Wednesday, July 8, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon By T. Lee Brown BLM Statement w! hing Ne t e m o S Try $3 OFF ANY CA CAT LITTER, ANY SIZE! O Our ur litters include inclu low dust, quick clumping, od odor control, scented or unscente unscented, corn cob, wheat, w a shell and clay. walnut (Off er good through 7-22-20) 541-549-4151 | 102 E. Main Ave. OUR DINING ROOM IS NOW OPEN! I should mention that she9s Black. Back at home, I didn9t find anything about state- ments and podcasts on the Black Lives Matter and NAACP websites. I skipped a week9s podcast anyway, not so much a bold show of solidarity as a quiet absence. No statement was posted. I felt I hadn9t done the deep work adequately. Sure, I9ve written about racism a bit, done some activism over the years. I9ve learned from Black friends and bosses and artistic collaborators. I9ve also whitesplained, generalized, failed to be inclusive, and wended my way through life in oblivi- ous privilege. In other words, I am racist 4 aware, ashamed, and despairing of it, but racist nonetheless. What kind of statement could I possibly make? It feels better to do some- thing than to remain silent and immobile. So white people make statements. Pause podcasts. Stand along Highway 20 holding signs. Others do work that can- not be seen. They make donations. Talk to com- munity leaders behind the scenes. Do the uncomfort- able and sometimes terrify- ing inner work required to comprehend privilege. Days rolled by. White people9s voices and actions didn9t appear to be point- less. White police chiefs stepped down to make way for Black police chiefs. Officers marched alongside Black Lives Matter pro- testers or took the knee in solidarity. Symbols of overt racism were rejected. A Black woman on the radio said White participa- tion mattered. I joined the mostly White protesters on the corner of Cascade Avenue and Larch Street. As for my statement, I guess this is it: Black lives definitely matter. Racism is real. I9d like to fight it, internally and externally. I9m a writer. Maybe that can be of use. If you9d like me to write about a personal experience regarding race in Sisters Country, get in touch (tiffany@plazm.com). Beyond that, I9m unsure. Perhaps, amid spasms of mostly White fragility, I will become a better ally. Work on the ancestral trauma in my multiracial blood- lines. Help my son come to terms with the genocide that almost wiped out one branch of his family. But there9s a chance I9ll bail. There9s a chance I9ll sink back into privilege and wring my hands at the violence and bigotry in our world, too horrified to make a difference. Holistic Mental Health Solutions Medication Management Counseling • Functional Medicine Audry Van Houweling PMHNP-BC Quick and Affordable Help Sun-Thurs 11-9 • Fri-Sat 11-9:30 Menu at SistersSaloon.net 541-595-8337 • www.shesoarspsych.com 541-549-RIBS | 190 E. 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It began <Black Lives Matter= and went on to say earnest things about race. He and his business part- ner are White men with a successful enterprise near Portland. The statement looked out of place amid photos of agricultural items and posts about weather conditions. I felt curious and nonplussed. I9ve met friends and customers of the two own- ers, people of various races and ethnicities. The own- ers experience prejudice and discrimination; I could imagine them responding to injustice with sympathy. They weren9t anti-law- enforcement, I knew. I grew up with one of these guys; his dad was a cop. I decided I liked their statement, which was short and sincere. Others, I feared, might dismiss it as window dressing, the <vacuous vir- tue signaling= or <perfor- mative wokeness= against which Sisters Country likes to stay vigilant. In the wake of George Floyd9s death, I wasn9t immersed in liberal group- think. I was on COVID lockdown with health issues and I9d abandoned social media years before. I read the news selectively, care- fully. I wept. I felt horror, guilt, and shame 4 for my country, for complacency and racism, my own and that of others. My email inbox began to fill with awkward state- ments from White people, pledging with varying degrees of believability to FORKLIFTS • MANLIFTS • JACKS, HOISTS & LIFTS • MOVING • PAINTING • PARTY • LADDERS PINES both create woo-woo spiri- tual materials online. She suggested we stop posting to make space for Black voices. I thought of the handful of listeners who appreciate my mini-podcast, among them a heroic hospice chap- lain in California, a wheel- chair-bound musician in Wisconsin, a hard-working environmental activist in Sisters. I wondered how denying them a dose of weekly woo would benefit Black Americans. Folks in Sisters had asked when I was going to write about all this, whether I was participating in the BLM protests. I blamed my health; in truth I was stilled by ambivalence and cynicism. I thought of the race-related column I wrote in The Nugget a year ago, how the responding Letters to the Editor suggested denial. Thoughts swirled in my head as the Deschutes eddied around rocks and tall yellow irises. Climbing up the hill, I ran into a young woman I know, a person with sparkling energy. She showed me where to harvest nettles. She also thanked me for my woo-woo podcast. I was honored to discover that it inspired and soothed her during the chaos of COVID. • HAND TOOLS • SAWS • GENERATORS • HEATERS & FANS • LAWN & GARDEN • In the really do something about that whole race thing. Every organization and corpora- tion, however pale its lead- ers, whatever its business practices, had something to say. I read a few, then began to delete them unopened. The combination of naïveté and showiness made me uneasy. The statements seemed tailor-made to invoke accusations of band- wagon-jumping and inspire backlash. People hit the streets in protest. Talking to friends, I found that some thoughtful, White activists didn9t con- sider themselves racist 4 as though they were immune to the forces of image, media, culture, economy, history and neurology. Did any of us White and mostly White people know a damned thing about rac- ism and our part in it? Did we understand the situation well enough to be making big statements, or were we knee-jerk responding to a trend? I couldn9t tell. A long walk along the Deschutes grounded me in the earth, the living planet under my feet. I breathed and listened to birdsong. I recognized the fortune of being able to take such a walk, as a mostly White person in a mostly White region with rising property values and rents, the kind of place where <BLM= usu- ally refers to tracts of public land. Our fair state (double entendre intended) was founded on principles that included a ban on slavery but also a ban on Black people settling here. One exclusion law specified that <any free negro or mulatto= who failed to quit the area in a timely fashion would <receive upon his or her bare back not less than twenty nor more than thirty- nine stripes, to be inflicted by the constable of the proper county.= That9s Oregon, my home state, the place I love. At the river, I met up with a friend, a White busi- ness owner. She gently explained that people were posting statements because they9d been asked to. The only request I9d received came from a white-appear- ing woman like me. We 5