It is not uncommon for me to see posts shared that reflect a nostalgia for a bygone era. Sometimes these posts come from people who are my age and who grew up in the 50s. Without exception, they are also White. That said, there are also many I know who would never wish themselves back into those times due to family circumstances which included the trauma of addiction, abuse, neglect. There is also very often a thread of patriotism, nationalism, and the idealization of our history and present day realities that are woven through the roots of this nostalgia.
Significantly, there is a bigger picture, one which is illuminated in the images and the quotes that I am sharing below from some of the great teachers, visionaries, truth-tellers, and wisdom-keepers of our times and times past who have long been bringing us the truth — truths that to this very day are commonly dismissed, distorted, denigrated, and denied.
Too often those of us who are White have been and remain oblivious or numb to the great suffering and pain, violence and oppression, inequality and discrimination, racism and white supremacy directed at Blacks, and other marginalized communities, which was pervasive all those many decades ago. It is also true that racism and caste and a history dominated by white supremacy has yet to truly be courageously seen, addressed, owned, healed, and transformed — and, therefore, continues to plague us today.
A past that is not healed inevitably lives on in the present. This is true for us as individuals, within family systems, and within our collective culture. And it is true, as Jeff Sharlet speaks to: "grief without mourning curdles into anger" — which we are witness to today in epidemic proportions in our nation.
My ever growing sensitivity and awareness of the pain and suffering of racism and caste and white supremacy moves me into my own deep levels of grieving and to take whatever action that I can — including doing this post today. May the courage to grow and to, one day at a time, evolve to where we are increasingly learning how to be anti-racist within our belief systems and the ways that we live our lives. It is not enough to simply say that we are not racist. And it is not easy to transform our empathic impairment with actually coming to truly see each other with the eyes of our hearts — and this is certainly true even more so with those who are different from ourselves and with whom we have had little to no depth of relationship.
It takes a great deal of courage and commitment to our individual and collective healing — and to truth and love — to come to see layer after layer of what we have absorbed into our very cells from our ancestors and our culture that is harmful. And, yet, nothing can be more worth it than opening our hearts and coming to live increasingly aligned with values that are rooted in connection, compassion, caring, respect, growing and evolving consciousness, and increasing reverence for all beings.
May we move towards the roar — towards an unaddressed past that lives on in the present, towards that which remains unhealed in ourselves, our culture, our world. May our circles of caring grow and grow. And may we come to increasingly open the eyes of our hearts and truly see. This is my passionate and deep ongoing prayer. 🙏
We all matter, we are all connected,
we are all related and all family.
— Molly
History matters, and an awareness of it puts our lives into a context. A disdain for history sets us adrift, and makes us victims of ignorance and denial. History lives in and through our bodies right now, and in every moment.
The vital force behind white-supremacy is in our blood — literally — and in our nervous systems. However light or dark our skins, we Americans must all contend with these elemental forces.
We will not end white-body supremacy — or any other form of human evil — by trying to tear it to pieces. Instead, we can offer people better ways to belong, and better things to belong to. Instead of belonging to a race, we can belong to a culture. Each of us can also build our own capacity for genuine belonging.
If you compromise at the expense of bodies of culture, particularly Black and Indigenous bodies, as you have so many times before, you will accelerate our country’s destruction.
Find and stand with other bodies who care about liberation, justice, and an emancipated democracy.
At its best, activism is a form of healing. It is about what we do and how we show up in the world. It is about learning and expressing regard, compassion and love.
― Resmaa Menakem,
From My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma
and
The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to
Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning
* * * * *
Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant. You tolerate mosquitoes in the summer, a rattle in an engine, the gray slush that collects at the crosswalk in winter. You tolerate what you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated. Every spiritual tradition says love your neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them.
Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another's experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.
Empathy is no substitute for the experience itself. We don't get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.
Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.
― Isabel Wilkerson
From Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.
I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
― James Baldwin
* * * * *
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together. And you can't get rid of one without getting rid of the other.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated.
Hatred and fear blind us. We no longer see each other. We only see the faces of monsters, and that gives us the courage to destroy each other.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive our hate; only love can do that.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.
Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'
Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
The time has come for America to face the inevitable choice between materialism and humanism. We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.
I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.
Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a better person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.
The time is always right to do what is right.
― Martin Luther King, Jr.
* * * * *
The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression . Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded.
We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.
In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.
I feel that if we don't take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist who is the perpetrator, then we won't ever succeed in eradicating racism.
If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.
We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
Everyone is familiar with the slogan "The personal is political" ― not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.
Racism cannot be separated from capitalism.
I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.
I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.
Walls turned sideways are bridges.
I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.
You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
― Angela Davis
* * * * *
Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations, shutting essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War. But how many people stare inside the body of their nations' racial inequities, their neighborhoods' racial inequities, their occupations' racial inequities, their institutions' racial inequities, and flatly deny that their policies are racist? They flatly deny that racial inequity is a signpost of racist policy. They flatly deny the racist policy as they use racist ideas to justify the racial inequity. They flatly deny the cancer of racism as the cancer cells spread and literally threaten their own lives and the lives of the people and spaces and places they hold dear. The popular conception of denial-like the popular strategy of suasion-is suicidal.
Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us.
Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It's a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.
Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.
One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism.
The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans toward equity is “reverse discrimination.” That is how racist power can call affirmative action policies that succeed in reducing racial inequities “race conscious” and standardized tests that produce racial inequities “race neutral.” That is how they can blame the behavior of entire racial groups for the inequities between different racial groups and still say their ideas are “not racist.” But there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas.
No one becomes racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other.
Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.
To know the past is to know the present. To know the present it to know yourself.
― Ibram X. Kendi
* * * * *
We like to keep separate the evils of our national past from the sacredness of our ideals. That separation allows us to maintain a pristine idea of America despite all of the ugly things we have done. Americans can celebrate the founding fathers even when we hear John Adams declare to King George, “We will not be your negroes” or learn that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t so consistent in his defense of freedom. We keep treating America like we have a great blueprint and we’ve just strayed from it. But the fact is that we’ve built the country true. Black folk were never meant to be full-fledged participants in this society. The ideas of freedom and equality, of liberty and citizenship did not apply to us, precisely because we were black. Hell, the ability to vote for the majority of black people wasn’t guaranteed until 1965. The value gap limited explicitly the scope and range of democratic life in this country. So when folks claim that American democracy stands apart from white supremacy, they are either lying or they have simply stuck their head in the sand.
Correction of past wrongdoings, like ending slavery and dismantling legal segregation, confirmed the rightness of our ideals. Nothing fundamental about those ideals needed to change. We simply had to be better people. I want no part of that story. It blinds us to how the value gap has been so fundamental to who we are as a nation. Over and over again, we have confronted the overriding belief, held by our government and exhibited in our daily lives, in white supremacy. The story blinds most white Americans to the harsh reality of this country.
If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection the most!—and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person—ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it.
I can imagine my conservative friends crying foul, saying that I am too harsh and bitter, that Trump’s election was not simply about race and that economics were more important, and they would be genuinely sincere. But sincerity can often be a mask for cruelty, especially the cruelty of conscious disavowal. To agree with me entails much more than condemning Trump. It necessitates an honest confrontation with and condemnation of one’s complicity with a way of life that insists that some people matter more than others and with a society organized to reflect that belief.
Revealing the lie at the heart of the American idea, however, occasions an opportunity to tell a different and a better story. It affords us a chance to excavate the past and to examine the ruins to find, or at least glimpse, what made us who we are. Baldwin insisted, until he died, that we reach for a different story. We should tell the truth about ourselves, he maintained, and that would release us into a new possibility.
The task at hand is not about securing the goodness of the American Idea or about perfecting the union. It is about according dignity and standing to all Americans no matter the color of their skin.
We have to become better people by fundamentally transforming the conditions of our living together. This will require setting aside our comforting illusions.
We must remove our mask to call attention to white advantage. That may help us understand one another a bit better. It may bridge divides, disrupt assumptions and stereotypes that block empathy and get in the way of serious efforts to achieve our country. As it stands, we don’t really talk frankly about race. And too many people are too damn scared to say so.
In the end, Americans will have to decide whether or not this country will remain racist. To make that decision, we will have to avoid the trap of placing the burden of our national sins on the shoulders of Donald Trump. We need to look inward. Trump is us. Or better, Trump is you.
[Trump] and his ideas are not exceptional. He and the people who support him are just the latest examples of the country's ongoing betrayal. . .When we make Trump exceptional, we let ourselves off the hook. For he is us, just as surely as the slave-owning Founding Fathers were us, as surely as Lincoln with his talk of sending Black people to Liberia was us, as surely as Reagan was us with his welfare queens. When we are surprised to see the reemergence of Klansman, Neo-Nazis and other White Nationalists, we reveal our willful ignorance about how our own choices make them possible.
But, in the end, we have to allow this “innocent” idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.
Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.
― Eddie Glaude
When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation... Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.
The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.
Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.
African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct.
Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.
Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, ‘I’m going to hang you up and burn you.’ Once you get that F, you’re on fire.
In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
Racial caste systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned more than forty-five years ago.
Black success stories lend credence to the notion that anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top, if only you try hard enough. These stories “prove” that race is no longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate.
We could choose to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; we could treat them like one of “us.” We could do that. Or we can choose to be a nation that shames and blames its most vulnerable, affixes badges of dishonor upon them at young ages, and then relegates them to a permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen, and it leads to a familiar place.
The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.
Martin Luther King Jr. called for us to be lovestruck with each other, not colorblind toward each other. To be lovestruck is to care, to have deep compassion, and to be concerned for each and every individual, including the poor and vulnerable.
Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem. The fact that the meaning of race may evolve over time or lose much of its significance is hardly a reason to be struck blind. We should hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love. That was King’s dream—a society that is capable of seeing each of us, as we are, with love. That is a goal worth fighting for.
― Michelle Alexander
From The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness
