Transcript: ALEXIS SHOTWELL on Resisting Purity Culture /298
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana. Today, I'm speaking with Alexis Shotwell.
Alexis Shotwell And since you're definitely going to make big mistakes, it's much better to be one of many, many, many, white people who are good enough, doing our best, definitely going to mess up but are going to stick around and be available for repair and further responsibility.
Ayana Young Alexis Shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. A professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.
Alexis Shotwell Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
Ayana Young To begin our conversation, I’d like to discuss the ways in which your work finds impurity and imperfection as a fecund ground for political, social, as well as personal, and collective transformation. I am particularly struck by this notion because of the ways that perfectionism and purity are inextricably wound up in white supremacy culture. To provide some needful grounding, I want to raise an article titled “(Divorcing) White Supremacy Culture” by Tema Okun, a facilitator of long-term anti-racism and anti-oppression work, wherein Okun identifies perfectionism, individualism, and either-or thinking as key tenets of white supremacy culture. Given this, could you expound on the relatedness of conceptions of purity and whiteness, and then, speak to the utility of our imperfection and how we harness it for collective power?
Alexis Shotwell That's a beautiful and complicated question. So I think, yeah, people are often really surprised to think about the ways that purity culture is an expression of white supremacism. And so one thing that I think we can start with is just asking what whiteness is, what it has been historically, and when we look at that there's something really significant about the particular formations of what we call racial formation. So the particular way that race came to be delimited, articulated from that, as part of the project of colonization. And I'm situated in North America, but we can see the ripples and the intellectual formation of whiteness moving across the Atlantic, across the globe, as part of the colonial project. So what that was, in some real way, was an attempt to square the insurgent and liberatory idea that all people have worth and dignity, that was coming out of the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment, to square that sense, right? That everyone has dignity, and anyone can be someone who learns and transforms and lead, with the fact of colonizing nations wanting to and enacting genocide, enslavement, land theft, and so on. So, the initial way that that was organized intellectually was to make a split, make a difference, between people who would be considered human persons and everyone else who could be exploited, used, and subjugated.
And of course now, when we look at this, we also see the ways that when we think about people, we don't need to just think about human people, we can think also about the tendency and impulse that this initiated and that it sustains in extracting and devastating the natural world, ecosystems, and what we sometimes think of as non-human persons, right? So, to say there's a difference between the ones that we need to consider and hold in view and respect their dignity, and everyone else who we get to use up. That's the initial kind of an initial impulse of whiteness, that's where we're living now.
So that impulse is always splitting. And it's always concerned about contamination. It's always concerned especially about contamination of lineage or blood. It's concerned about the ways that things can be inherited. And so it comes to be a whole governing modality that is about keeping things pure. And, you know, we see this continue in white supremacist logics and rationales today, in eugenicist moves, and moves that turn toward an idea of purity, purity of blood, and purity of being. And, of course, aside from all the violence that that impulse has curated and promulgated, the move toward purity is always going to fail because the world is just not like that. There is no such thing as racial purity. There is no delineation between different kinds of humans that is biologically written. And as we learn more and more, and as we deepen our attention, it turns out that there's no delineation that we can really hold firm between humans and non-humans, who also care, and are curious, and play, and think about the future. So I can say some things about how this shows up in our personal experience, which most people don't think about, that quality of purity as something that is showing up in their own pursuit of perfection. But would you like me to talk about that a little bit?
Ayana Young Yeah, I would love that. Thank you.
Alexis Shotwell So a lot of the time the way that we experience this is that we think that in order to do anything, we have to do it perfectly. In order to have standing to do something, we have to do it perfectly. So that might seem a really long way away from colonialism, enslavement, border militarism, and so on. But the way that that purity impulse is actually the same is, it's supposing that there's something that really exists that can be achieved. And so one part of that is a framing of the activity that we're doing as something that's possible to close off from the complexity and the interconnectedness of the world. So the only way that you actually have - you know, purity is a myth, it's a lie - and the only way that you can even imagine that it exists is if you're imagining yourself as not embedded and connected to the world and to other people.
As soon as you breathe, as soon as you take a sip of water, as soon as you are in any kind of relationship, you're implicated in everything that's happening. Doesn't mean you're responsible for everything. There are definitely people who are responsible for horrible things that are happening. But we all inherit the whole history of what has shaped our worlds and we're connected to the whole thing. So if we're trying to - for example, I'm a white person, I think a lot about whiteness - so if I'm trying to be responsible and to get everything right about whiteness, I will inevitably mess up. Because there's not a way for me to be a white person and not be inheriting the legacies of all of that violence and there's also not a way for me to be a white person and not be benefiting from them. So, if I aim for perfection, and purity, even as a leftist, right? If I aim for perfection and for never messing up, you know never getting canceled, I'm always going to miss that goal. Because it's not possible. There's no such thing as being pure.
So the place that I care about this most I think is in our politics, right? If we're trying to be perfect in our politics, the only thing that we'll do is never do anything. Because as soon as we do anything, we're going to make mistakes. And I have to say that, as I've thought about imperfection as a ground, one of the things that has really helped me is also noticing how releasing that idea eases a whole bunch of other stuff in our personal lives. So it's not just political, I think, that we should let go of that idea of perfection. It's also personal, it's how we could live in a more gentle way with ourselves and others.
Ayana Young Gosh, I'm with you there. I've been definitely thinking a lot about that strain for perfection in myself, and how detrimental that is, how much internal pain that's caused, and where that idea of perfection even came from. Who conditioned me like that? It doesn't feel like it was nature that put these ideas of perfection in my head. And I think also, there's the cancel culture but there's also sometimes this self-righteousness that comes out when people strive for perfection or purity. It’s like the pain of being complicit and implicated is so intense that instead, people go to the other side of the spectrum of self-righteousness to maybe defend themselves from that pain of complicity. I've been thinking about that lately, how we all metabolize and acknowledge our complicity and lack of purity, and how that relates to being a good person or, you know, there's so much in this.
In your book, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, you write “personal purity is simultaneously inadequate, impossible, and politically dangerous for shared projects of living on earth.” Can you speak about how personal purity actually bifurcates us from collective thinking, and walk us through a process of how we reframe neoliberal conceptions of the self into broader, expansive understandings of collectivity? And in your view, how might this reframing be done in a way that does not extract or appropriate Indigenous epistemologies and worldviews that are fundamentally relational?
Alexis Shotwell Yeah. Well, maybe I'll start with that part. Because many of us now are trying to be in better relation with Indigenous lifeways and land, and recognizing that we live on stolen land in this continent and that we're not in good relation with the land or the people who have cared for it historically, and who would care for it again if they were given the opportunity as a practice of their responsibility. So I see a lot of us when we start thinking about interdependence, and about being in good relation with other people and land, turning toward Indigenous teachings and people. And for settlers who are differentially positioned, right? So there are white settlers like me who have moved across nation-state boundaries without permission or blessing, particularly of the people whose place I came to live on. And there are also settlers of color who were brought to this continent - they didn't choose it. And people who are currently being displaced because of rapacious capitalism, whose migration and movement are also not chosen in any direct way. So, there are lots of different ways that we who live here who are not Indigenous might try to be in relation with these places: thinking with and in response to Indigenous practices of relationality.
And so one way that works and that is really great is we might begin to have less of a sense that the point is for us individual people to be correct. And sort of like certified on the right side. Because a lot of those teachings and just people are really organized around, what does interdependence look like? And what do ongoing relations of responsibility feel like, what's the practice of those? So there's nothing bad about listening to Indigenous people and trying to have those relations of responsibility. But one of the things that tends to happen is that white settlers in particular might try to become Indigenous in one way or another. So in the part of North America, where I live, this is happening where people are explicitly just discovering, you know, pretending that they're native because they've found some ancestors 14 generations ago. And that's a kind of identity theft that is very violent.
Also, though, we might just try to fold in and give up the particular painful space of being part of settler society, and the sort of web of implication that that puts us in. So the way to do these relations of responsibility without either appropriating Indigenous spiritual traditions or identity, pretending to be Indigenous, or folding over our own capacity to be in dignified relation is to find our own ground, right? Which is to find the threads of response and capacities for responsibility that actually we have. So I've come to think that if at every point that any of us feel a kind of tug of wanting to divest ourselves completely of settler history and its violences is that those places, the sites of complicity are really good places for us to start to transform complicity and implication into responsibility and reciprocal care. So wherever we notice something, where we're like, “I do not want the world to be like this and I feel awful that I'm implicated in it.” That's a place where we can start, we can turn toward that feeling, and start asking what collective work is already happening there.
So that's a sort of heuristic, right? When you feel a sense of horror that there's a mine going in near where you live, and it's going to poison the river. And the people who are authorizing it are settlers who are ignoring Indigenous treaties and land responsibilities. And they're saying it's for the benefit of settlers like me, and maybe settlers like you. That's a good place to start fighting, to start calling relations of responsibility into being. To say no. So it's a heuristic when you feel uncomfortable: turn toward it and see where you might fight. And then it's a kind of medicine for counter-individualism and for resisting what I think of as self-righteousness that is based on purity. So often, when you start doing work, when you start working together with people, there's an impulse to be like the good white person who is totally down and has everything together. But a little bit often that happens in a mode where there can only be one. And since you're definitely going to make big mistakes, it's much better to be one of many, many, many white people who are good enough, doing our best, definitely going to mess up but are going to stick around and be available for repair and further responsibility. So that's kind of the best way that I've thought about the practice of not trying to be personally perfect and always correct. It’s those two ways.
Ayana Young Yeah, there are definitely a few people in my life coming to mind. And of course, myself too, in my own ways, but just really playing out what you're saying in my memories, of moments of conversations with intimate loved ones of how do we show up in this time? And what is it to be a good person, a good white person, a good Earthling? Somebody who cares, somebody who protects? It's interesting to consider what leads us to choose these different paths of relating to these issues, those of us who choose to be comfortable in our imperfection, or those of us who choose this type of desire for purity and perfection and self-righteousness, and how our wounds probably inform which path we go down with how we relate to these times. And also what stops us at moments from breaking through that clinging to purity in ourselves. I don't know if you could speak to that at all, or what your thoughts are there.
Alexis Shotwell I mean, some of the time, I feel really moved when I notice myself clinging to purity, or I see someone else having that struggle. Because one of the things that it signals is we really wish that it could be better. We really want to help the world. So it's actually that we could see it as a beautiful impulse. It's wonderful that you want to do it right. So if we meet that impulse in ourselves, with that quality of curiosity and kindness, we might be better able to meet it and others with that same quality too. So seeing, like, “Oh, you want to get this right, I see that.” Well, the definite and sure and certain way to get this wrong is to spend a lot of time identifying how everyone else is getting it wrong and how you're getting it right. Or to be monitoring your words constantly and trying to never put a foot wrong. And that actually is a recipe for demobilization and de-collectivization, and it's a way to despair.
So the impulse is really good, the impulse is really like, “I want to help.” But the fact that that impulse has been co-opted by a Puritan ethic that continues to inform so much of our activist work in North America, to turn that toward individual perfectionism. It's just a terrible mistake. So I think one question is when we notice ourselves doing that, trying to identify the people who are wrong and how we're right because we can see that they're wrong, we can look and say, “what are you scared of here?” And usually, we're scared that we're going to really mess something up, or we're going to shame ourselves before people that we care about, or we're going to be cast out of communities that we want to be in, or we're going to mess up something that we really don't want to mess up. And those are all good impulses to try to take care of each other to try to get things right. So as soon as we notice that tightening, you know, the hardening of self-righteousness, I think what's helpful for me is to turn toward righteousness instead of self-righteousness.
So righteousness, many people don't agree with me about this, so it might not work, right? It might not play, there might be some other affect I need to find. But it's basically when I've looked at people who've stayed involved in social movements and stayed involved in struggles for the Earth for a long time, they have this steady quality, and unflappability. They've usually made lots of mistakes, really. The ones who have stayed in, who you still want to talk to, who are still showing up at meetings and are a pleasure to be around, they have a quality of curiosity. And they know some things that have worked in their life but they're not positive that those things are going to work in this particular struggle or in this particular group formation. So that they have a vibe that is really showing up for the long haul, staying involved, and not collapsing when they make a mistake. They have an orientation toward repair, responsiveness, and a sense that things don't have to stay the same. They don't have to stay this way. And when we talk about repair, it's not like we're - there's a beautiful book by a philosopher named Elizabeth Spelman about repair, and she says, you're not trying to return something to a previous state. There are lots of things where the brokenness is just there from the beginning, right? So we can't ever go back. We can't return things to a different, previous state, all we can do is move things into some future state.
So repairing brokenness can be not a return but a move forward. And if we have good relations with others who were struggling with, alongside, shoulder-to-shoulder about things that we care about, the only way to do that over the long-term is to build in that quality of asking, “how can we look at the broken relations that we're in, that we've entered into just because we've been born into this world in, this moment? How can we enter into those relationships and repair them? And when we hurt each other, or we make mistakes, or we misstep, how is that work of repair also part of our project of caring for this world and making it a place where more people and more beings can flourish?” So once we take that attitude, that people are going to make mistakes, and we'll have to figure out how to repair relations with them. And we're going to make mistakes and we'll have to figure out how to repair the relations we've harmed in those. If we center that in our work, that changes the practice, and it means that we don't just leave if we mess up. And it also means that when other people mess up, we don't just expel them until we have just a smaller and smaller group of people who haven't messed up yet. That's a sure way to kill a movement.
Ayana Young Yeah, yeah, repairs, something that I've been learning and practicing more and more, and I always find it's so much scarier before I just start. What I find so beautiful about repair and healing is vulnerability, and so I can be vulnerable with others and I see that vulnerability come out. And then it's not that the healing becomes uncomplicated but it feels possible. I think, for me, at that point when we can just let go of whatever it is that's holding us back from real connection is what I think is broken, and what really we all want. And if we can go into things knowing that hurt will happen but it's how we stick with it and not abandon each other or ourselves. It's a lifelong lesson that seems to be something that is always present.
And I want to stick with this notion of complicity and complexity a bit more. And you address both of these topics in your forthcoming book, Collecting Our People, wherein you write, “We face multiple wicked problems that we cannot solve alone – complex things like global warming, systemic racism, and chemical pollution. This book is about how we get together to solve big problems in which we are complicit,” you continue, “But if we are complicit, we are not equally responsible. The harms embedded in social and material relations of living are unevenly distributed; some people benefit from those harms, and others bear their effects. There is no homogenous ‘we,’ only groups of people clustered in various ways, through choice or chance, positioned in history and moving together toward an uncertain future.” So, could you flesh out for listeners this idea that there is no place outside of complicity; that each of us is profoundly impacted by the complexity of social location, relative privilege, and subjugation?
Alexis Shotwell Yeah, sometimes, it's easier to think about implication than complicity. Complicity might have a feeling like I'm saying, “everyone's done something wrong.” And really, what I mean to be saying is we're all connected and we don't get to choose it. Just by being alive right now, on this Earth, we're connected to things that if we really looked at it, we would say, “I don't want this to be like that.” So that's about, I mean, gosh, just anything you look at there's something that when you pull on any strand in it, there's something that you're like, “I would rather if it wasn't like that,” right? So the right really likes to say to anyone who is advocating for solar power, “but look at the mining practices that are required to make solar panels.” So I mean, anyone who's been in an argument with, anyone who said something about like, climate change, or environmental devastation with a relative, or a co-worker, or friend who is on the more conservative end has probably had one of these conversations. As you say, “you are against climate change but there you are taking a plane.”
And I think all of us, it's nourishing actually to think about like, how can we actually better perceive the points of attachment that we have to these sites that we wish were otherwise? And that's one of the things that I think really is a way for us to start, right? If we are like “I want a solar panel but I don't want children mining it and enormous environmental devastation,” what things might we step into, and what things might we prioritize in our work? So saying that we're all connected to things that we think should be otherwise is really just a way to say all of us have some point of attachment for something that we could work on, that we could care about, that would start to move this world in a direction that would produce more possibility for more of us to live and flourish. But of course, not all of us are equally responsible. So there are people who are making decisions that will vastly immiserate masses and masses of people, that will devastate ecosystems, that will kill rivers, that are killing the planet. So we're not equally responsible. And it's good for us to identify our enemies, the people who are making it be the case that we are implicated in truly horrific things because they want to make money.
So when I say “we're all implicated, we're all complicit, but we're not equally responsible,” that's what I mean. We can have a clear-eyed understanding that there are people who are making these decisions, they could make different decisions, and if we're generous, we could help them make different decisions. Now, thinking about this move, right? So I was saying, purity politics is always going to be individual. The illusion of purity relies on the idea that we could be separate, not complicit, and not implicated. So resisting purity politics is going to always require us to resist individualism. And so this comes back to the question about neoliberalism that you asked earlier that I never answered. We can't solve these problems just by sheer acts of will and trying really, really hard to recycle everything. We can't solve them by going off-grid in any relevant way. We're still going to be involved in the world, touching the world, making an impact on the world.
So if we think about that, then we can say, the only way we're going to solve these big problems is by organizing with other people, by getting together with other people. Which, again, is always going to mean that we make mistakes, or we are really grumpy. We don't like we don't want to organize with that person, they're so irritating when they talk all the time in a meeting. Like all those things are gonna happen. As soon as you're organizing with other people, they are irritating, you make mistakes. It's uncomfortable. But it's also joyful because it's the only way to actually address the things that matter to us. So, in this book that I'm working on, I've been really thinking about these different ways that we can get together with other people and what they look like and how they are. Do you want me to talk a little bit about that?
Ayana Young Yeah, please.
Alexis Shotwell So one way is just on the level of friendship. So we're really taught in this world that the only kinds of sustaining relationships that we should have should be with maybe our sort of nuclear family of origin, which is one of the myths of neoliberalism that the only people that will take care of you or your family. That's a lie. And when we maybe leave our family of origin, we're supposed to find dyadic, monogamous, romantic relationships that will fulfill us in every way. So as everyone knows, neither of these things work like that. And both of them have actually a kind of great fear of the power of friendship. So one way to get together with others is to be friends and to be friends in the mode that the friends that you have called out to you, in their being, a kind of respect for what philosophers think of as your best self. So the you that you are when you feel most yourself when you have joy and no shame, and you feel like you're filling yourself to the edges of your skin. And you're also stretching into something that you can't predict yet. And this can be you know, humans can do this. Companion animals can be friends to us in this way. Places can be friends, you can befriend a mountain or a river that can do this for you. So that's a kind of personal feeling. And I think we should proliferate more friendships like that.
But that's different… and not necessarily this, you know, it doesn't even necessarily come into doing political work with people. So having comrades and struggle, or fellow travelers, is the way that you build people power with people who you don't even necessarily like but you are on the same side of a relevant struggle and you trust them to show up and work with you to help something change. So, this is another kind of relationship that is not nourished. You know, movements have been on their back foot for a long time now, and many people don't have the experience of being in a collective. So, forming collectives is a skill that we can have. We can have collectives that are intentional and formal, where you have social harm reduction practices, where you have ways of rotating roles so that fixed hierarchies don't structure those, and can have temporary collectives… So I'm just a big fan of people actually just making collectives - having friends, making collectives.
And then the third kind of relationship that I'm really thinking about is the relationship of naming our enemies and opposing them. So in my town right now there's a lot of white supremacists organizing, and coming out to say, “I am opposing you because I am white and you claim to speak for me,” is another form of relationship. Opposition is a relationship. So when we directly name the thing that we are fighting, we can begin to engage in opposition. And that doesn't mean that we have to be mean or horrific. But we have to actually be able to stand against things and sometimes it helps once you've got your mushroom friends, and your mountain friends, and your human friends, and your animal friends, and your comrades who are standing with them too. It helps to think about that work of opposition as something where they're standing shoulder to shoulder with you and you sort of have a duty to respect their dignity by opposing the thing that's killing them. So those are three forms of relationship that fight individualism but also that we need in order to make big change at the scale we need to make right now if we're going to survive on this planet.
Ayana Young Yeah, I'm just taking it all in, and I'm wanting to expand on this notion of friendship and comradeship and relations, but also on this understanding of our implication in white supremacy and settler colonialism and capitalism and I’d like to reference your essay “Claiming Bad Kin,” in which you propose, “I argue for a specific form of responding to whiteness that involves white settlers claiming rather than disavowing our connection to white supremacist people and social relations. I see at least three different roles we white people can take up in claiming our kin: as friends, comrades, and enemies.” Could you elaborate on this methodology, perhaps through a personal account, of claiming bad kin at sites of friendship, comradeship, and relations with those perceived as our enemies?
Alexis Shotwell So thinking about whiteness, I think, is really generous for thinking with these relations because it's so hard. So the ways that the friend relation helps us, well, I'll just say something first about claiming back kin. So often, white people, we do a good job claiming and referencing the ancestors we have who maybe fought slavery or opposed, in the Canadian context, residential schools. We sometimes will look to inspiration from people who've fought right, who were on the side of good as we identify it. And sometimes even will say, “I'm nothing like those bad white people.” So one part of claiming that is just recognizing that also we inherit people who were actively engaged in enslavement and colonizing projects, that we, many of us, have inherited the benefits of those systems, or currently benefit from them. So claiming bad kin is partially that actual work of like, who in our family do we need to take responsibility for like in our bloodline, our particular family narrative, or particular family tree if we know it.
But claiming that kin also, for me, comes from listening to Indigenous feminists who have talked about that move that white people do to say that they're not really white. And to say, “I'm Cherokee, I'm, you know, different things.” And one of the things that people like Kim Tallbear and Circe Sturm say is, that it doesn't actually matter what you claim about your relations and your identity. What matters is who claims you? Who says you're part of them? And when I started really looking at that, I realized that white supremacists claim me. So they're doing what they're doing to benefit the white race, to benefit white people. And they're trying to build that world. And as I've been walking around my city this weekend, the racialized people I know are targeted by these folks who are in town. And I'm not. So they're claiming me as one of them. They're claiming me as kin. So thinking about how I can oppose that and name that move as a move that I'm against, various things can happen, right? So that can be showing up for the people who are targeted by white supremacists organizing in my town, it can be putting my body and my face between them and someone they're targeting, it can be using my political position to leverage certain things because of the ways that I'm listened to. So there are lots of ways that opposition can be that kind of relation.
Comradeship in fighting whiteness, or recognizing white complicity, is often going to be in these more collective spaces, asking how groups that we are involved in can take better or different responsibility for the things that were implicated in, especially as it regards whiteness. So the comradeship part really asks us, what kinds of relationships is this group participating in and building that will transform whiteness and abolish white supremacism? How is this group calling each other and calling ourselves into practices of responsibility and transformation collectively? And what forms of coalition might we build that can leverage more power against white supremacy?
And then friendship? So some of the time this is people who are white people who have friends who are racialized, sometimes have the really incredibly generous space where the racialized friend will say, “this thing that you did was really not okay. That was a racist thing to say, or the way you behaved was because you're white, and it hurt me, or I noticed it.” So sometimes we have racialized friends who will do that very hard friend work for us. And it's always a sign that they actually care about us and want to be in relation care enough to do that. We also can do that for each other, white people can do that for each other. We can say, “I noticed this happened,” or, “I noticed you spoke about this person in this way,” or, “I know you don't want to be like this in the world.” And those conversations also are really hard. But if we're friends with each other - no one wants to be awful, but the only way that we transform is through relation. So those spaces are the ways that we can shift how we're living whiteness, I think. And often, they're all entangled. They're all together. Soon as you're working with a group, you're usually identifying something you want to change, and you have a tactic for how you want to change it. And you have people you're targeting, whose minds you want to change, or whose actions you want to shut down whether they change their minds or not. You have comrades, you know, you have people who are friends who are calling you in or calling you out. So it's messy.
Ayana Young Yes. Yeah, I feel that. And it's messy, and so worth it because we can't escape it. And there's no perfect place to be in our minds or in this world at this time, maybe ever. So I appreciate just looking at it, honestly, and facing sometimes our fears or our discomfort to be with what is and learn how to repair.
As we come to a close, I did want to bring up something that I've heard mentioned a few times and that's about the political sphere, and your book, Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, describes how the unspoken, intimate, nuanced, and implicit knowledges within each of us hold the potential to contribute to transformation. Can you speak to this relationship between how our intimate experiences of our minds' inner workings are actually deeply political and can influence politics on a mass scale?
Alexis Shotwell Yeah, no one ever asks me about Knowing Otherwise. That's so lovely. Yeah, I mean, this also came out of doing work with anti-racism training and recognizing how often, I mean, I'm a teacher, that's what I'm passionate about. That's what I do. And recognizing how often when we're learning and teaching about systems of oppression and injustice and harm, we give each other better facts, you know, and we try to sort of address how people are wrong, or they have a bad understanding. But actually, so much of what's happening around race and around everything, gender, and disability, and the environment is not about our concepts. It's about our feelings, and our implicit understandings, the things that we just don't even put into words, because they seem so obvious to us and our bodies, and how our bodies respond to things.
So, beginning to think about that whole network of things, our feelings, our bodies, our common sense, presuppositions, the way that the world has positioned us to be positioned toward each other and toward the world, that whole bundle is implicit understanding. And that's something that we have. It just is part of our being. And it's on that level, often, that we are transformed, and that we help each other transform. So when I'm thinking about this orientation toward movement spaces as an orientation of constitutive imperfection and repair, really, that comes out of that work in that book about recognizing that most of what we're doing politically isn't about having a reasonable argument with someone. It's about this sort of mush that is complicated, rich, entangled, and incoherent. It's like internally contradictory, that all of us have that stuff. And it's bumping into each other, right?
So being able to actually drop down into the level of the body, and the feeling, and taking seriously that that is a place where politics is happening is so valuable for us to be able to see like, “oh, is my drive for perfection and always being right just a fear that I'll be shamed?” You know, “is my feeling of elation here attuning me to something that I want to work on more?” So having some sense of trust in that inner being, and that way that we are in that way that we know can actually guide us sounds very kind of woo-woo a little bit. But actually, I think it's kind of the only way that any social movement has ever really flourished, right? Like building a space where we collectively can be with our messy, mushy, imperfect innards. That's the thing that's really nice about being in a collective space organizing with people - that all of that is welcome, your whole self is there and it's present.
And this comes back to that impulse to cut off one form of being from another and to say, “these people are white and they should get everything, and they're full persons, and everyone else is extractable.” That's also part of a move that thinks we should just think about the concept and our heads and freeze them in a particular mode. But when we dig down into it, we're like, “there's no such thing as reason without feeling and without the body.” And also, that place, our implicit knowledge, might need to be cared for and it might need to learn, right? I might be wrong about some things. So racism happens so much in that area and that whole sphere of our experience. And it needs to transform. That's not going to happen just by making a better argument. So yeah, attending to the implicit is so important.
Ayana Young Yes, it really is. And I'm hoping that each of us can just hear your words and let them sink in and find ways to embody this knowledge and allow it to help us navigate these times. So thank you so much, Alexis, for spending this time with us and just going into all these crevices that we went into. I really appreciate it.
Alexis Shotwell Thank you so much for this conversation. It's been really great.
Emily Guerra Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Wild Podcast. The music you heard today is by Daniel Cherniske and Anne Carol Mitchel. For the Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, and Julia Jackson.