I wish I could be in the Pacific Northwest to attend one of these screenings for Dark and Tender, a film exploring the work of Aaron Johnson and the Chronically UnderTouched (CUT) Project.
From their website:
The Chronically UnderTouched (CUT) Project is a movement supporting People of the Global Majority — people of color — to recover healthy, nourishing, platonic touch in a culture that, in the United States, denies it at every turn.
Born out of the development and tracking of the Chronically UnderTouched trauma story, the CUT Project develops accessible practices — deep listening, song, access to nature — as antidotes to the Black Brute archetype. […] Tender, thoughtful touch and holding, to the Black male body, is so dangerous to white supremacy that they use all matters of violence to erase this practice.
I’m watching my dad decline and trying to stay present for the version of him that remains and always, always thinking about grief in this country. How we drown it, gloss over it. We’re starved of the emotional technology that helps us process any of this. Our rituals fall so short. Aaron’s work illuminates the ways this deprivation disproportionately impacts people of color, making it all the more timely.
These days my ears perk up when someone speaks with the candor that comes from living through immeasurable loss. I find myself gravitating to places I never would’ve called home before: grief circles, mortality workshops, books and books and books about mourning, death, and ceremony.
Touch is a cornerstone of survival in this season. The older I get, the more deeply I know it. I know it because I want it. I want lingering hugs that last a full breath. I want leonine forehead to forehead greetings. I want a hand on the shoulder, a back scratch, the reassuring weight of leaning into someone side by side. I want to feel us shoring each other up, reminding one another that we are warm and breathing and alive, even as we hold everything that breaks us.