This week I’ve been thinking a lot about social responsibility. I’ve been re-reading (for critique purposes) Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s ridiculously candid memoir, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home.

In it, she talks about her identity as a mixed race queer girl and her finding home in the South Asian communities of Toronto. She speaks plainly about the things all of them did to survive poverty and class and race dynamics. What strikes me is this passage about social responsibility and the women who taught her: “I was raised here. By these women-of-color places that taught me that being a light-skinned person was a privilege and a tax, that it didn’t mean you were prettier or more special than anyone else, it meant you took your privilege and went in and got the grant or stole the spray paint because no one was following you aroun the store, and then you shared the money and spray paint with everyone.”

For all of my life, or at least since I began to understand my place in systemic privilege for only select groups, I’ve felt a calling, an almost teary-eyed foot-stompy desire to be that person who gets the grant and steals the spray paint, if in any way I possibly can. It’s a fierce need, destructive sometimes. I want to share what I have, even if it’s nothing, and I want to build allyship and community with people, not just people who are like me. I want us all to feel a little less alone, to feel held up and embraced on all sides, to not feel afraid to go home or go out or go where society says we’re not supposed to. Who’s with me?

Also, a song, because all my ears want to hear right now is Cocteau Twins. There’s something of that embracing quality in their music. You feel almost stifled by it, in the best possible way.

See you all next week.