un·der·bel·ly

/ˈəndərˌbelē/

Noun

a dark, seamy, often hidden area or side

*****

“Don’t come in here with your WHITE VIOLENCE and ask me to expose myself to WHITE VIOLENCE!” was the response to me in the comments section. I had asked if I could share her most recent post, after revelling in the power of her words. I genuinely believed it would put things into much needed perspective and help a lot of people understand the plight of the Black community. My entire nervous system set off. My face and neck flushed, my body started to shake, my palms were sweaty and my breath, shallow & rapid. Fear.

“Donate to her NOW for the time she spent having to respond to you!”

Before I could wrap my head around how on earth I was perpetuating violence by asking a sincere question, an army of white women, resembling diligent little digital soldiers, started firmly telling me to donate money. And donate it now. I knew how these situations ended. In the months prior, I had witnessed countless white woman business owners have their livelihoods ripped out from underneath them. Cancel culture was labelled as accountability and anyone could be next, at any time. Before I knew it, I was wiring money to a woman I didn’t know, for reasons I didn’t understand, because I was terrified I had done something wrong, that no one could articulate to me other than “do the work”. While I could acknowledge the deep, rage driven pain of the Black woman I had unintentionally set off, I couldn’t help but wonder how the destruction of White women in the process somehow lead us down a path to unity. Nonetheless, there was no denying the fact I had become easy to control.

* * * * *

It was July of 2020 and the landscape was ripe for social justice after the murder of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter had become a global movement and a much needed tidal wave of reflection, awareness and learning moments had all come with it. It was painful, uncomfortable & often heartbreaking to unpack, for a variety of reasons. I held shame, guilt and embarrassment for not knowing more than I did, and for living my life in a state of such ignorance, while so many lived with so much pain. So I made a commitment to myself that I’d do better. As with most things, I knew that doing the right thing probably wouldn’t be easy and I accepted that. What I didn’t expect was for it to throw me into one of the deepest depressions of my life and to wreak total havoc on my own identity as a white Canadian woman.

* * * * *

I can remember spending an inordinate amount of time reflecting on my childhood in Northern Ontario. It shook me to my core that as a child who was free to do as she pleased, there were Indigenous children in the Residential “school” system until I was 11 years old. It made me feel physically ill to think of how such a stark contrast of rights, privileges & treatment could exist in the country I loved so dearly. There were several Reservations near where I grew up. We’d often go to their school for cross country meets and Ojibwe was a language I learned basic words and greetings in. My father, a former Conservation Officer worked closely with the local Reservation for lake and shoreline preservation, often partnering on fish stocking projects. As a kid, this was all just something I considered normal, and yet I never knew the deeply rooted pain of Indigenous history. What on earth were we taught in school, and from what angle? Realizations of how components of our education systems had flipped the scripts on parts of our history had me feeling all sorts of darkness. Who could possibly benefit from not telling the truth? A simple question that has triggered an avalanche of realizations ever since.

I desperately wanted to be part of the solution, but what felt concerning to me was the lack of autonomy for how we were able to engage in the solution. A narrative was forming that suggested if you fought for social justice in a way that also challenged left political ideologies, meant that you were a part of the problem - even if you were in fact, being part of the solution.

Example – Pipelines:

If you supported pipelines because of the jobs they created,

and you supported how many people the pipeline projects would help lift out of poverty,

and you supported the correlated reduction in crime that disproportionally impacts marginalized communities,

and you supported the movement of the oil within Canada by way of pipelines as opposed to trains and tanker trucks to the coasts and then onto oil tanker ships down through the Panama canal in order to get from one side of Canada to the other...

well...you were a racist right wing extremist that hates the earth. Just like that. So very quickly, open dialogue was squashed, nuance was eye rolled & polarity was welcomed with open arms. You either supported the approach of the left, or you were racist, misogynistic, or both. Sound familiar? Woke had moved from social justice to social programming at the hands of the left and there is no denying it. The worst part was, that no one seemed to be talking about, was that the polarity was starting to take the place of the important conversations and issues regarding social justice that desperately required resolution and reconciliation, leaving little to no true resolve but rather, a continued escalation of division. We were supposed to be coming together, so why did it feel as though we were being ripped apart? How could something representing unity, carrying messages of: doing the right thing, being on the right side of history, & being part of the solution feel so intolerant? Fuck, it was heavy as hell.

Still, I held myself accountable to have the uncomfortable conversations with beautiful, brave people & do the work. These conversations opened my heart and understanding to the injustices still present today. Which begged the question, if politicians consistently used these injustices in their election platforms, why hadn’t they been resolved? Where was the action? Why just promises of more money with no attention on the roots of the issues? Where was the leadership to unite us human beings? I couldn’t ignore the fact Our Canadian Prime Minister was being painted as a hero. Pictures of him down on one knee with his fist in the air circulated at lightning speed across the media, and then recirculated all over social media because “Trudeau = good & Trump = bad, reiterating the brewing storyline of left = good, right = bad. What people weren’t noticing however, was the fact that little by little, the woke movement was becoming the left’s biggest political weapon. What people weren’t noticing was that the narrative made social justice and left wing ideologies one and the same. A dangerous tone was being set that there was only one proper political view, and if you didn’t share it, you were a dangerous supporter of alt-right mentalities, equated to the KKK. What on earth was happening? How on earth was this for the greater good? How was this healthy for democracy? How could a movement for unity be creating even more division? And why was that division being supported by our leaders, under the guise of inclusion? How does more control of people lead to the freedom of all people? W…t…f was happening?

* * * * *

Why I’m Leaving The Cult of Wokeness by Africa Brooke. To this day, I can’t remember how she ended up on my feed, but I don’t believe it was by accident. It was around the time her viral blog was making waves. I was likely in the middle of a doom scroll, wondering if I’d ever feel safe enough to speak my truth on what I was seeing. It felt like I had inhaled a breath of fresh air for the first time in months. A sudden rush of permission started washing over me as the post of hers that landed on my feed was tackling the subject of self-censorship. It was like a punch to the gut, in the best way possible. I don’t know if it was the way she said it, but replacing my idea of cancel culture with self-censorship restored a sense of personal empowerment and responsibility that I had fallen so far away from. They could censor and cancel me if they wanted, but I’ll be damned if I was going to continue to sensor and cancel myself.

As I began to inhale Africa’s content nearly as much as oxygen itself, the good ol’ algorithm began to tilt in my favour again. I was running into feeds of all kinds that were engaging in open dialogue & healthy conversation. Some were even outright condemning group think and encouraging people to feel safe in speaking their truth. It’s like I found an entirely new world. One that definitely wasn’t being propped up by the mainstream media. The wild part? Most of them weren’t white or straight – going completely against the picture painted by politicians and media outlets around the globe that all non-white and non-straight people thought the same. Confirming my suspicion that wokeness had little to do with true social justice and representation of marginalized voices. How could it? I was staring at profile after profile of people whose voices were not only going unheard, but intentionally being left out of the dialogue. Their skin colour and sexual preference may have fit the narrative, but their ideologies didn’t. Therefore they were excluded. It was clear as fucking day. An intense form of social programming was emerging under the guise of social justice.

When you zoom out, it becomes easier to see that we are being conditioned to comply and in turn become too terrified to speak out against anything the talking heads on the TV say. As time ticked on through the pandemic, this became more and more clear. Labels and descriptions that no good person with a beating heart would ever want to be associated with, became a way for labelling people who chose not to comply, or even just merely asked questions. Words & descriptions like racist, selfish, conspiracy theorist, uneducated, misogynistic, radical, uncaring, un-compassionate, and more were, and continue to be used. This is no different than what we saw in the 2020 social justice movement that quickly equated people to be something abhorrent, if they had another point of view, swiftly shutting down constructive dialogue and handing power & saviourism to the government and those carefully chosen to be featured on the MSM.

There is a dangerous thread weaving through our society right now. We need to lift our heads up and open our eyes. We are living in a world where citizens are rewarded with social acceptance, privileges, basic freedoms, mainstream media air time and praise from government officials if they comply or simply share or promote the narrative. On the flip-side, citizens who don’t are ostracized, face the threat of cancel culture, get utterly dragged by the media, get accused of spreading misinformation and then even have to deal with the heartache of their own friends and family members turning on them. What purpose could this possibly serve for “building back better”?

* * * * *

Looking back at my internal struggle in 2020, I know where my pain was rooted in. It wasn’t the crumbling of my white supremacy like I was told, it was the pain of abandoning myself. It was the pain of questioning my own heart. It was the pain of losing my own identity. I was following the herd. And when you follow the herd and engage in collectivism, you quite literally lose yourself bit by bit, as layer by layer, the beliefs and ideologies of others pile onto you, ultimately burying your own truth. Deep down, my intuition was roaring that something wasn’t right but the narrative, in all its power had me doubting my own thoughts. Sound familiar? The larger agenda at play here is designed to be orchestrated by governments within each nation, but pushed through by the citizens themselves within each nation in the name of “doing the right thing”. So it’s time we all start questioning what the right thing really is, before we get to the point of no return.

I want to give special shout out to my therapist Sarah, who helped me through a very important part of my journey. As I woke up to how wokeness was being used as a propagandic tool, I landed on a secondary internal struggle. Had I been deceptive? Was I fake? Was I performative? I can say for certain, there were times I was driven by fear and fear alone – as in the incident at the beginning of this blog. However, I rest easy knowing my heart was at all times, simply trying to do the right thing. Through therapy, what I realized was that while I believed with my whole heart, the 2020 version of me was the real me, it actually wasn’t. While I felt authentic, I was actually only authentic to the layers that were surrounding my truth, and not my truth itself. Which then begged the question, how do I know the me today is the real me? And the answer is simple: Inner peace. Judgement, negative attention, criticism, insinuations or attacks on my character have no bearing on me or influence over my own thought process any longer. While my truth may have cost me many relationships, the relationship that grew the most is the relationship I have with myself. The choice to be true to myself above all else, is the most important decision I have ever made.

In closing, I whole heartedly reject notions that I condone anything other than integrity, freedom, truth and unity for all. Those who believe this to be true about me are quite literally upholding the same system that drives oppression, segregation and division. It’s the system that needs to crumble, not the individual people within it, simply for having a different point of view. The system crumbles the moment we collectively drop our egos and come together, so remember that the next time you hear another speech from our PM, pitting one group of people against another.

The system only holds its power, so long as we are divided…

Sarah Swain's Substack

And then I woke up - Part 2