Fear Is Profitable

(especially when white women get scared)

(This is just a semi-quick piece of writing… process, remember? I saw this graphic by Jeremy Sole today and I couldn’t stop this process to the point that I had to get the words out. This matter requires much more dialogue, for sure. But for now, it’s something I need to get out and this is the space for me to do so, thank you for receiving it.)

This is not meant to shame, point fingers, unless they are me pointing at me. I write for myself just as much as for anyone else. I try to be as gentle as I can on myself, but also, I need to remember things).

Read it as you will, I am open to dialogue— I hold salons for all kinds of sharing and writing, please sign up for one if you’d like, link at the bottom, we begin January 28).

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Fear is profitable.

So my first spell is this: they will not profit off my fear.

They will not gain resources and power because I am afraid of them—afraid for others, afraid for us all.

Which means: I need to continue to show up, in the ways I know how to do, despite fear.

When we are scared (without containers to hold that feeling), we go quiet. We hide. Our bodies deregulate. We lose the capacity to actually show up for this situation in the ways we are being asked to—any of the 10,000 ways we are being asked to, and for the decades we have been asked to, but perhaps didn’t because the fear hasn’t hit quite as close to your home before.

Fear for me lives in my jaw first, clenched. Then it drops to my belly, and that area hardens and pulls up. My breath shortens. My sleep goes thin and unfruitful. My body feels brittle. I keep breaking it with my own shattered thoughts. Fear feels like a quickening, moving too fast, ahead of my own body, so I don’t have to feel.

I am not on the front lines. I am not out there in the streets (yet). I am in here, in my safe little house, writing and facilitating. And then, for three to four months a year, I get to escape—to go to a gorgeous Mediterranean island where the dust of half my ancestors’ bones helped form the soil, where the magic is so familiar it clings to my skin as soon as I arrive.

When I am there, I hold people and share how the ancestors may have connected with land, with each other, with the resilient magic of the island itself. I get to serve people, and the island, and even though it’s work, it’s also a dream.

But, I still need capacity even to do that. To keep showing up here, in this page. To keep showing up for my students, wherever I am meeting them. And to do it in a way that is actually of service. If I am doing it in my fear body, I suck at it all. My capacity goes from spacious to clenched.

There are two things I know I am good at right now—things I excel at: staying present, and being of service. That is the narrow passage I have to keep walking, the thing I have to keep practicing. I am not always in the right relationship with it, but I know it is my true north—the center of my circle, the tone my fascia resonates toward. It’s that sound my body returns to when I stop forcing something on it. It’s a low hum. Drums warming in the sun, a finger tapping the skin. The wave of the sea kissing sand. When I can sense that tone, I can sense I am aligned. It’s not easy lately.

That being said, I could escape. Easily. I can remove my presence. I could let fear be the thing that pushes me to serve myself.

I could get the hell out of here.

I am a dual citizen of an empire that controls the once-autonomous island of my ancestors. I could take two of my three kids (one already lives there) and my partner—though his role in this is different from mine, so he may not come. But I could go and hunker down in the mountains. I could learn from people of unbroken lineages how to fight fascism and protect land, eat good food, take siestas, tend to olive trees, and live a totally different kind of life. I could work remotely. I could forget about how it feels to live here, until it catches up with me there. It will catch up.

But I have no plans to do that. Not out of fear, at least.

I will not flee. I will not let them make me so scared that I flee.

I will leave, as planned, one day—on my own terms.

I have always known I will be an elder witch there, that my bones will contribute to that dusty soil. But not now. Not in this moment. Not because things are getting hot, unearthed, fraying, and bluntly obvious. Not now. Not like this. Not because sanity is slipping and the ground is shaking and we are being asked to erupt in the name of love.

I also want to say: I am not new to this. I did not just wake up to what is being reorganized politically. And I know many of you didn’t either—you are my subscriber, after all.

For example, October 7, 2023 was not my wake-up call to the Palestinian struggle. I think my first march for Palestine was in Los Angeles in 2002, before phones, before livestreams, when the FBI—or whoever—surrounded us with notebooks and cameras and headphones on. I am fifty-two years old. I have known this was coming since 1996.

Much of my activism happened before the digital archive. I have no photos of those times. We just learned early on to carry grief, gather in tiny living rooms, invite elders in to speak with us as we poured them coffee and took notes on legal pads. We went out after and danced to DJS spinning vinyls because that was the only choice.

I am a white woman, and I want to get on to my point of this.

I refuse to let the outright murder of Renee Good—bless her, may she rest in peace and power—elevate my fear to the point where I can no longer show up because I fear for myself.

Renee, who shared a similar skin tone to me, who was a U.S. citizen like I am, was publicly executed for attempting to protect people from the violence of ICE. She stood there and said no. She was shot in the face. Her wife watched. Her dog watched. A street of witnesses watched. She was called a fucking bitch with pure spite after she was killed.

It did not matter.

Do you know how many people of color have been shot down by police and ICE? Many. Too many. And of course—I hope—we feel/felt terror for our kin, grief, rage, and a commitment to show up as allies and protectors. But be honest, if you are white: did you feel the same fear then that you feel now? Did it resonate in the same way?

I don’t think you did and I don’t think it does and honestly it would be impossible for it to.

And there is no judgment in that. I love you. I see you. This is not about shame. It’s about remembering.

Of course your fear has escalated. Of course it terrifies you that it could have been you—mouthy, fascist-hating, ICE-hating, bad-ass, wanting this place to be just and livable for all, thinking that nothing that bad could happen to you because you haven’t seen it happen to people that look like you, not really, not like that.

Not that it hasn’t happened. White people were killed in civil rights. My mind goes to Viola Luizzo and also to a (white) friend of mine (actually the husband of my best friend).

When my friend was a child, his father was a well known Los Angeles preacher and also a close bodyguard and friend to Dr. Martin Luther King and they went to Selma to organize with Dr. King and many others. He (my friend) was kidnapped (along with his sister) when he was about 10 years old while his family was organizing outside of Selma. My friend, and his sister, were held for about 2 weeks in a KKK barricaded church. He wasn’t harmed physically. But it was a message to all the white people organizing at that moment: “LEAVE, or we will take your children”. Many white folks got the fuck out of there with their kids. They got scared.

When we saw Renee get executed, I heard a lot of It could have been me. It could have been you, by white folks. It could have been anyone we love who shares our politics and our skin tone. We don’t often see this, do we? How many times have you seen an innocent white woman shot in the face by law enforcement, in public, for doing absolutely nothing illegal and on purpose? With intention. We have seen plenty of innocent people of color murdered by the police, but not so many white folks.

This was deliberate.

This was on purpose.

This was meant to keep you—white friend—afraid. Deeply afraid. Immobilized. Your fear is their gain. Your fear keeps them in power. Your fear is their resource.

Because when white women—especially working-class white women—mothers especially, are scared, we are easier to manage. We stay isolated. We go to work like good workers. We buy things like good consumers. We stay away from trouble like good white ladies. We follow the law. We bite our tongues.

Even when it makes us sick. Even when large parts of us want to throw Molotov cocktails.

Fear gives them our power. And that power becomes their profit.

Fear turns us into small delicate animals. We keep our heads down. Our backs rounded. We eat whatever is put into our bowls. Don’t complain. Shhhh.

They will shoot us now, too. Did you hear? They kill white ladies now, too?

Don’t let them bury their fear-seed inside you. Stop it.

Don’t let them rule the world because we stayed scared. No.

Fear turns neighbors into threats. Encourages isolation. Weakens mutual aid. Fear creates distrust. When people don’t trust each other, they rely more on institutions.

That reliance is both political capital and economic leverage.

Fear keeps people focused on the next bill, the next crisis, the next threat. This kind of fear time horizon means less organizing, less relational thinking, less capacity to imagine new worlds together.

People that can’t imagine new futures will accept almost anything present.

That is incredibly “profitable” in terms of system stability.

I learned long ago from women of color how to do many things—how to write, how to care for others, how not to let fear run the show. I am not about to fold those lessons neatly, crease them carefully, lock them in a drawer, and carry on because wow, this is scary—this could have been me.

The most powerful thing that could happen right now is for all women to use our voices, our bodies, whatever tools we have, to declare that our fear will not be harvested for profit. Not off our bodies. Not off anyone’s bodies. Not off the land. Not anywhere.

We have so much power if we alchemize fear, if we gather it, and pray the Hail Mary over it and infuse it with the fire that we are.

We can move it through the body, like a wave. We can keep ourselves in gentle motion. We can breathe. We can be soft. We can read. We can write. We can pay attention to what’s within. We can make food and feed hungry people. We can stand on the line. We can do whatever the fuck we want that is needed.

Build the capacity to stay present and to serve—even while afraid.

The fear is ours. Not theirs, they don’t get to manipulate it. Fear is heat in our palms. Volcano in our bellies. Mother waters between our hips. It is powerful energy to not succumb to but to transfer it.

We get to work it, like dough. It’s ours to use as a portal for creation and bravery.

Do not hand them this energy. It can become so many things. It can become bread.

For me, it becomes writing. Staying present. Serving.

Your fear fuels their profit—in body count, in land theft, in total domination.

Make it into art. Make it into something so potent that those spineless men feel it in their bones, trembling all the way toward the fires of their own hell.

Be scared. But be brave.

Ok? Thanks.

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Let’s do this.

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