S1 Ep001 Belonging and Absence in Public Space with Reverend Peaches Gillette, Pt1
This is part 1 of our 2 part conversation with Reverend Peaches Gillette - a poet, prison chaplain, diversity consultant, school board member, and educator. She shares her thoughts about unequal access to public space:
What it means to belong
How to think about the human costs of exclusion
The missing piece in the study of racism and racial injustice
Why we must carefully guard against indifference
Bio:
Reverend Gillette has been an educator for more than 45 years in private and public school settings and structured literacy programs for two non-profit organizations, including Brooklyn's Juvenile Detention Center. Presently, she substitutes for the Ithaca and Newfield School Districts and sits on the Dryden School Board and the Human Rights Commission. She has served as a Tri-chair of the Eastern Southern Tier of the Poor People's Campaign.
Revered Peaches Gillette is an ordained chaplain and has worked with battered women, the mentally disabled, and veterans. She also works with individuals in Bedford Correctional Facility, Albion Correctional Facility, and Attica Prison. She is a Spiritual Counselor.
“So the idea of absence represents to me the idea of not just marginalizing people, but almost marginalizing them to the degree that we forget that they even exist.”
About her work:
Race Through Time - Blog and Online Community
Peaches Gillette - Founder - Diversityrising / Spiritualaum | LinkedIn
The Breadth of a Tree: Poems, Letters, and Dreams
We Will No Longer Hide Writing Workshop - Tompkins County Public Library
Transcript
Season 1, Episode 1 (Part 1) : Belonging and Absence in Public Space
[Sounds of train station fade in to background]
Reverend Peaches Gillette, Guest:
“I think people think that indifference is something that you make a conscious decision to be. And it is not. It is something that happens to us, as we're focused on the so many other pieces of our lives. And in the very background of our thinking are these little teeny narratives that keep telling us that we are different, that we don't have to care about that person, or ‘why would I go sit in a jail with people who are incarcerated? They're not like me.’ So these little stories that we have in the back of our minds are still sitting there. And they are helping indifference to ferment.”
[Rhythmic sounds of train passing]
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
[Silence in background]
Cevan Castle, Host:
Welcome to ‘Towards a Kinderpublic’, a podcast exploring issues in public space and ways to design kinder space that better meets our interconnected needs. I’m Cevan Castle, and along with Annie Chen, we are Kinderpublic.
Today’s episode is “Belonging and Absence in Public Space,” and the first half of our conversation with Reverend Peaches Gillette.
Reverend Gillette is a published poet, a prison chaplain, a diversity and race relations consultant, a school board member, and an educator. She is from Brooklyn, New York, now living in Ithaca.
In her writing, Reverend Gillette has shared vivid stories of her childhood in Park Slope, Brooklyn, of summers spent writing in the woods of Vermont, of personal experiences of racism, of devastating loss, of heartbreak, of bringing light into dark places, and of the potential of love. The theme that winds through these stories is the conviction that our presence is a powerful invitation to action.
In Promises to Keep: Wading the Waters of Belonging, she writes:
“In this individualistic society, we forget that we are truly defined by our time here together and defined by one another; and without one another, we would not know who we were. Our sense of self, both negatively and positively, is constructed by our relationships from the time we are born. We know this, we see it. It is actually quite beautiful, this belonging to one another, this seamlessly drifting into the need to belong and have another belong to us. To be thoughtful. To think of others. And to wish and do them well.”
We will talk about her ideas of public space, race, equity, and inclusivity today.
With Kinderpublic’s purpose in mind– to encourage kinder and more inclusive public space– we share this conversation with the Reverend Peaches Gillette.
Cevan, opening interview:
Thank you for being here.
It seems to me that the first step in thinking about improving public space for all is to acknowledge that not all people are accessing it equally.
There is a spectrum of entitlement to access of public space, and there seems to be a corresponding spectrum of belonging. Every hardship in the ability to access public space is potentially contributing to an absence of some kind.
But what about inclusion? You have spoken on the subject of belonging- can you share thoughts about the experience and feeling of belonging? What does belonging mean?
Reverend Gillette:
I started looking at the sense of belonging as almost feeling embraced by a certain kind of love and being embraced and that love spreading out into like, ‘you mean something to me. I need to have you in my life.’ And those kind of things…, and that's what belonging started meaning to me... we have specific expectations in certain types of relationships that have their own value and their own space. And when you remove one, it's almost like that game Jenga, if you pull a block out, the foundation starts crumbling.
Cevan:
Hmm. So in contrast to belonging, how do we identify and understand absence and how can we think about the human costs of exclusion in our communities?
Reverend Gillette:
Yeah. I was talking to someone today and I used the expression ‘to cross bridges.’ Or, ‘to build bridges,’ was what I used; and then I thought, you know what? The truth of the matter is, the bridges are actually there. It's just a matter of crossing them. And I think that, you know, the feeling of being absent to me and doing this project, with regard to going into rural communities and finding out what it's like to be poor farmers on small farms, and things like that. Absence, to me, has very much to do with this way that we are indifferent to the meaningfulness of that other person or that other group. And for me, it creates an absence for them, and it creates an absence for us, that we're losing out.
So the idea of absence represents to me the idea of not just marginalizing people, but almost marginalizing them to the degree that we forget that they even exist. So it's just pushing them out. And in that we not only create a hole for them, we're actually creating a hole for ourselves in the scheme of who we really want to be, as people who think of ourselves as compassionate and loving and humane in other areas of our lives except for that area. So we're leaving ourselves lacking a sense of being whole without sometimes knowing it. But sometimes even when you don't know something, you act upon it anyway.
Cevan:
And you can feel the lack of wholeness even if you can't put your finger on what may be causing it.
Reverend Gillette:
That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah.
Cevan:
That's really interesting.
In 2019, you organized a trip called the Seminar on Wheels, a history of slavery and racial injustice, which took an interracial, interfaith, and intergenerational group of 29 people on an eight day bus trip to sites that would help expand their understanding of oppression and racial injustice.
Your stops included sites like the National Memorial of Peace and Justice, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In writing about that trip, you explained that “people of good intention unknowingly participate in maintaining this divide and that racial indifference is the fuel that continues to power racism and racial inequality.”
What was the particular impact of the participants moving together through historical and contemporary spaces dedicated to education and justice? And are there collective or individual experiences from the spaces you visited that you would like to share?
Reverend Gillette:
Yes. The trip itself was actually organized by the First Presbyterian Church up in Ithaca. And I heard about it, it's very interesting the timing of it, because I heard about it not very long after my husband had passed away. And I was in the state of experiencing, obviously a great loss, and again, a lack of feeling like I belong. Because that's a primary source of feeling like you belong, to have somebody in your life, especially.
And so I decided to go on this trip because it's a way that I clear my mind whenever I'm struggling with something, going away from my home base and kind of putting myself out in the world, is a way that I can find some sort of grounding, often. So I went on this trip, and there were, I think there were over 23 people there, out of that number there were probably three or four people of color- and that's just the demographic makeup of Ithaca- so you'll often be in situations that way. And everybody was very gung ho. And, you know, certainly all the white people had like, read all the books about anti-racism and studied the history of slavery and did all the things that they feel are a requirement to really deeply understanding the impact of racism on our country, and certainly on people of color.
What is often missing in that way of gathering information about the quote unquote “other,” is the relationship, and the intimate understanding of the details of somebody's life, from their day-to-day existence. Not just from the overall perspective of history (and history, you know, centers on a certain group of people). And if you're only reading about a certain group of people, like if it's the rural south, that's one way that racism manifests itself.
But when you're talking about the person living next door to you, and you don't have an understanding of that and how racism operates in their lives every single day, then you're really selling yourself short. And even your efforts to make people feel like you care and that you're including them really fall flat, because you haven't really developed the intimate relationship with them, which is how we develop friendships.
We develop friendships by saying, ‘hey, what movie do you like? And where do you like to go for dinner,’ and things like that. And most of the people even nowadays who are into anti-racism don't do that. What they do is study racism from a very abstract point of view. And they never get down to, ‘come hang out in my house,’ ‘let's have a cup of tea,’ you know, ‘let's go off for a beer,’ or whatever it is. So they never develop intimate relationships, which really are the foundation of dispelling stereotypes. When you really get to know people.
I mean, I grew up in the middle of a racist neighborhood that was kind of moving out of being intensely racist, simply because we knew one another. Not because they read books, not because they took seminars or workshops, but because we knew one another and you grow on one another.
Well, if we leave that out of the package of anti-racism, it's really not gonna work as well as we think it is, and so when we went on this trip, literally everybody on that bus, most white people, had taken tons of seminars and read tons of books, updated themselves on every piece of information about racism. And they were gonna put it into true action by really coming into the spaces where all of the worst of that kind of racism manifests itself. And that was great, and I met some really lovely people.
But when they got there, when most of them got to these places, it was almost as if they were unmoved. You know, you go to the lynching museum and for me, even if I didn't do so outwardly, like… I imaged myself just falling down on my knees and weeping because that's the way it was feeling for me. And these people had almost trained themselves to only look at racism as a historic event that's removed from them, in other words, it was like a study, it's not an experience, which are two different things.
And so that was the most shocking part, that I expected people to be much more moved by the situation, to be much more thoughtful. Because of course, we went out to dinner and we went to do whatever. And not even thinking like, what does this handful of black people feel like going into a restaurant that still has a confederate flag! Because they're not identifying with the reality and the day-to-day of what racism feels like. And this is what's keeping us very separate in a lot of ways. Not separate from love, because I love these people, but separate in terms of certain conversations- that there are certain things you don't talk about because you know, they won't understand or they won't feel it as deeply as you feel it, you know?
And so we have to get past that. So there it is again, this effort to make people feel like they belong. And I'll address that later, because the fact that you're, you're trying to make people feel like they belong is almost like the point of it, as opposed to just absorbing the fact that they do belong. You know what I mean?
Cevan:
Mmm-hmm.
Reverend Gillette:
So they're trying to make people feel like they belong, but they're not really. They have to do it in a way where that person's life, the details of that person's life has such meaning to them. And, and an understanding to the greatest degree that that person feels like, yes, I see that, I mean something to you. I see that you're identifying with me. And so they have not succeeded in doing that. And so black people still stand on the other side of the relationship feeling like, well, we really don't belong there. Because we haven't come to mean that way.
The idea that it's difficult for most white people to speak up against racism puts us in a different position. Nothing would stop you from defending children, or our husbands, or our wives. We don't think like, okay, how can I defend this person? Or what do I say? You just say whatever you need to say and that's it. You just say it because your heart goes, I'm defending this person, I'm not letting somebody harm them. So that leaves us kind of separate. And so the sense of belonging, and absence, stays active in these relationships because we really have not walked across that bridge in the way that we think we have, you know?
Cevan:
Mmm-hmm.
How do we eliminate indifference? And what do we replace it with if we are kind of caught in that place of a studious relationship with history? Belonging is not the same as presence. Belonging is not the same as participation. Belonging is something very different, very much beyond those things.
So how do we eliminate the indifference? How do we begin to replace that?
Reverend Gillette:
Mmm-Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
The first way that we do that is to really be, you know… the feeling of indifference or the sense of indifference is insidious, and it can creep up on us before we even realize it. As we are trying to navigate the so many pieces of our lives, you know, everything in our lives… And life is a struggle in so many ways, whether it's about work or job or family or self-esteem or whatever… And so, while we are busy trying to survive all those other elements, indifference is sneaking in to the fabric of who we are. And we don't even realize. It's almost like saying, I cannot think about that right now. I have too much on my table. Well, we cannot have too much on our table when it comes to human relationships.
The first step to me is to really be very aware that we can fall into indifference without even knowing it. I think people think that indifference is something that you make a conscious decision to be. And it is not. It is something that happens to us as we're focused on the so many other pieces of our lives. And in the very background of our thinking are these little teeny narratives that keep telling us that we are different, that we don't have to care about that person: ‘why would I go sit in a jail with people who are incarcerated? They're not like me.’
So these little stories that we have in the back of our minds are still sitting there; they are helping indifference ferment, you know. That we already set up in this world.
We're like, “well, if you're a Republican, we don't have to care about you. If you are this, I don't have to care. If you're across the world, I don't have to care about you.”
So we have these little narratives in our head, and then indifference starts seeping in and making those things grow into this picture of inhumanity, basically. Because that's ultimately where it ends up being. So the first step to getting rid of that is to be very conscious of the fact that it will take over without us even knowing it. And so we have to keep that on our mind. If you think about the fact that anything, any of our qualities and virtues, like let's say just love for instance, those things are active forces. They're not passive forces. Love has things that you have to do to prove that that's what it is.
So you think about that, well, there are things you have to do to prove and to manifest this, the fact that you're not indifferent to people, it's not a passive thing. You don't just let it sit there and hope that it happens. You know. You have to make it happen. You have to keep it on the focus of what you're doing. And I think most people not only don't understand that, but they get so consumed with their own life, and even they get so consumed, just for an example, complaining about injustice and in the background of their thinking, they're allowing injustice to ferment because they're not actively working against it. You know, they're not actively working against indifference, and while they're complaining about indifference, it's still fermenting in the back of their minds, you know? And you have to be conscious of that.
Cevan:
Mmm-hmm.
Reverend Gillette:
We always have to take steps and actions to keep things where we want them to be.
[Sound of birds in a city park fade in to background and play with no other sounds for 10 seconds]
Cevan Castle:
Please subscribe to Towards a Kinder Public on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and a review, we would love your feedback. To share information about issues in public space, and spaces that are doing things right, please email podcast@kinderpublic.com.
Links to the guests and topics mentioned, as well as a full transcript of the conversation, are available on the podcast section of our website, kinderpublic.com. You can also visit our website to learn more about our work.
I’m Cevan Castle, our guest has been Reverend Peaches Gillette. Thanks for listening. I wish you a good week!
[Sounds of birds fade out]
Mentioned in the episode:
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Home | Museum and Memorial (eji.org)
Southern Poverty Law Center
Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org)
The National Museum of African American History and Culture