This is an excerpt from a work-in-progress response to the death of nine.

There are those who are proud of you. They wish they had driven to the church with you. They feel they missed out. They know they would have needed a crowd, maybe hoods, maybe Molotov cocktails, maybe bombs. They are in awe you sat for an hour staring into what was hated and erasable. And when the hated, those to be erased, welcomed you, made a space for you in a circle of study and prayer, you killed nine, would have killed more.

My excerpt from my the recently released 4th Edition of, This Bridge Called My Back: The Writings of Radical Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga.

In facing myself, while eliminating my self oppression, I stumbled into a terrifying and isolated place. If I reject and question concepts, morays, and values of my brown community, where is my support, where is my family, what becomes of my sense of community…peoplehood? While becoming myself, will I become so different, so threatening, that they too will reject me?

I am facing that terror and isolation as are brown women across the globe. When we question ourselves, seek to create harmonious, supportive, nurturing, liberating environments for ourselves, we find the white and brown super cultures ready to wage battle together in order to make us reformed, in order to decrease their stress and difficulty in visualizing difference and selfhood as revolution and revolution as positive and necessary for the cohabitation on this planet.

Pictured, Andrea Canaan with workshop attendee Jonathan Leal at Stanford’s The Bridge Reading and Workshop