Being Safe

Rev. Marisol Caballero
July 26, 2015

In many liberal activist circles, we hear the term “creating safe space” casually thrown about. Is “safe space” truly ever possible or is the notion a popular fiction of progressive rhetoric? Is being safe what will ultimately transform our world?

Call to Worship
by Angela Herrera

Don’t leave your broken heart at the door;
bring it to the altar of life.
Don’t leave your anger behind;
it has high standards and the world needs vision.
Bring them with you, and your joy
and your passion.
Bring your loving,
and your courage
and your conviction.
Bring your need for healing,
and your power to heal
There is work to do
and you have all that you need to do it
right here in this room.

Sermon: “Being Safe”

I’ll never forget a story that Meg once told me about how she tried to explain male privilege to a man who, despite her best efforts, still didn’t get it. She said, “Women live with various levels of fear 100% of the time. Men don’t have to.” I had never heard it put that way before and had never even considered it in those terms, but yes! I don’t walk around looking over my shoulder, in a constant state of panic, but it’s nonetheless true. I think that, in our heart of hearts, it’s true for most women. I think that a certain level of naivete can be expected from those women who don’t carry around a healthy dose of such fear. History and experience have taught us this. The annual statistics of rape and sexual assault in this country, alone, are staggering- and that’s only counting the women who muster the courage and, more importantly have the support systems in place, to come forward and report these crimes. Margaret Atwood once said, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

Understanding how tenuous safety is for women, I was shocked when I heard the term used in a starkly different manner by a young Latina activist at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health’s Summit in D.C. this past spring. At the outset of the lobbying workshop, the day before we would lobby on Capital Hill, two presenters made their apologies, “Lunch ran long and we have a ton of material to cover, but everything we are going to cover and more is included in your binders for your perusal on your own time before we get to the Hill tomorrow. That being said, we are going to go quickly to cover as much material as we can in the time we have.” Midway through the session, a young woman raised her hand and interrupted, “I need to say that I am feeling very unsafe right now…” “Can you tell me more about what you mean?” asked one of the presenters, patiently. (I’m learning that patience and a high threshold for foolishness are skills required of professional activist/lobbyists.) “Yeah, you are presenting a lot of information very, very quickly – too quickly for my brain to process it all. I feel like this format isn’t providing a safe space for every learning style. My learning style isn’t being respected and I just needed to say something about that.”

The presenters reiterated their earlier disclaimer about time constraints, apologized, and attempted to slow down the presentation. As a result, less material was covered than originally hoped for and there was less time for questions. The workshop had been high-jacked in the name of safety.

I have been engaged in liberation movements and have run in activist circles for many, many years now, and have heard the phrase “safe space” used ad nauseam. In the late 90’s, the term was so refreshing. When facilitators of dialogue, professors, and organizers introduced a conversation as intentional “safe space,” it meant that bigotry and disrespect would not be tolerated. That historically marginalized identities would be celebrated and openly acknowledged. Slowly, over time, I have watched this prevalent term morph into a perversion of what it once was.

Curious by its mis-usage by a young woman of color (a first for me), I approached the woman during the break and told her that I was curious about her use of the word “unsafe.” Did she truly feel her safety was threatened? Did she feel like the presenters’ admitted lack of adequate time was somehow an affront to her, personally? Did she truly have the expectation that all learning styles and speeds would be catered to in every setting, at all times? She was defensive in her response, as expected. I was hoping that her defensiveness signaled that she simply hadn’t given enough careful consideration to her word choice. Who knows?

This interaction disturbed me. Obviously, it did. Here I stand, talking about it, months later. It didn’t just annoy me, it disturbed me. I saw it as a symptom of a quickly-spreading illness among progressives that conflates comfort with safety and upholds conflict avoidance as a virtue of doing social justice organizing and education. The sheer entitlement that is presumed by using the term “safety” or “safe space” is enough to get my suspicious side-eye out on anyone who uses it. Though I understand the continued need for and will continue to advocate for spaces and occasions for historically marginalized people and communities to know that they are in the presence of allies, think the mutation of the understanding of “safety” and “safe space” point to deeper, more systemic problems within progressive organizing and get in the way of true growth and hopes of peace.

In the early 70’s, when Paul Simon penned, “American Tune,” he identified the time as “the age’s most uncertain hour.” Little did her know that uncertainty, war, and violent hatred of difference would not be questions that only his generation would have to grapple with.

I had the pleasure of meeting Rev. Osagyefo Sekou at the UU Association’s General Assembly this year. His talk had me on my feet and his humor at a mutual friend’s cookout gave equal levels of profound insight. Sekou, as he’s called, is a Baptist minister from the St. Louis area (and hails from my alma mater, Union Theological Seminary! Woot, woot!) who has become a leading prophetic voice in the Black Lives Matter movement from the ground in Ferguson. He was recently interviewed in Yes!Magazine about how the nature of this movement has some on the outside, looking in a bit squeamish:

“Martin Luther King ain’t coming back. Get over it,” said Rev. Sekou “It won’t look like the civil rights movement. It’s angry. It’s profane. If you’re more concerned about young people using profanity than about the profane conditions they live in, there’s something wrong with you.” He notes how the leadership in this new civil rights movement is different, “Now the leadership that is emerging are the folks who have been in the street, who have been tear-gassed. The leadership is black, poor, queer, women. It presents in a different way. It’s a revolutionary aesthetic. It’s black women, queer women, single mothers, poor black boys with records, kids with tattoos on their faces who sag their pants.” When asked about the lack of ethnic diversity in most churches and how that affects this movement, he quotes Chris Crass, one of Unitarian Universalism’s baddest (I mean that in the best possible way!) white, anti-racist writers and organizers, “Chris Crass says that the task of white churches is not about how many people of color they have. It’s what blow are they striking at white supremacy.”

On Thursday, I was asked to give an opening prayer at a silent march and vigil for Sandra Bland, the black woman killed in police custody this past week, right here in Texas. I was pleased to see several of you turn out for the last-minute event. Before we began marching, the organizer announced to the crowd that we would be marching in a particular order, “Black people in the front, Latinos behind them, all other varieties of brown bodies behind them, and behind them – everybody else.” She made the crowd repeat this to make sure it was clear. I was standing next to a member of our congregation who has shown up to stand against injustice many-a-time. They asked if I had seen “what just happened.” “They just segregated the march!” “It’s great!,” I said. “What?” “That’s what allyship is about. It’s about listening for and not presuming how to be of help, about knowing when to lead and when to follow.” “Fair enough.” I was so moved by how this short exchange could move someone from discomfort, from possibly feeling hurt and excluded, to considering a different narrative; from considering that, “okay, maybe it’s not about me.”

We live in a world where, increasingly, those who are afforded unearned privileges, have unwittingly grown accustomed to an expectation of personal physical and emotional comfort. We saw this in the confusion around the name of this new civil rights movement. Many white people, and those people of color who felt a bit tasked with caring for the comfort of white people, didn’t like the movement being called, “Black Lives Matter.” “Why not, “all lives matter?” they asked and sometimes demanded. Saw a great twitter post that summed up “why not,” “What is the impulse behind changing Black Lives Matter to All Lives Matter? Do you crash strangers’ funerals, screaming I TOO HAVE FELT LOSS? Do you run through a cancer fundraiser going THERE ARE OTHER DISEASES TOO?”

Let’s stop expecting personal “safety” in our justice work. This expectation is the ultimate expression of unchecked privilege – which is not to say that those who catch themselves with their ganglia hanging loose are bad people or even bad allies, it’s just to say that when we realize that we can survive getting it stomped on, we may realize that is was us who dangled it all out before the world, in the first place. Friedman, of Friedman’s Fables, once wrote that, “all organisms that lack self-regulation will be perpetually invading the space of their neighbors.”

The notion of “brave space,” as an alternative to the expectation of “safe space” is creeping its way into activist communities. It presumes that learning requires levels of risk, vulnerability, and personal transformation. In truth, courage is what we need. After all, if safety is to be conflated with personal comfort, how can any group or individual ever be responsible for the personal comfort of another? “Agreeing to disagree,” is usually a means of avoiding such growth and learning from one another. Instead, we should venture into conflict and controversy with civil, yet challenging discourse, taking responsibility for both the intention and the impact of our words, understanding that these may sometimes be incongruent.

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