Spinescent

I hear comments all the time that remind me of just how many people I cross paths with on the daily who fancy themselves progressive but understand startlingly little about trauma or poverty. It’s exhausting to be sure, but when I hear stuff of this nature in passing, I usually just roll my eyes and get on with my life. It’s a little different, however, when remarks like this come up in a conversation I’m actively checked into. Recently, I heard something that fits into this broad genre of comments during a staff meeting on Zoom. 

In situations where the person saying something classist or dismissive of another person’s struggle is somebody I know and/or work closely with, I have to make a quick call. On one hand, I feel a serious responsibility to challenge what’s been said because, to me, that’s showing solidarity with vulnerable folks in our shared struggle against dispossession, extraction, and erasure. However, there is always this looming consideration around how much emotional energy I have to basically host the teachable moment on the fly.

If I’m being frank with myself, it’s probably most often the case that I do not have the reserve energy to do that. What’s more, I seriously lack the patience and trust that characterizes the style of teaching that I respond to and would always prefer to offer others if possible. That’s all to say that this teachable moment stuff is really not my forte.

Nonetheless, the sense of responsibility wins out for me almost all the time — largely because I’m privileged in ways that make me feel like doing my share means I need to show up where others can’t. So I stagger through explaining to somebody why what they said was fucked up as productively as I can. Always to my surprise, I often do an okay job holding the line, and whoever made the inciting comment is usually receptive and acknowledges the assumptions it was predicated on. That’s exactly what happened in this situation.

It’s really the best case scenario for how these kinds of confrontations can go. I can’t take much credit for that aside from the fact that I do choose my battles, and my bullshit tolerance threshold is so low that it probably forestalls much prolonged exposure to full-on assholes in my daily life. So maybe that leaves me with all the well-meaning unicorns who are genuinely empathetic and open to learning. Or maybe they’re willfully ignorant and just good at performing when they’re put on the spot — I don’t know. Whatever the cause for it, even in the best case scenarios with the most receptive people, these interactions still weigh on me. This one happened on a Wednesday and I felt like I had whiplash from it for several days after. I think part of that came from the ensuing struggle to figure out what it was about that particular comment that felt so harmful.

I knew within the day it happened that one thing that initially rubbed me the wrong way about it was that it trivialized someone’s trauma. Even as a relative newcomer to the discourse of healing and recovery and its function in social justice more broadly, there is one piece of wisdom that I know I hang my hat on: Trauma should be validated, not compared. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t account for privilege to contextualize everything, trauma included. But I feel certain that discounting trauma on the basis of privilege is not what solidarity amongst us vulnerable weirdos looks like.

That realization was an important bread crumb, but it took me several days to get any more clarity. To explain where I’ve ultimately landed in the weeks since, it’s worth sharing some of the context around this comment.

One practice we’ve kept up at my day job is a steady group reading regimen on equity- and access-adjacent issues through the lens of history in our region. It’s not required, but for each book we read, we have a pretty robust discussion or two that all staff and board members are welcome to join. It’s been pretty great overall. And because of the nature of the discussions, the usual suspects who participate regularly are aware of my queer Marxist sensibility at this point, and it’s quite refreshing to not have to explain where I’m coming from to a critical mass of people I work with. That said, the focus of our reading so far has been almost exclusively on the effects of racism, discrimination, and the brutal legacy of American imperialism in BIPOC communities throughout western Washington and the Olympic Peninsula. Now, that’s all very important stuff. And I’m glad we’re reading up on it as a group, but it feels like there’s a lot of focus on the consequences of inequity rather than its roots.

Something that I’ve noticed in enclaves like Port Townsend (where I currently live) is that there are usually a lot of white, self-identifying liberal folks who are comfortable isolating different kinds of bigotry — especially racism, homophobia, and misogyny — without necessarily calling to task the overarching system all those things serve. By contrast, I understand all forms of scapegoating, stereotyping, and political violence as in service to, and perpetuated by extractive, heteropatriarchal capitalism.

The reason that you will always hear me rail against “dispossession and extraction” — the reason I view our shared struggle as one against those things — is because I believe that theft and slavery are hallmarks of an economy built on the convention of private property. To chalk them up to the result of bad actors, extremists, or grave miscarriages of justice is to fundamentally misunderstand the endgame of an extractive growth economy that was made to profit white men from its inception. Theft and slavery are predictable (arguably integral) features of settler society as I understand it. They might take on different appearances to basically pass legal muster through the decades, but they will always be part of the air we breathe as long as capitalism is the law of the land.

That observation seems foundational to me, and yet, I don’t think it’s part of the dominant culture’s understanding of injustice. People are strangely comfortable calling out all of its effects though. I have two theories on why so many folks are comfortable condemning things like bigotry and discrimination, but not necessarily the economic system that has fomented them and made them necessary.

The first: Doing so requires facing the ways that we perpetuate harm with whatever property and wealth we’ve accumulated. I think most folks who’ve accumulated more than they need are just not comfortable with that liability. I’m not saying waking up and smelling the coffee like this is an easy thing to do. But I would argue we all have a responsibility to do it, and anybody who doesn’t is flouting their obligation to other beings on the only living planet we have.

The second: I think people are honestly more comfortable accepting a lot of constructed things as natural and predetermined. I think recognizing something like race as synthetic — recognizing that these things with very real consequences are in fact man-made — is another version of liability that a lot of the most privileged among us are deeply uncomfortable with. Because, at least as my theory goes, to admit something was actively shaped by humans in positions of power means it needs to be actively dismantled by the ones in power now. And that will require effort beyond virtue-signaling and yard signs. It will likely require giving up property, status, and material wealth.

I don’t know if either of these theories hold any water with anybody who is actually qualified to talk about this stuff. But while I’m arm-chairing this whole tirade, I’ll volunteer that I think the worst possibility of these two is the second because we’re in deep shit if people can’t see that anything can be constructed by the powers that be to justify inequities.

Something that I think about all the time is what I took to be the central argument of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning. It’s been a while since my reading, but I recall Dr. Kendi repeatedly describing how racist ideas have always been produced to satisfy a political desire to legally sanction and explain racial inequities. One quote that comes to mind a lot when I think of slavery as a form of extraction is: “So long as there was slavery, there would be racist ideas justifying it.” I think the logic there can be extended to extraction more broadly: So long as there are exchanges in this world (and with this world) that aren’t consensual or reciprocal, that is extraction, and extractors will manufacture ways to make it seem expedient or preordained. And you can bet your ass they will manufacture ways to make it legal.

While my opinions about the slow, calculated violence of capitalism are shared by some people in the bigger world, it’s far from mainstream, and I really don’t know of many people who wear their Marxism on their sleeves like I do — especially not in Port Townsend. My experience with most folks here is that they’re precisely the types who give the consequences far more attention than the roots of inequity. The danger of that is it feels like we’re always focused on damage control and not abolition. I believe we have to do both at this point. And I feel like a step toward getting people to think this way is taking the bigotry they’re comfortable condemning out of isolation, and centering the inequity in their midst.

So back in September, when I suggested a group read with my staff and board that centers wealth inequality in a local context, I wasn’t terribly surprised that the response wasn’t enthusiastic. I plugged a memoir that I had read in 2019, knowing it was about to get a much larger audience because it had been adapted into a Netflix series that was set to be released in October. That memoir, some of you may have already deduced, is Stephanie Land’s Maid.

Not insignificantly, most of Land’s story represented in Maid took place in Port Townsend. To me, the success and popularity of the memoir itself — though wonderful to see — was not the primary reason to lobby for it with this particular group of people. The bigger draw in my view was that Land’s story prominently features a working single mom’s experience trying to survive amid the wealth inequality and housing insecurity that dominate our area. Like anywhere else in the western US, these two issues have only worsened locally since Land’s years here.

I knew that many, many more people were probably going to read Maid for the first time after seeing the series. Even if the adaptation had been a dud — and it absolutely wasn’t — Netflix’s huge platform all but guaranteed this. Because of that, I knew that many, many more people who’ve never heard of Port Townsend will associate it with an “Upstairs, Downstairs” energy that is totally here, even if the wealthy retirees and nonresident homeowners floating around here are in aggressive denial about it. Nothing came of my initial suggestion for weeks, so I assumed it had been a non-starter. Which again, with this crowd, would not have been a surprise.

Fast forward to an early November staff meeting. We got on the topic of picking our next group read and a coworker revisited my plug for Maid, but this time with some sense of the success its Netflix counterpart had after a full month on the service. The coworker was gauging our interest as a team in reading and discussing it, but admitted they had reservations. When I asked them to elaborate, they said, “I mean, was it really that hard for her?” The implication, as I interpreted it, was that this person thought that because the story was from a white woman’s perspective, the trauma and demoralization of poverty was less valid. Everyone present for this conversation was white by the way. And all but two were women.

In follow-up questions, I was eventually able to suss out that this person didn’t realize that both the memoir and the series encompassed a whole lot more than economic hardship and navigating the maze of government assistance as a single mother. In my opinion, those are experiences that should be validated as stressful, degrading, and traumatizing no matter what — even while acknowledging that people of color, folks with disabilities, trans folks, and so many others of course face all kinds of discrimination and barriers that make survival in the US in this century all the more difficult. But just knowing how much homework I’ve had to do to arrive at my own thinking around validating trauma and rejecting the bigger system that perpetuates it, I understand if people aren’t quite there yet.

This person came around and seemed willing to give Maid a shot only after I said that I have friends who aren’t white who still identify with Land’s memoir and the representation of abuse and generational trauma in Molly Smith Metzler’s fictionalization of it for Netflix. I can certainly empathize with the cynicism when it comes to degrees of privilege. But I’ve also read more about Land’s experiences outside of the scope of Maid, which include at one point being strangled by an intimate partner.

For reference, strangulation is among the most predictive factors of an increased risk of intimate partner homicide. The risk increases by 750% for victims who have been strangled. And because I knew that piece of Land’s background that’s perhaps not apparent to every reader or viewer of Maid, I think the immediate dismissal of Land’s memoir was triggering and felt dangerously akin to victim-blaming. For various reasons, my brain is wired such these days that one of the most black-and-white, straight-up uncool things a person can do is gaslight and shame victims of domestic violence, or trivialize their trauma.

I can articulate that much now, but I was pretty unsettled for several days after that Wednesday staff meeting while I clambered to figure out why the comment had left me so upset and unmoored.

Was it really that hard for her? The question kept replaying in my head. I felt physically wiped out through the Thursday and Friday after hearing it. I’m not so sure that wasn’t my own body’s way of recalling a sensation tied to growing up in a home with an abusive caregiver and being expected to function as a normal kid at school.

The more I learn about domestic violence, the more grateful I am that no serious injury or homicide occurred in our household before my mom could get out with my sister and me in 2004. Every now and then, I look over the current danger assessments intended to help victims identify factors associated with an increased risk of being seriously hurt or killed by an abuser. For my childhood, I can answer yes to several questions about behaviors that are strong indicators of a homicide risk. It puts into perspective how fragile everything is in that situation. I think it stings to hear somebody question the intensity of any survivor’s circumstances — even if it’s over a different time in their life altogether — because I’m so keenly aware of how improbable it is that they’re even alive right now.

It wasn’t until almost a week after that Wednesday staff meeting, during a phone call with a friend the following Tuesday, that I began verbally processing some of this. There are a lot of glowing things I could say about this friend. They’ve really fought to live their life on their own terms over the past few years, and I admire them greatly for it. Part of that journey for them has included getting out of a toxic relationship and they currently share custody of their kids with their abuser. So, abuse is not an uncommon topic in our periodic talks and we almost always end up discussing the intersection of personal trauma and systemic injustice. I’m sure we’d be very fun to chat with at parties these days if we ever went to any.

Anyway, I shared what I had located as a personal dilemma. While being conscious of the heavy responsibility I feel to speak up for vulnerable people who aren’t represented in most conversations, I’d also grown self-conscious about being the prickly young white lady who seems to have an opinion about everything — especially where the welfare and dignity of other beings I share a planet with are involved. Basically, I can never tell at what point people are so inured to my contrarian reactions that they write them off as a schtick, and just tune out.

Something I think about sometimes is that I’d probably get to be a quieter person most days if I were always surrounded by some of my favorite thinkers and writers (read: like-minded weirdos). In this current phase of my adult life, I’ve come to recognize that I’m a mostly shy person who feels a responsibility to be vocal about certain things. And because those certain things show up everywhere, I end up having to summon the bandwidth to speak up more than I’d like. In turn, I think I get miscast as outgoing when really I’m just outspoken when provoked.

In our conversation, my friend and I were able to pinpoint that I’m largely reacting from a place of responsibility to the collective based on personal trauma. They agreed that was tricky territory, citing this wisdom they’d come across: Your trauma can’t be your personality.

I’ve thought about that a lot in weeks since. While I hadn’t thought about it quite that way before, I had previously thought about how easy it is to start relying too much on your personal trauma for a sense of identity. It’s easy because once you start to understand how trauma can disorganize your nervous system or leave epigenetic markers that get passed down through generations, it’s hard not to see your entire life as influenced and defined by your formative wounds, and those of your ancestors. I knew that I agreed that our trauma can’t be our personality on that basis. But I wasn’t sure how to square that with that prevailing sense of responsibility that I also feel strongly about.

Eventually, I landed on a satisfying amendment to the statement: Your trauma can’t be your personality, but it can be reflected in your principles.

That tracks with the solidarity of affirming trauma but resisting the violent systems. It also feels like the best-possible evolutionary progression of surviving something. If it moves us to prevent the slow violence of dispossession, extraction, and erasure, the struggle is no longer about any one person. By a similar token, I think objecting to statements that uphold the slow violence is no longer a matter of prickliness.

While thinking through all of this, I was curious about the biological function of prickles, so I looked into it. I kind of hoped that after reading about prickles, I might learn something especially profound about their purpose that would elevate “prickly” as a metaphor and make me feel less self-conscious about coming off that way. What I actually learned was that, in botany terms, prickles are just one type of adaptation found in a larger family of plants characterized by spines.

Botanists describe these plants as “spinescent” — literally meaning they have a spine or terminate in a spine. The family encompasses plants with spines, thorns, and prickles. Spines are derived from leaf tissue and thorns are derived from stem tissue, but prickles actually come from neither. They’re made of dermal tissue — making them projections that are only skin-deep. It makes me think that prickly is probably not the word for the kind of trauma-informed solidarity I’m riding for.

We ought to be spinescent. Our resistance to the lethal trifecta of dispossession, extraction, and erasure ought to come from something more like a spine than prickles. That’s what reflecting trauma in our principles should look like. It can’t come from a place that’s performative or cosmetic — that would be merely prickly. It has to come from a desire to reduce and prevent harm.

In Port Townsend, the most abundant spinescent plants around are brambles — specifically blackberries. I know we have native Pacific and non-native Himalayan blackberries and although I’m told the less common Pacifics are far superior, I’m not great at telling the two apart. They’re all just thorny and fucking delicious to me. The stems are thorny. The ripe berries are delicious in their prime between August and September.

While thinking about my own formative experiences with spinescent plants, I recalled a vivid memory of sitting on a prickly pear while mini-golfing as a kid in Gardiner. I was mortified and of course disappointed that the outing of mini-golf I’d dropped a few bucks on was cut short. But I recall being back in the saddle pretty quickly and no worse for the wear. Blackberry thorns, I have learned, leave a more lasting mark than the spinescent flora of my high desert youth in Montana.

I still have a mark on my left index finger from an off-target attempt to pick a ripe blackberry back in September. It makes me think that maybe there’s something to this blackberry brand of spinescence — leaving a mark on contact and bearing good fruit in season. If my reactions to uncool comments ever approximate that evolution, I’m okay with being spinescent.