Like most people, I watched the attempted coup on January 6th in shock, horror, and disgust. I watched something happen that I intellectually believed had to happen at some point, and my intellectual belief was almost no preparation for the reality.
When I hear Trump and his followers talk about how they are the “real Americans,” I feel a vast and deep disgust. I also feel ashamed to look like them, to know that a non-White person walking down the street, seeing me, might hate or fear me just because I look like one of them.
As if I needed to feel any more shame. Because as the Trump definition goes, I qualify as a “real American,” being descended on both sides from Puritans, pioneers, and slave-owners. It sure would be nice if I could brainwash myself and hop over to the other side, where unchecked white supremacy is just America being “great.” But it hasn’t worked out that way.
I want to identify here as not just White, but as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, aka WASP. Plenty of the terrorists who attacked on January 6th wore shirts with anti-Semitic views and frightened friends of mine who are White and Jewish. I feel anger and sorrow. I try to imagine how my friends are feeling. And I continue to learn how complicated a place America is: I have a Jewish friend who told me her ancestors had owned slaves, at which point I suddenly remembered once meeting a Black person with the same unusual last name as hers.
But for the purpose of this blog, I want to keep the terms “WASP” and “White” distinct. This is also out of respect for my Middle-Eastern friends, who, like Jewish people, do not reap all the privileges of whiteness.
The people who stormed the Capitol were an ignorant, easily deceived, grossly misinformed, violent bunch of terrorists. They are delusional, they are haters, and they belong to a group of roughly 15 million Americans who believe the attack was justified. Fifteen million is a hell of a lot of people living in denial. And they’re not going away.
Then there are my fellow WASP friends and family members, curled up in shame at our ancestral past, frozen by ancestral guilt, and confused about who we are, what we stand for, and what to do next. Some of us are still talking to our Trump-supporting relatives, and some of us are not. Well, we’re not going away, either.
Denial versus damnation. Could there be a third way? Or maybe some way to guide the damned toward redemption? Then denial might start to lose some of its appeal.
Part 2 of Miss Experience White is called Bonfire of the Ancestors. Part I ended on a cliffhanger, and Part 2 does not follow convention and pick up where Part 1 leaves off. Not literally, anyway. Part 2 is radically different. I wanted to come up with a way to deal with complicated ancestors: both the heritage and the legacies. It turned out the best way to do that was through ritual, and Part 2 is my own personal ritual.
Most of the biographical information in Part 2 is “true” in that these were the ancestral stories I heard growing up. But sometimes I gave the facts a massage, and a few times I just made stuff up. Because I can! I did many hours of research to place my ancestors in their respective, proper historical contexts. I learned a lot about American history: enough to know that I know very little, and that history remains the “his story” of white men because the other stories have yet to be told.
When it came time to start working on the wall calendar with John Seabury, I wondered if there was any way to incorporate some of these “other stories” into the calendar. I got the idea to include a few for each month as “on this date” calendar entries. John’s images depict scenes from the poem cycle, and so I let the image for any given month guide my choice of entries. The calendar will be available later in January.
Initially, I wanted to donate the proceeds to a color-blind, national educational charity because I thought if more poor White students could only get a good education, they wouldn’t be so stupid. Well, how stupid of me. Ted Cruz graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude! This isn’t about stupidity. It’s about entitlement, privilege, willful ignorance, and denial. So all proceeds will go to One Goal, an organization helping low-income high school students of color get to and through college.
Because let’s not forget; the Democrats just won the Senate! Stacy Abrams spent 10 years and turned the red state of Georgia blue. She mobilized the Black vote, including the votes of many affluent, well-educated Black people who had moved to Georgia to reclaim the South as their own.
Please support the development of a smarter, more inclusive America, and buy a calendar. And if you, like me, suffer from pangs of conscience because of ancestral shame, I hope you’ll be inspired by my dramatic ritual, Bonfire of the Ancestors, in Part 2 of Miss Experience White, due out later this month.
Milo
MISS EXPERIENCE WHITE
2021 CALENDAR
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