What being a white woman in Memphis asks of me right now.
Some reflections I have in the wake of a tragedy, a breach of safety, and in the reality of White Supremacy in America.
Hi! First, I know I just sent out a newsletter this week! I’m sorry for another one so soon; this one felt necessary to share at this moment.
Second, CONTENT WARNINGS ON THIS ONE ABOUND! This talks about sexual violence, death, incarceration, racism, and other really intense things. Please take care of you and engage as you can (or not at all). As Toshi Reagon always reminds listeners on my favorite podcast when they talk about hard stuff, drink some water as you move through the hard parts.
Finally, I needed some encouragement to share this (thank you, Garrett). I hope for those of you who decide to read this, that the words land in you in the spirit with which they are offered: with love and a determination to face the fullness of what is true in the reality of what is right now, which is really fucking complicated, but that asks us all - and definitely us white women - to do some work.
Yesterday, I took a walk on my neighborhood greenline in the morning while catching up with a friend who recently moved away from Memphis. I was excited to catch up with her and eager to get my body moving after a night of disrupted sleep. It’s also starting to be that time of year where the weather isn’t signaling fall just yet, but the summer heat and humidity have started their slow descent, which is just such a delight, especially after this summer’s heat.
We started out talking about the State of Things in the World™ and as part of that, we discussed the kidnapping of Eliza Fletcher and how the police had found a body in South Memphis on Monday, but had not yet identified the remains. I was surprised, but not shocked, to hear that she had been hearing about it in real time as Eliza’s kidnapping had become national news.
I was not shocked because this pattern of media attention and police response for missing white women (particularly those who are skinny, attractive, have jobs that are coded as “doing something good” for the community, are wealthy, etc., all of which Eliza was) has been true in America since, well, maybe the moment white women landed and colonized America alongside white men.
That her alleged kidnapper is a Black man with a rap sheet that includes jail time for a previous kidnapping makes this a particularly difficult case for the media to ignore, let alone absolutely accelerate attention to. In fact, part of what my friend and I talked about was how many emails from local news outlets I’d gotten about the case that was only a few days old.
We talked about all this - how horrible it is that she was kidnapped, how terrifying it must have been for her, how we hoped she would be found alive, how we wanted our societal response to not be so predictable and racist, how we feared the racial identities of Eliza and her alleged kidnapper would negatively impact everyone in Memphis, giving white people more reasons to feel justified in their fear of being “inside the loop”1 and Black people more reasons to fear the police and white people’s responses to their mere existence. We likely hit all the points on The Things You’re Supposed to Say, Think, and Feel as a “Good” White Person When These Things Happen™ and I believe we legitimately believed, thought, and felt what we said.
Our walk continued, as did our discussion.
About half way through the trail, I noticed a man on the trail standing at the bottom of a set of stairs that leads up to homes and a street. He was standing there looking up, and then looking back at me. He did this several times.
Because of my past history with men, which includes sexual abuse, assault, and other violence, I have learned to consciously choose my response in these kinds of situations, where my body and gut say “ALERT! THERE IS A MAN! HE CAN AND WILL HURT YOU!” instantly, without my conscious thought. As I approached this man, my inner chatter was, in roughly this order:
“ALERT! THERE IS A MAN! HE CAN AND WILL HURT YOU!”
“Take a breath, Athena. Every man doesn’t hurt you.”
“Take another breath, Athena. He has every right to be on this trail, at the bottom of these stairs, simply looking up and looking back at you.”
“Take another breath, Athena. You want a world where a white woman can walk safely on a trail and a Black man can simply exist on that same trail and there isn’t fear involved.”
“See, it’s okay. He’s walking up the stairs. I bet he’s simply waiting to meet up with someone.”
“Take a breath, Athena. Re-engage in the conversation with your friend on the phone.”
90 percent of the time in my life as it is currently, this is the right work for me to do when I encounter men when I’m alone. I can’t stop my body and brain’s immediate reactions to what it perceives as danger, given my lived experiences, my conditioning (familial, cultural, social, otherwise). I can and I believe must learn to bring more discernment to my chosen responses to these situations - both for my own healing (I do not want to live in a state of constant fear and hypervigilance for any number of reasons) and to be part of bringing forth the world I dream of.
Yesterday, though, I got it wrong.
As I passed the stairs, I couldn’t help but look up and see where the man went. I think part of this was my survival brain reminding me to track the movement of men at all times when I’m near them, and part was my conscious brain inviting me to look for the evidence that he really was just minding his own business, living his life.
I didn’t see him, though, so I simply kept walking.
About 15 seconds later, though, he appeared in my peripheral vision, on the hill above me, yelling the shit men yell at women to get their attention, his pants at his ankles, his penis in his hand.
I screamed at him to get the fuck away from me, to get the hell out of here. My friend, when I told her what was happening, rightly told me to get the hell out of there.
I got off the greenline to walk home through the neighborhood. I thought it was over.
Except, about two blocks on, I noticed he was keeping pace with me, but on a parallel block.
My friend stayed on the phone with me until I made it home. Eventually, the man changed directions and stopped following me.
When I got home, I was thankful for my friend who was “with” me during all of this. I was thankful I was okay.
I felt embarrassed. Dirty. Ashamed. Terrified. Fucking FURIOUS. Worried about other women on the trail. Worried about this man who had done this horrible, disgusting, horrific thing and yet, I want him to get help and healing, not an arrest, a beating, or death by the hands of anyone.
I opened my email.
The body had been identified as that of missing jogger Eliza Fletcher. The alleged kidnapper would now also face first degree murder charges.
Yesterday was a terrible day. I cried for Eliza, her family, those who knew and loved her, for me, for women everywhere who do not need to be told that walking or running alone at any time in any clothing is potentially deadly, and who do it anyway, because we dare to demand freedom or just to live our lives. I tried to get some work done. I cried again, so touched, moved, and inspired by Danielle Heineman’s response to “finish Liza’s run”, which will now likely have several hundred women run Eliza’s route in the early morning on Friday, to complete the run she didn’t get to. I went to dinner with a friend, where we commiserated about the events of the day, tried to process our own feelings about her murder, and our own experiences at the hands of men. I slept terribly, fitfully, and for not nearly as long as my body and my nervous system crave for healing and integration.
I woke up this morning sluggish. As I met with a dear friend of mine for our weekly call where “all” we do is witness what is moving through each other so that we might feel it all the way through, and do that by strengthening the connection we have to each other, everything from yesterday - and more - was alive in me to be witnessed.
Mostly, I talked about how powerless I feel to do anything in this moment to bring about the world I most want. I struggle, even as I write this with big questions like:
What do men need (and I mean this sincerely, not glibly) so that they keep their eyes, hands, penises, mouths, and thoughts to their fucking selves?
What will it take to create a world where any person on Earth can start a run anywhere else and anytime else and in any clothing they damn well please and make it home safely?
What would it take from me, from my neighbors, from the V&E Greenline community (truly one of my favorite parts of Memphis), from our institutions, and more to ensure that every person who enters it - no matter their social identities - is safe? What would it take from those same people to ensure that when safety is breached - like it was for me yesterday - that our response to those who breach it isn’t to then turn right around and make it unsafe for a whole swath of people - in this case all Black men - but instead to stop the breach and also ensure that whoever breached it to begin with gets the help and support they so obviously need?
What is my responsibility at this moment to support the safety of others on the greenline? What should I do, when I believe as I do, that involving the police is not the answer?
What should I do, especially after no fewer than NINE different law enforcement agencies just came together to solve a white woman’s murder at the alleged hands of a Black man, to not be yet another person who makes the city unsafe for Black men, while also recognizing that a Black man did a thing to me yesterday that was not okay?
How do I keep walking the greenline by myself and feel safe?
I don’t know the answers to most of these questions, if any of them.
I know yesterday was a reminder that I’m not safe in this world and yet, I don’t want that to lead to my hypervigilance and living my life scared of the world and others in it.
I know I am really grateful that I have access to tools and resources that allow me to heal so that yesterday and ongoingly, I could actually take care of myself (with the support and help of so many others) and feel my feelings, instead of retreating into numbness and escapism. I know I am especially grateful for learning the power of box breathing, of having a community to meditate with regularly, of having tools that help me disentangle what happened to me from what happened to Eliza (because you can bet your entire net worth that my brain is SO DESIROUS TO LINK THESE THINGS), of having friends who hold me in loving, accountable relationships, and more.
I know I am terrified that Eliza’s murder will be used to re-cement White Supremacy in Memphis (and likely elsewhere). The elements of this story are directly aligned to the ways in which the feared safety of white women has been used to advance racist policies, policing, and vigilante violence over America’s history, at the expense of the safety of Black men who are demonized as the oversexualized perpetrators of violence, and at the expense of creating safety for Indigenous, Black, and Brown women, who are kidnapped and murdered far too often without the resources and attention that white women in similar situations garner2.
I know that I believe we white women have a unique role to play in ending this cycle. That we can come together to do the work of looking at the ways in which we are truly unsafe in this world and the ways in which white men, in particular, use our safety as ways to advance the agenda of White Supremacy and we allow this to happen in our names, passively and actively. That we can come together with women of color to imagine a new world where we are all free and safe; that we can do the work to make ourselves trusted partners in the fight for not just our own safety, but those of Indigenous, Black, and Brown women; that we can do the work in a way that would make the writers of The Combahee River Collective Statement proud to call us sisters.
I know that I continue to dream of a world where love, not fear, is our organizing principle.
I know that writing this was hard, but it was the first thing I could think of that would move me out of powerlessness and into feeling any kind of agency. And now that I’ve written it, I can identify another: if you’re a white woman and want to join me in some sort of way (I don’t know what that is yet! Maybe we can figure it out together!) to do some of the work I’ve highlighted here, then email me (athena.palmer@noduckscoaching.com) and maybe we can find our way into some of the answers and actions together.
In the meantime, may we all be safe. May Eliza’s family be held in love and care and access the healing they need in their grief. May the man who allegedly did this to her find as much safety as possible and access the healing he needs. May we all be safe. May we all be safe. May we all be safe.
“The loop” refers to the interstate system that rings the city proper, and it’s common for those inside it to not venture outside to the suburbs around it which are predominantly wealthy and white and for those who live outside of it to venture in for work and basketball games and to fear and stereotype those who live inside it, who are predominantly poor and Black.
There are so many organizations who work to step into the gap of this reality and support families. One I donate to and recommend to others is The Snowbird Fund which supports families of missing Indigenous people in Montana to search for their loved ones.