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Intimacy, Mutuality and the Art of Anti-Racism
By The Rev. Barbara Ballenger, ARC Co-Chair
When it comes to addressing the effects of racism both within us and in our wider community, there are some common tools that we turn to again and again in the work.
For White people who have been taught to not notice color or to not see racism as a root cause of so many inequities, education about the history and the current realities of racial injustice has been an essential first step. For many years, the Anti-Racism Commission has worked to foster this difficult learning through our anti-racism training series. Such education helps individuals and faith communities understand how to engage in the many ways that racism can be disempowered and unraveled.
ARC’s recent Telling Our Stories series reminded me of some additional practices that can get overlooked in the work, and that are important to people of all racial identities: intimacy and mutuality. Indeed, these are practices that help us all cross the racial divides that have been long designed to keep us from healing a shared wound that takes many different forms.
Intimacy and mutuality are ways of knowing that are deeply embodied, and which occur in places other than the intellect. They are fostered by shared experience, deep relating. They are essential to the work of anti-racism because they strengthen the kind of empathetic relationship necessary to recognize racism in its most subtle forms, to feel deeply its deep impacts on others as well as ourselves, and to move to halt its spread. Intimacy and mutuality foster a depth of communal knowing and being that promotes healing, that challenges the intricacies of sinful systems, that allows us to strengthen one another for that work. They are spiritual practices, and they strengthen the spiritual practice that is racial repair.
ARC’s Telling Our Stories workshops, created by the theater company Playback For Change, were designed to go to those places. In these workshops, audiences were prompted in a variety of creative ways to surface and tell their own stories of race and racism. The first two workshops were for groups of similar racial identity: Exploring Our Whiteness was designed for a White audience; Telling the Whole Story engaged an audience of People of Color. People of all racial identities came together for the third workshop, Creating Common Cause. Creating two experiences for racial affinity groups allowed stories to be explored in spaces where the context was already known, and truths could be safely told without additional explanation or fear of misunderstanding.
In all of the workshops, members of the Playback For Change ensemble would artfully interpret those stories using the improvisational techniques that are the hallmark of the theatrical form Playback Theater. As a result, all could look more deeply into individual stories to see beneath the initial narrative.
Playback For Change co-directors Pamela Freeman and Sarah Halley would draw out the audience members’ stories, inviting the storytellers to pick an actor to play them in the retelling, and then checking in with the storyteller to see if the group captured what lay beneath these experiences. Sometimes the group would strike a tableau that captured an emotion or feeling that accompanied an experience. Sometimes they would simply retell the story.
Meanwhile, the larger audience was invited into their own personal reflection, looking for the places that resonated, appreciating the diversity of experiences and the wide range of wounds that racism fosters across racial lines and burrows deep into our identities.
The evaluations from all the sessions indicated that more such sharing would be welcome. “We all hide a lot of wounds from racism. And we need a safe space to heal,” one respondent wrote after Exploring Our Whiteness.
“I felt release,” a participant from Telling the Whole Story shared.
“Storytelling and listening are an important part of the work,” wrote an attendee of Creating Common Cause.
My take-away was that the shared experience promoted mutuality. The deep personal nature of the sharing evoked intimacy. The audiences left the experiences in a different space than when they entered.
Art does this. Beauty does this. It is a particular gift of theatrical performance to foster both of those things. And they are essential to the work of racial justice because they are inherently motivating and energizing. And without motivation and energy, we can’t sustain the many acts of social change that are required to disempower racially unjust systems - the work to create laws that protect all people, to redistribute power to those who have been denied it, to ensure everyone has access to what is needed for lives of dignity, to make lasting and effective and healing reparations to groups that have been long exploited.
More than 140 people attended these workshops. More than 20 parishes from all over the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania were represented. They also drew people from the wider community. It is my hope that the intimacy and mutuality that this artful storytelling yielded will allow us to truly work together in common cause to strengthen our shared work, informed by the deep knowing of a body that seeks to heal.
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