. We are home. The silence, the calm, is unruly.

While I was at the uprising Grey had been texting me constantly, watching my live feeds and those of our friends via Facebook, and spending the time he was not at work communicating with others via social media and in person encouraging them to give to the bail fund, donate needed supplies, he also gathered the supplies I took with me. He also used his Facebook page to push out updates about the Uprising to spread awareness. Grey has learned from leaders in our community that there is a role in the movement for everyone and he, over time, learned to quickly find a way to take up all that he could and was good at what he took on.

Emma essentially lived with us for some time after we returned. Every chance we can, we head back to Charlotte with our comrades. And Grey keeps on taking care of us.

After some time passed, once I was no longer consumed with verbally processing the events I had witnessed and had been a part of to reflect and plan for the future, I began to remember what had transpired with my college friend. It was as though I had blocked it out. Without the time or capacity to entertain how I felt about her non-response and then her too-late explanation, I had just stored it away. But that did not mean that time healed that wound. Once the storm outside me settled, this storm took form inside me, raging. I opened up, slowly at first, to let it out so that I could try and process it with Grey.

“This might sound ridiculous,” I started to say to him.

“But I just know she was out drinking with my ex, because going out during the Uprising and drinking with friends as if nothing is happening is something my ex would fucking do.”

He turned to face me.

“You know, I didn’t want to tell you this while you were there, or right when you got back, but you are right.”

Grey proceeded to tell me that my friend wasn’t just out with my ex, she was at my ex and her fiancé’s bachelorette party, which they apparently moved to another part of town out of fear of the Uprising.

“One of the pictures a friend of theirs posted on social media literally had ‘#Whatcurfew’ as part of the caption,” he said with a note of disbelief.

But more than believe it, I had somehow, on some level, known it in my gut. That is why my friend took days to respond. Before even seeing the image with my eyes I saw it, I saw it in my mind’s eye, a group of all white cis women all dressed up and drunk outside of a bar on the other side of town in the middle of the Uprising. I saw them, having the time of their lives, finally at the center of their straight friend group. I saw them, the lovely couple, two conventionally beautiful, young-professional, white-cis assimilationist gay women, smiling and celebrating because their “love won,” because “love is love,” because the Uprising, because Black death at the hands of police, would not, could not, can never ruin the celebration of their white wedding, their white love.

My ex’s #lovewins bachelorette in the middle of the uprising with its #Whatcurfew slogan made clear to me why we would never have worked. And yet, what I thought of more, more than this sign from the universe that things were as they should be in my love life, that I had ended up in a partnership that allowed me to be in alignment with my soul’s social justice calling, was the many times when trying to make things work with her, that I wished I could just be what she wanted to be. I thought of the last time I tried to get back together with her, when I, home from graduate school for winter break and aching all over from missing her, made an attempt to get her back by saying to her, in so many words, that I could be for her who she wanted me to be—someone who cared about “normal” things, someone less “hung up on” and “obsessed with” social justice issues and grassroots politics, someone who could, after school, move back to Charlotte and build the life she wanted with her. And even with this offer, this offer to trade my “weird” and “radical” ways for her love, she did not take the bait. She did not take me back.

“It’s over Cristina”

“I am with someone.”

I’m Still Here, You’re Still Here, and We Just Have to Keep Trying

Shortly after the Charlotte Uprising moved off the streets and into a focus on jail support and court support, the election of Donald Trump happens. I wish I could say I was not shocked by it, but I was. In the hazy, heavy morning after, Grey hits the snooze button on his alarm more than usual. I hear it go off each time. I barely slept all night and only sleep lightly on and off in the morning, in the minutes between alarms. In the sleep I did get, I had nightmares about the Klan. The one I was having right before Grey’s first alarm went off was that they had led a victory march down our street—pulling our neighbors of color from their homes to terrorize them. Some of the neighbors ran to our house and were banging on the door asking us to let them in when I woke up. How is it already morning? I know he is dreading going to work even more today. I feel him peel out of bed and carry out his getting ready routine slower than normal. He has to face his co-workers, many of whom, like his boss, enthusiastically support Trump. And even when I hear the noises of him making the final touches on his hair with my worn out hair dryer, I fight to go back to sleep, because maybe this could be a bad dream.

I’m staying in bed.

I want to stay in bed.

I want to stay in denial of this morning, of the election and of the fact that Grey will leave soon.

I can’t be alone with this.

The click of his boots grow louder as he comes to my side of bed to gently kiss me good-bye as he does every morning, but this morning we need this ritual, this kiss, the love between us, even more.

“I wish you could call out of work,” I say.

“Me, too,” he replies with defeat.

We linger in a pause that tugs us toward each other for a moment.

But it’s not long enough, I knew it wouldn’t be.

“I’ve got to go, I’m going to be late,” his words jump our rushed, irritated and abrupt but they fall heavy with sadness.

“Why don’t you call Emma?” he offers up.

And I know he needs me to call her and be with her as much as I do.

When I finally get out of bed, I set up to make myself some tea (sleep wasn’t taking me back anyway). I fill the kettle with water and set it on the stove. I don’t bother to make myself something to eat. I know I can’t. I start to load the dishwasher with the dishes sitting in the sink and open the cabinet under the sink to get a dish-detergent pod. And then I’m filled with anger. I feel angry that the things inside my kitchen cabinets do not look different. Everything should be a mess. How can anything look the same, be the same? Nothing is the same. And yet the boxes of tea, the honey, and the mugs sit in the cupboard just where they were, just as they were the day before, staring at me. The spray bottle of surface cleaner, the box of trash bags, the bag of dishwasher pods are still arranged in a row in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, unmoved, waiting for today to be the same as yesterday. I am angry. I am angry. I am so damn angry. How can the ground beneath us shift and everything still be right where it was? I realize I can’t be alone with this. Grey is gone. The mundane is mocking me. And so I call Emma. I call her and she comes.

“Hi,” she smiles and shrugs as I open the side door and greet her.

I notice, although we both aren’t really looking at each other yet, that her face is as ragged and puffy from crying and lack of sleep as mine. We hug and then we do the only thing we can do in that moment, we get back in my bed to cry some more.

I don’t remember half of what we said to each other. But as I sit here writing I can see us so vividly. I don’t remember what we were wearing, or the color of the sheets on my bed, but I do remember that we were raw, terrified, and angry and also, at the same time, grateful that we weren’t alone, that we could be together in this. I think the conversation was less like a conversation and more like a series of bursts, fear interrupted by crying, crying interrupted by silence, silence interrupted by anger.

It went on like that for a bit although my memory is swollen and a mess like our eyes were that day. I imagine that at one point I had to get up and get a fresh roll of toilet paper because Grey and I never really keep tissues around unless one of us is sick. All I know is that I couldn’t log the details, couldn’t remember what I had just said. It was as though reality had just grown too ugly, too heavy, and dead for details. It was a time that could only be felt, a heavy soul-numbing silence, a disgusting, horrifying truth that took up all the space that was so big you couldn’t catch the details.

Maybe it was that the details from Charlotte were still taking up all the detail—remembering parts of my being. I just remember feeling like we were taking turns passing back and forth the rough, broken, burning-coldness of the moment, because it was all we could do. All we could do was see it for what it was. All we could do was look at it, share it, try and figure out how we were going to cope, how we were going to act, how we were going to live in the face. That is how we loved each other, by sitting together in my unmade bed cradling as delicately as we could the new blow that we and so many others had been dealt. We sat together witnessing the ushering in of a new horror, of another great loss in the movement for justice, gentle with each other, soft with each other, because that is what you do, when the hardness closes in.

I do remember that we talked a lot about what we were afraid of. That the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would have a field day every day for the next 4 years. That health care coverage for loved ones who desperately need it would be taken from them. That Planned Parenthood, a place where many of our friends get hormones, screenings, and reproductive care, would be closed. We worried about the new levels of institutional and interpersonal violence that would befall our friends because they are Black, because they are Brown, because they are undocumented, because they are Muslim, because they are trans, because they are queer. With the curtains drawn shut and my dogs drawn into our laps, we pet them and cried, we asked questions that we knew damn well neither of us could answer, namely, what is going to happen now?

As people classified as white and assigned female at birth, we were also carrying the weight of the fact that 53% of white women who had voted, voted to elect Trump (Women in the World Staff, 2016), a man endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council (Dominguez, 2016), the Fraternal Order of Police (Pane, 2016), and the KKK (Detrow, 2016) to be President of the United States. I personally felt like I had not done enough to connect with white cisgender heterosexual women not involved in social justice, had not done enough to be in the struggle with them. But I couldn’t go back. We couldn’t go back. We can only go forward.

And so, Emma and I supported each other in letting ourselves fall apart, together. At times we reached out to touch each other. The crying punctuated intermittently by moments of silence, when words couldn’t touch our fears and when our minds, eyes, and mouths took a break from naming them, leaving that blank deadness, that numbness, that emptiness to settle in our bodies, our spirits, and the space. In those moments of stillness, a detached inner dialogue takes hold of me, is this it sinking in?. . .is this us coming to grips with it?. . .is this us finding footing in this new hell? But you don’t find footing in the sink-holed aftermath of an earthquake, you don’t find footing in the wreckage of white supremacy’s last stand.

We eventually run out of tears or at least the energy to produce and surface them. We grow restless and unable to be still in the face of the shit. And just like that, like a gift from the universe, Emma’s phone goes off. She receives a bunch of texts from members of the radical drum core she is a part of and after reading them she looks up at me,

“The group is planning an action downtown today in response, do you want to come?”

They were planning to take to the streets in protest.

“Yep.”

I say, as I get myself together and put my dogs in their crates so that we can head to her house so she can do the same. While she gets ready I make some signs. We ride to the group’s storage space to meet everyone and pick up the drums. Thank god there is something to do.

Putting my feet to pavement, taking to the streets to move through pain and against injustice with others was the only thing that made sense that day. I held the sign I had made. It read “Not my president” on one side and “Not My AmeriKKKA” on the other.

And yet it was

It is

I am a part of how we got here

So many of us are

Two days after the election, I am headed to Canada (I prepared myself for the jokes at the airport and from Trump supporting in-laws should they find out, they did not really take an interest in my work but would not pass up the opportunity to make a timely joke). The trip, planned prior to the election, was because I was traveling to the annual National Women’s Studies conference, the theme for this one was “Decoloniality.” I was scheduled to, on a panel with other scholars, share my preliminary findings of interview-based research I had been conducting on the role of community building in the grassroots organizing work of white queer and trans people engaged in antiracism. Great timing right? Here I am, a white, queer femme heading to a conference centering women of color, as well as emphasizing immigrant and indigenous folks of color, to present research validating and affirming the antiracist work of white folks including some other white queer folks like myself in a swing state that had just “turned red.”

How can I go to this conference and present?

How can any white person say anything about white antiracism now?

It was bad enough that throughout the research project all of the folks I interviewed kept bringing up toxic dynamics in our social justice organizing community. We were a mess, the work was a mess, and that could not be more clear than it was now. While the crisis mode of the Charlotte Uprising had temporarily, as so many crises before it, brought a halt to discussions and recognitions of the unhealthy dynamics in the organization I was a part of, as the uprising started to slow, when we all began returning home, we found the issues waiting for us. The “revolutionary” hierarchy, the hostile call-out and purist, dogmatic insider culture of our group could not be ignored or denied anymore. Ours was the kind of social justice organizing culture that was more concerned with harshly critiquing and attacking outsiders and newcomers than “building the mass movements needed to destroy mass oppression” (Lee, 2017).

To top it off, many of us were experiencing “activist burn out” (Gorski & Chen, 2015, pp. 390-391) in the form of poor mental and physical health. Many of us, while still called to the streets and to organizing, could no longer be a part of the organizations as we once were, we could barely function in actions or after them because of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the pulse of trust between us and others threaded and weak, always threatening to flat line.

I can’t do it anymore.

And so, sitting at my gate in the uncomfortable arm-rest restricted fake-leather row seating I write from scratch an email I’ve started and kept versions of in my drafts many times before, an email to the group, telling them that I can no longer organize or be part of the group formally and why. Although I felt in my bones that it was the right thing to do, my heart was breaking.

How much more can be lost?

How much more lost can I be?

I wished so badly that I was not alone and that I was not going to this conference. If I can’t start over at least I can stay home and not be leaving the comrades I am still connected to, despite the toxicity of the organization where we had met. I may be feeling alone right now but I am leaving those comrade-friends I am still close with alone, in the South, to take to the streets for an emergency action in response to the election. How can I leave them home alone to potentially face off with the Klan who might come out in unprecedented ways? In my mind’s eye I see the plain-clothes dressed Klan members from the streets of Charlotte and the scenes from my nightmare after the election. After all, their president did win.

When I arrive in Montreal, I miss my stop to getting off the airport bus. The bus driver calls it out but then, almost as soon as the name is shouted through his mouth, he calls out another. Wait, what? Apparently the bus only stops if folks stand to demonstrate that they are getting off at that particular stop. Wow, you can’t even stand up to get off at the right stop. Instead of being nervous about being lost in an unfamiliar place I am almost pleased. Fitting, you’re lost, no more metaphor needed. I eventually gather myself and my things and make it off the bus. In the crisp November dawn light, on the sidewalk beside the bus, I approach the driver who is pulling luggage out from underneath the bus for other riders getting off.

“I missed my stop a few stops back,” I begrudgingly admit aloud.

Do not offer an excuse.

You have no excuses.

His face tightens in frustration for a moment, but then his irritation melts into pity.

Do I look that pathetic?

I tell him my stop. “What is the best way to walk there?” I ask pulling out my map.

He gently points into the Montreal’s downtown night where people walk with friends, lovers, and family to restaurants, bars, and stores, “You will walk about 30 minutes in that direction to get to your stop.”

“Do you know where to go from there?” he asks.

I want to say, “Believe it or not I do, I know I’m as shocked as you,” but instead I simply nod. He smiles back tiredly and I try to give him the best one I can back. I am not happy but I’m grateful, for the cold, the walk, being physically lost, at least these things give me something to do, something to focus on. However foolish and self-inflicted, for the moment, I am grateful to have something to fix, something that I can fix.

When I finally arrive at the inexpensive Airbnb I’ve rented, a recently remodeled studio on the outskirts of downtown near exit ramps to the highway, I wash the trip off me, get into comfy clothes. I realize I can’t remember the last time I ate and order in cheap vegetarian delivery. I eat more out of necessity than actual hunger. I set up my laptop on the bed and stay up into the early hours of the morning watching live Facebook feeds of the action in downtown Greensboro that my friends are taking part in, communicating with everyone at home by phone and text to make sure they are ok during and after the action. Somewhere around 3:00 a.m. I drift to sleep in the glowing blue light of my laptop screen.

On this trip, my depression took hold of me in a way it had not in years. Typically when my anxiety and depression worsen, my appetite and sleep are the first to go. Then my negative thinking and self-talk increase, then there is the catastrophizing, which is usually quickly followed by fleeting, almost detached suicidal thoughts. This happened in rapid succession in Montreal.

Standing in the metro station on a platform waiting for the train that would take me to the conference location it creeps in. There it is. I recognize it instantly, the pulling ache, the desire to disappear. It manifests in suicidal ideation.

Just step out in front of the next one.

It would barely take any energy to step forward.

What good am I doing in this world anyway?

But as is always my pattern, just as quickly as the thoughts come, others come to intercept them. I think of my loved ones. I think of the train driver. I think of the people who would have to clean up my remains. I think of those who would have to witness such an act. I think of the time when I was on a train heading from North Carolina to my uncle’s funeral in New York and someone had stepped out in front of that train to end their life and how deeply impacted I was by that stranger’s death.

I can’t.

I could never do that.

I may not be doing any good in the world, but I can’t do that.

The realization that I would be leaving behind the people I loved, people who have to experience the violence of this world on their bodies in ways I never do moved me to pick myself up and carry my body on to the train. After staring thoughtlessly at the walls of the stations made into watercolors by the train’s speed, I make it in time for that day’s plenary session.

One of the speakers that day is poet Natalie Diaz. The moderator on the stage announces that Diaz is not at the conference in person because she is at Standing Rock with #NODAPL water protectors.

“But she has recorded some remarks to share with us in her absence,” she says quickly, desperately trying to alleviate the disappointment I assume she anticipated.

The moderator motions to the conference technical staff and exited the stage. On the screen on stage they queue up the projection of a picture of the camp Diaz had taken. On the surround-sound speakers, they begin playing the audio clip she recorded for all of us to hear.

In her intimate, what I imagine was a personal cell phone, recording, Diaz spoke about what she was seeing in North Dakota and what was going on in the United States. She spoke of the times we were in and the experiences and wisdom of indigenous people, her wisdom. She shared that part of this wisdom was that of “staying in a place of tension,” the space that lets her love herself and others “in the midst of so much violence, so much hurtful energy” (Diaz, 2016).

Diaz (2016) emphasized that, like other indigenous people, people of color, and immigrants of color, she does not “have the luxury that a lot of other Americans have,” she cannot “look away” (Coates, 2015, p. 98), she cannot “collapse beneath it.” Carrying on the legacy of her parents and grandparent she is called to “not just endure it” but to “stay within it,” “live within it,” “breathe in it,” “make love in it,” and “work in it, always work in it” (Diaz, 2016). In concluding her remarks, Diaz (2016) imparted the words of her friend, a Black woman poet by the name of Khadijah Queen who said of the election “America is still America to me” and Diaz (2016) said of her friend’s words, “I knew exactly what she meant when she said that because it is.” Then Diaz (2016) said the words that would change me, words that I think of still today,

“. . .through all that, all I know is, I’m still here, you’re still here, and we just have to keep trying to show Americans what love means.”

Upon my return from the conference, I begin moving into a different space in myself and my social justice work. I become, in some ways by my own choosing, effectively excommunicated from “the church of social justice” (Lee, 2017) in local community organizing as a result of my choosing to leave the organization I had been part of. While still participating in and marshaling direct actions here and there as well as attending a few city council meetings, I began to shift my focus. My learning, teaching, and interpersonal relationship building become, as they were when I was in my MA program, the heart of my social justice work. And although it may read as though I was, as I had a little after the election, “collapsing” (Diaz, 2016), I was instead focusing on my return to the roots of my social justice work to stay “within it” (Diaz, 2016).

I made the time to take a reflective, intentional, inward turn. A turn that provided me with space to critically reflect and engage with the losses I was grieving, the loss of the organization I was a part of, and some of the friendships that came with that membership. A turn that allowed me to mourn the loss of my identity as a budding grassroots social justice organizing community member, the loss of being involved in city and statewide grassroots social justice work.

I grounded myself in a search, a search for meaning, a search for wholeness, a search for more holistic, authentic, compassionate, and connected social justice work. This was a search that took me back to where I started in ways and to new places in others, a search brought me closer to, not further from “being with” (Freire, 1998, p. 58), living and working with myself and others for social justice. Inspired by Diaz’s (2016) words, I took up a journey that centered a deep and critical search for not only what love means for me in engaging with others in social justice work but also for what it could look like, feel like, and do in the social justice work I try to engage in with.

I started a journey toward spiritual healing and growth, a journey that, in many ways, I am still just beginning. I headed down a path to make room in my life for a way to be different to and with others and myself. I worked to be present in that room. Though it meant Grey and I would struggle financially, I cut down on the number of jobs I worked because my mental health needed to be a priority. I spent time with trusted comrade-friends outside of the streets, building deeper bonds with them by getting to know them, experiencing joy with them, supporting them in their healing, and allowing them to support me in mine. I reconnected with friends and family. I allowed myself to more fully take on the difficulty and beauty of study (Darder, 2002), allowing it to become a spiritual practice for me. I approached teaching and learning for social justice not as “sell-out” or easy work, but as the social justice work that had and continued to transform me as a student and teacher, work that I had seen transform so many of my colleagues, classmates, and students that I have been in classes with over the years.

I do not mean to make it sound as though I was not still grieving my losses during the time I made these shifts. I was, and still am. But with the coming of the spring of 2017 I began to move through my grief differently and experience what once felt like only an ending of all things as the ending of some things and the beginning of others, as a transition. The winds were changing. And I was changing too.

Learning From Mestiza Consciousness: Conocimiento, La Facultad, and the Colonizer’s ⁵ Queer Kid

It was 11:00 p.m. on a weeknight this past summer. Just five hours earlier or so, I had been sharing some intense anger and pain in class discussion about my increasing invisibility as a queer, as a queer femme person partnered with a trans person who is read as cis. The funny thing is, looking back I can’t remember how it came up or how my engagement, critical engagement, with my emotions and experience of this escalated. But I do remember that force within me, my deeper inner knowing, telling me that this conversation could and needed to come up now because we were talking about engaging across lines of difference and I was in a learning space where critical community had taken shape.

Bettez (2011), the social justice scholar and educator (and teacher of said course), defines critical community as “interconnected, porously bordered, shifting webs of people who through dialogue, active listening and critical question posing, assist each other in critically thinking through issues of power, oppression and privilege” (p. 10). In critical communities, those involved “at a minimum, an attempt to question dominant norms and a goal to further one another’s critical thinking, particularly around issues of power, oppression, and privilege” (Bettez, 2011, p. 10). Within a critical community in my class and feeling supported by it I was able to go as deep as I did, in class discussion and my self-reflexion ⁶ after.

As I had several times in class before, albeit less at length, I found myself venting to my classmates about how invisible I feel now that Grey is always read as a cis-man and how that makes me feel. I know my tone was sharp. I show anger like this, a cutting anger, when what I am feeling inside is deep, soul-shattering hurt and fear.

“It just pisses me off” I say, “when cis-straight white women talk to me as if I was one of them.”

“I hate it.”

“It happens so much now, when Grey and I find ourselves in spaces dominated by cis-straight white people, like bars or restaurants” I explain. “They look at us, talk to us, treat us as if we were one of them.”

“I’m erased into their world.”

I proceeded to go on, telling everyone in the class how angry it makes me when people say things like “you know how men are” or “well that’s married life for you.”

“I feel this most with cis-straight white women” I tell them.

“And what’s worse is, I feel this way not only with strangers but the cis-straight white women who are my extended family and old friends, who know that Grey is trans and that I am queer.”

“It is like they think that I am like them now. Like all of a sudden we are like them, just like that. And we are not. We don’t want to be.”

Anger, sadness, loss, frustration, run through and around me.

In the midst of the whirlwind of my processing, Dr. Bettez gently interrupts me. With much compassion and grace, she prompts me to think critically about what I was saying, about what I was feeling and about how others might hear and feel what I was sharing.

“There might be people in here who go to those spaces, those bars and restaurants and they may be thinking, well what’s so wrong with their spaces, with being who they are.”

I paused. I was reminded of a conversation I had with my mother several years back after my ex and I had broken up. I asked my mom if she thought I had missed my chance with “the one.” She said no. She had never given her feedback on anyone I had ever been involved with. We were somewhere we had never been in our relationship, talking and sharing honestly and intimately.

The conversation continued and turned to the topic of my queerness more generally. Up until that point, my mom and I had never talked about her feelings about my identity. My coming out really just involved me dropping hints and then just showing up to the house with partners and being out. It was not up for discussion. But in this conversation, years later, sitting in the white rocking chairs on her front porch, I asked her questions I never asked before, I wanted to know what her journey had been. I told her that I had often heard straight parents of queer kids say things like “I had to mourn the loss of who I thought my daughter was, what I thought her wedding and life would be like in order to accept her.” I didn’t say it but I find this so frustrating, the idea that your child being queer is something to mourn. That your child being heteronormative is something you come to not only expect but plan for, dreaming about the details of their wedding day and life laid out before you, resonate images of their own no doubt dream.

Trying as best I can to keep the judgment I hold out of my tone I asked her, “Was that your experience? Did you have to do that with me? It’s ok if you felt that way, you can tell me. I want to know what your process has been like.”

“No.” She replied quickly.

In my mind, I wondered if she would have even told me if she did. She knows me well enough to know that that would make me upset. But then she said something else, with the softness of vulnerability coloring her voice.

“But I did wonder what was so wrong with my life that you would choose one so different from mine.”

My mother’s words and that scene on her porch came back to me with Dr. Bettez’s interruption me, calling me to see and think of the cis-straight women in the classroom before me. Thinking of my mom and our conversation I tried to re-enter the discussion differently. I tried to clarify that it was not that there was anything wrong with being cis and straight, but what felt wrong to me was that if folks thought they were being kind by treating me and Grey like we are like them, like they were doing us a favor by giving us “entry” into their world, they were in fact harming us because that makes us feel as though we should want to be like them.

“I do not think they mean to, but when people say those things to me and interact with us like that, it feels as though they are implying that we should be so grateful to be treated like them. That of course we would want to be like them because something is wrong with us.”

Later that night, while trying to read and prepare for class the next day I felt so undone and distracted. I could not stop thinking about the class discussion. And in the middle of my thoughts about the day it hit me. It is all connected. I found my way through the dream.

According to Anzaldúa (2012), la facultad is “an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is behind which feelings reside/hide” (p. 60). She states that “those who are pounced on the most have it the strongest—the females, the homosexuals of all races, the dark-skinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign” (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 60). Those of us “up against the wall,” those of us who have “all sorts of oppressions coming at us” are, in Anzaldúa’s (2012) view, “forced to develop this faculty so that we’ll know when the next person is going to slap us or lock us away” (pp. 60-61).

I, as a queer femme person, to a certain extent fall into the group Anzaldúa (2012) identifies as having la facultad. But because I am someone who inhabits fewer marginalized positionalities than dominant ones, the version of la facultad that I have is different. I experience privilege and am advantaged as a white, U.S. born citizen of european descent, with educational privilege, who, despite working multiple short-term contract and wage-labor jobs (classified as working class), has upper class parents and inherited wealth. I also identify as queer and am coming to identify, at least to myself, as a genderqueer femme person. I also identify as someone who suffers from chronic anxiety and depression.

Though I separate out my positionalities here for the sake of putting them all out there, I never experience them as separate. I experience all of my positionalities simultaneously. Because almost all of my dominant positionalities are visible, they most inform how I am read, and treated by others, how I am ranked and sorted by the power structures of our society, and thus how I experience the world. So while I agree with Lorde (2009, p. 219), that there is no hierarchy of oppression, I also believe those of us inhabiting more salient dominant positionalities must acknowledge that we are not all “up against the wall” (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 60) in the same ways. In my case, the person backing me up against the wall, the “next person” (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 60) looks, talks, and is, in more ways than one, (like) me.

Working with and through my bad dream and the embodied, spiritual, emotional experiences or knowings connected to it, a central sensory part of “la facultad” (p. 60), I can begin learning, can begin “getting to know” (Britzman, 2009, p. 41) the unknowable inside of me, “that which we do not wish to know anything about” (Britzman, 2009, p. 5). I can begin to critically engage and attend to my “inscribed emotional habits” (Boler, 2004, pp. 119-121), excavating my unconscious complicity with hegemony (Boler, 2004, p. 121). Through learning from and with my dream self and the fears I feel when I am faced with her in the light of day, through bringing together my conscious and unconscious, my emotional, spiritual, and embodied knowings with my intellectual knowings, I now can learn that which I do not want to know about myself. I can get to the root of my dream.

Rather than experience oppression in the form of another person, a white other, as a manifestation of internalized oppression the way Chicana feminist Irene Lara (2002) does in her dreams, since all of me is racially white, I am the white oppressor of my (bad) dreams. The oppressor getting in my way to justice, to freedom, is me. I am that next person Anzaldúa (2012) speaks of. My nightmare is about what I fear and what I hate most about myself, my self hatred, my internalization of the dominant ideology, my willingness to give up myself, others, and justice for its love and acceptance. My nightmare is about my secret subscription, my dream self’s willingness to acquiesce to the dominant narrative and the hold that the hegemony inside of me has on my soul, my life, my work.

I wrote to Dr. Bettez and our class co-facilitator, a former classmate of mine, about my realization. I was so tired, not only from class discussion, but also from my journey, from working through my dream. What I intended to be an email ended up as a text message. It was long winded, filled with run-on sentences, and that was because that is how I came through it. Thoughts and then meanings coming through me, sucking the air from my lungs, filling the room around me, running on-off into the distance. The writing of it doing for me what it has always done, what it is doing for me now, giving me the space, the power to move through and beyond myself, my realities, my emotions, through time, place, relationships, and consciousnesses.

Writing helps me find that “precocious” femme “child forced to grow up too quickly” (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 88) eager to storm, to journey with me. We are out on our journey, crossing a bridge into new consciousness. I find my reflection as we pass water and see in it the assimilationist white gay I have been, begging for my ex’s love, for my ex’s life. I can look now, without shame. I can look at that part, my myself, inside myself and understand where she came from. I can witness her and invite her to go another way, to cross the bridge with us.

I have dehumanized white middle-class cis-straight women because I had, my whole life, felt dehumanized because I was not them. To be offered admittance to their club now, when I have no want or need for it, can feel like a cruel joke. Much of my life, on some level deep inside, I wanted to be like them or at least as close as I could be to like them. I wanted to be enough of “the right things” and not too much of “the wrong things” as I had been for so of them, my ex included. And when I became conscious of my queerness, of my politics, I felt so much shame for having ever internalized the dominant narrative and its story about me and so many others, that I denied that I ever had.

In denying the ghost inside of me I fed her shame, and rather than heal her and accept her as a part of me, she grew into a more and more terrifying monster that haunted me. In never permitting myself to bear witness to her existence, never offering myself forgiveness and compassion around my internalized hegemonic values (Boler, 2004), I kept her exactly where she was, I kept us from coming together to transform, from taking up a path of healing. Only by digging up the wannabe-assimilationist white gay that I was from the grave-yard of my past, facing her and my fear of her, humanizing her so that she can cross over, am I able to begin to move from being haunted by my ghosts to invoking them as a part of me, as a part of my journey to consciousness.

Being With the Ghost: Witnessing and Wresting Anew

I am on a spiritual quest, an enlightening journey, to transform my life, my relationships, my work (Rendón, 2009). I have learned that it is possible to “re-member” experiences “in new arrangement” (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 556). I am following a calling to co-create wholeness in learning, teaching, and living with others for social justice (Rendón, 2009). I am not alone (Rendón, 2009). There are ghosts, living and dead, of us, of those we love, and of our histories, on, under, and all around the bridge I am on and the bridges ahead of me. I do not have to “drag the dead” selves with us (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 558). But I must extend ourselves, try and recognize, try and heal, try and invite the “treacherous ghosts” (Boler, 1999, p. 175) and our own “demons” among us, those haunting us and trying to hold us back, onto the bridge, “the path of understanding” (Boler, 1999, p. 175), the path of “conocimiento” (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 540). And I must learn to be with them.

For Virginia Woolf (1942), “killing the angel of the house,” the ideal (white) wife/woman who upholds (imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, cis-hetero) patriarchy was the duty of the (white, upper class) woman writer, so that she can be free to create (pp. 151-153). But I argue that we can only kill the angel of the house, if we are willing to live with, learn from her ghost, which is and is not our own.

I am not the first queer white femme poet to believe we must move past “innocence,” past the “dreams” of our white fathers and mothers, our white ancestors so in love with power, to become haunted, bridging the human and “suprahuman” (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 59) in our pursuit of consciousness and social action. white lesbian poet Adrienne Rich (1994) wrote that, even if white folks, white femmes, white queers “may find ourselves forcibly shut out from our community of origin” or “know no other way” than to “separate from parents, sisters, brothers, lovers, husbands” we still cannot “deny the connection ever existed” or pretend as though “we have moved on a direct, single minded track” (p. 144). According to Rich (1994), we can never forget that we are “born both innocent and accountable” (pp. 144-145).

In “Identity, Skin, Blood Heart,” white antiracist queer poet Minnie Bruce Pratt (1984) tells us of the nightmares she had of her father “leaving a heavy box on her desk” filled with what she did not want, the benefits of her privilege, “the restrictions, the injustice, the pain, the broken urgings of the heart, the unknown horrors” (p. 71). She writes “I wanted no part of what was in it. . .,” “and yet, it is mine” (p. 71). To engage what Rich (1986) and Pratt (1984) do, to take up what Boler (1999) terms “collective witnessing” (p. 186), to “undertake our historical responsibility and complications” and trace the genealogies of our “particular emotional investments” (p. 186) to systems of power as a process of “collective inquiry collective accountability” (Boler, 1999, pp. 176-177), in critical community (Bettez, 2011, p. 10) with our comrades of color, with other white folks who are just beginning to find their way to their path toward consciousness, we have to embody and offer our ghosts and the ghosts of others compassion and critical hope (Boler, 2004, p. 131).

Now I come to my nightmare-body, the white assimilationist cisgender gay woman of my nightmares, open to her because I see “personal transformation as inseparable from social transformation” (Shahjahan, 2014, p. 228). If I can come to her with compassion, with critical hope that she can heal, that I can heal, that we can heal, that we can be transformed, I can do the same with the other white cisgender straight and gay people. I can take up a haunting wholeness in being a student and teacher of critical pedagogy and a comrade in critically conscious social action, one that moves past blame and denial (Shahjahan, 2014, p. 228). I can recognize my complicity with power and by “re-conceiving” my personhood I can, with others, co-create humanizing “kinds of social relationships and social structures” (Shahjahan, 2014, p. 230). Through my nightmare I found and began living with “new fears” (Pratt as cited in Boler, 1999, p. 182), new risks, ambiguity, and uncertainty that move me and those I seek to journey with “towards a new ethic of humanism” (Shahjahan, 2014, p. 230).

I choose not to give up the ghosts, but to evoke them, to invite them on the bridge so that we can meet on the “path of understanding” (Boler, 1999, p. 175), so that we can transform.