Light in August

By William Faulkner

“No man is, can be, justified in taking human life; least of all, a warranted officer, a sworn servant of his fellowman. When it is sanctioned publicly in the person of an elected officer who knows that he has not himself suffered at the hands of his victim, call that victim by what name you will, how can we expect an individual to refrain when he believes that he has suffered at the hands of his victim?”

I was reading Faulkner’s Light in August on the day George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. It is painful to write. And in Faulkner’s book, published in 1932 I was surprised and saddened to read the words here. If I read it correctly, and I have read and re-read it, I hear Faulkner’s character pondering the rage of the oppressed, the victims. And, as Noah Trevor reminds us in this time, the consequences of the broken social contract we have agreed to live by. Faulkner’s story is a richly woven tapestry of race and poverty and the cruelty of ignorance and the complications of love. I am sad that his words reverberate with such truth and resonance still in 2020 on this subject.

Watching and reading about the brave people who are joining in the protests, I felt pride when I saw the millennial generation, labeled by boomers as over-protected and over-indulged come out in droves of support. I felt encouraged to see Capitol Hill in Denver flooded with mostly young people, on their stomachs chanting “I can’t breathe.” As a result, I find myself pondering my place as a white middle class woman, in this struggle. And then I read a piece on Medium today entitled Sometimes White People, You Should Just Be Quiet. It’s a rough read, and I don’t agree with everything she writes. But I do know this. I have experienced the oppression of being a white woman in a man’s world. And I know that I have never looked to the writings or words of a man, a symbol of my oppressor, for support. I have respected men who chose, instead of a need to talk into my experience, a desire to listen.

Yesterday I tuned in to a webinar where poet David Whyte answered a reader’s question about supporting our children during crisis. Speaking of his daughter, Whyte said he learned his role as a parent was to “apprentice myself to my daughter.” In summary, he said he needed to listen, from a masculine body, to what could be learned from her feminine experience. That’s what I hope for. A deep listening.

I decided that is what I can do. To be quiet and listen. To listen as deeply as I am able from the the experience of living in a white woman’s body into the expressions by people of color. To apprentice myself to their experience. It is easy to join people in calling this turbulence a “tragic time.” But when I read Faulkner I see that this is not ‘of a time,’ but instead of a deep and endemic cultural truth that has been brought, yet again, into the light.

I am not advocating passivity. Yes there is much to be done, actively and by people afforded the agency and power to bring about change (which is all of us, really, in a variety of ways.)

But today I believe the most empowered thing I can do from my place in the midst of this is to be silent. To listen. So.

That is all I will say about that.