Reading around the Pagan social media I’m finding that some people are claiming that the dialogue around racism at PantheaCon and in the local community is an attempt to “hijack” our “narrative”.
Are you fucking kidding me?!
Picking up a rug and finding what has been swept beneath it all along is not “hijacking the floor”. It’s cleaning house.
And it’s about damned time.
–Ember–
My name is Ember Cooke. I serve the Vanir - Freyja, Freyr, and Their kin - as a priestess, minister, teacher, bard, artist, medium, and witch. Or to put it the Heathen way, as a gythia, galdrakona, and seidhkona.
My personal practice is more diverse, as the Vanir have lead me into cross-training, interfaith work, and counseling for the wider Pagan community as needed. My friends and allies may span the world, but it is the Vanir I love as family. -E-
EmberVoices: Listening for the Vanir 
Kind of related… one of the things I love about Loki is that He doesn’t care what we look like, how we identify ourselves, who we love, or where we came from. Why can’t we all just see one another as genuinely awesome souls on our individual paths and respect that? This is one thing I’m trying to teach my kid. Respect others and their choices.
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Treating each person as an individual is good. Ignoring what makes them members of various groups isn’t as useful.
You haven’t quite cited colorblindness, but what you say here is a similar sentiment. It’s very easy to think that if we just ignore the systemic politics, and deal with each individual as a separate entity, all the problems built into the system will go away.
Alas, it doesn’t work that way. The systems in place significantly affect how we see each individual, how we treat them. Even if we’re trying our most honest, concious best, we have to make judgements based on what we know, and what we know is inevitably influenced by the over-arching systems.
The other problem with treating each thing as individual is that it makes us blind to larger patterns. When we say “that guy was shot because he did X” and “this guy was beaten because he did Y”, we’re missing that both were targeted because they were, for example, gay, or black, or trans, or Muslim. We can’t afford to ignore those patterns.
So, for better or worse, we can’t afford to only treat everyone as individuals. We must also pay attention to group identities, and address the issues that arise as a result.
–Ember–
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Good point. I’m a bit of a dreamer in that I wish we could all just be who we are meant to be without giving one another a hard time. It’s nice in theory, but alas, it won’t happen in the real world.
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I totally understand.
A lot of things that seem ideal would work if we had a clean slate, but don’t serve to *acquire* a clean slate. Unfortunately, we can’t base our plans on the ideal, we have to deal with what’s really in front of us. It’s hard to look at when what’s in front of us seems so horrible. I have to remind myself that closing my eyes is itself a privilege.
-E-
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Very true.
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