What to Do when you don’t know what to Say
It’s on a completely different level, but it may be a familiar feeling when you felt something terribly broken down or horribly damaged between you and someone you cared about and you just didn’t know how to talk about it. It’s in these moments that we need to ask questions and listen. We need to listen deeply and without agenda.
We can use our voices to say this is wrong; and we should demonstrate, contact government officials, donate money to social justice organizations, and post to social media… But we need to keep asking questions.
If we don’t understand, we need to find out.
This is where the vulnerability begins; when we open up to ask the other person what it has been for them – every day – while we were not thinking about it one bit before; not to ease our own feelings, but to empathize with theirs and take informed action.
As in your life, when the other person failed to connect with your fear and trauma so have we failed to connect with the same for black people in this country. We need to listen deeply and then we need to ask ourselves what feelings arise in us as we confront the privilege our white skin affords us to ignore or avoid awareness of this trauma.
This is the hardest part of any relationship conflict; we never want to hurt anybody but our defenses arise to protect us from our own feelings of fear and helplessness and they push the other person away. In confronting our privilege, we’re reflecting on those parts of ourselves that we’re not particularly proud of, and if we speak up in this moment we have to acknowledge a lifetime
So let’s acknowledge our failure.
Let’s acknowledge the damage caused by ignoring what was always there and demonstrate our willingness to listen deeply now, and to act now. It is meaningful to address with friends and family and co-workers their racist jokes or implications or statements; but we need also to ask with curiosity what made them say that in the first place because it is through understanding and empathy with all sides that we will make meaningful change not by silencing each other.
And here begins the internal revolution that feeds our external actions and who we become in this moment.
It is a hard thing to acknowledge where we’ve failed, but it’s the only way we can objectively hear the truth and move towards something better.
I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to break on through.