The Moment of Decision

Hello friends,

There comes a time when you have decide who you are, what you stand for, and what you're going to do about it.

In fact, from the vantage point of several decades, there are many such points in everyone's life.

But today I want to talk about my first one, which came up in a recent podcast episode with Shanti Joy Gold. It's a decision I made at 21-ish which led somewhat circuitously to the path I'm on now. Or, to put it another way, I had no idea at the time but it turned out to be really important.

The Catalytic Incident

As some of you know, I lived in France for a year when I was 21/22. Many positive things remain from that year, not least my love of strong coffee, my appreciation for wine and cheese, and the occasional French phrase.

There were also negative experiences. It was a year when I experienced the most egregious racism, which spanned everything from being sexually objectified to being called the N word in French to being ignored in restaurants and many many hurtful acts of both deliberate and unthinking racism (which didn't feel that micro).

During that year I shared a flat with LG from the Midwest in the USA. She was racialised as white, and she'd never met a person racialised as Black as far as I could tell, let alone someone like me who confounded her by being a well-travelled graduate who was fluent in French (it was her first time out of the US and her French was poor) AND Spanish. The cognitive dissonance must have been huge, which probably accounts for what happened next. In the midst of a conversation she told me that she thought of me as white. Listen to the podcast to hear how that landed with me.

Reflecting on my Values

But over the course of that long, long year, I had the chance to reflect on who I was, what I believed and how I would act. Hence the decision that I would not knowingly contribute to oppression of others. I didn't want to do to others what had been done to me. I've never regretted that decision, and though I'm far from perfect, and don't always get it right, it's still the way I feel.