In the recent New York Times article entitled, Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years, the article states, “He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been.”
I have been thinking a lot about what will need to change in our culture to address male sexual misconduct. Did you know that according to the United States Sentencing Commission, Fiscal year 2021, 93.6% of sexual abuse offenders are male and 74.6% of the child pornography offenders are white?
Sexual abuse is an expression of undigested male pain, just as racism is an expression of undigested white pain. White and male and power needs to grow its capacity and its willingness to sit with itself and heal its own wounded heart. I do not mean white male power, I mean white and male and power as three distinct bodies. Male includes all ethnicities, power includes all genders.
For much of my life I hoped white and male and power would see the bruises on my body and change. But, like the women in the Chavez article, male power did not take responsibility for its “loneliness.” Instead, it laid me down and then called me broken.
Waking Up Alone is the story of how I stopped colluding with white and male and power. I stopped colluding with its way of seeing me, which is really its way of trying not to see itself. To stop colluding, which is a process not an arrival, I had to work with the narratives in my mind, narratives that turned and twisted me against myself. I had to sit with incredible pain.
Ms. Murguia, a woman sexually abused by Chavez when she was a child, says in the New York Times article, “That was how it worked back then, she said — girls were abused by family members, by people close to the family, and it was always kept quiet. And if anyone found out, she said, the question was never about the man. “It was always: ‘Well, what did you do? See what you did.’”
What did you do? See what you did. These are questions men need to ponder. They need to sit naked before the mirror with someone who is wise and courageous, who can help them pick up the broken pieces they need to mend and take responsibility of the harm they create; and perhaps they won’t.
But I know that I can.
¡Sí, se puede!
I can ponder, What did I really do as an eight year old child? What is really mine to carry? Is it true that I am not as good as you because my skin is brown, because this man laid me down, because I am this gender, or this size, of have this kind of mind? Are these ideas they have passed me about my value, valid? Who do these ideas really serve? What is MY definition of whole and holy? Do I believe I am broken because that is the collective story? Do I deserve shame or blame because he hid the truth, because he lied, because he used me for a moment of pleasure, because he saw me as only a piece of furniture? Do I deserve shame because in the moments that I was most in need of acceptance, belonging and comfort, I agreed, I colluded, I saw myself as I was seen, as nothing more than what white and male and power are willing to see? I can ask myself what is really mine to carry?
This is my prayer for you and for me — May we put down everything that was passed to us that does not help us realize, free!
SO grateful to be waking up alone, together.
Nicole
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