play/failure
play/failure
Practice Progress is an ever-evolving experiment into embodied methods for failing at upholding this white supremacist world. We practice failure because when we embrace the discomfort that failure brings up, we are moving away from what we know and towards anti-racisting. We fail in order to become the kind of beings we need to be to create and inhabit the world we all need and deserve.
Remember that we HAVE to fail, so we need to embrace its spiky feelings with a playful spirit.
We like the word “play” to remind ourselves to lower the stakes, to play rather than try to control, and to remember that our bodies already know how to play–we just need to practice how to listen.
KAI
As white folks trying to do change work, we often stifle ourselves by focusing too much on "getting it right. So if I am trying to “get it right” when I show up with organizers on a community ICE Watch, or when I invite my mom to talk with me about paternalism with her Brown neighbors as racist, or when it's time for me to apologize to my students for moving too quickly when something messed up was said in class, I will miss out on invaluable opportunities for trust, connection, and learning. Being willing to fail, make mistakes, or admit I am exactly where I am–which is not perfect–allows me to stay close to my experience of sensation, to speak honestly and humbly, to ask for lots of help, and practice trust instead of false mastery.
As Jay Smooth reminds us, fucking up is inevitable, and false distinctions between “good” and “bad” have no place in anti-racisting:
“I hope that bit by bit, if we consider that and are mindful of it, we can shift away from being told we said something racist as an indictment of our goodness, and move towards taking it, as a gesture of respect and an act of kindness, when someone tells us that we've got something racist stuck in our teeth.”
— Excerpt from Jay Smooth’s TedX talk at Hampshire College 2011
SARAH
“If we want to make the antisocial turn in queer theory we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
EJ Hill on his artwork Brake Run Helix at MASS MoCA