Unmasking Possibility
If you’ve followed my personal Instagram over the last year or so, you know I’m a sucker for the sleeping raccoons tucked high up in the trees of the Ramble. I fondly call them: “park cats.” Late last summer, I often found families of them during my morning and afternoon walks (often raising a whole host of other questions about their wellness!). One day I was on the phone with my coach, interrupting our conversation frequently commenting on the number of raccoons I was seeing as we walked and talked.
Against the backdrop of a conversation centering my relationship to asking for help from others, she asked: “Do you know about the meanings of raccoons?”
“No,” I replied.
Her knowledge about raccoons went a little like this:
“Raccoons wear masks. And I’m wondering: what mask might have served you or protected you that you need to put down now in order to move forward in your legacy building?”
Whew, well that’s a word. I thought as so many emotions and memories began to rise up from my gut to my heart to my throat. Over the coming hours, days, and months, I’d find myself in deep inquiry with the different masks I’ve worn - in service of protecting myself, in search of belonging, in pursuit of comforting others - and how they were constraining me from tapping into the abundance of possibility and power that exists within me.
I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland – a curly-haired, knobby-kneed kid who had a little more brown in her skin than her sisters, and certainly did not get her mom’s red hair.
I, like many multiracial or biracial kids, had secrets about race that were buried deep. My maternal grandparents never came to my parents’ wedding because my dad was Black. When I was in elementary school, I overheard teachers referring to my mom as my guardian as if they didn’t believe a Black girl could be loved by a white mom. I quickly learned as a light-skinned Black girl, it was expected I would blend into white dominant culture or be met with resistance along the way. It was reinforced in school and social environments that if I “spoke white,” it must be my primary identity.
Throughout my life, I internalized the need to maintain white comfort for survival as shame. I mastered code-switching cultures – from the way I talked to mimicking the fashion trends on white TV shows. I architected a mask of myself instead of focusing on my well-being and freedom as a Black woman.
I experienced the consequences of carrying others’ secrets and wearing this mask during a trip to Savannah, Georgia last spring.
It was an unusually cold March night, and I was on a ghost tour and bar crawl with a group of predominantly white women I’ve known for years. Sitting in the basement of an old tavern, our white tour guide kicked us off with the history of Savannah. He told us tales of its founding by white colonizers who had to talk with “Indians” and “pow wow” and “smoke some chi chi.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised by his words. It’s not a new trend to hear history recounted and passed down from the lens of white exceptionalism. In fact, we see active efforts to keep these false narratives in tact all around us.
I cringed along through his monologue, but then he said: “Sadly, slavery ended shortly after the city’s founding.” Sadly?
I was one of two people of color on the girls trip, but I was the only Black woman. The group looked at me for my reaction. My heart raced.
Then the guide shared that the basement where we were sitting was once an auction for enslaved Black people, and we would go through a tunnel where they were illegally sold while slavery was banned. But first, he asked us to get drinks, trivializing the experiences of ancestors to a drinking exhibition.
I wanted a night where I could just be — but instead I was saddled with so many other thoughts.
“What should I do? I can’t stay here. Is the room getting smaller? Can people see my cheeks getting red? I don’t want to ruin the group’s night.”
My shame was keeping white people comfortable (again). I sank into my mask – one that I created for many years of my life.
Deep in a sense of anger and shame, I barely noticed the guide stopped talking and headed up the stairs to officially begin the walking tour. The room and group were excited to get going. I shared with a friend that I may need to head out and that I certainly wasn’t walking through tunnels as I headed up the stairs.
I didn’t immediately order my car. Why? I didn’t immediately stand up at multiple points in the guide’s opening monologue either. Why? I stayed — quiet. I stayed — wearing my mask in shame about whether I’d ruin the night. I stayed — wearing my mask in hope that surely someone would say something to the guide about his racist comments. That someone would say our group was leaving.
But the only person leaving was me. I was departing from my body and sinking further into my mask. A mask that for too many years of my life felt like home. A mask that “didn’t want to ruin the night” for the group of women. Before I knew it — as if I were coming out of a trance — I began to open my eyes to the sad reality that that the walking tour had begun with the women I knew in tow.
The women began to blend into a sea of strangers I couldn’t recognize and huddled into an alcove. Their laughter echoed off the stone like hearing the jeers and cackles of slaveholders, reflective of the sad reality that in America you can make a profit encouraging people to get drunk and laugh standing on the very stones that hold the blood and tears of the enslaved.
My panic was disorienting and as I continued to open my eyes, I realized I had finally walked away. Slowly taking off my mask and leaving it behind on the cobblestone streets.
As I walked away, the many images of countless Black women rushed through my head:
“How many times have we as Black women been subjected to shame fighting for the ability to just live and thrive? How many times have we put up with white aggression, disrespect and disregard for our humanity as we fight for the seats we deserve?”
White comfort and supremacy are what tried to keep Justice Jackson that spring from becoming the nation’s first Black woman on the Supreme Court. It’s what bans books about the truth of our history, censors diversity in the workplace, allows rhetoric on reckoning with racism but no action, and holds white supremacy in place. The list goes on.
During that same weekend in Savannah, I would find myself on a Zoom with a cohort of women of color leaders sitting at the virtual feet of Dr. Gail Parker. Dr. Parker would help me to understand and begin to embody an essential legacy building practice: the secrets we carry aren’t our burden. I would begin to learn from her that holding racial trauma as a secret can cultivate a sense of shame. A constant feeling of a reckoning in our skin and souls. That reckoning with racial trauma in our skin and souls contributes to the health disparities we experience as a Black community and Black women. Cumulatively these traumas hurt us, our biologies, and our future generations.
But here’s the thing Dr. Parker also taught me that day over and over again:
Often the secrets we carry are really the secrets of others. They aren’t ours to carry. They aren’t ours to constantly reckon with.
The experience last spring in Savannah taught me that as a Black woman, I can no longer carry the weight of maintaining comfort for white people or addressing their guilt. I can no longer wear this mask symbolizing a desire to belong and protect the comfort of others.
This story is no longer mine to carry. This mask is no longer mine to carry. The shame is no longer - and was never - mine to carry. These are not my truths to carry.
In the months that have passed since Savannah, I’ve come to sit in the symbolism of raccoons. I continue to question when I see them what I might need to face with bravery that I’ve been hiding from myself head on. I come back to the words of my coach:
What mask might have served or protected me that I need to put down now in order to move forward in my legacy building?
As I think about what it has taken to imagine and begin to build a part of my legacy known as The Highland Project, confronting the masks I’ve created for protection and belonging head on - with compassion, bravery, and stillness - is my legacy work. Confronting the mindsets and adaptations that no longer serve me is my legacy work. It is the required legacy work to unmask possibility and abundance.
I’ve also come to sit in perhaps the lesser known symbolism of raccoons: time travel. For some cultures, raccoons are said to travel between worlds - across generations, if you will - and communicate back signs or omens. Reflecting on the Savannah experience, I am now seeing the sign that clearly reads: as Black women, we must look back and look forward in order to disrupt cycles of trauma if we are to legacy build.
Our racial trauma as Black people can harm us physically and cost us our lives long-term from all the burdens we carry. But if we are supposed to disrupt cycles of generational trauma for our daughter’s daughters, then we must commit to no longer carrying secrets and shame on our shoulders in service of comfort.
If I could go back in time, I would share with my younger self that she will be just fine as her true self – that meditation, restorative yoga, and stillness are the keys to survival, freedom, and possibility.
To be free as Black women, it is essential that we center our own healing and well-being and stop shaming ourselves and begin telling our truths. To be free as Black women, we must stop carrying the secrets of others. We must stop reckoning with ourselves and relentlessly shift the reckoning to others.
This is essential for our survival.
For our freedom.
For our own visioning and building of possibilities.
In still of possibility,
Gabrielle
