I am grateful for less visible parts of my privilege –
Most of my life I’ve spent surrounded, loving and standing with people as we demand the State do better.
I grew up in a white lesbian/activist enclave of a mostly black neighbourhood.
This isn’t an uncomplicated scenario, and I’m grateful for parents who mostly could and did speak of the complexity.
As a child, we marched at night for safety for women.
Early learning from my mother’s kitchen:
It takes four cops to move one person, if that person can stay released and keep passive weight.
There were plenty of situations in which being arrested meant you were on the right side.
And the other learnings of the time…
That cops would be nice to me because I was a white boy.
And that the black kids in the neighbourhood would be treated differently.
That by saying, “It’s not worth it” I could talk myself out of any trouble.
“It” being literal or abstracted State violence.
State violence that would, no doubt, be on my side.
And I’d learned the black kids in the neighbourhood
would know what I meant.
I was much more scared of the groups of South End white kids who knew they could get away with it.
I don’t know if that was before or after
We followed the Donald Marshall Inquiry
That laid bare the corruption and racism of the NS legal system.
If there had been doubt.
Or before we explicitly talked about the the endless racial profiling
and white supremacy enacted by Halifax police, businesses, city planners and citizens
that started before I was born and continues now.
To write about this privilege is to risk
bragging about having “good parents” / being the “good one”
Which is not how I feel about it.
Mostly I need to process my rage that turns to contempt (neither helpful) at those folk surprised;
my disgust and hopelessness at the self-preserving gas lighting of institutions;
my self-hatred for not being a good enough activist/community organizer/human;
my desire to disappear to create space (also not helpful to me or the world.)
This is my work. And I’m terrible at it. Alone.
As, I suspect, are most of us. Alone.
Maybe we can work together?
1986 Bethan Lloyd (my mom), Shelley Finson (her partner) and others at International Women’s Day March