slowing down
slowing down
SARAH
Racial justice educators Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones teach us urgency is a tenant of White Supremacist Culture. Doing things faster means being more “productive”, keeping the wheel of business as usual turning at a rate too quick to notice when something has gone wrong. Racism depends on the snap judgments of white bodied supremacy and the automatic, split-second decisions that BIPOC bodies “out of place” are dangerous and need to be eliminated. Racism depends on us moving too quickly to sense racialized rupture and need for repair. Racism depends on a world with too much to do and not enough time to do it, which ensures that the healing possibilities of anti-racisting remain out of reach.
Our relationship to time can be an anti-racist practice. For white people, slowing down to tarry with structural, relational and personal racism can throw a wrench in the endless cycle of urgency. Slowness supports white nervous systems in the biological cues that are needed to listen, listen to ourselves and listen out to BIPOC sharing their experiences. Slowness is a key ingredient in daydreaming an anti-racist future, as Tricia Hersey shares in Rest is Resistance. As white people, we need to be able to pause long enough to notice and interrupt our racist habits so something different can emerge.
KAI
Racialized people often come from histories (and a present) of exploited labor. So we slow down together, we rest together, we reclaim our right to slowness, to softness, to rest that those that came before us had stolen from them. Sometimes the “work” we do in the BIPOC circle is a guided nap. Because napping on company time, laughing on the clock, and slowing down to grieve together is how we resist, how we build power, and how our bodies remember what rest feels like and remember that we are always worthy of it.
We have beautiful examples of other relationships to time in our more-than-human kin, in Disabled embodied wisdom, and so many cultures of the Global Majority who know that time is flexible, that time is not only linear in its flow, and that grind culture is a sham. Our work is to trust ourselves, each other and the examples all around us to remind us to rest, to slow down, to care for ourselves because the future needs us. WE need us, so we have to make it.
“One day I hope we can all deprogram from the lie that rest, silence, and pausing is a luxury and privilege. It is not! The systems manipulated you to believe it is true. The systems have been lying and guiding us all blindly to urgent and unsustainable fantasies. We have replaced our inherent self-esteem with toxic productivity.”
― Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto
“I feel like a legacy of exhaustion resides somewhere in all of us, but specifically resides in the bodies of those who have melanated skin.”
― Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto