Why riots?  Unfortunately, perhaps because they work.  If a group peacefully protests for years, decades, generations, and sees little come of frank and courteous requests, and then upon protest fomenting into riot, we see responsive action, what can anyone make of that?  Given the outcomes—the now actualizing awareness and heightened response of the white ally community and the tangible (even if minimal) legal reforms—the riots seem to have been a philosophical and visceral necessity.  Would the committed response have been as dramatic without the intensified pain of rioting? 

Ah, but this situation is far from that simple.  For peaceful protest might not have shifted into riot if not literally sparked by… white supremacists?  What?  How can this be, and what outcome had the far-right groups actually hoped for?  Surely they didn’t want this: this unifying action, this banding together for measurable change.

I shudder at the possibilities being investigated.  So, like my friend Leah—who lives in South Minneapolis and whose story was recently profiled here—I hold dichotomies and trichotomies side by side by side in my mind.

All of today’s back-fired extremist plots aside, I’ve long wrestled with this tension between non-violent and violent resistance.  I’ve often wondered, would the non-violent branch of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s have been as effective without the parallel life presence of the Black Panthers?  Mindful, skillful, non-violent protest is profoundly powerful.  But it seems that, throughout history, the power of peaceful protest is enhanced by sharp teeth, waiting in the wings.

It’s well known that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X reserved strong critique for each other.  But toward the end of their lives, each man had moved philosophically, toward the other.  I find this captivating.  Perhaps they were more united than they realized.  Perhaps they did realize their unity and were, simply, differentiated in their tasks.

 

As in the Body, So in the Soul
As in the One, So in the Many

I’ve written for years in the natural health world about the inflammation process.  Inflammation gets a bad rap, but it’s actually an integral part of the healing process.  Like vomiting or getting a fever, inflammation is not fun, but it is the normal response of a healthy body when assaulted.  Perhaps by a wound, an infection, or an internal tear.  Maybe from breaking the skin or from over-exerting a joint or straining a muscle.  External or internal, whatever the case, white blood cells race to the site of assault.  Lymph, the body’s cleansing river, collects and results in what you experience as swelling and pain. 

In a healthy response, the initial swelling and restriction calms down and the active-duty players in the white blood cell community shift.  Inflammatory cytokines tamp down, swelling subsides, and tissue repair commences.  Skin and muscle, tendons and ligaments are mended, hopefully without excessive scar tissue.

That latter bit is tricky.  A small cut heals in a few days and may not leave a hint of a scar.  But a more serious injury can have plenty of complications.  Sometimes the initial inflammation response gets stuck.  Sometimes massive blocks of scar tissue form.  Sometimes the body gets confused and begins to attack its own healthy tissue. 

Sometimes damages are lasting.  Sometimes just twisting the wrong way causes dramatic re-injury.  Sometimes you’re a fool and you keep doing that activity that you know will cause re-injury.  Sometimes pain never goes away.  Sometimes no one can tell you why.  Sometimes a mile-long list of pharmaceuticals and herbal products and physical therapy and massage and dietary changes and injections and… sometimes none of it fully works.  Sometimes you have to learn to live with pain and modify every part of your life to accommodate it. 

It isn’t fair.  It’s simply there. 

 

No Getting Over

When my white loved ones say, “Why can’t (Black/Brown/Indigenous) people just get over the past and move on?” I seethe.  For those who have marveled at my excessive sensitivity over the years, a few thoughts:  For starters, the opportunities for re-injury in every generation have been limitless.  Racism, inherently systemic, is alive and well.  There is no getting-over what is still present day.  But even if we lived in a society where peace and equality were finally the norm, healing the epigenetic damages from our particular past would take generations.  We’re nowhere near that, given the reality of constant re-injury in every generation. 

Why do we persist in viewing this gargantuan, multi-generational, constantly re-injuring, collective pain in simplistic terms?  How can we over-simplify in that realm?  We know that chronic pain in a single human body is wildly complex, inexplicable, often incurable—and, when we’re wise enough to listen, deeply precious and instructive.  We know that.  So why do we persist in over-simplifying a far more complex and layered collective Pain? 

Consider, just for a moment, the multi-faceted tools needed to heal the solitary-body and see, just for a moment, the multi-faceted needs of the nation-body.

 

Breathe, Listen, Acknowledge

If you’ve ever suffered from chronic physical pain, there’s one thing you know for sure: Getting angry at the pain only makes it worse.  Telling the pain to “shut up” never works.  Telling your wrist or shoulder or knee or back that it’s stupid and over-reactive is a recipe for disaster.  Pain will knock you flat on the ground in reply.  The only thing that helps is accepting the pain at the very outset of the latest wave, and gently breathing into it whenever it rages.  Over and over and over.

 

Welcome to Leaving Behind What Doesn’t Work

I hate to tell you, but there ARE some bad questions in the school of life.  That “why-don’t-they-get-over-it” question is one of them.  There is no sane reason to question the existence or validity of the pain of Black, Brown, and Indigenous People.  It’s non-sensical to question the reality of any Pain period.  When confronted with Pain, the only effective immediate response is to listen.  Hear it. 

Then, slowly, without tripping over yourself to provide some shining answer, ask a more useful question. 

• Ask what needs to be done to best alleviate Pain in the present moment.
• Ask how to cultivate a healing environment going forward.

Please do not ask these two questions of one who is presently In the Pain.  Do not heap the burden of your own healing-education onto the shoulders of those presently weeping. 

Ask it of the contemporary theosophical healers and thinkers who have been offering the Answers to you for decades (See the Reading List at the end of this piece), who have spent their lives addressing the wounds of racial injustice.  Do not demand Answers of one actively in Pain. 

Your encounters with People of Color are not about you, your own education, or even your need to apologize.  This is not your therapy appointment.  This is solely a chance to offer resources and begin, in a small way, to right a massive global imbalance.   Keep asking, keep listening.

Always be prepared to hear Answers much bigger than yourself or your skill set.  Keep listening.  Be prepared for an Answer, the size and scope of which, will expose your own spiritual poverty.  You have barely any tools to fix this problem.  That is precisely why you must engage with it.  You’ll find the one miniscule, awkward, behind-the-scenes, unappreciated way that you can contribute to the Answer.  And then keep listening. 

When corrected, don’t rage about how hard you’ve been trying to do the right thing, how you feel like you can never get anything right.  Think of this process more like physical therapy.  You tried a new exercise, and Pain let you know that the exercise caused re-injury.  Quit taking Pain as a personal offense.  It’s just information.  Accept the information.  Then adjust.  Say, “I’m sorry.  I wanted to help, but it didn’t work.  What can I do instead?” 

Remember this too:  You need your legs.  And arms.  And heart.  Our intertwined communities are one body and, for one part to deny the other its basic needs, is self-destructive.  It is a heart disease patient insisting she “does not have the time for healthy eating and cardiovascular exercise.”  Indeed, she shall have no time. 

 

Coda: Look Back for Lessons, But for the Love of all Good, Do Not Hearken

There are no good old days.  The United States have, in limited moments and angles of light, presented with a shiny and hopeful façade: Truly generous opportunity and freedom (for some); the chance to actualize one’s dreams (maybe).  The far greater likelihood you’ll die still trying.  We have always been a limping and broken experiment, our foundation consumed with the dry rot of unthinkable hypocrisy and corruption.  We the fragmented white people, divorced ourselves from oursouls in order to deny ever-obvious Pain and Injustice.  The Nation’s promises have been simultaneously beloved and rotting from the start.

At least be brave enough to confront the Question: How could men who wrote such shining democratic ideals go home in the evening and rape and beat people—people whom they owned?  There is no “different times” rhetoric that covers that, so unclench your hands from that shoddy defense.  They knew.  Thomas Jefferson’s own conflicted and troubled writings (among many others) lay that fact bare.  It takes incredible spiritual fragmentation for a human to be so split, so ethically schizophrenic.  

Whites have inherited that interior fragmentation, generation after generation.  It’s still evident in our incredible aptitude for codependence and denial, for the widespread tendency in our leaders to abuse and harass women and minorities, for our tendency to ally with such bully-leaders and protect them, for our obsession with maintaining appearance and niceness, while failing to address our own deepest character flaws.  One might shrug off those qualities as the “human condition”.   Yet the past 80 years showcase white Western Culture honing these specific vices as a science.  That matters. 

These cultural quirks are the psychological relics, the coping strategies of a slave-holding colonial past.  The codependency, the denial, the obsession with control—these are unique coping mechanisms.  How else could one write brilliantly about freedom and yet own people?  How could one be a loving family member and yet a monster to Black and Indigenous people?  This requires a fragmented psyche and soul. 

This brokenness, passed down generation after generation, has become culturally ubiquitous.  It doesn’t matter if your family had a direct connection to slavery or not; these coping strategies are simply how the dominant culture does life now.  Codependency, denial, and the refusal to hear and respect survivors of violence—all these are a lasting legacy from overt slave-holding times.  Denying slavery’s echoes and its current re-manifestations keeps white folk from healing too.

Black and Brown America is not “over the past”.   Whites are not “over it” either!  The fractal patterns may seem smaller (at times), but they’re all the same patterns after all. 

Still we are one organism, this nation of multiple peoples and dramatically disparate castes.  We are one organism, this entire globe of peoples now inextricably tied by trade, and fuel, and air travel, and electronica.  Opening the lens further, we are one organism, the planet itself with her trillions upon trillions of living beings. 

If we can’t learn that now, then when? 

The burden of establishing equity is upon those who Have.  The burden of healing a wound is upon the parts of the body that are the most mobile.  The broken leg cannot care for itself, so stop demanding that it does so!  A sick heart requires the whole body to make massive systemic changes in unison!  Disparity only ends when the parts that are the most equipped and able, begin to share with the parts that are not.  Again, you need your legs.  And right arm.  And heart.  And brain.  The Have’s in our nation still suffer from a deep ethical schizophrenia.  They “have” in the physical realm, but they cut themselves off from the rest of their nation-body with disturbing ease.  This is both spiritual and emotional disease. 

I have seen inklings of change.  When such a soul begins to care, when a Have gives in quantitative outward ways (money! skills! material! equipment!) with no strings attached, particularly when they give anonymously—with no hope of thanks or accolades—they lay hold of the tendril thread that might mend their fragmented humanity. 

To all who Have, begin caring now.  Begin reparative action now.  Or Pain will keep stopping you in your tracks.  That’s no threat.  It’s nature.  It’s biology.  It’s how a body works to keep itself accountable.

 

Continue Learning

Ibram X. Kendi
How to Be an Anti-Racist
Stamped from the Beginning

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the World and Me
The Water Dancer

Ruth King
Mindful of Race

Edgar Villanueva
Decolonizing Wealth

Robin DiAngelo
White Fragility 

Jim Wallis
America’s Original Sin

Paul Oritz
An African American and Latinix History of the United States

 

An here’s a beautiful and practical list of Follow-up Tasks for Allies at Soul Fire Farm:

https://www.soulfirefarm.org/thank-you-for-the-outpouring-of-support/