What Is Justice to a Community that Refuses to Remember?
Courtney Bither
My heart is pounding as I stare at my computer, hands hovered over the keyboard. I am nervous. Writing, like Twitter and the buzz my phone makes when I get an email, triggers me.
It has been more than two years since I felt compelled to write anything. After my last post on Quaker process, I gave it up. I was done with sacrificing myself for people who couldn’t listen to me or see me. I took a step back to heal.
Now 25, I look back on the year I came out—21-years-old and knowing no other ‘out’ folks in my community—and I finally feel compassion for myself. I didn’t say things nicely back then. I didn’t ask for respect; I begged for it. I screamed, and I wept, and I held my friends sobbing on the sidewalk, and then we got up and yelled some more. I lost relationships. I burned bridges.
I wish things would have gone down differently. I believe there was no other way for things to have gone down.
There is context for my desperate pleas: meetings I had with pastors twice my age who told me there was nothing they could do for me; times I sat through orchestrated meetings with people I called family publicly debating if queer people “ought to be included;” youth who sat in the back of the church crying as they watched their community ripped apart, not because of queer people, but because a group of adults allowed “Quaker process” to determine the worth of people they raised—literally their own children—sitting in the pews. I watched my friends lose their jobs. I lost my job. There were DMs on Twitter and texts from my male professors, angry about the tone of my tweets regarding the treatment of women and queer folks in the community; times staff members suggested we couldn’t care about queer people and people of color at the same time (as if these things are mutually exclusive); hours upon hours given trying to help paid staff at these churches and institutions see the humanity of folks who were not straight, white, and cis.
And I’m leaving out so many stories. So many names. So many folks who came out to me and others in secret just weeks and months after I came out. I’m leaving out all of the stories of the harm that my university did to me and so many others while folks silently watched in fear that supporting us would threaten their relationship with the folks harming us.
My community expected me to be an advocate and a counselor and a scapegoat and happy with whatever was given to me. I was just trying to finish my last year of college.
I can feel the question: why do I keep writing about this, especially if I’ve taken time to heal? I keep writing about this because I keep thinking about it. Because this informs my choices, still, even after all the therapy. Because writing and Twitter still make me dizzy. Because I still feel anxious during June, while the staff and congregants who held homophobic views and facilitated debates about queerness just two years ago now proudly fly a Pride flag high. Because I can’t erase it all from my memory the way straight folks can. Because trauma doesn’t just go away.
What is justice to a community that refuses to remember or acknowledge the people they sacrificed in their journey towards goodness?
The other day I was talking to a friend from my community who went through the whole ordeal as well. We were talking about abolition and transformative justice. We were talking about how the people who harmed us (or sat silently while their friends and family harmed us) were now talking about justice, some even on staff at a proudly affirming church. We wondered if they spend as much money and time in therapy processing this history as we do. We wondered how to heal the harm left in the wake of it all.
My friend said, “I’m so mad about all of it and it lives in me every single day AND I’m so far past it at the same time? It’s hard to know what “justice” could even look like.”
What is justice to a community that refuses to remember?
A community that refuses to remember. As I write this, it is impossible not to think about whiteness and its refusal to reckon with its history—its ability to thrive in communities amongst people who refuse to remember. I think about the Quakers’ history as slaveowners—their investment in capitalism and whiteness that worked to slow abolition. I think about Sundays where folks were allowed to stand up in open worship and spew violent racism all over the sanctuary. I think about the erasure of Black people and people of color from our meetings. I think about the roaring silence of the community in response to the violence directed toward Black people at George Fox University. I think about the way people who fought back were reprimanded.
How can we protest for racial justice if we cannot even acknowledge the ways we have upheld and facilitated racism, especially in our meetings and in open worship?
How can a church (or a country, or a people) be affirming (or anti-racist or just) that has erased from history and memory its violent origins and the people it silenced?
I look at my community and I recognize that it forced out, harmed, and silenced queer people each year until 2018, when staff and congregants from the community separated, rebranded, and formed a new church. I wonder if straight people think about this history as much as we, queer people, do. I wonder if this lives in them every day the way it lives in us. I wonder if, when they hold LGBTQ support groups for folks in the area, they remember that there was a time when people begged for support like this, and the same people now facilitating these groups silenced us.
When I lived in Newberg, I was constantly told to “live in the tension” while people I loved debated my morality and validity. I wonder if these folks are willing to live in tension with their history and their ideals.
I wonder if there will ever be enough room to acknowledge the harm and the growth. I wonder if people can truly grow without acknowledging the ways we have harmed others.
Community is beautiful. And I am so sad for the ways I was put out of mine. At the same time, I learned more about solidarity in my final year in Newberg than in the rest of my life combined. I watched my (mostly new) friends stand up for queer folks even when it meant standing against their parents and pastors. We checked on each other, cried together, made food together. We took turns performing, in essence, wellness checks, because everything was so hard and sad, and we had such little support and resources.
I wonder if transformative justice (or, as some might call it, the good news of the Gospel) is even possible. Sometimes, when I remember the solidarity, I believe in it again. I want it so badly.
But I am waiting for people to reckon with their history. We have to reckon with our history.
There is no time to wait.