I don't know who still reads my newsletters, why, whether my thought fragments hold any significance to you, or whether they matter in the grand scheme of things. But thank you for staying present with me. Writing has become a conduit for my personal liberation and a reminder that my voice and perspective in this world are necessary. Writing helps me to take up space, to imagine what is possible. To question the man-made boundaries and limitations on Black radical imagination. Writing expands and breathes into and creates capacity to hold the nuances of my reality with as much grace as I can muster in these moments.
Last week, I presented my thesis project to a room full of faculty and colleagues for 30 minutes. It was the last “thing” I had to do to be done with my workday. Standing beside the podium, I addressed the room: I had been rushing around all week. Today, I am taking my time.
Here are snippets of wisdom from others that remind me to take my time and take up all the space.
In this infamous interview with a young Venus Williams, she speaks confidently about her ability to win a match against a competitor. In the face of a white man questioning her confidence, she repeats and affirms her ability. Her father comes to her aid, creating a buffer between her and the journalist whose incredulity becomes an insult.
“Do you think you can beat her?”
“I know I can beat her.”
The spark in her eyes. The gleam of her cocky smirk. She slightly lifts her head upward to look him in his eyes directly to say and say, “I’m very confident.”
There is power in a gaze. In this interview, Venus’s confident gaze is oppositional to the white gaze of this man, who was to humble her and diminish her confidence.
In the Introduction of his book How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, La Marr Jurelle Bruce introduces the concept of radical compassion as the antithesis to anti-Black ableism and sanism. He writes:
“Most urgently, mad methodology primes us to extend radical compassion to the madpersons, queer personae, ghosts, freaks, weirdos, imaginary friends, disembodied voices, unvoiced bodies, and unReasonable others, who trespass, like stowaways or fugitives, in Reasonable modernity. Radical compassion is a will to care for, a commitment to feel with, a striving to learn from, and an openness to be vulnerable before a precarious other,though they may be drastically dissimilar to yourself. Radical compassion is not an appeal to an idyllic oneness where difference is blithely effaced. Nor is it a smug projection of oneself into the position of another, thereby displacing that other. Nor is it an invitation to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes and amble, like a tourist, through their lifeworld, leaving them existentially barefoot all the while. Rather, radical compassion is an exhortation to ethically walk and sit and fight and build alongside another whose condition may be utterly unlike your own. Radical compassion works to impart care, exchange feeling, transmit understanding, embolden vulnerability, and fortify solidarity across circumstantial, sociocultural, phenomenological, and ontological chasms in the interest of mutual liberation. It persists even and especially towards beings who are the objects of contempt and condemnation from dominant value systems. It extends even and especially to those who discomfit one’s own sense of propriety.” (pp. 10)
I come back to this quote often. It reminds me that there is power and beauty in difference, even if someone else’s difference is not like mine. By extending radical compassion to myself and others, I see the opportunity to respect and value moments when I don’t see eye-to-eye with someone. Radical compassion gives us the capacity to accept the ways in which we will not always be intelligible to one another in our interpersonal relationships—across class, madness, disability, or politics. There is power in that acceptance, as long as it does not violate the human rights or the safety of another.