Blindsided: Essays from the Only Black Woman in the Room
Kansas City Author: Dawn Downey
We strive for authenticity, but expediency often demands we suppress our true feelings.
Dawn Downey struggles to find her genuine self, as she navigates her white surroundings. She wages an internal war, her intuition recognizing bigotry and her intellect wanting-needing-to deny it. At the end of any given day, she is angry. She is weary. She despairs.
"You get to hopeless by sinking," she tells us.
"I sank through dreamlike images of shackles, chains, branding irons, whips, ropes, nightsticks, burning crosses, and fire hoses. Bloodhounds on my trail, police dogs at my throat. I crashed through all the places that are supposed to be safe: school yards, lunch counters, courthouses, and church basements. From nigger to nigra to colored to negro to black to african-american and back again. Strange fruit. Centuries-old images absorbed from textbooks. Civil rights marches flickering across the family television. Labels, passed down from one generation to the next, labels meant to hold me apart, the other."
When a family member transforms a racist artifact, the act of redemption explodes her self-concept. She re-examines old beliefs, and on the other side of hopeless, discovers her Black power.
Downey prompts us to consider how we find our authentic selves in the heart of our discomfort.
About the Author:
Dawn Downey writes to bring people together in a compassionate understanding of one another. By writing her personal challenges, she sees the workings of her mind. By listening to her readers, she learns that most minds work in a similar fashion. She is driven to share her stories by the hope that readers will lovingly accept those similarities-in themselves, in one another, and in their adversaries. She believes a good story well told lies at the heart of such recognition. For instruction in the craft of story telling, she turns to her favorite authors. To remember how to express emotional pain, she reads the novels of Toni Morrison. Annie Dillard teaches her to describe metaphysical experience, without succumbing to spiritual jargon. She reads George R. R. Martin to master the art of run-for-your-life terror. Downey is the author of From Dawn to Daylight: Essays, a collection of personal vignettes. She is also the author of a memoir, Stumbling Toward the Buddha: Stories about Tripping over My Principles on the Road to Transformation. She composes her essays in traditional narrative style, as well as the nonlinear lyrical form. She experiments with the format of flash nonfiction-each story less than a page long. Although her subject matter is the familiar territory of daily life, she draws inspiration from the transcendent. Publications featuring her work include Punctuate; Persimmon Tree; Kansas City Voices; River, Blood, and Corn; Skirt! Magazine; and The Christian Science Monitor. The solitary process of writing makes her crave face-to-face interaction, which she satisfies through lunches with readers and friends and weekend strolls with a hiking club. She and her husband live in Kansas City, where she writes books while her house grows dust bunnies. Learn more at dawndowney.com.
