Show your face and say what you think

Authentic expression in a time of fear

My eye’s been twitching for weeks. I’ve been putting myself in an uncomfortable space on purpose. My eye twitches, and I let it twitch. I notice it—there it goes, mid-conversation—and let it twitch.

I’m in Atlanta, doing a DEI show with a touring theater company at a conference for the Federal Reserve. I did these shows a bunch in the before-times (pre-2020). I took a long hiatus during the pandemic years, and have just dipped a toe back in this year. I’ve changed since I did it last. The world has changed too. 

I’m like a progressive who thought they were all for legalizing hard drugs, then thought twice when they saw the ramifications of legalization play out on the streets of San Francisco. Or a conservative who celebrated the fall of Roe v. Wade then watched with alarm as IVF was outlawed in Alabama. 

I’ve had the chance to see DEI initiatives taken to their fullest, most extreme realization. I’ve seen the White Fragility-inspired self-flagellation sessions, the cancellations of advanced algebra classes in the name of equity, the Smithsonian declaring that love of the written word and rational thought are manifestations of whiteness. I’ve seen friends and colleagues get more paranoid, anxious, sad, and disconnected as they increasingly see the world through a lens of catastrophizing and grievance.

I’ve been blown back on my heels. Where before I thought, “We should all be more aware of potential harm,” now I think, “We need to stop insisting that everyone see harm everywhere they look. This isn’t making anything better. We are making people unwell.” 

So why am I here? In Atlanta, I mean, doing a show all about DEI and microaggressions. This is a question I have asked myself. I’m like a former true believer who wants to see if the church has room for me in all my newfound ambivalence. I’m like a newly-out gay Evangelical, trying to see if there’s a way to stay in the fold, holding on to the beautiful and good things I always loved about my faith community. 

I know my most ardent social-justice-minded friends think I’m a little dirty and sinful—reading the heterodox press, defending old-school values around free speech, refusing to disavow J.K. Rowling—but maybe there can be some mutual accommodation here? 

There’s been too much fracturing. Too much canceling. Too much declaring others “toxic” and cutting them off. Too much retreating into spaces where we only allow people who think exactly the way we do. Enough! 

Yes, sometimes growth means separation from what no longer fits. But often, there’s reward in staying in relationships throughout change. Surely not everything has to splinter and collapse. Surely there’s some middle ground between total agreement and fiery condemnation. 

The fact is, I deeply value inclusion. I want to be surrounded by people with diverse viewpoints, life experiences, and ways of thinking and being. I want to contribute to making those spaces “safe,” in the sense that people don’t feel they need to self-censor or risk expulsion. I want to embody the courage it takes to create and participate in spaces like that. I want to cultivate the resilience to withstand the discomfort of friction and disagreement. I want to keep listening, and venture to offer my truth as well. 

I want to do what I’ve always done—resist conformity, and defend the right of others to do so too. 

In the scripted portions of the show, I help portray various race-, gender-, disability-, and age-based microaggressions. I point out problematic phrases that we should scrub from our language (“Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?” “It’s the blind leading the blind.”) In one of the group scenes, I play a white lady who needs to be “called in” for a subconscious attitude that her fellow DEI committee members find troubling. 

My heart’s not really in these sections of the show anymore. They don’t resonate with me the way they used to. But people in the post-show discussions reliably tear up and express how validated the show made them feel, how powerful it was for them to see their experiences and relationship dynamics portrayed like that on stage. That makes it worthwhile to me, and highlights how much is missing from my own view, how much other people’s realities are so very different from my own. This is useful for me to remember. It helps to modulate my drift. 

There’s another portion of the show titled, “I am afraid,” in which each performer stands up and lists some of our sincere, personal fears. 

In this section, I speak words I wrote myself. I say, “I am afraid that we’ve given up on talking to each other and settled for telling ourselves stories about the cardboard-cutout villains over there. I am afraid that a constant focus on grievance is making us all more miserable and anxious. I am afraid that I will be disowned by my liberal community if I insist on thinking for myself.” 

These are scary things to say onstage at a DEI event. But I tell myself I can’t be the only one in the room who feels this way. I remind myself that the point here is to let people see themselves and their internal realities reflected onstage—to give voice to the things that people are thinking but not saying.

An oft-repeated mantra in DEI circles is that it takes courage and radical honesty to “do the work.” “The work” is rarely clearly defined. I have my own sense of it, though. To me, it’s making room for multiple truths. It’s bringing the unspoken into the light. It’s growing our power through integrating our own shadows, which we can only do by looking at them, owning them, and declining to project them onto others. It’s recognizing that each of us is a valid and distinct piece of the Whole. 

The two most powerful parts of the show for me are “I am afraid,” and “I am from.” In the latter, each performer does a little spoken-word piece about where they come from—the town, their family, the values and beliefs, the flavors, the joys, the people, the culture, the tragedies. There’s no way to hear someone talk about their roots and their fears without feeling tremendous tenderness for them.

If “the work” has a shadow side of shame and blame, of simplifying complex dynamics into reductive boxes in order to create hierarchies of oppression, then this represents its beauty and light: the way our shared humanity is revealed in the very particularities that make us unique. It’s agape love—unconditional and complete, encompassing the self and others with radical abundance. It moves me every time. It keeps me coming back.

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In 2012, I auditioned for a play at the biggest theater in town. I had never worked there, and wanted to, desperately. I nailed the audition and the callback, and I knew the part was mine. I was right — the director wanted to cast me. But I learned later that members of the administration wouldn’t let him, partly because I had (mildly) criticized the artistic director of the theater on social media several months prior. 

It’s hard to overstate the effect this had on me, as a lesson, an example of the dangers of using your voice. My throat chakra felt blocked for years afterward, even after I had coffee with the assistant AD, apologized, groveled, and subsequently worked at the theater several times. 

The lesson was: People are watching and listening. They’re taking notes. Nice little career you’ve got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it. 

I’d be lying if I said I’m done working through this. It’s still one of the main dragons I need to slay—accepting the risks and consequences of authentic expression. There’s huge fear here for me. And huge power waiting on the other side. 

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In the madcap summer of 2020, Winston Marshall of the band Mumford & Sons read a lot of books. He tweeted his opinions on them to his 3,000 followers on Twitter—books on science and philosophy, fiction and nonfiction. At one point he tweeted approvingly about a book that was critical of Antifa and far left extremism. The tweet went viral, and not in a good way. The pile-on was intense: accusations of fascism, attacks against his bandmates and friends, etc. 

First, Marshall issued an apology. But it didn’t stick. He describes it in this interview with Canadian journalist Tara Henley:

“A lot of my friends and associates were very upset by my tweet. And I issued an apology. I would say I was forced to issue the apology, which is true. But I also felt like perhaps I didn’t know the whole story. Perhaps I didn’t know everything that was going on. I was open to being proved that maybe I was wrong. So I issued the apology. And then, over the coming months, I looked deeper and deeper into the issue, and I kind of went mad. Because I didn’t think I had actually done anything wrong.”

“When I say mad, I mean I wasn’t sleeping. I was losing sleep, not eating properly. And I was in this horrible situation where my options — basically, I could have stayed, stood by this apology that I think was participating in the lie that far left extremism was good. Or, I could leave, save my bandmates the trouble, but at least have my integrity and dignity.”

So he left the band. Subsequently, he spoke up in defense of the singer M.I.A. after her invitation to perform at a London music festival was revoked following critical comments she made about Covid vaccine mandates. In the same interview, he explains why this kind of punitive cancellation is bad for the arts:

“So, why this is bad is because other artists will see this and think, ‘Oh, I better keep quiet. If I risk losing gigs because I’ve got the wrong opinions, better to not have any opinions.’ …It’s very hard to make money from music. And so, the majority of artists are just not going to take the risk. Another consequence of that, by the way, will be that they take less risks with their creations, with their music. It just creates an atmosphere. And I know that. That was my experience in it. After a while of ‘don’t say that,’ it seeps into every aspect of your creativity — the idea that there are things you cannot go towards, and things you cannot explore.”

He’s right. This has been a bad time for art. Theater in particular is struggling. Theater is meant to explore big ideas, create generative friction, plumb the ugly depths and soaring reaches of the human soul. When so much expression is off limits, we’re left with pablum. 

There’s been no end to speculation on the reasons that theater is struggling: changes in audience habits post-pandemic, “woke” programming, inflation, etc. In my view, it all boils down to fear. Timidity, self-censorship, preemptive defense against potential mobs, the constant need to signal allegiance to a pseudo-religious ideology, fear of being accused of wrongthink. No frisson, no hope for a transgressive thrill. 

There are pockets of good work happening, but the larger atmosphere is one of stifling caution. How disappointing. How very sad. I think all the time: Where did all the artists go? I have to hope that many are just lying in wait. I have to hope they’re beginning to stir. 

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Protests have been rippling across college campuses all spring. Big swathes of the protestors are masked. When asked why, many report fearing for their future careers if their identities are known. 

It seems worth noting that until very recently, laws prevented masking in public to protect against violent, anonymous actions by members of the KKK. Presumably, the KKK members also feared for their careers if their identities were known, hence the hoods. 

Obviously, the student protestors are not the same as the KKK. But credibility and moral heft come from putting yourself on the line, stating your position, and accepting the consequences of doing so. Ask the civil rights protestors of the 1960s, the freedom riders, the activists of the Arab Spring. You have to have the courage of your convictions if you hope to change hearts and minds. 

At the end of the day, if you believe your cause is righteous and you want to convince others of it too, you have to show your face and say what you think. 

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We grow up with quotes plastered on our classroom walls extolling the virtues of resisting the mob, standing alone, being fearlessly committed to the truth even in the face of exile. 

Orwell: "In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." 

Gandhi: "Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth." 

MLK Jr: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." 

Benjamin Franklin: “If everybody is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world."

The trick, of course, is that when these sentiments become subsumed into the dominant culture, which still somehow casts itself as a scrappy, ragtag movement that’s peripheral to power, disorientation sets in. 

In the name of protecting minorities, we’re silencing minority views. In the name of protecting the truth, we’re recasting dissent from official narratives as “disinformation.” 

No wonder so many of us feel so tentative and confused, so ready to abandon our inner compasses in favor of the comfort of the herd, which seems to know where it’s going. Yes, that’s a cliff in the distance, right in our path. Does anyone else see it? Are you crazy? Do you speak up and risk being abandoned, left to wander the wilderness all alone? Isn’t this what all those classroom posters prepared you for?

It’s a dicey moment. What if we took some of those wise thinkers at their word? Trusted that the truth will set us free, and all that? It does seem worth a shot. 

None of us is likely to have access to the complete, capital-T Truth by ourselves, but our only hope of finding it together is by bravely sharing the little window on it that each of us uniquely has, and letting others share theirs too. The beautiful thing about courage and truth is that, once kindled, they are wont to spread. 

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Now I’m on a road trip in New Mexico, still trying to calm this eye twitch. It’s slowly mellowing. The best trick I’ve found to make it stop is to find a mirror and look myself in the eye. A stressful thought or circumstance will set it twitching, and I’ll find a mirror, focus on my right eye, and will it to stop. It works; it’s helping. I’m needing to do it less and less.

I don’t know why it works. Maybe it has something to do with neurofeedback. Maybe it has to do with integrity—the state of being whole and undivided. I don’t like to look at my face. I try to avoid it. There’s something about looking yourself in the eye that’s stabilizing, though. Externalities melt away. It focuses the mind. 

The inner compass is in there somewhere. You have to check in with it. You have to sync up. You have to show your face, even to yourself I guess. You have to know who you are, then say what it is you think.