Princess McDowell

I grew up as the only black person in the room – classrooms, social settings, work environments, you name it. My single mother worked hard so I wouldn’t have to struggle in poverty, rooting us in the outlying communities of Dallas instead of the historically poor black neighborhoods.

Living in the suburbs left me feeling like I wasn’t “black enough” when I visited cousins still living in my old hood. And yet, I learned to navigate the ‘You’re so articulate’s of white suburbia until I could fight back with my intellect and language that stood in the gap when my integrity and respect was being challenged or called into question.

By college, I was ashamed that I felt more comfortable with my blackness in a room full of white people than I did with my queerness / masculinity in a room full of black people. Part of that came from my nontraditional experience in high school where both of varsity coaches were masculine-presenting queer white women. Even though I live in traditionally conservative Texas, these white spaces were more accepting of my queerness than the black spaces I occupied, which fostered a sort of solidarity that didn’t extend to my blackness in the same way. In an effort to not appear racist, white people erected boundaries when race was discussed or in question that cemented a disconnect. In the black spaces I experienced where the default is often heteronormativity, my queerness, and specifically my masculinity, made me a threat and therefore not completely welcome.

It took me a while to learn how to spot allies (both black and white) and most times, they were people who were willing to listen, to be wrong and to further their education around racial and gender-based issues. I found that that openness is essential to my feeling included and honored in mixed and all-POC company. That foundation has kept me from feeling triggered.

After working closely with Tatyana at a national slam competition and sharing a space where I felt safe and supported enough to recount a triggering interaction with a local white poet, I contacted her about a writing workshop she was teaching online. That led to the creation of a small novel writing group, where, two months in, I realized that I was a black person creating an afrofuturistic book in a novel group with two cis white women, and I was never uncomfortable. Time and effort was put in to make sure I was supported in the midst of the heightened/visual accessibility of violence against black people, and it never felt disingenuous.

~

Tatyana Brown

Long before I became involved in poetry, I spent most of my childhood and early adulthood working class as a domestic violence survivor. My (predominantly POC) neighbors and I, while relating across privilege, frequently found ourselves up against similar problems with only each other to rely on for support, and as such I learned to identify with and care about struggles that likely wouldn’t have mattered to me if I’d grown up in a more insulated, white context.

When I moved across the country in 2008, I faced some interesting problems in trying to form a sense of myself in community. Free of my context as a lifelong neighbor, I discovered that the people and issues I cared about most were not spaces where much trust was present for white folks—for good reason, of course. Through these initial interactions, I realized there was more to being anti-racist than my previous experiences had allowed me to see (by virtue of those long-term connections/friends rather generously giving me a TON of trust). What’s more (and this is a lesson I am still learning), I had to accept that my assumption of inclusion could at times be a kind of violence in and of itself.

(A brief moment of gratitude and love for all the friends, collaborators, and community members who have been my teachers throughout this process. I consider every lesson—even and especially the hard ones—to have been incredible acts of generosity, no matter how small or short the moment might have seemed.)

I’ve spent years taking apart socialized white supremacy for myself personally, and learning how to do it for others in various settings. For the past several years, due to what I can only now think of as an unconscious socialized need to impose boundaries between social justice and “purely artistic pursuits,” I tried to keep my creative work (as a poet and workshop facilitator) separate from my work around systemic oppression.

But as time went on, the turnout for my online workshops started to reflect the inequity and problematic nature of society at large more and more. Accessibility was a massive issue, as was the perception of what the space of an online writing workshop could/would be used to make. That meant that the demographic of writers I was working with was severely limited—often to predominantly white men. And when WOC writers showed up to work, they, in turn, felt limited in what they could talk about, no matter how welcoming and accepting I tried to make the space become. The workshop container just wasn’t different enough from the world outside to attract or support voices that would default end up marginalized. I realized it never made sense to separate my anti-racist education and work from my creative writing endeavors.

When I met Princess, the combination of her willingness to trust me and my previous work in the real world made it possible for us to click with one another in ways that were exciting for both of us. We committed to talking weekly about our writing projects on an ongoing basis, and those weekly calls became even more regular communication as the work we were capable of together deepened. We’ve supported one another through developments in our writing, in our efforts as community organizers, and as (now) close friends.

After a year and a half building a working relationship (which was largely guided by her invitations and based on a slow build of trust over time), we realized that together we could take the things that made what we have so extraordinary and turn them into a container for other writers. We could create guidelines for conversation and relationship that build trust, make space, and allow wonder and true intimacy/creative appreciation to grow. We realized that this kind of space had potential for radical change—both in terms of the kinds of friendships that could be built and in the quality of work our participants could create.

If you’d like to work with these two in a workshop for women-identified folks, please click below to register for Restorative Writers:

*Please know that we recognize the multitude of unique experiences of black and brown people cannot fully be conveyed by just addressing “white supremacy.” We are actively working to make space to also address anti-Black racism, anti-Latinx racism, xenophobia, anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Asian Pacific Islander racism, among other harmful -isms.