Social Location Project - Contextual Thinking

 

The project - my shawl and myself

If one took a quick glance at me they would be able to tick a few boxes and formulate an idea of my social location, I am cishet, white, female, I live in Silicon Valley, I am a graduate student teacher at a university, middle-aged, middle-class, I don’t seem very remarkable or unusual on the surface and can very easily and neatly be dropped in the “middle class white lady” box. And I have been dropped in this box repeatedly despite numerous intersections that make my “white lady-ness” more complicated than it appears. To further reinforce my white lady status, the creative aspect of this project is a knitted item. Seen in the following Image:

I have been knitting this shawl throughout the semester during class times. I consider knitting (and crochet and spinning yarn) to be my main contemplative practices, and this object is imbued with my meditations from this semester, as well as some other symbolic design elements. This object will help me “knit together” my various intersections as I go through this paper, each intersection will be associated with an aspect of the design - it’s structure, color, or texture for example. 

A bumpy start

The texture of this shawl is very “bumpy” - it is highly textured done in a stitch called “garter stitch. This is a simple stitch, the most basic of knitting stitches, and the very first stitch that a knitter is taught. It is appropriate to start with the garter stitch, because much like the first stitch you learn, the beginnings of my story are also a bit bumpy. My bumpy start is due to a couple of intersections that define my actual social location. These are the intersections of poverty, and also belonging to a family of recent immigrants. All but 1 of my great grandparents arrived in the US during the early part of the 1900s, some in the 20s and some in the 30s, all fleeing political upheaval, war and ethnic discrimination in their home countries. My mothers side of the family came from what is currently Ukraine, then it was considered “Ruthenia” and had been the “property” of Russia, Germany, Austria and Poland at various times over the previous 20 years. My great grandmother was born in the Carpathian mountains, and was a simple peasant woman, my great grandfather also from the region (but from the Polish side of the shifting border) was also just a simple country person. They arrived at Ellis Island separately, my great grandfather with his current wife, and my great grandmother recently widowed with children in tow. Within 4 years of their arrival, my great grandfather's wife died and he married my great grandmother. He was a coal miner, and she kept a rooming house, and they also raised rabbits in the backyard to sell for meat. They were alcoholics, they were violent with each other, and with the children. They were marginalized because of their ethnicity, the language they spoke and their poverty.  They were the victims of unspeakable trauma from their home countries, and they passed it down to me. 

While they personally did not get much benefit from being “white”, my grandmother and mother and myself and my children have had much more benefit from the fact that we have white bodies. My grandmother and mother bought into the system of white supremacy hook line and sinker, but would of course say that they weren’t at all racist. If you were to try to talk to them about white supremacy they would not even be able to begin to tell you about it. Like fish swimming in water, they don’t see the “water” - as Jennifer Harvey states “we understand it as white persons, we often understand its pervasiveness, function, and urgency the least”, and “White supremacy has retained its power for so long, in part, by functioning as standard operating procedure and disguising itself as the way things are “supposed to be”. (Harvey et al, 2004). They were not very aware of the ways that white supremacy had robbed them of their real ethnic identities, and distanced them from other poor people with whom they had much more in common than they did with upper middle class whites. This is always to the detriment of poor whites - it allows for them to be tools of rich white oligarchs - oligarchs reap both the power of having their political support and also all the money that they keep for themselves all the while telling them how good they have it. This just serves to  intensify intergenerational trauma for people of color and white people alike. 

We still carry this trauma inside of us, and it manifests itself in a number of ways, through my sisters mental illness and drug addiction, through my mother’s abusive behavior towards us, and also in the form of physical illnesses. In his book “My Grandmother’s Hands”, Ressma Mennakem explains that various types of trauma 

“are routinely passed on from person to person and from generation to generation. This intergenerational transmission—which, more aptly and less clinically, I call a soul wound —occurs in multiple ways: 

• Through families in which one family member abuses or mistreats another.

• Through unsafe or abusive systems, structures, institutions, and/or cultural norms.

• Through our genes. Recent work in human genetics suggests that trauma is passed on in our DNA expression, through the biochemistry of the human egg, sperm, and womb. 

This means that no matter what we look like if we were born and raised in America, white-body supremacy and our adaptations to it are in our blood. Our very bodies house the unhealed dissonance and trauma of our ancestors”(Menakem 2017:9-10) 

This is undoubtedly the case in my family, as we also carry a number of gene mutations that make us more prone to autoimmune diseases (I am HLAB27 gene positive, as was my grandmother, my aunt, my mother, my brother, and 2 of my own children). These genes do not always lead to illness, but for my grandmother it did, she had ulcerative colitis and had to have an ileostomy at the age of 42, and wore a bag attached to a stoma on her abdomen to capture digestive waste for the rest of her life. My aunt had Chron’s disease (died at 42), my mother and brother (died at 29), type 1 diabetes, my daughter Chron’s disease, and myself - I have multiple autoimmune disorders, that I truly believe were triggered by the trauma of my young life, coupled with a great deal of poverty, inadequate access to health care as a child... which brings me to the second intersection, that of chronic, invisible illness. 

The jagged edge

The edge of the shawl is kind of jagged, saw-toothed, if it were not made from wool, you would probably not want it touching your skin. It’s also red, symbolic of rawness and tenderness. My chronic illness has shaped a lot of my adult life. I was always a bit ill as a child, I had unexplained hives when I was aged 9-13 that never did have a discovered cause. I would be covered in hives from head to toe, my eyes would swell shut, my lips would swell up, it was pretty awful, I would get sent home from school by panicky nurses, and then teased by kids when I returned. In my 20s my health issues began to earnestly take a frightening turn for the worse when my children were still small and I was a single mother. I had dealt with an abusive husband, and the stresses of being a single parent and compounded with the embodied trauma I already carried around started a cascade of diagnoses that were life-alteringfactor-producinhave. First was pernicious anemia, an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks the acid and intrinsic factor producing cells that line your stomach. So I no longer make adequate stomach acid, and also am unable to absorb vitamin B12 through my gut due to the missing intrinsic factor. It took many years to get a diagnosis and I had to be nearly dead and having serious neurologic symptoms before I was able to be seen by a doctor and get treated. This was mostly due to poverty - living on welfare with 3 kids...I had a GED (dropped out/pregnant at age 17), and Medicaid would cover the kids, but not me, and so I nearly died due to this illness. Next in my 30s I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's, thyroiditis, then premature ovarian failure and early menopause, then at 42, Addison’s disease, and Ankylosing Spondylitis (which is a form of autoimmune arthritis). I had literally been walloped with 4 autoimmune disorders and all the not-so-fun things that go with it. They are physically quite debilitating. I take many medications every day, and I wear a retrofitted insulin pump filled with steroids to mimic the action of the normal adrenal gland as closely as possible. The pump is now a part of me as much as any of my other organs, and without it I would not survive much more than a few days, so I am technically a cyborg!  Much like Leah Pipezna-Samarasinha, I did a lot of writing from bed over the years, and I also turned to art “not out of a desire for fame or cultural capital, but to be useful” (Piepzna-Smarasinha, 2018:17).. I learned to knit and crochet because it helped to ease the anxiety and depression that I suffered around my illness, and also let me produce useful things that might offer comfort to others. This brings me to the third intersection that I want to discuss in this paper - that of my Asperger’s syndrome. 

The Blue Streak

This shawl has a single blue streak, it was just a lucky thing that this particular ball of yarn had this streak in it, and it worked out as it did for the overall design. The blue streak is symbolic of my Aspergers, which mostly manifests itself to others in the form of “talking a blue streak” when on a topic of particular interest to me. For the most part, I have learned to work with my atypical neurological makeup, I have learned to wear clothes that are less triggering of my sensory issues, as they can cause severe anxiety, I am really very good at reading social cues most of the time (although on zoom it is a bit more difficult), I have always been empathetic and emotionally sensitive, and so that was not a part of my constellation of issues. When I was young and had much less training I often became the subject of teasing, bullying, and ridicule for some of my behaviors, which was really quite painful. While these incidences are less frequent now, mostly because I have become very good at masking them they continue to cause problems for me occasionally. 

The Podcast we listened to “The Freedom of Real Apologies” (2018) with Krista Tippet and Layli Long Soldier presented an “aha” moment to me. I was thinking about all the times that I have apologized for my behavior, for the way I may have interrupted a conversation, or taken up too much space with my thoughts or opinions, or feelings about a topic, it has become just my mode of operation to apologize when I recognize that I may have crossed a boundary or caused someone else discomfort due to the manifestations of my Aspergers. BUT...I realized something about this...that I am constantly apologizing for my essential self when I do this. I apologize to everyone for not being “normal” for not knowing how to be “right” or “good” in the way that “normal” people are. I was suddenly hit with just a great weight of sadness over this. 

Neurotypical people find me uncomfortable to be around, I am often blunt, matter-of-fact, and honest about my feelings in a way that others are not accustomed to. And so I apologize to them for my being. For my causing them discomfort, for my not understanding a joke(maybe it’s not really that funny!), or for not being able to read a cue when people are bored of my rambling about something. Or when I am overly enthusiastic, or “talk up a blue streak”.  Or when I am able to put together the pieces of a complex problem so quickly that others don’t keep up and get angry or upset that I am “rushing” to a conclusion or “getting ahead of myself”(my actual superpower). I apologize for these things, and I mean it, it's an honest apology, I try to learn to “fit in better”. I apologize to everyone, to other students, to professors, to friends, relatives, my partner, and my dog when no one else wants to listen. But you know what I have never once experienced....someone giving me an honest apology for the way that they, a neurotypical person, has reacted to me. To my being. To me being my authentic unedited self.

 Even in situations where perhaps a neurotypical person is actually being hostile or rude to me, I apologize because other neurotypical people also often think it is my fault that the interaction was uncomfortable. This honestly causes me a tremendous amount of pain and leads me into a vicious cycle of over-apologizing, taking blame for situations that may not be my fault, and sometimes to  feelings of deep unworthiness, and inadequacy. I am in a relationship with another person on the spectr um as well and the two of us can really indulge ourselves in a lot of self-punishment over things...but I think that observing each other do this helps us each to recognize and heal from our own trauma. 

Its a multicolor, multi-dimensional, and not quite symmetrical object

Like the shawl, I am varied and imperfect. I also have other intersections, such as gender that have an influence on my social location, in the ways one would expect. Being a woman has had a profound impact on my life, and being a teenage dropout single mom, being subjected to the horrors of domestic abuse, both physical and emotional, and suffering the pervasive damages of white male patriarchy, while also being disabled and poor have had a profound impact on my life. For most of my children's early years, it was very difficult for me to get employment that would come anywhere close to covering bills, and we relied on welfare and food stamps. We cycled in and out of homelessness, living in abandoned houses, on friends' couches, and at one point an old school bus with no running water or electricity. My father was too poor to help me, my mother too uninterested in my life to even know that this was going on. I was often unwell, and also dealing with the hidden issues of Asperger’s that I didn’t really have a grip on that made it hard for me to keep my life going in an orderly and organized manner. 

Having been through all these things (and a whole lot more), and finally getting myself to community college at 33 where I took remedial classes to get caught up due to dropping out of high school, I slowly started to pull all these threads together. I was learning to knit my life into something new...something beautiful, and useful.

 I started out in computer science but soon shifted to sociology. This came about because like Audre Lorde, I learned to use my anger at white male patriarchy in a way that led to my flourishing rather than my destruction. I was in a sociology class that was one of the general education requirements for my degree and a young white guy decided to go on a rant about how single moms on welfare were the root of all the problems in the country. The professor came to my defense when I got really ANGRY at this man, and on my way home from school I decided to change my major to sociology. Over the last 17 years since I first started college I have been able to “pull myself together”, and find myself in a place where I am now able to use my powers for good, and where my “shortcomings” are able to be transformed into useful tools, for empathy, for understanding, and for transforming my own personal pain and suffering into work that promotes not only my own flourishing, but that of others, and particularly those with whom I have more in common than difference: other marginalized people who may have less social status and capital than I have at my disposal as a white person. I have taken up the task of dismantling white supremacy and the toxic idea of whiteness, working for racial equality and justice for people of color. There is no way to become a community that fully engages the beauty and humanity of all people without dismantling these false identities that we (white people in particular) cling to. As Gloria Anzaldua states: “I seek an exoneration, a seeing through the fictions of white supremacy, a seeing of ourselves in our true guises and not as the false racial personality that has been given to us, and that we have given to ourselves” (Anzaldua 1987). I feel that the closer I am able to move towards my authentic self, and the closer I am able to help others move towards theirs, fearlessly and with love and tenderness, that we can all find ourselves closer to the Kindom of God, to the beloved community that we long for. So to that end I feel my main vocation and calling is going to be working towards dismantling whiteness and white supremacy, and that I have been well equipped through my education and my intersections to do this work. 

References

Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. “Borderlands: La Frontera The New Mestiza.” In , 4th ed. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.

Harvey, Jennifer, Karin Case, and Robin Hawley Gorsline. 2004. Disrupting White Supremacy From Within: White People on What We Need to Do. Cleaveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press.

Lorde, Audre. 2012. “(1981) Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”.” Blackpast 2020 (1981): 1–17. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1981-audre-lorde-uses-anger-women-responding-racism/.

Menakem, Resma. 2017. My Grandmother’s Hands. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver, BC Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press.

Tippett, Krista (On Being with Krista Tippett). 2018. “Layli Long Soldier The Freedom of Real Apologies.” USA. https://onbeing.org/programs/layli-long-soldier-the-freedom-of-real-apologies-oct2018/