It feels surreal to go about my morning routine—showering, making breakfast and tea, checking email—knowing that yesterday white supremacists stormed the United States Congress in an attempted coup.
In my 35 years of life, I've born witness to historical events like 9/11, the 2008 market crash, and of course, the pandemic we are all still living through. When 9/11 happened it was the first globally recognized "history in the making" event in my conscious memory. I was seventeen at the time. One of my best friends called me that day and said, "I keep thinking how one day, kids will be studying this in school and we can tell them where we were and what it was like to live through it just like our parents with stuff like the fall of the Berlin Wall or Kennedy's assassination."
The Internet has evolved drastically since then and there is almost a kind of unreality to unfolding events like what we witnessed yesterday. I watched it in real-time and yet it wasn't until this morning that I thought: RIGHT! This is IMPORTANT. I should write something about it! Mark it. Name it! Own my part in history and my role in bearing witness.
I was fully ready to just...carry on with life as is given how these days, every day feels like some historically monumental thing is going down. How could I possibly respond to all of them?
Of course, as someone racialise white, this particular event carries a different kind of weight. It was white people who planned this. White people who organized and recruited and built up community connections. White people bearing the symbols of the legacies of colonialism and white supremacy fighting to uphold that legacy.
It's a legacy I want no part in and yet, I am actively benefiting from right now as I write this. As a white person committed to anti-racism, I strive to call other white people in to do the work we must do so that white violence cannot continue to thrive. I want to create systems that prevent white people from enacting the violence we bore witness to yesterday. Systems that call white people into their better selves and whatever identities that are not reliant on the oppression of other identities.
Sometimes I feel like I'm yelling into a void, but I persist. I persist because I have seen such incredible social change in my lifetime alone. It's not just disasters I've born witness to, but shifts in culture. In my lifetime the Residential school system in Canada was ended, marriage equality was achieved, and the existence of more than just two genders has once again become recognized. Each of these changes has been a challenge to white supremacy (and male supremacy and cis/heteronormativity).
I can't know when the next great historical moment will happen. I can't know if it will be for the better or for the worse. Yesterday we watched history unfolding in the Georgia election alongside the history unfolding with the attempted coup. Both/And. Never either/or.
May I consistently align myself with the side of liberation.
Keep safe.
Kait