What to my elder is your fourth of July?

5 questions for writer, teacher, and activist Louise Dunlap

Imagine yourself in your 80s. No really, close your eyes and do it for a minute. For some of you, that might be very soon. For some of you, and for me at 40, that feels very far off. But I’ll tell you what, I’m in love with this woman I can imagine. She’s wise. She’s easily delighted. She’s a good listener and a fierce talker. She’s never stopped learning. She’s beautiful and often found with her hands around a paintbrush or in a small child’s hair. She’s not without fear, but she’s skillful at putting that fear in perspective. Her body is aging, and that’s sometimes frustrating, but also a natural progression, an excuse to read and enjoy solitude, an excuse to say no and spend time noticing the sunlight move across the walls instead.

I’m pretty sure that one of the main reasons I can fantasize about this version of myself is because of Louise Dunlap, my neighbor, friend, and mentor. Since I met Louise about 7 years ago, she has continually and quietly transformed the way I understand activism, aging, anti-racism, teaching, gardening, conflict engagement, and about 25 other things.

She is averse to hero worship in any form, but it’s hard not to be a little moony about her. I see her walking through our cohousing community, green onions peeking out of her pockets, dirt under her fingernails. She stops for a little chat, takes a little delight in one of the grubby-faced kids in her midst, and then heads back to her studio apartment to chip away at her manuscript. Her life is a work of art, a reflection of her values more accurate than almost anyone else I’ve ever met, and she’s never done evolving.

I thought that if anyone could put this moment in America in perspective, it would be my dear neighbor.

Courtney: You’re turning 82 this month and you’ve been engaged in racial justice movements of various kinds for most of your life. Does this moment feel different to you?

Louise: It sure does. I understand racism better than I did in the 60s when us white people thought it was just hateful behavior by certain other white people. Now I see the economic and political systems that keep injustice operating. What’s changed is that now lots of other white people see them too. We see our complicity. Plus world majority leadership is so strong right now. Their work, and also ours as white people, has been building for years.

You spend a lot of your time and energy nurturing the writing of people of color--mainly through writing groups. Why is that work so important to you?

I began that work in academia. The elite graduate program where I taught recruited remarkable BIPOC students but didn’t honor their perspectives or center their voices as they did the more mainstream students. I got to see how difficult it is for world majority thinkers to have their work listened to in the academic and professional worlds. Prioritizing their voices started out to be about equity, but at this point I also realize that these voices have the perspectives we need to survive what the planet is going through. Indigenous ideas about balance and the environment, Black and Indigenous experience surviving genocide and enslavement. Generations have cultivated resiliency that they are willing to share if we listen. Einstein understood you can’t solve problems from the mindset that created them, and the mind of white supremacy culture really gets in our way. We desperately need the voices we’ve not been listening to.

Your own writing project for the last few years has been a book about the quest to understand the genocidal roots of some land you inherited in the Napa Valley, and love very much, and to think/feel through reparations with that land and those people. What brought you to that project?

As a child I was drawn to the indigenous plant life on this land, and later as my racial awareness grew, I found myself in Indian Country, through some of those same students I mentioned earlier. Feeling the vast injustices they’d faced, I knew my own settler ancestors had been involved—even if only as bystanders and enablers. It was painful to dig out the disgusting facts of the genocide in California during early statehood, but how can we live in integrity with the land without facing its history? Being invited into ceremony with Native people challenged me to “honor” my own ancestors, the perpetrators, and that has been the hardest part of my quest. Healing what Indigenous people call “the soul wound” that affects all parties to the genocide is at the heart of this project. How to restore my share of the family land is something I’ll be wrestling with for the rest of my lifetime.

In this moment of racial reckoning, so many of us are trying to decenter whiteness. How do you think about your book project in relationship to that effort? (As you know, I'm also working on a book about white consciousness and action, so really struggling with this in my own head and heart.)

Decentering whiteness doesn’t mean we ignore it. World Majority voices like Resmaa Menakem are telling us to get together as white people and look at this history, look at our own complicity in it—acknowledge so we can transform and create a white culture that is not about supremacy. Hoping my book will be a small part of this effort has kept me going through some hard times. We have to keep asking ourselves: why am I doing this? If it’s to “look good, feel good, do good and move forward” as decolonizing scholar Vanessa Andreotti would say, then this is the habit energy of white supremacy and part of our complicity. I’ve struggled with this and also received a lot of encouragement from friends of color for what I’m trying to write. I’m guessing you have too.

Will you be celebrating the 4th of July this year? Do you feel a sense of patriotism, and if so, can you describe it to us a bit?

This is a hard question, Courtney. I’ve shunned 4th of July for decades—to me fireworks celebrate war, and I’ve read enough about the “War of Independence” to know it was also a war to clear the land for settlement—and a really brutal one. An organization I used to work with in Boston does a public reading every year of Frederic Douglass’ speech, “What to the Slave is Your Fourth of July?”

That was how I celebrated. If I feel “patriotic,” it’s because I love the idea of people rising up to make a better world, but I’d like a better word for it. “Patriot” has Latin roots that center the masculine—same as “patriarch.” Maybe we could take a cue from the amazing Sogorea Te’ Land Trust –started by Indigenous women here in Oakland. Their newest slogan is: “Rematriate the Land.” Even with all we’re facing right now, I have some hope that we can learn to be human together and pull through this sickness that’s been affecting us since my ancestors arrived from Europe 400 years ago.

Some people have already asked where they can get Louise’s awesome shirt in the second picture. Here! My friend and artist Jen Bloomer makes them, in addition to other gorgeous things.

Listen to me interview the visionary Mia Birdsong here.