I wrote anonymously a bit last summer on a blog called “White Guy, Black Liberation”. I was trying to figure out how to write about these things without putting myself at the forefront of what I was learning. I’m still very wary about trying to be seen as an authority… when some of my blog posts on this blog blew up a few years back, I grew very quickly uncomfortable with the possibility of thinking myself, or being seen as, an authority on things religion and race and just stopped writing.
Last summer, I thought the solution was to just write anonymously, so I tried that. It worked, for a while. But after a month or two I once again grew uncomfortable with taking the position of teaching people how I knew things they didn’t, especially as friends started asking me to write posts to address specific concerns they were hearing about as the 2020 presidential election was ramping up. So, I stopped writing again.
In conversations with friends recently, I’ve realized that what I want, and am hopeful will be helpful and sustainable, is to share what I learn… nothing else. I don’t want to write takedown posts, or “gotcha” posts, or convincing-others posts. Rather, I feel like I’m slowly learning things about what part of spirituality and faith actually make sense and I want to put them down in one place… and that’s it. Nothing else.
So, let’s try this experiment, and see if I can do it. For starters, I’ll be importing all the old posts from the other blog (and dating them back to their original dates, so they’ll show up as having been originally posted last summer).