Being Known, Named & Gathered in Affinity
March 3, 2023
In her book, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, Mia Birdsong writes, “We can’t fully know ourselves without other people… And we are closer to spirit, to whatever is divine in us and the universe, through our connections with other people.” My own divinity, the deep knowing of my inherent value has always been reflected to me the strongest and brightest when I am in community. When my beloveds hold me with the love, care, tenderness, and compassion that is rooted in a deep knowing, I am able to access my fullest self. They know me not because we are the same, but rather because we are connected and intrinsically linked in the ways we are raced, gendered, classed, perceived within a heteronormative and white supremacist capitalist society.
From 2018 - 2020, I worked as an Intergroup Dialogue Facilitator in a program designed to encourage conversations around issues of social identity, interpersonal and intergroup relations/conflict, prejudice reduction, and social justice for students on campus. I facilitated a session on Disability Justice and the 8-10 peers that attended the ongoing group were all women and femmes of color. Holding the space transformed me. Even as a host in that space, I experienced a profound cracking open of my bodymind. The vulnerability and ease that came from similarity, sharing, and witnessing - not sameness - helped us create a type of ceremony every week in the basement of the student activities center.
“I believe that Black trans people deserve to create our own ways to affirm ourselves, on our own terms. When we dress as we please, and shape ourselves as we please, when we name ourselves as we please, those to me are all ceremonial acts. It's the way we breathe life into ourselves, get in touch with ourselves how we see fit.”
As a Black, queer, non-binary, thirty-something writer, I grew up in the age of the internet and have found abundant care, resources, aid, and love through wires, cables, and radio waves. Virtual intimacies have sustained my connections to community long before the pandemic ushered many into life via video conference. I recently found a Black queer virtual writing community called Sunset Service, hosted by an abolitionist bookstore & community well in Bed Stuy. During my first session, as we all settled in via Zoom, a host opened the space by sharing, “Names point us in the direction of who we are or want to be.” The invitation was to write and to explore all of the world-making possibilities of naming ourselves, and by extension our own divinity. They immediately provided warmth, lighting our path. So we gathered, a collection of queer digital boxes, and made sacred space.
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved
These affinity community spaces where my identities and their intersections are honored, held, and affirmed have been healing. Affinity, whether through race, gender, dis/ability, or sexuality, has, for me, been a practice of “gathering.” To have the pieces of me gathered and given back in the right order, has dispelled the fundamental lie of otherness, brokenness, and aloneness that many of us with marginalized identities feel. The gift of love, and the safety of failing also allows our pieces to be gathered by those who offer accountability when shame, blame, and guilt often push us out of community and belonging. Affinity spaces have gathered me both when I experience harm, and have put me back in the right order, aligned with my values and rooted in my dignity, when I have harmed others.
It has been a year since I wrote and reflected on Black History Month and holding quietness as a process and ceremony of Black future making. This year, as I call in my ancestral connections, vision and freedom dream, collage, and spend time dancing to my Black Futures playlist as part of my new year rituals, I am also moving more explicitly, earnestly, and lovingly to accept the gifts of community in affinity.
Center for Equity Leadership Affinity/Healing Offerings
Working and Leading Towards Equity for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC)/People of the Global Majority (PGM) | Tuesday, April 11, 2023
Working and Leading Towards Equity for White People | Wednesday, April 12, 2023
Sacred Pause: Equity Leadership Webinar | Thursday, April 27, 2023 (coming soon)
Additional links:
