Manifesto
On this fifth day of Pentecost,
in these days of raging fire,
on the day it has been declared,
“Richmond is no longer the Capital of the Confederacy;"
the monument-I-cannot-name will come down post haste;
and, "Richmond will do the right thing:"
I have been writing ever since seeing a live recording of the Governor of Virginia’s press conference, around 230 this afternoon.
In between patients and skipping meals, and any- and everything else.
Always, I am a writer and an introvert -
and a recovering perfectionist and a human being.
* * *
I am emboldened and enlivened by this day.
I am electing not to join in protests today.
I am considering traveling to Richmond for the day the monument comes down.
I will welcome accompaniment.
* * *
On this day, I take the action of writing a Manifesto, and sharing it with you.
I take this action as a native Richmonder, and in multiple others of my identities.
These identities include my identity as a Christian, and as a parish associate of Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church (Baltimore).
These identities include my identity as patient in, student of, and therapist practicing, psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
These identities include my identity as an affluent white woman.
* * *
I am a person of unearned and substantial privilege that continues to come at the cost of other human beings’ lives.
That I can write and make that statement is, itself, a matter of privilege. And it should trouble me much more than it does.
I type these paragraphs on a MacBookAir, on top of my Ikea desk, in my office which is (in the Spirit of Virginia Woolf)
a room of my own. I am in a home which I co-own with a bank and with help from inherited “wealth.” My home is located on
one of the “hottest blocks” in one of the “hottest neighborhoods” in the city. (I bought my house eleven years ago.
I couldn’t afford it today.) My neighborhood, ______, is an historically racially violent neighborhood
that is still predominantly white and increasingly affluent. Public, explicit racism continues here, in my neighborhood,
including towards children, in a city that can’t seem to rise from it’s own burning ash. Perhaps you get a sense of these things.
* * *
That I can write this Manifesto as my truth reveals many of my privileges.
* * *
In ways both similar to and substantially different from The Rev. Robert E. Lee IV, I am an ordained multiple-great descendant
of a white man who had a prominent voice during the "Civil War" era. One of my maternal great-great-great-grandfathers is the minister who prayed over the South Carolina Assembly when it decided the State of South Carolina would secede from the Union.
Some of my ancestors on this side of my family elected to change their religious affiliation from Quaker to Presbyterian
so that they could continue to “own slaves.” My personal, social, economic, national, religious, and spiritual legacy includes
the enslavement of human beings - as well as the ongoing incarnations and manifestations of this enslavement.
I am also the descendent of a Northern family, the Gerows (who changed their name from Giraud as they tried to assimilate
in America). This Northern family bought a Southern family's home and property, near Petersburg, Virginia,
after the Southern family had become destitute. What was (or had been?) that family’s home and property was used
as a headquarters and hospital for the Confederate Army. It is surrounded by still-preserved breastworks
and was the sight of a significant battle shortly before the fall of Richmond.
Generations later, my dad was helped-to-be-raised by a Black teenager whose name was Lizzie, a person who spent some of
the hours of her life living in the attic of this (now the Diehl family) home. In the next generation (mine),
the last and only time I was in that attic it felt hotter than hell and had a snake in it.
(My dad went to deal with the snake issue and he let me tag along.)
This is to say that, on one of my living days, in my own early teens, in an adventure shared with my dad,
that attic was not fit for human habitation.
The home, named Tudor Hall, and its surrounding property is now part of Pamplin Park. The Pamplins are descendants of the family, the Bouisseaus, who first lived in the home and owned the surrounding property. I believe the Giraud family, and perhaps the Boisseaus, were French Huguenots who fled to America to escape religious persecution in France.
* * *
I am the granddaughter of The Rev. Aubrey N. Brown, Jr., a man who used his voice to advocate for civil rights during the time
he served as the Editor of The Presbyterian Outlook (decades); Supply Pastor for All Souls’ Presbyterian Church
(an historically Black congregation); coordinator for the Peace Forum and Wednesday Night supper programs of Ginter Park Presbyterian Church (an historically and predominantly white congregation in Richmond). Aubrey Brown, Jr. participated in,
rose in the ranks of, and was a founding member of various civic and religious groups devoted to the cause of civil rights in Virginia. Some of these things happened simultaneously.
Aubrey N. Brown, Jr. is a man who once told me he didn’t run for Moderator of the (Southern) Presbyterian Church
because his job, as he saw it, was “to make moderators.” He seemed to see his job as a parent and grandparent
to raise a tribe of children who espoused his public and social values. I am part of that tribe,
as well as one that tries to make sense of parts of him he seemed to keep to (or from) himself.
* * *
I am the granddaughter of Sarah Hill Brown, who, as Aubrey's wife, raised eight children and followed Aubrey’s instruction
not to wear bright colors or play tennis as a “minister’s wife.” (She had been voted “Miss Health” at her alma mater,
Agnes Scott College). She taught piano lessons to white and Black children in the city of Richmond;
hosted innumerable gatherings of faculty and visitors, along with missionaries affiliated with Union Presbyterian Seminary,
a block away from their home in Richmond; and she oversaw household “help,” in other words, people who were Black and
likely poor and had some life of their own. I imagine Sarah tried to maintain a sense of her own voice in the midst of it all.
More often than not, Sarah did these things either in the absence of her husband, Aubrey, or in the presence of his commanding voice. In her senior years, she was voted Virginia’s Mother of the Year. In her last years, she received inpatient psychiatric care
and lived, during my first year of college, apart from her husband in my family’s house. My parents named me Sarah
in honor of the woman they knew as “Mother" and "Mrs. Brown.” “Sarah,” after my grandmother, has been a challenging name.
It is becoming less so.
* * *
I grew up in a predominantly white, affluent suburb of Richmond. My neighborhood was called “Cambridge"
and was located off of a thoroughfare called, “Huguenot Road.” The city was on one side, and the county on the other.
Multiple times a week, per the location of my family’s house, I traversed more miles to attend public schools
farther out in the county than to attend the city schools closer to my home. Multiple times a week, I also "crossed the river"
into and out of the city to see my grandparents or take music lessons or accompany my mom on her visits and errands.
As many children, I sometimes heard my parents say one thing but seem to be doing another.
All of these realities contributed to a confusing childhood and adolescence - for me.
* * *
I want to believe, in my heart and in the cells of my body, that all of my ancestors did the best they could to be the best human beings they could. I am also frustrated, at times, that they were imperfect. In more and more moments, I feel gracious.
* * *
In this moment, I feel particular complexity and risk:
How do I speak? It feels important to me to do.
How do I continue to try to use my white privilege as an ally, and not as a performance to call inappropriate attention to myself?
I don't know the answers.
I am very much a work in progress.
This is my confession.
It is my desire to make it in this way within My Spiritual Family.
I recognize it is not enough.
* * *
I am feeling consumed by many feelings. Consumed, as if by fire - although I don’t feel its true burn.
This fire will not cause me to die or be arrested or be gassed, or hit with a rubber bullet or shoved or knocked to the ground,
or pained by a concussion grenade, or violently overtaken in all of my sincerest beliefs and a representation of who I am.
By the time I finish this Manifesto, “something else” will have happened.
All I am ready, willing, and able to do is to feel, to think, and to speak in this way.
It is impassioned, but also feeling quite vulnerable.
* * *
I am grateful, to the marrow of my ancestral and living bones, for the actions of Virginia's Governor, by the majority of voters in the State of Virginia, and by the Mayor of Richmond related to particular monuments on Monument Avenue in Richmond. It is an Avenue I have travelled many, many times through the years ... in wonder, awe, confusion, anger, pain, delight, and gratitude.
* * *
I believe the Governor's press conference represents an historic moment
as significant as others that have helped to turn the course of life as I know it.
I would say some things a bit differently from the Governor. For example, he suggested that in our earliest centuries,
“Americans were buying and selling Americans.” I’m fairly confident Americans were “buying and selling” people of color
native to other countries and other continents. Also, he gives his opinion, quoting General Robert E. Lee, that the realities
and effects of war should be “obliterated” when war is finished. As a psychotherapist, as an ordained minister, as a citizen of
the United States, as a Christian, and as a human being, I aspire not to "obliteration," but to working through histories
as they are felt and considered, spoken and enacted in the present.
On the whole, I am grateful for this press conference, constructed and given in this way as a product of the Governor's leadership.
I am grateful for the unseen gifts and wisdom of all the people who help inform the Governor's and Mayor’s decisions
and enable them to do their jobs.
In his remarks, The Rev. Robert E. Lee, IV, multiple-great descendant of the General, quoted from the Canticle of Turning:
"Let the Fires of your justice burn. ...
the Dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn!"
May it be so, and may I help it be.
in these days of raging fire,
on the day it has been declared,
“Richmond is no longer the Capital of the Confederacy;"
the monument-I-cannot-name will come down post haste;
and, "Richmond will do the right thing:"
I have been writing ever since seeing a live recording of the Governor of Virginia’s press conference, around 230 this afternoon.
In between patients and skipping meals, and any- and everything else.
Always, I am a writer and an introvert -
and a recovering perfectionist and a human being.
* * *
I am emboldened and enlivened by this day.
I am electing not to join in protests today.
I am considering traveling to Richmond for the day the monument comes down.
I will welcome accompaniment.
* * *
On this day, I take the action of writing a Manifesto, and sharing it with you.
I take this action as a native Richmonder, and in multiple others of my identities.
These identities include my identity as a Christian, and as a parish associate of Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church (Baltimore).
These identities include my identity as patient in, student of, and therapist practicing, psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
These identities include my identity as an affluent white woman.
* * *
I am a person of unearned and substantial privilege that continues to come at the cost of other human beings’ lives.
That I can write and make that statement is, itself, a matter of privilege. And it should trouble me much more than it does.
I type these paragraphs on a MacBookAir, on top of my Ikea desk, in my office which is (in the Spirit of Virginia Woolf)
a room of my own. I am in a home which I co-own with a bank and with help from inherited “wealth.” My home is located on
one of the “hottest blocks” in one of the “hottest neighborhoods” in the city. (I bought my house eleven years ago.
I couldn’t afford it today.) My neighborhood, ______, is an historically racially violent neighborhood
that is still predominantly white and increasingly affluent. Public, explicit racism continues here, in my neighborhood,
including towards children, in a city that can’t seem to rise from it’s own burning ash. Perhaps you get a sense of these things.
* * *
That I can write this Manifesto as my truth reveals many of my privileges.
* * *
In ways both similar to and substantially different from The Rev. Robert E. Lee IV, I am an ordained multiple-great descendant
of a white man who had a prominent voice during the "Civil War" era. One of my maternal great-great-great-grandfathers is the minister who prayed over the South Carolina Assembly when it decided the State of South Carolina would secede from the Union.
Some of my ancestors on this side of my family elected to change their religious affiliation from Quaker to Presbyterian
so that they could continue to “own slaves.” My personal, social, economic, national, religious, and spiritual legacy includes
the enslavement of human beings - as well as the ongoing incarnations and manifestations of this enslavement.
I am also the descendent of a Northern family, the Gerows (who changed their name from Giraud as they tried to assimilate
in America). This Northern family bought a Southern family's home and property, near Petersburg, Virginia,
after the Southern family had become destitute. What was (or had been?) that family’s home and property was used
as a headquarters and hospital for the Confederate Army. It is surrounded by still-preserved breastworks
and was the sight of a significant battle shortly before the fall of Richmond.
Generations later, my dad was helped-to-be-raised by a Black teenager whose name was Lizzie, a person who spent some of
the hours of her life living in the attic of this (now the Diehl family) home. In the next generation (mine),
the last and only time I was in that attic it felt hotter than hell and had a snake in it.
(My dad went to deal with the snake issue and he let me tag along.)
This is to say that, on one of my living days, in my own early teens, in an adventure shared with my dad,
that attic was not fit for human habitation.
The home, named Tudor Hall, and its surrounding property is now part of Pamplin Park. The Pamplins are descendants of the family, the Bouisseaus, who first lived in the home and owned the surrounding property. I believe the Giraud family, and perhaps the Boisseaus, were French Huguenots who fled to America to escape religious persecution in France.
* * *
I am the granddaughter of The Rev. Aubrey N. Brown, Jr., a man who used his voice to advocate for civil rights during the time
he served as the Editor of The Presbyterian Outlook (decades); Supply Pastor for All Souls’ Presbyterian Church
(an historically Black congregation); coordinator for the Peace Forum and Wednesday Night supper programs of Ginter Park Presbyterian Church (an historically and predominantly white congregation in Richmond). Aubrey Brown, Jr. participated in,
rose in the ranks of, and was a founding member of various civic and religious groups devoted to the cause of civil rights in Virginia. Some of these things happened simultaneously.
Aubrey N. Brown, Jr. is a man who once told me he didn’t run for Moderator of the (Southern) Presbyterian Church
because his job, as he saw it, was “to make moderators.” He seemed to see his job as a parent and grandparent
to raise a tribe of children who espoused his public and social values. I am part of that tribe,
as well as one that tries to make sense of parts of him he seemed to keep to (or from) himself.
* * *
I am the granddaughter of Sarah Hill Brown, who, as Aubrey's wife, raised eight children and followed Aubrey’s instruction
not to wear bright colors or play tennis as a “minister’s wife.” (She had been voted “Miss Health” at her alma mater,
Agnes Scott College). She taught piano lessons to white and Black children in the city of Richmond;
hosted innumerable gatherings of faculty and visitors, along with missionaries affiliated with Union Presbyterian Seminary,
a block away from their home in Richmond; and she oversaw household “help,” in other words, people who were Black and
likely poor and had some life of their own. I imagine Sarah tried to maintain a sense of her own voice in the midst of it all.
More often than not, Sarah did these things either in the absence of her husband, Aubrey, or in the presence of his commanding voice. In her senior years, she was voted Virginia’s Mother of the Year. In her last years, she received inpatient psychiatric care
and lived, during my first year of college, apart from her husband in my family’s house. My parents named me Sarah
in honor of the woman they knew as “Mother" and "Mrs. Brown.” “Sarah,” after my grandmother, has been a challenging name.
It is becoming less so.
* * *
I grew up in a predominantly white, affluent suburb of Richmond. My neighborhood was called “Cambridge"
and was located off of a thoroughfare called, “Huguenot Road.” The city was on one side, and the county on the other.
Multiple times a week, per the location of my family’s house, I traversed more miles to attend public schools
farther out in the county than to attend the city schools closer to my home. Multiple times a week, I also "crossed the river"
into and out of the city to see my grandparents or take music lessons or accompany my mom on her visits and errands.
As many children, I sometimes heard my parents say one thing but seem to be doing another.
All of these realities contributed to a confusing childhood and adolescence - for me.
* * *
I want to believe, in my heart and in the cells of my body, that all of my ancestors did the best they could to be the best human beings they could. I am also frustrated, at times, that they were imperfect. In more and more moments, I feel gracious.
* * *
In this moment, I feel particular complexity and risk:
How do I speak? It feels important to me to do.
How do I continue to try to use my white privilege as an ally, and not as a performance to call inappropriate attention to myself?
I don't know the answers.
I am very much a work in progress.
This is my confession.
It is my desire to make it in this way within My Spiritual Family.
I recognize it is not enough.
* * *
I am feeling consumed by many feelings. Consumed, as if by fire - although I don’t feel its true burn.
This fire will not cause me to die or be arrested or be gassed, or hit with a rubber bullet or shoved or knocked to the ground,
or pained by a concussion grenade, or violently overtaken in all of my sincerest beliefs and a representation of who I am.
By the time I finish this Manifesto, “something else” will have happened.
All I am ready, willing, and able to do is to feel, to think, and to speak in this way.
It is impassioned, but also feeling quite vulnerable.
* * *
I am grateful, to the marrow of my ancestral and living bones, for the actions of Virginia's Governor, by the majority of voters in the State of Virginia, and by the Mayor of Richmond related to particular monuments on Monument Avenue in Richmond. It is an Avenue I have travelled many, many times through the years ... in wonder, awe, confusion, anger, pain, delight, and gratitude.
* * *
I believe the Governor's press conference represents an historic moment
as significant as others that have helped to turn the course of life as I know it.
I would say some things a bit differently from the Governor. For example, he suggested that in our earliest centuries,
“Americans were buying and selling Americans.” I’m fairly confident Americans were “buying and selling” people of color
native to other countries and other continents. Also, he gives his opinion, quoting General Robert E. Lee, that the realities
and effects of war should be “obliterated” when war is finished. As a psychotherapist, as an ordained minister, as a citizen of
the United States, as a Christian, and as a human being, I aspire not to "obliteration," but to working through histories
as they are felt and considered, spoken and enacted in the present.
On the whole, I am grateful for this press conference, constructed and given in this way as a product of the Governor's leadership.
I am grateful for the unseen gifts and wisdom of all the people who help inform the Governor's and Mayor’s decisions
and enable them to do their jobs.
In his remarks, The Rev. Robert E. Lee, IV, multiple-great descendant of the General, quoted from the Canticle of Turning:
"Let the Fires of your justice burn. ...
the Dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn!"
May it be so, and may I help it be.
Sarah Diehl
Thursday June 4, 2020
Thursday June 4, 2020