As you can see, this is a new format for my newsletter. I changed to Substack because of some fun functionality things and the ability to have an archive. For instance, my last newsletter on awe is right here. Just like that. Boom. Since we are making a bit of a transition here, let’s review. I started this monthly-ish newsletter in 2018 when I was living and working in Thailand as a way to talk about giving and how to do it better. I now live in Texas and manage giving at a family foundation while also consulting with nonprofits that work in the Global South. Sometimes I talk about giving, but recently I’ve been compelled to talk about what it means to be human and how we can even contextualize generosity when things are so fractured and painful. Sounds fun, right?! 🥳
I know this newsletter is finding several friends dealing with flood aftermath in Northern Thailand and Appalachia. Some still don’t have water. Some lost everything. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen are all under attack and the destruction is being funded by the US. Misinformation and dehumanization abound in our stories and conversations as we head into an election that I can’t think about without slight hyperventilation. It’s a lot.
I’m always looking for points of light or ways to think more deeply about where I find myself. Some of it is just wanting to be validated, if I’m honest. I heard Isabel Allende speak last week, and she was so funny and refreshing. Besides sharing the fact that she got married again at the age of 76 and is still working and traveling at the age of 82, she shared a lot about how she got to be who she was. She frustrated her mother from a young age, she said, because “I don’t take anything for granted - religion, law, politics, I question everything.” She was speaking specifically about defining her role as a woman in a traditional patriarchal society. Similarly, my “mouth” and “opinions” were not seen as strengths by my parents and teachers, especially at a young age for similar reasons. I gravitate towards other people who show me that it’s not only good to question but necessary.
I’ve always appreciated the way Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks and interrogates things as well. He recorded Trevor Noah’s podcast right after he did that atrocious CBS interview. He was able, in this forum at least, to talk about why he went to Israel and the occupied territories. It’s a great example of questioning everything. He wasn’t able to get across in the CBS interview that he actually identifies with aspects of Jewish people in their fight against dehumanization. That it led him to wonder what he would do, what he would be capable of, to assert his own power. I recommend you listen to the whole thing, but this section on Israel really got me (bolding is mine):
I would say, nationalist impulse that I grew up around and grew up under has been taken to like the nth degree. Like it's actually been operationalized… It's not… just people without power trying to… create stories and trying to preserve themselves and trying to arm themselves against an oppression. It has become an actual state… this doesn't work if you can't see yourself in Israel and in Zionism. If you think it is just evil people over here doing an evil thing, then you've missed it. You know what I mean? You've missed it. This started somewhere. You know what I mean? It started somewhere. And I have to be honest, and I said this in the piece, once I started reading like the documents around Zionism, it was like, on one level, I was like, oh, this is so clearly colonialism.
Like I recognize a colonialist discourse. Well, first of all, they use the word colonized, but also, you know, depicting the people over there in a certain way, either as they don't exist or they're savage one or the other. But the other part was, I recognize the yearning. Like I recognize, you know, Moses has talking about being a member of a degraded people. At one place he says, you know, your nose and your hair won't be made to disappear. You can't pretend you're German. He's saying this before the Holocaust. You know what I mean? You can't hide your Jewishness. You should be made to disappear. You can't pretend you're German. He's saying this before the Holocaust. You know what I mean?
You can't hide your Jewishness. You should be proud of it. And all I can hear is like Malcolm X, right? So I'm like recognizing it. Like I can feel- The parallels. The parallels, yeah. And the fraternity for it and the sympathy.
Like I understand it, but then you see where it goes, right? You see where it goes and how a people who have been just repeatedly degraded over centuries, massacred, killed, chased, ethnically cleansed themselves out of Spain, you know, can go somewhere and perpetrate and create a system of just dire inhumanity. Dire inhuman, I say this having seen it, you know, against other people. That was a challenge for me as a black person actually… Like as much as I was like concerned about Zionism and what it did because I started thinking, and this is imaginative and speculative, but this is I think what writers are supposed to do. What would we be if we had power? Like, what would we do?
What would we be if we had power? We all must contend with this - the humanity in all of us. I hear people say “I wouldn’t have owned slaves” or “I would stand up against a genocide.” Look. LOOK. That is all well and good, but how hollow. How meaningless. What are you doing today. Who are you in your day to day interactions. What power do we have and what do you do with it. My people are from Louisiana and Mississippi. I am clear about where I come from, and what I probably would have been doing 200 years ago. I cannot pretend I would be working on that underground railroad or sheltering Anne Frank’s family during the Holocaust. I can’t shelter myself from hypothetical immoral choices, as much as I want to, while making them. I still would have been mouthy, probably, but the laws would have been on my side (relatively speaking, as a woman). I have traveled the world with a passport made possible by colonialism and imperialism. I have stood on the bones of people massacred during my lifetime in Rwanda. I live in East Austin that is still dealing with the 1928 plan. I am complicit. I see it.
What I hear Isabel Allende saying and Ta-Nehisi saying is that I can use my identity, and my discomfort with it, to make room. For empathy. For finding same-ness. To question with love. I understand how hard it is to operate within a system and feel trapped, like I imagine many Israelis and Jews the world over are feeling. I get how my convictions don’t align with those of my neighbors (hello, Texas!), but we still have to live together and see each other. For all that nobility I’ve just assigned myself, I also yell at people in traffic and I hate and I want to win and I want to go wherever I want to go and I am guilty of all of it. For all you OG evangelicals, do you remember that book What’s So Amazing about Grace? I had the illustrated version and treasured it. It’s embodying that. For all you millennials, it’s listening to Sufjan’s John Wayne Gacy, Jr. in a dark room and feeling feelings. We are the worst thing we have done, that anyone has done. And we can also love and be loved.
The work is moving towards each other, not away — even moving towards ourselves if we carry shame about who we are or what we have done. The work is identifying when we are the oppressor while always centering the oppressed. The work is owning where we have power and admitting what we are doing with it. Questioning everything, especially power. Voting is power. Capital is power. Speech is power. What are we doing with it.
I know this sounds very intense. I take this seriously but wear it lightly. Lighter even now in my 40s. You should have met me in my 20s 😬. I feel freer and lighter by giving historical context to who I am and recognizing that I can see myself on both sides. That I must. The two films I mention below are both beautiful takes on this theme of recognizing ourselves in each other. And being human.
I truly appreciate each one of you. I know this might not be, like, the funnest newsletter you receive. But I love hearing from you and how you’re processing it all. Thank you for spending time here.
HERE FOR IT
Voting — CHECK your voter registration! Make a voting plan! Make a mental health plan for the day/week after the election!
Spooky vibes — It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Well, it would be if it dropped 20 degrees in Texas. If you need a playlist for pumpkin carving, making fall cocktails or dressing up your dog in costumes while you drink fall cocktails, I made this one:
An album that sounds like I am feeling - Sudanese-Candian poet/singer Mustafa’s latest album Dunya.
Documentaries that point to hope — I happened to watch two films on the same day about people seeking to understand each other with curiosity and empathy, and I loved them both. Will and Harper is about Will Ferrell getting to know his longtime friend on a cross-country road trip after she transitions in her 60s. Refuge is about two men — a veteran and KKK member and a Syrian refugee physician — seeking to understand what makes people hate and how to get past it.