Shortly after my oncologist prescribed chemotherapy, we had a meeting with the Nurse Navigator. She sat my gent and I down in a conference room, put a huge three ring binder on the table in front of us, and began to talk us through what was ahead with chemo. Of course my first question was how long it would be before I lost my hair? She told me that by the third treatment, my hair would likely be gone. (She was right, it was two months for me from diagnosis to bald.) My long Instagram hair with the pink, purple, and blue streaks would soon be gone so soon.
I cried.
And then I learned that tears are a part of the body’s remarkable detox system that takes out the rubbish left when cancer cells die. The human body is an amazing ecosystem and tears play an important role in that system.
Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about tears.
I’ve also been wrestling with some things that have happened recently, so I expect that the work of wrestling some of these things into words will be somewhat therapeutic for me. Welcome to my weepy wrestling. Grab a handkerchief.
WHITE WOMEN’S TEARS
I recently took a class on antiracism in the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at EMS. One of the things we talked about in a small group conversation is white women crying in front of brown people. One of my classmates indicated that this should not happen. I really struggled with that because I’m a weeper. Tell me a story of heartbreak and tragedy and I’ll be weeping right along with you, no matter the color of your skin. It’s just the way my self silenced ecosystem works. I think I’ve stuffed so many thoughts and emotions in my life that I have basically sprung a leak from which I can not recover! LOL!
The reason my colleague felt it so important not to cry around black people is the familiar trope of “white women’s tears”. Because of all the things white women have done through history – like crying big crocodile tears and saying “he raped me” and then a gang of white thugs go lynch an innocent black gentleman. It’s also about a white woman who is quick to call the cops when brown people are busy going about their normal business in the neighborhood where they live. Sadly, there are loads of examples featuring “Karen” behaving in a shockingly rude, racist, and intrusively entitled manner. White women and our tears have been the soft face of racist violence, and those tears were pure manipulation.Thugs took their cues from those tears, communities were terrorized, and people of color wound up dead.
But even more nuanced than racial violence, there’s an aspect of “white women’s tears” where a brown woman can begin speaking, and a white woman can begin to cry – and then the focus of the room turns to consoling the white woman rather than attending to the important message the brown woman was communicating. It’s a dynamic of entitlement and selfishness that draws focus from the work of brown people. Unfortunately, this is such a predictable microaggression used change the focus from brown women to white women, that it continues to perpetuate that trope of white women’s tears.
I am clear that I do not want to be a caricature of a weeping white woman. I don’t want people to be afraid my tears are about to cost them something. I am committed to not centering myself in conversations that aren’t about me. Listening is a gift I can give, even when I am flat broke.
What I don’t understand on a very basic level is how to stop up my tears. There’s a lot to weep about. The reality that brown women have had to put up with this bullshit from us white women for generations is worthy of a lot of my tears.
And then there’s our own government’s complicity in the death and destruction in Gaza. Our politicians have failed us and the world God so loves. The number of Palestinian deaths has passed 30,000 now, but the infrastructure is so disrupted and information so interrupted that they don’t think this number is nearly high enough. Some sources have the count at more than 38,000 at the time of this writing. This massive loss of life is in response to the Hamas attack on Israel that took 1,139 lives.
March 24, Israeli authorities blocked access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem for prayer during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, adding to mounting tensions. By October there was such a wave of Israeli settlers publicly praying on the temple mount (which is not allowed) that the Israeli military police were turning away thousands of Palestinians. The attack of Hamas was not without provocation.
It will be many years before the bodies are found and identified and we can get a more accurate count of the magnitude of the heartache there.
Still, even if the numbers aren’t correct, it represents so much trauma, grief, pain, and loss.
There’s an amazing song on the new Soil and the Seed project called Jesus Wept, and the lyrics are very simple: “Jesus wept. Jesus wept and He weeps with me.” I’ve had that album on a loop around the house ever since it came out. It’s hitting a spot in my heart that’s been hardened with the exhaustion of life. (Visit their website and order your free CD by clicking on the download form.) I’ve really appreciated having this soundtrack for my tears. It helps me sense the nearness of Jesus in these painful places.
I might add that this Jesus whose name I’m using so casually is a brown skinned man from the Middle East – just precisely the kind of brown body that’s being bombed and starved in Gaza.
Jesus wept and He weeps with us. And rather than a “get out of jail free” card so that we are somehow immune from weeping and the pain of the world – I think it’s more likely that Jesus is showing us a life of compassion for and connection with people in solidarity rather than judgment. (Even though I admit that judgment does spring forth so casually.)
Writing things like this isn’t comfortable. Acknowledging the systemic nature of oppression that many women like me – and different from me experience – this is worth my discomfort.
Is not weeping, in fact, necessary? Beyond that, of course, Jesus is describing the state of those who weep, who have something to mourn about. They feel the pain of the world. Jesus is saying that those who can grieve, those who can cry, are those who will understand
Sister-friend. Our tears have done enough damage. We’ve used them to get our way, and to lord our privilege over others. It’s time we grow up and give up that kind of manipulation! Put off childish things. Power and privilege that leads to soft violence or bloody violence is a language we need to forget. Our mouths, and our tear stained faces do not need to be fluent in the language of oppression!
Richard Rohr writes:
In the Beatitudes, Jesus praises the weeping class, those who can enter into solidarity with the pain of the world and not try to extract themselves from it. Weeping over our sin and the sin of the world is an entirely different mode than self-hatred or hatred of others.
When Jesus moved from his wilderness into his ministry, he went to a synagogue in Nazareth on the Sabbath. The scroll containing the text of Isaiah was handed to him and he found the place where it was written:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressedfree, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Luke 4:18,19
(These words are taken from Isaiah 61:1, and maybe it’s also a loose reference to all of Isaiah 61 which is such a fun read!)
I only noticed recently, that the people in this passage that Jesus felt most called to were without exception the lowest caste of culture. The poor, prisoners, and the oppressed. What a powerful context to help us understand the ministry of Jesus. While modern evangelicalism seems mesmerized by prestige, power, and presidents, Jesus was and is on a mission to the folks with the least privilege, to set them free from their oppression.
Well honey, if you and I are part of that oppression, then we’re more likely to see the table tipping side of Jesus, than the soft side.
And that is as it should be.
What would happen if we very intentionally focused our life and work on helping the people Jesus went after. As Richard Rohr puts it, “the weeping class”. We will find Jesus in the weeping class. We will also find a sense of purpose there.
Sister-friend, if we can’t weep with the weeping class – acknowledging the places where we might actually be a part of the cause of the pain… then we’re missing out on mission!
Jesus wept. And maybe Jesus weeps for the places where we are blind to our participation in systems that do harm. I’m not here to lay a burden or guilt on anyone, I just think it’s reasonable to have our hearts and minds open to the ways we can make adjustments to our existence so that others can live with less pain and oppression. What good is a religion that prefers our blindness anyway?!
Maybe there are times when I need to allow those tears that I’ve been hiding – maybe there are times and places to let them show.
I HAVE A QUESTION:
If our white woman’s tears have the power to instigate violence and oppression when they are used for self centered dominance, violence, and greed…
Is there any chance that if the tears come up out of the pain of the weeping class,
That they’d hit the target of oppression and fell that sucker?
Carmen Shenk 