Cutting Off My Arm

a white person confronts her racism

 

On April 26, 2003, Aron Ralston was canyoneering alone through Bluejohn Canyon in Utah. Somehow a boulder became dislodged while he was climbing down from it, crushing his right hand against the canyon wall.

 

I grew up in a white world. I was white. I didn’t know that Whiteness had me plucked and skewered to a marble wall. 

After days of being trapped, the dehydrated and delirious Ralston decided to amputate his arm in order to escape. After experimenting with tourniquets and exploratory cuts to his forearm, he realized that to free himself he would have to cut through the bones.

If asked of my life I would have said, “really peachy!” Peachy was finding a job, birthing a family, buying a house. Peachy was claiming creature comforts for my own and searching for an American Peachy dream. Peachy was reaching toward a meringue covered pie in the sky future built on the smooth lie of whiteness.  

Ralston carved his name, date of birth and presumed date of death into the sandstone canyon wall.  In a hallucination, he saw himself playing with a future child while missing part of his right arm and some part of him believed he might live.

Too slowly I found that there had always been a different world where white was only emptiness. Here mahogany, ebon
y, cinnamon and chocolate are warm earth and heart’s ease. I wake to find love slapping the scales from my eyes and Rumi yelling in my face to not go back to sleep. In this world light teaches me the long history of betrayal, slavery, genocide, murder. I fight to stay awake. No peaches—only reality with a strange part of me trapped and growing uglier by the minute.

After waking at dawn the following day Ralston discovered that his arm had begun to decompose. With surprising strength, he torqued his arm against the rock to break both bones. He then amputated his forearm with a dull two-inch knife and pliers for the tougher tendons. He took care to leave major arteries until last.

 

Each moment I stand in a red pill world holding my dull two inch knife out in front of me.  My whiteness has the sweet smell of gangrene and I know there is no future in holding onto this rock.  

After freeing himself, Ralston climbed out of the slot canyon in which he had been trapped, rappelled down a 65-foot sheer wall, then hiked out of the canyon, all one-handed. He was rescued approximately four hours after amputating his arm.

Lord let me be as strong as Aron Ralston.