(And the privilege here is, my skin colour has never come into it).

This will come as a surprise to pretty much everyone who didn't know me during my formative years, but from about the age of 13 to the age of 17, my sincere goal was to pursue a career in ministry. Raised in a Mennonite home with my father as a minister himself, I was exposed to, and encouraged to investigate intersectional faith relationships and teachings. Contrary to the image that many will conjure when picturing a ministers daughter, my experience of faith exploration was one of community, scholarship, and respect for the multiplicity of belief systems around the world.

There was also an underlying thrumb of violence, which was so powerful that it put me off the pursuit of any sort of moral community for 17 years. I hesitate as I write this, because to be so bald faced with my experience continues to jar me. It feels like a threat to say aloud. But even in the fairly liberal reaches of the Mennonite church, violence was and is taking place against LGBTQ people, women, and people of colour. And it's subtle, which is why for me as a then young woman, speaking but not being heard, fighting for my own validity as a queer woman WHO BELONGED was something that took me a while to realise was killing me. I've been treated for suicidal ideation, I've been treated for anxiety, and deep depression. And I didn't realise that the force behind it all was the constant demand to justify my intrinsic right to exist, and be loved, as a young, sexual, vibrant woman.

What I want to talk about is tone policing, gaslighting, and why these actions (which are often hidden behind the guise of peaceful and respectful discussion) hurt the intersectionality of our discourse and therefore, our communities. I use “our” much more broadly than solely within the Mennonite church, because for many of us, some sort of moral community existed within our formative years, political or religious. It's worth discussing the impact.

Let's start with tone policing. Tone policing is subtle. It's a way of removing the discomfort from the conversation by saying we need to keep things level, keep things kind. Tone policing is when we say, “I'm open to hearing your grief at your exclusion from the community, but I expect you to calmly present it, and listen to all sides.” It is the false equalising of the value of the oppressive experience vs the oppressor. Often, I'd find tone policing couched in an argument of values centring around respect and, ironically, equality. Perhaps you have too? As a university student, I once voted for my right to continue to access birth control and abortion services in the state of Colorado. I mostly discussed my fear with my female friends, the core reason being that I didn't have to justify my emotion, or calmly present a theoretical argument about my right to basic medical care. I certainly didn't talk to a faith community, or to most men in my life. If that makes you bristle, think about the discomfort of the vulnerability of voting on my own humanity. You need to really be able to hear that discomfort, and let it sit. Peacekeepers the world round make this mistake, time and time again. We forget that a peaceful sounding conversation is not necessarily a peacemaking conversation; peacekeeping, at its root, is messy. We need to let it get messy. We need to allow those around us to howl with grief, to scream with rage, to sing with emotion, to lament their dehumanisation. And we need to be wildly uncomfortable, and uncertain of what comes next, and accepting of this visceral display of inequality and communication, because the TONE of a piece is not what makes it VALID. The bravery of the expression of oppression, that's what makes it valid.

We must move beyond our fear of discomfort and uncertainty, and embrace a lack of comfortable conversation. That's where the peacekeeping starts.

Once you're uncomfortable, you're going to have to accept that these experiences exist within their impact, whether you intended to participate in that impact or not. This is where we need to examine gaslighting and the minority experience. A common response to an eruption of emotion is to generalise (“well, that may be ONE experience but”), distance from responsibility (“I get that you felt that way but the intention behind the idea was”), and minimise (“I understand you, I really do, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't share your experience, it won't be good for the community”). I cannot speak for how people of colour have experienced this within the church, though I have been told by many friends of colour of their experience of this pattern within our western culture, and I myself have experienced this as a young woman discovering my sexuality, as a young guidance counsellor attempting to provide healing and confidentiality on my college campus, and as an immigrant trying to express my experiences of discrimination in a country I call home (and the privilege there is, my skin colour has never come into it). So if for some strange reason you need to hear it from a white person, this shit is happening. Now think about why you needed me to validate it.

So I am calling you to it; check yourself. Take some responsibility on board. I'll take some on right now in front of all of you; I knew that black men were dying disproportionately at the hands of police in the US, and though I sought to raise awareness, I did not do everything in my power to stop this process. I have many times let racist comments slide because of my own discomfort at challenging them (couched in the excuse of, “Oh it won't change their minds anyway”). And I know, based on the demographic of my readership, that you have, too. But look: when these voices are amplified, are not tone policed, when they are so loud that they drown out the gaslighting, when riots break out because it is a shame that things have to break BUT BLACK PEOPLE CANNOT KEEP DYING, change happens. And all of us own the responsibility of keeping minority voices loud, and lifting up these experiences, and stepping in when we see inequality. Peacekeeping is not about playing nice; it's about applying PRESSURE, on ourselves and others.