Not too long ago I was at an event and there was a person there saying biased thing after biased thing. I just kept gently disrupting her. To “that’s not the kind of place where we would expect this to happen” I responded with “I hope we don’t expect this to happen anywhere.” To comments about those people I asked what she meant. To a rant about why we always have to bring race into things I responded with why I thought it was important, especially for white people, to think about race. I was the only person at the table pushing back until she went after a child in the group, and then the rest of the group joined in with boundaries on her rhetoric.
It was exhausting and at the end it got pretty personal with her saying some very negative things about me. Part of me wondered if it was worth it to engage her. And then I found out this week that her organization asked her to resign her role, partially because of her behavior that night. I know that the people who work with her had spent a long time setting boundaries and doing this work with her, but I also know that if I hadn’t been gently and quietly pushing back all night long she might not have gotten so hostile at the end, saying things publicly that were the last straw for her organization.
Sometimes doing the right thing, doing a hard thing can feel futile. I know that often we don’t see the impact, sometimes on the people at the table who can’t speak up, or who are watching to see if this is a safe space. And yet we have to keep setting the boundaries. We have to keep responding with clarity and love because that is the only thing that is going to change the world. If we all confront the problem in the moment, work to be more aware in our own language and perspectives, learn from others, and surrender power we just might find that we are shaping the world after God’s dream for us.
-Eilidh
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