This
is so well said! Thank you, Alison
Rose Levy!
The
more layers that I come to recognize of my own racism, illusions, privilege, and
biases that I’ve absorbed growing up white in America in a
wealthy Detroit suburb, the more I’m coming to see and be
accountable and empowered to be actively antiracist and accountable
for fighting the many faces of violence and injustice that are so
pervasive in our society. There are so many layers to my ignorance
and indoctrination into disinformation, apathy and inaction,
minimization and denial to shed!
I’m
also just now working on a piece to share with the limitations of
Eckhart Tolle and other New Agers whose focus on individualism and
catapulting into enlightenment is a pervasive obstacle to actual and
active collective participation in the universal struggle for racial,
economic, social, and environmental justice.
The
wisdom and truth-telling here is an illuminating gift. May we receive
it and act.
Molly
Molly
Yesterday,
one of the supposedly "spiritual" people I knew from my
former yoga world injected the familiar activism shaming into a
thread about another topic-- "you have to be clear of all your
problems before you can try to change society." "Anyone who
has not overcome their own needs will just carry their problems into
their activism."
In
becoming a social activist coming out of a community of "seekers"
of my generation, I've endured decades of this kind of high-minded
caution, invalidation, and assertion of the primacy of the individual
self— over everything else in our collective.
I've
been told that people will "hear you better when you say it
nicely." Making people feel uncomfortable about their own
compliance with a status quo that hurts others -- won't feel nice.
Privileging our friends, and pandering to their weaknesses to avoid
hurting them— or to maintain a connection— hurts a whole lot of
other unseen people. At first, we don't see these people, and
eventually we CANNOT see them BECAUSE of the need to protect our
sense of our own "niceness."
The
belief that it's all about perfecting the individual and that other
social injustices can wait-- is inherently privileged and racist. And
yet people who had these beliefs inculcated into them in youth and
formed an identity around them refuse to examine and re-evaluate
them. As we look at our world today, did these self projects help
make a better society, save the earth, or raise awareness on a social
level? Obviously not. And yet people who have identified themselves
with such beliefs or made a profession of them continue to advance
them.
With
the severe distortions of compassion and so-called spirituality we
are seeing playing out through COVID, QAnon, and in other ways, I
feel we are called to revise what it means to be authentically
spiritual in a troubled world.
When
I suggested to this friend that for the sake of other people
experiencing systemic injustice, some social issues cannot wait until
you or I are perfect, I used the example of what happened to Eric
Garner.
My
friend did not recognize the case, when I described it. He may never
have known of it. He began deliberating about the "truth"
of the case, centering himself as the judge. In other words, he
equivocated as if there were a question about what happened-- that he
had to decide. This is an incident (one of many sad to say) where
what happened was captured on video. There is no possibility of
quibbling over the facts.
The
case as presented to him posed just one question: Is it okay in this
country, is it okay within our community, and is it okay with me that
a black man can be murdered by police for an exceedingly minor action
which in any court of law in any developed country would NEVER incur
a death sentence?
Is
it okay that this happens routinely in our society? Is it okay that
any minor question about someone's behavior can instantly trigger the
death sentence, be used to justify their murder, and allow the
killers to go free?
Is
this and other such incidents, social concerns that can wait to be
addressed until I and other activists are without personal issues or
needs?
My
friend's visceral response was to back away and spread doubt over
what happened as presented. In other words, he could not meet the
circumstance even as a hypothetical, (though in fact unknown to him
it was a documented reality) because privileged people have the right
to become confused and doubt a police murder— but black people lack
the right NOT to be murdered.
Second,
is the root of the problem the many minor actions people might do? Or
is the problem a system set up to allow and perpetrate this level of
violence towards certain members of our society? While others look
away and lie to themselves as to whether or not it is happening.
If
you or I shop lift, have a certain look on our face, belong to a
race, gender, or dress in a way that triggers someone else— is it
the universally applied law of this land that we can be killed for
it? Or is the problem that people who are insulated by their race,
gender, or dress code— lack the empathy to identify their own
assumption of privilege that they would never be subject to such
treatment? And to not care about those who are.
My
friend's visceral response to my account of the Garner case
replicated his spiritual stance. "I can back away and not deal
with this."
This
is why people need not only individual self-awareness but a developed
social conscience and a sense of solidarity with people who are just
like us under the skin-- but different from us on the visible
surface. Emphasizing the first while failing to fully develop the
second produces a blighted moral character.
Many
years ago, for a TV show, I did an interview with a social scientist,
who measured specific social values and their role in moving the
needle towards or away from fascism. Since that time, I've seen our
society devolve into authoritarianism not because of a few bad
apples-- but because of the many people who hold corrupted social
values without even questioning themselves.
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