Rope and Skull

12 Jun Rope and Skull

I am sitting knowing that I am complicit in systems of white oppression. This recognition opens up two ‘Gates of Grief’ for me. ‘The Harm I have caused myself and Others’ (Sophy Banks) and ‘Ancestral Grief’ (Francis Weller). I am still only just begining to understand the ways in which my defensiveness and my inaction perpetuate injustice. I am also holding the lines of my heritage – people who stood with the advantages of white skin; who also took part in systemic repression. I think especially of those who were linked with the church, participated in civic life or held social capital. Some worked their way up through Lancashire cotton mills to make ropes and twines of cotton and jute. I sense my guilt and shame exude their rancid odours. I place a rope and skull on a grief shrine, to remind me of the weight of the suffering of others – then, as now. This gesture seems impotent, but I offer it and bow my head. Resmaa Menakem suggests that “the first step is to acknowledge that something has to change” around the “Historical, Intergenerational, Persistent Institutional and Personal traumas” resulting from genocide, colonisation and enslavement. I recommend Resmaa Menakem’s ‘Free Racialized Trauma E Course’ as a brief introduction to white body supremacy and the impact of racialized trauma on black bodies.