In Conversation with Charlotte Swain - 'Nor Will I'
"We need to have the hard conversations,” is a saying that many people have repeated throughout this summer of racial reckoning. But what does that actually look like in action? What does is mean to call folks in instead of calling folks out, to unpack deeply rooted and nuanced social issues with those we are connected to and care about as opposed to random internet users?
Charlotte Swain details that exact scenario in her piece for Your Silence Will Not Protect You titled ‘Nor Will I,’ where she discusses the tough conversations she had with her mother and longtime friend. In the final In Conversation interview, Charlotte shares more to her story and offers advice for those looking to begin that work in their own relationships.
What’s your story? Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today.
I’m Charlotte, pronouns she/her/hers. I guess my story and my background are a litte interesting: I spent the last eight years working in charities and nonprofit work, kind of hopping around. In that time I’ve really worked on myself as a creative and a writer and found myself getting closer and closer to social justice work.
It means a lot to me as an individual with several different intersections - being a Black, mixed-race woman of color and also being queer and seeing the trajectory this country is going in as well as my other country which is the United Kingdom. I’ve started working more on figuring out what my own politic is and how I can be engaged and help the world a better place for myself, my loved ones, and my community.
Especially in this most recent year, I’ve taken to living that politic more intentionally - not only just in my everyday life, but also in my work life. I recently accepted a position with a statewide abortion fund called Fund Texas Choice as their Director of Development and Communications. I’m really excited to be involved with an organization that has such an impact on the ground with people and can really make a difference in their lives, and also to be able to make that difference and also be transparent about it both in my professional life and my personal life and have those two parts of me meet.
I consider myself to be a writer, a thinker, a lover. I’m always engaged in conversations about politics, about what it means to be human and to love one another and to help support one another, and how to be a more equitable society and to be anti-racist even within myself.
How did you approach writing your piece, “Nor Will I?”
When it came to this personal essay, this was kind of a first for me - I’d never written anything exactly in this format and I wanted to challenge myself to really dig a little bit deeper and talk about these tough issues that I have been struggling with on a personal level in my personal relationships.
The idea of civic engagement to me - as I mentioned in the essay - is something that I came to pretty late. I didn’t really have to think about it and that was a privilege that I experienced pretty early on. I both recognized myself as Black and mixed-race and also recognized that wasn’t something I struggled with that much growing up and I know that I was lucky in that. Many of my friends and people whom I consider family now have been a huge part in molding me and allowing me to understand the differences in the Black experience that I had and the one that most Black people do.
I’m actually a part of an organization called BYP100 (Kési: oh same) it’s the best, love to see it - squad! We did a question-answer run-through, spectrum style where we asked a question to each other about when we first became aware of our racial identities. That was really the first moment that I thought about - not my politic but how long it took me to reach it and what that meant for the people around me. Because those weren’t conversations I was having with people earlier and I really worked internally on my politic before thinking about anybody else’s that I was surrounded by.
I’d like to think that I’m surrounded by pretty great humans and I think ‘Nor Will I’ shows that to be true, but it also shows that there were a lot of boundaries that needed to be pushed. I think that’s how I got to this concept of opening up those conversations that I’ve had over the last 5-10 years with the people closest to me and showing to other people what that can look like and that it can really make a difference, even if that’s not in an electoral way. Which, to be honest, in these times sometimes it feels like a thoughtless, fruitless task and so having those small wins of being able to convince the people that you love and are closest to of things and show them the right way to think about people and what they’re doing and their actions can be really valuable and really important. And it certainly - in a selfish way - helps me to feel better about the state of the world I’m currently living in because goodness knows it’s anxiety-inducing every day.
The thing I really loved about your piece was that it illustrated this phrase that people have been saying so much in the midst of this racial reckoning - about “having the hard conversations.” I love that you not only had them with key people in your life but that they were effective and that you chose to write about it - what would you say to people who, themselves are trying to initiate those hard conversations with the people in their life?
It’s scary. It’s scarier than any other conversation because to look somebody in the face that is one of your closest friends and somebody you know loves you and supports you and to tell them that they’re harming you and they have been harming you in very deep-rooted and uncomfortable ways is really hard. Nobody likes to feel like they’re hurting people that they’re close to and that goes both ways, and to name it and to be able to call it out is a certain kind of conflict that I don’t think we’re trained to be able to engage in - I certainly wasn’t.
I realized one day I was really great at engaging with trolls on the internet and I was really bad at having those conversations in real-time. It was one thing to talk things out about what it meant to be anti-racist, racist policies that exist in our country, and racist experiences - the small things, the things that we know about. People trying to touch your hair or telling you that you speak great for somebody who’s Black, even if that’s left unsaid. There were so many things that I think were understood by people of similar experiences and I realized people around me had no idea about that. Those were things they never had to think about, especially for my family.
My family is - as I mentioned in my piece - is privileged. We’re upper-middle class. My brother is, if you can believe it, even more white presenting than me and he kind of coasted. I think my mom also exists in this space where a lot of white liberals do these days where they can kind of think “I’m not actively bad, which means I’m good.” So it was starting to have those conversations about “Well let’s unpack some of the things that maybe you don’t realize are harmful.” And to her credit, my mom is one of the most adaptable people I’ve ever met. Those conversations were hard - there were tears and there were disagreements, but she listened in a way that I’m not sure she would’ve listened if I had been anyone other than her daughter.
That’s what really led me to write this piece - because I have to believe that if we can have these conversations with people we’re connected to we can change their minds and we can show them that they’re wrong. Some people - I don’t know why - some people I don’t think are salvageable, but some people are. The more we have those tough conversations, the better off we’ll be.
There’s a message that I received from my long-time friend and roommate back in college that I quoted in my piece and she sent me that back in June pretty immediately after George Floyd was murdered and everything was blowing up and she was out in the streets in LA protesting. She reached out to me and we had a very long conversation and she basically said “I’m so grateful to have you in my life because not only do I think you’ve made me a better person, you’ve made me more able to have those tough conversations with people in my life.” And then she proceeded to tell me about her and her sister having those conversations with their white parents who are also neoliberal and also didn’t understand a lot of the ways in which they were inherently racist, intrinsically racist. And so just to see those conversations happening in real-time based on conversations I started within my community and spaces that I held, really made me feel like I was making a difference and that brings me hope.
