Why F*ck Perfect? And what does it have to do with White Supremacy Culture?
“White Supremacy Culture takes our humanity, crushes it up, and says, ‘You can have some of this back if you’re complicit in your own dehumanization.’”
-McKensie Mack
We run a program called Fuck Perfect.
Not everyone likes that title. I certainly get that.
We’re not trying to be flippant or inflammatory. We’re trying to be real. We’re trying to use our anger and our hurt to reclaim and speak back. Perfectionism is the thing that screams: you are not now, nor will you ever be, good enough. It is an impossible standard and a never-ending feedback loop spiralling to nowhere, or, rather, toward stagnation, paralysis, and self-hate. Perfectionism says: you ARE your mistakes. We think that line of logic deserves a good old: F you. It hurts us, it hurts our friends, it violates the unquestionable truth that, in the words of McKenzie Mack, “we are all born worthy.” And I happen to believe that not a thing is required of ANY of us to prove our human worth.
We also talk a lot about white supremacy. We’re not trying to be concerning or divisive. We’re trying to be part of the change. Unknown to me when I first conceived of Fuck Perfect was the fact that perfectionism is a characteristic of white supremacy culture (see the work of Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones, and COco). Now, THIS. MAKES. PERFECT. SENSE. White supremacy is in the business of stripping people of their own deeply embedded knowing, of their own inalienable self worth, of their own entanglement in a much broader collective.* White supremacy culture makes invisible the ways in which “to be socialized in Whiteness is to be socialized into dehumanization” (Shah and Peek, page 47). And finally, white supremacy culture would have us believe that there are many, many conditions for self-worth and that these are doled out according to hierarchies of identities, with middle class, white, straight, cis-, able-bodied men on the top. Naming this is not an attack on that category of human. After all, my brother, from whom my personal commitment to this work derives, and with whom we all too late identified a deep and ultimately fateful struggle with perfectionism, was that category of human.
Part of what we hope to do in Fuck Perfect and in our work more generally is harness the power of the arts to create the conditions for inner and outer social change. In fact, the deep intention of this program is to not only speak back to perfectionism and the systems that reward it, but to deepen our access to our creativity in the service of community. Our wording here is intentional. We cannot do this alone. We need each other because we are made of one another. We think the arts provide us with incredible tools to access our whole selves, to loosen the grip of white supremacy on our souls, to be in our bodies, to access our senses, to serve something greater, to inhabit our rage, to learn from our ancestors, to practice our love, to resist dominant ways of thinking, to find ways toward each other, and to do all of those things without need for fixing, saving, or apology.** I believe this sets the stage for, and IS a site of change both internally, and externally. And, let’s be real: the arts, the way they have been individualized, commodified, capitalized, and hierarchized means that they too, are steeped in white supremacy. And so while they present the capacity for all of this and more, the way these tools are used matters.
And this is a lifelong journey and we will only ever make a dent. Like perfectionism, striving for change exposes an ever-receding horizon, but THIS is a “not yet” that I can get behind and to which we will remain deeply committed. It’s not the kind of “not yet” that is a headfuck and a set-up (i.e. when you’re thinner, you’ll be more lovable; when you act more white, you’ll be more worthy). It is not marked by arrivals or resting points (you have already arrived, you’re always allowed to rest). It’s an orientation. It’s an undoing. It’s a remembering. Whereas, perfectionism is a halting, a stifling, a forgetting. And white supremacy is the logic and the system that keeps it all in place.
And when we impose this logic on one another, when see each other through these lenses - hold measuring sticks up to other human bodies to discern how they stack up against a very specific and exclusionary measure of self-worth (one must always be right, and polite, and productive, and wealthy, and able, and white), we live in constant fear of the possibility that we too, might not measure up. And that fear makes people do unimaginable, dehumanizing things, to others and to themselves.
“White Supremacy Culture takes our humanity, crushes it up, and says, ‘You can have some of this back if you’re complicit in your own dehumanization.’” - McKensie Mack
We use these simple exercises in our facilitation - like freewrites, or freedrawing - and sometimes participants share what they’ve created. And just like I WILL NEVER STOP LOVING HOW DIFFERENT EACH EXPRESSION IS (like, how is it possible that no two people created the same thing? It is truly astounding), I’ll never, ever, stop being in awe of the infinite expressions of beautiful that exist in the world in human (and beyond human) form, and, similarly, will never understand why and to whom the proliferation of such expressions pose a threat. Except for that, perhaps when we fear difference, it’s that we’ve been denied our own.
So that was a long winded-way of peeling back the layers behind a seemingly cheeky name for a program.
And, yes, fuck is a powerful word. And we think it is entirely appropriate.
By Michelle Peek, Executive Director
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to the following thinkers, mentors, and critical friends, who introduced us to the work of Coco, Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones pushed our thinking, and asked critical questions to help us grow in the service of more inclusive and equitable worlds and work: Nadia Chaney, Prentis Hemphill, McKensie Mack, Melanie Schambach, Dawn Serra, Vidya Shah, and Sonya Renee Taylor.
*In reviewing a draft of this blog post, friend and co-author Vidya Shah reminds me of how even notions of self-worth perpetuate the logic of individualism in white supremacy culture. Perhaps it is precisely because the conditions set for self worth in a white supremacist culture are so bound to expressions of individualism, that we are so unwell, so in pain, so alone feeling. Relatedly, Alexis Shotwell writes about how our orientation to individual vs. collective care shapes our response to Covid-19: “The relationship we’re in with this virus invites us to form practices for taking care that allow more of us to live, and for that life not to predictably line up with whiteness and wealth. How do our definitions of wellness similarly line up with whiteness and wealth? How do they place the individual at the centre, in competition with ourselves and each other, and how might we work to undo this, in community?
**One of the Touchstones of the Centre for Courage and Renewal’s Circle of Trust work, which aims to resist white supremacy culture, is “no fixing, saving, advising, or correcting.”