I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric

6. After the Fire, a Still Small Voice

6 a F t e r t H e F I r e , a S t I l l S m a l l vo I C e with Vershawn A. Young The following chapter began with the exchange of letters written between November 2010 and late January 2011 between Vershawn Ashanti Young and me. Vershawn and I met in Chicago one winter at a conference on race and writing centers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Probably, you too have had the experience of meeting someone and having the sense that you have been given, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the gift of a chance meeting—an opportunity for a friendship deep and kind and challenging in the best sense. Friendships require work, and, in truth, the work of friendship , like the work demanded by all our relations, is integral to the possibility of going on together; the necessity for doing the work never ends. It is a mark of the authenticity of the care that animates all sorts of relationships when this work feels joyful even in the hardest moments. In the case of transracial friendships , I think, that joy may develop more slowly, as we learn how to believe that we can lean in toward one another without leaning unduly on one another: that together we can resist the power racism possesses to distort, subvert, and ultimately destroy relationships that transgress established racial order. When I first conceived of Vershawn (Vay) playing a role in the writing of this book, I imagined him writing a foreword. 146 I HOPE I JOIN THE BAND When I asked him, though, he declined. He recalled Keith Gilyard’s response to him following a similar request, in which Keith urged him to allow his work to stand on its own. Vay said I needed to allow my work to stand and questioned why I might need or want the kind of endorsement a foreword typically signifies for my book from a person of color. Vay never said he wouldn’t help with the book, but he thought a foreword was not the way. These are the kinds of conversations we have every now and again: the kind that stop you in your tracks and make you think long and hard about what you are doing and how and why. I thought for a while about Vay’s point and decided he was right: that I was wrong to look to him or to any person of color to offer an imprimatur of my work’s legitimacy. The book needed to stand on its own. But I kept on thinking beyond this conclusion. I thought about the strands of the book that trace possibilities for care, for affiliative relations across racial lines, for mutual engagement and the embrace of challenge such engagement offers, and for love as the question that begins, but can never conclude or resolve, the struggle for racial justice. I went back to Vay and asked him to write with me, to coauthor a chapter in which we might both describe the potential and the challenges of transracial alliance and friendship, but also enact or embody the work those potentials and challenges demand of us. I suggested that we write letters to one another and include them as an epistolary chapter to conclude the manuscript, and he graciously agreed. The letters we wrote were deliberately personal, although we both knew we were writing for an audience beyond each other. We didn’t talk too much about this choice, but it is my belief that we wrote as we did because both of us know that racism does not confine itself to the public spaces of our lives, but conditions our experiences across boundaries between professional and personal, public and private spheres. Both of our working lives are shaped by our shared conviction that to behave as if our struggles with racism are confined either to the personal or the After the Fire, a Still Small Voice 147 professional spheres of our lives is to represent ourselves, our commitments, and our understanding of racial formation and the power of racism within and across systems and institutions, inadequately and dishonestly. But we have also written personally , I think, because we know not only that this is what the work looks like—moving along perspectival horizons and fields of experience fluidly and dynamically—but this is what the work is. It...