Tag Archives: me too

Featured, Justice, Listening

Good Men, Me Too, and the Rise of Nazism

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At 5:07 am this Friday, October 20, the Nazi who attacked me in Houston back in January was booked into a jail in Alachua County, Florida. He was charged with attempted homicide in the first degree. His bail was set at one million dollars. He and two other Nazis had shot at protestors speaking up against White Supremacy when Richard Spencer came to their University of Florida campus this week.

I call William Fears a Nazi, because William Fears does not like being called a Nazi. He prefers to be called a White Nationalist, because he told me he believes the plans of Nazis are weak and small compared to what he has in store. I’m sure he also knows that there are plenty of “good, God-Fearing men” that do not want to be associated with the Nazis that their granddaddies fought, but are begrudgingly content to be associated with the White Nationalist, Alt-Right that won their party the Presidency.

In January of 2017, with the childish and snide smirk of a 5 year old who has just put a whoopee cushion on his teacher’s chair, William stood next to men, women and children holding welcome signs at the Harris International Airport. We were waiting for the release of University of Houston students who had gotten their travel interrupted by Trump’s ban, and he thought it was wonderfully clever of him to hold a Nazi poster up amongst their words of love.

William looked like a baby who has just messed his diaper, as he smirked slightly and looked back and forth, waiting to see who would be the first to notice his stench. He and his brother were trying to get someone to fight with him so they could film themselves getting punched and send it to Fox News. They wanted to do it for Big Daddy Trump: create some fake news to make his lies look real, so that people sitting comfortable on their sofas in suburbia would be afraid of us and continue to sit silently when the violence against us and eventually, he hopes, the killings begin.

Unfortunately for William, the optics did not turn out the way that he was hoping. I asked him to stay away from the Muslim women and children, happily chanting their words of welcome. I asked him if he was a White Supremacist or a Nazi, hoping to distract him from them, knowing that it might offend him. It did offend him, but not as I had thought it would. He told me that Nazis and White Supremacists were weak, that they did not go far enough. That the Alt-Right would have to push them further.

He then he told me that women were inferior and not worth engaging in conversation, so he did not have to talk to me. Without thinking it through, I did something that could have cost me my life.  I turned my back to him and informed him that we did not need to engage in discussion, but that I was not going to let him near those children either.

As much as William had wanted to get his “liberals punching Nazis” video clip for Fox News, and there was a man standing right there ready to do it, to have a woman turn her back to him seemed to be too much. Suddenly I was being violently shoved from behind as he lay hands on me. The Virgin Mary with Jesus stitched into my clergy stole by the nuns of Marianhill Monastery in South Africa whipped back and forth, until another woman with baby in arms pulled him off of me, as a cry of “He’s got a knife!” went up.

The police officers took him off without searching him for the knife and he went to creep around the parking garage, waiting for another woman to harass. Advocates spoke to City Council about him, but it came to nothing.

Good Men did not want to be associated with his behavior, but they did not want to confront him either.

So, as I’m still blessed with a life and a voice, here’s what I need from our nation’s self-described Good Men, specifically those who bear the hue that William Fears prefers:

I need you to stop telling me from your armchair that you are one of the Good Men, and start showing me.

I am not asking you to punch a Nazi so you can feel like a man either, that is exactly what he is desperately longing for you to do. We cannot give this petulant child his way. Instead, I need you to start talking to William Fears. I need you to visit him in prison. I need you to find his 12 year-old self at your local school and mentor him. I need you to talk to your son about what he is reading on the internet, and teach him to listen to women rather then feel entitled to our gratitude and silence. I need you to understand that you can never lay a hand on a woman, and still be a part of the problem. I need you to step up and take responsibility.

When I say we have a problem, when I say Me Too, and you respond by saying that “there are good men out there” and you “don’t know what made me so mad at men” then what you are saying is that you do not actually hear me. What you are saying, just like William Fears did, is that I am not worth hearing. What you are saying, just like William Fears did, is that you do not have to listen to me. If you want to change the world that William Fears is trying to create, then teach your sons the opposite. Show them what it looks like to change in response to the voices of women.

Do not strive to keep the focus on yourself as one of the Good Men, without realizing that continually centering our national narrative on the irreproachability of the Good Men is exactly what is at the root of this whole White Supremacist system.

All that William Fears is doing is taking the Good Man’s fear of critique to the extreme. Listening to all the complaints of Good Men not getting their due, and spinning it into a philosophy of what he will do to return the world to the kind of place where they do. He is not the opposite of the Good Man philosophy; he is the extreme of it.

The same culture that makes the rise of Nazism possible in this nation is the one that tells you that you are a Good Man and that you do not have to listen to me. That raises young, white men to believe that it is their role to protect me and treat me like a lady, as long as I do not step out of line.

Meanwhile, here I stand, face to face with William Fears, unafraid of the wounds to come, while you sit on the sidelines waiting to use those very wounds to silence me. Waiting to rub salt in by telling me that you too do not have anything to learn from me; by telling me I am irrational; by telling me “I don’t know who made you so angry baby.” Pitying yourself for the way that women do not act like ladies anymore, while I stand here with a knife at my back.

The very system that puts me in danger, claims to protect me. It silences me by telling me to be grateful that Good Men want to treat me like a lady, while simultaneously using protecting my body as a justification for violence against others. The same culture that makes the rise of Nazism possible in this nation is the one in which the penultimate “Good Man”, retired General John F. Kelly, can get on television and reminisce about the days when women were treated with dignity and honor while simultaneously dehumanizing a Black woman because Black women are not who he is talking about.

Why should we be suprised? The narrative of Good Men in our nation was built by men who regularly assaulted Black women in the slave quarters, and Indigenous women on the plains, and then came back to bed to snuggle up with their white wife, relying on her to say he is a Good Man. The Good Man counted on us to make it possible for him to get up and do it again the next day. Our affirmation of his goodness made him feel confident to stand before God on Sunday without a care in the world. Don’t you think that broke something within us? Don’t you think we, all of us, need to be healed? Don’t you think it is time for a new story? Don’t you think you should stop relying on white women to tell you that you are a Good Man? Clearly, we have been lying to you for centuries, anyway. Maybe we should all start listening more to Black women like Representative Frederica Wilson if we want to get to know ourselves better.

Try this: Stand up from the leather office chair behind your pastoral desk. Stand up from the armchair where you are reminiscing about the good old days when I stayed in my place. Stand up and go find William Fears, wherever he is in your community. It may be awkward, it may be hard, it may even be dangerous. Yet, if I can do it, so can you. We need you to do it now, because when William Fears was a little boy, you taught him in so many ways that he did not have to listen to me. Now he has taken it to the extreme and is ready to kill to prove you right. It is time for you to show him he is wrong.

My friends at the airport were good people, precisely because they would never expect me to call them Good Men. Precisely because they would not have presumed to tell me what to do with my body or whether I could place it in harm’s way. Precisely because they were not about to disrespect my non-violence by punching him, but they were not going to let him stick a knife in me either. We were in it together.

Maybe all of us could stop worrying about who are the Bad Men and the Good Men, and all of us try together to be good people instead. That is not a title to be either earned or demanded, rather it is a life to be lived.

Do not insist on maintaining the role of a bystander in the struggle we face.

Do not try to change the topic to the fact that you do not feel like your goodness is acknowledged, in order to avoid acknowledging and facing our righteous indignation.

Do not tell me you are a Good Man, show me you are a good person.

 

Featured, Listening

To those that said “Me too” and those that thought it…

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The other day, I was walking down the street in my clergy collar and dress slacks, when a man with a white beard drove up. He was yelling something at me and so I turned to listen better, thinking he may need directions. “That’s a nice ass you’ve got,” he hollered. “Why don’t you get in my truck? I am going to pull over, up there at the corner, and you get in my truck.” I was walking into the Jewish History Museum, in a converted synagogue in south Tucson, and I knew that there was a small crowd of Jewish leaders watching. Not wanting to be disrespectful to them, all I could muster in response to him was, “Do you have any idea how inappropriate that is?” I walked inside the gate, only to see him continue to drive back and forth like a circling shark until I went inside the building.

I need you to know that there is nothing you wore or said or did or went that caused this. It happens to women in clergy collars, nuns in habits, and mothers wearing the hijab. It happens to lawyers, and teachers, and stay-at-home moms. It happens to the most famous people you know, and those closest to your heart. It happens on sidewalks, and schoolyards, and our own homes. It happens in offices, and Starbucks, and church sanctuaries.

I need you to know it’s not your fault. I need you to know that this is not about our behavior, it’s about their behavior. I need you to know that when this passes as a trending topic, and ‘woke’ men return to avoiding the discussion and demanding the exchange of flirtation in order for us to gain their collaboration, we will all still be here. You are not alone.

It’s been a while since I’ve written to you, I know. The better part of the year. The last blog I wrote was after that white supremacist in Texas was physically assaulting me at the airport, whipping my body back and forth like a rag doll until a woman with a baby in her arms tore me from his grasp. It’s always the women. Thank God for us. Thank God for you. You are so valuable.

In a couple weeks, I’ll be 35 years old. That makes it 23 years since the first time my mother told me that she did not like how the man at the store was looking at me. 23 years of being woman. 23 years of bearing the gaze of man. 23 years of having my male friends do that thing where they hug you really hard and pick you up without your consent and swing you around so that they can simultaneously assert their strength over you and at the same time squeeze your breasts against their chest. They think they are getting away with something. (Newsflash: we totally know what you are doing. It pisses us off. Stop.)

Going to college did not change things. Nor seminary. Nor the pulpit. I was 23 the first time I helped lead a funeral, and realized how uncomfortable I was with how the retired clergyman in attendance was gripping my waist. A little too low. It was a feeling I would grow accustomed to as men always felt the need to hug me tight after I preached. They never did that when the men preached. I learned, as women pastors have to do, how to put one hand out to shake the person’s hand and the other to place on their shoulder to hold them back from encountering my body.

It was always I who had to move out of the way, or out of the state. I had to leave North Carolina when my stalker walked into church and sat behind me. I was told my safety “could no longer be guaranteed.” I did not want to be a danger to those I cared about, either physically or mentally. I did not want them to know what I was experiencing. I left so silently and quickly, as if it was I who should be ashamed.

It was always like that. Men like my stalker wanting to own me as a possession. As if we should be grateful that they offer us the attention we so clearly do not want. Believing the myth that it is only they and not us who can give us value; only they and not us who are supposed to realize we are powerful and beautiful. That it is a virtue when they see our power, and a flaw when we see our own power.

I see our power now, and I am unashamed. We have every right to relish it. I celebrate us. I celebrate you. You are at the heart of everything I do.

I had a conversation with a colleague during seminary that I will never forget. He told me that there were men who would want to possess us, and if they could not possess us, they would want to destroy us. It seemed a little dramatic of him at the time, that is until I spent a decade living it.

Until I was told when seeking help in later years:
“Have you forgiven yourself yet?”
“I hear relationships often start with violence.”
“Maybe its good this happened, maybe this experience will help loosen you up.”
“You can never ever tell anyone, or they’ll say, ‘this is why we can’t let women be pastors.’”

When I got inside the gate at the Jewish History Museum, the people inside told me it would have been fine with them if I had cussed the man in the truck out.

I’ve had over 30 years to practice, and I still have not learned how to properly cuss someone out. When I was being driven out of San Pedro, by a stranger trying to kidnap me in a taxi, the best I could muster in response to his “Te gusto sexo” was, “Por favor, estoy una Pastora. Estoy una Pastora.”

This world has taught us that what is more offensive than the behavior of men like Weinstein is our response, our scream, our outcry, our fury. They have opened the door for him, while pushing us out it.

Lord, deliver us from polite society that would prefer us to be silent so that dinner is not interrupted by our screams. Lord, deliver us from liberal society that is all too happy to point the finger at Trump while shielding Weinstein. Lord, deliver us from institutions that see our rights as more of a liability than their wrongs. Lord, deliver us from those who will only listen for as long as this trends.

I set about to write tonight because I wanted to let you know that if in a week it is no longer trendy to listen to and believe us… if in a week the world has gone back to the way it was… if in a week institutions would still rather protect themselves than us… I want you to remember you are still not alone. I want you to remember that we can do something to change this. I want you to remember that if it happens to women in clergy collars walking into synagogues, there is nothing you wore or did and nowhere you went that caused what happened to you.

I need you to know that you are never alone. I need you to know that you are loved. I need you to know that you are valuable. I need you to know that I need you. Not a one of us can do this on our own.