A Letter to the Haus…
On white fragility...
While the studio was closed and since I reopened it… Here's a question I keep coming back to:
Why does a person's Blackness, or their strength, immediately mark them as the problem?
I'm not asking rhetorically. I'm asking because I've lived it…here in Anchorage and from people who once came into our studio…It’s an interesting thing to talk about when you own a business because when black business owners talk about things like white privilege or white fragility happening in spaces we’ve built then the business is at risk because the conversations get uncomfortable, but here’s the deal…money is a material thing and anyone in the business of owning a movement studio is not in it for the money…trust me. Every time I think about who Nectar is for, and what kind of boundaries I am willing to set with people to uphold my own moral and ethical standards as they relate to community and protecting that thereof, I think about how far I'm willing to go to hold the line...and I am willing to risk it all.
If you didn't know…I'm a Black woman. I'm also the owner of Nectar Movement Haus in Midtown Anchorage, which means I'm in the business of strength… visible, deliberate, sometimes unsettling strength. Pole is a practice that asks you to take up space on purpose. To be seen. To trust your body to hold you when most of the world has spent your whole life telling you to make yourself smaller. That's a lot of what I love about it. It's also why I think the people who walk into Nectar and stay are a particular kind of brave. We're a new studio, our classes are small, the community is budding…the bravery is showing up knowing you may be the only one in class sometimes and you're still deciding to be seen.
But strength, in certain bodies, gets read differently. Both of those things, being Black and being strong on purpose, have a way of making certain people uncomfortable in ways they don't quite know how to name. And when people can't name what's making them uncomfortable, they reach for the closest available story. Usually that story is: She's too much. She's intimidating. She's the problem.
We lost a few customers in the last 60 days. In fact, we lost our entire intro student base, which made up 80% of our customers. The root cause is white fragility and anti-blackness for comfort, social safety, or whatever…
There's a particular shape to it that I want to name. When there's a disagreement between me, a Black woman, and someone closer to white…someone more practiced at being seen as soft, more comfortable crying online, more fluent in the language of being hurt…I become the problem. Not because of what happened. Because of who's more legible as a victim. Their tears get treated as evidence. My strength gets treated as callousness, or as proof that I'm guilty of whatever. The math runs the same way every time, and it doesn't matter who actually did what.
Here's what happened: someone used their proximity to whiteness to manipulate a narrative, and an entire group of people accepted it without question. When a story gets offered by someone who looks most like the people receiving it, discernment goes out the window. It doesn't matter if that story came from a place of instability, pain, or personal crisis that had nothing to do with the truth. Proximity to whiteness is a defense mechanism that this country has always rewarded, and it worked exactly the way it was designed to.
I was quiet. My silence may have read as guilt, or indifference, or confirmation of whatever was already circulating. But the alternative was to publicly expose private moments of someone else's crisis and I chose not to do that. I'm still choosing not to. What I will say is that silence is not the same as having nothing to say.
And yet, the silence was enough. A story traveled through a community of people who looked like each other, felt comfortable with each other, and that comfort made it easy to withdraw rather than discern. That is white fragility… not in grand gestures of hostility, but in the quiet of walking away. In accepting a story that confirmed what was easiest to believe about a Black woman who was too strong to be a victim of anything.
A more recent question on my mind is…How do I manage white fragility in our community 👀…I don’t know yet…Is that really my responsibility?
To wrap this up…here are a couple things that are also top of mind for me:
Most of the people who emailed and asked me to keep the studio open have not returned since it reopened 30 days ago.
Despite it all…Twenty-one of you came through our door for the first time in April. That number means a lot to me…It's a number that, in more than one tradition, means completion, arrival, I am here… and that's not lost on me.
I also think about my team a lot too. How it only took Brooklyn asking me to keep the studio open to make me say yes, despite reading emails from customers and being unsure of what to do. The ask is different when people are literally telling you they are ready to stick it out and keep building…to sacrifice their free time and time with their family to fill in the gaps. My friends Allison and Venus stepping out of their winter hibernation to support me when I absolutely needed it. Gaby being steadfast and ready to teach when the doors opened, and supporting keeping the studio clean when no one was allowed in. Joye creating space for Tuesday nights and an upcoming straps series in the midst of all of her activities, travel, and busy work season. Karisma for using her voice and inspiring me to use mine. Kendra enthusiastically offering to help with whatever she can, despite running her own business and curating literal VIBES for all of Alaska and beyond; and Hazel, who came in and basically said where do you need me and is now transitioning from instructor to instructor + community manager.
If you're new here…welcome. I do not wear my heart on my sleeve, but I'm working on sharing more, because apparently sometimes being too quiet, too resilient, too strong is too problematic…so I'll do each of those things a little more loudly.
I'll try to write again next month.
With care, Jaylah
Owner, Nectar Movement Haus