On racism, privilege, allyship and blessing
Recently, a Facebook post stopped me in my tracks. “Antiracism is trending!”
What does that even mean?
A thought crept up… What proportion of the anger and outrage we are seeing in the media is really about the optics? About being seen in the right light?
I was at an antiracist discussion forum yesterday, and many activists, Black and White, were worried about how every organization is tripping head over heels to come out with statements about how they’ve finally seen the light, and that they are no longer going to tolerate structural racism in their organizations.
Isn’t this good news? Isn’t this what many of us, and many of our ancestors, have been advocating for, and fighting for, for a very long time? Why then is this fear that a lot of what we’re seeing, especially at institutional levels, might be somewhat disingenuous?
Recently, I heard an elderly woman speak poignantly about being part of the civil rights marches with Dr. King and others. How she and her fellow activists believed that the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 was going to forever change the racial equation. Only to watch in horror as their apparent “win” was slowly eroded by the Prison-Industrial Complex, and the mass incarceration of Black bodies. How lynchings were replaced by enforcement of “law and order.” Now in the eighth decade of her life, she is asking herself, “what really changed from our actions?” She knows, in the heart of her hearts, that something did change. Forever. For the better. But something else in her feels cheated. Duped. Feeling like what was offered to her was a cheap candy for crying too long and too loud! Her activist self feels infantilized!
Here are some of my own reflections as I sit with it all. These are by no means fully formed theses, but just the first beginnings of trying to grapple with what feels too large, too multi-dimensional, to take in at one time. So, here is a fractal view of the different aspects that I am seeing at this time.
“I can’t breathe”
As I have followed the news over the past several weeks, and watched emotions rise up and swallow me whole, only to emerge for a moment to take a breath before being submerged again, I keep hearing the refrain, like so many of us at this time, “I can’t breathe!”
Where did all our collective air go? What demon sucked out the vital air from our midst?
I think it is worthwhile remembering that we arrived into this moment of knee-on-the-Black-neck from another moment of ICUs the nation over being overwhelmed by people who couldn’t breathe, many even with the help of a ventilator. And that Black bodies in those ICUs who couldn’t get in enough air to live, were 2.3 times higher than their White counterparts. We must also remember that other groups that succumbed disproportionately to COVID-19 are the Latinx and the Indigenous People of the USA. Also, given the mistrust a lot of people in these communities have for the medical establishment, it is likely that these numbers underrepresent the real numbers of death in the past few months.
And then, if we step back a bit more, we will remember periods where animals in vast forests couldn’t breathe because of all-pervasive fires. There was a long, long time, when Mother Earth was screaming, “I can’t breathe.”
Breath, the air we breathe, has had a spiritual connotation in many of the world’s religions. In fact, the very word “spiritual” derives from “spirit,” from Latin “spiritus” meaning breath, or breath of God. In Sanskrit, we have prana, in Hebrew ruah, in Arabic ruh, in Greek pneuma – all mean breath, and all use this word to refer to the divine breath.
So, when a man says repeatedly, over eight minutes, that he can’t breathe, he is not just dying, he is being denied his claim to his essential divinity.
Of course, he is by no means the first one to cry out thus. His ancestors have cried out, using a different language maybe, the exact same words as they were being lynched, and before that, as they were being captured, like animals, from the bosom of Mother Africa.
So, is our current battle cry, “I can’t breathe,” solely a call for civil justice? Or is this really a call to recognize that no one has the right to deprive another of their essential dignity as divine beings?
This is something I am going to be sitting with, and see what else emerges.
The danger of dualistic thinking
One of the developments that I have been watching with significant consternation is all the dualities that are emerging, and how many people seem to be becoming more and more rigidly identified with one end of the polarity.
These polarities are not new. Of course. But what may be new is this exaggerated usage of archetypal terms to describe the merely human.
Good and evil are archetypes. We human beings can NEVER be just good or evil. By calling someone else evil, and ourselves good, we commit sacrilege. We pretend we are gods. And as myth after myth, and legend after legend tells us, usurping the mantle of the gods never ends well!! (Just think of Icarus flying too close to the sun!)
As we see the horror of a Black man slowly choking to death under the knee of a White officer, our natural instinct is to distance ourselves from that officer and identify with the victim. Righteous anger feels good, even while it burns, as someone said poignantly “right under the skin.”
And of course, I have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the White officer! There is no part of him in me!! Right???
As I let that sink in, I start to see so many of my inner parts, in my own inner landscape, who are screaming “I can’t breathe,” while being slowly choked to death by my own inner aggressors. And these aggressors, by the way, totally identify themselves as the absolute authority. The ones who are only too happy to wield power, and to maintain “law and order” in my inner community. They are totally and completely aligned with the inner colonizer. The inner bully.
If I continue to pay attention to this dynamic within me, I begin to realize that the bully – the part of my inner being who is the aggressor, is actually shit-scared of what the one who is being choked will say, if it is allowed to breathe and speak. This inner aggressor is afraid that if he were take the knee off the neck off my inner wounded one, the inner shamed one, the inner ridiculed one, then there will have to be a reckoning. Then, there will have to be an inner “truth and reconciliation tribunal.”
It is so much easier, and so much less work, to choke these annoying parts out of existence, than allow them a voice, and really listen to what they have to say.
Because what they have to say is intense.
And it is old. Not just old, as in from my childhood. But ancestral.
These are the betrayed ones. The colonized ones. The ones who were forced to live only to carry out the whims of another. These are the ancestral woman who was forced to die on her husband’s funeral pyre. These are the colonized ones who could only enter the Whites-only gymkhana clubs in my home country, India, to serve the White masters delicacies, and to clean their trash!
Yes, if they begin to speak – there will be a riot in the inner world. Windows will be smashed. Shops set on fire.
It is so much easier to throttle their voices. One can then carry on with the important business of living, of advancing, of impressing, of “passing on a legacy” of how things are done around here!
Is it at all possible for us to see the White officer with his knee on the Black neck as a scared child?
Not that it absolves him of his crime. Far from it. He will, and should, be punished for his actions.
But maybe this will allow us to do the more important work to looking inside and seeing what in us makes each of us – yes, me included – capable of this monstrosity.
Because as long as we otherize that officer as “not me,” we are just postponing the inevitable. That monster that lives in our own basement, or that of our neighbor’s or friend’s – will break its chain and come roaring up to wreak havoc, yet again.
The riots as Dionysian orgies
One of the comments I have heard consistently from a lot of my liberal friends is, “I support the cause for the protests, but not the riots and violence.”
I hear it. And a part of me agrees with this sentiment. This part says, “Violence is bad.” Period.
But then I am reminded of Martin Luther King, Jr., saying repeatedly that a riot “is the language of the unheard.”
As that sinks into me, I find another part of me saying, “Well… we’ve had so many peaceful protests even in the past few years. The womens’ marches. The marches to save the environment. And as the marchers marched, the vast majority, often including me, went about our business. We supported them, yes, but nothing really changed. Institutions didn’t compete with each other to put out support statements.
Let’s face it. It is the riots, the real and present risk to life and property, and the risk of another potential surge of COVID-19 due to people assembling in vast numbers, that has woken us up from our collective slumber.
Somehow, when I see imagery from the riots and looting, I cannot but think of the Dionysian orgies of ancient Greece. For the most part, Greek society was an Apollonian one. Law and order, rules and regulations were important. Tradition was important. Living within the city walls, and following the citizen norms, was important. But in life, whenever one extreme of a polarity is privileged, its opposite arises. Carl Jung called it enantiodromia.
So, during Dionysian rituals, many of which were attended exclusively by women, and some by slaves and other disenfranchised members of the Greek society, all the Apollonian rules were laid aside. These were rituals to honor the “dark brother” of Apollo. Apollo was the solar god, the keeper of rules and norms that made the Greek civilization thrive. Dionysus is Apollo’s half-brother. His father is Zeus, but his mother’s identity varies with the myth. Some contenders for his mother are the mortal woman Semele, or the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone. Dionysus, in myth, is often surrounded by the Maenads, wild and intoxicated women who have left civilized society, given up their families and possessions, and follow Dionysus. In orgiastic celebrations, they dance in the fire of torchlight, drink alcohol, take hallucinogenic drugs, have indiscriminate sex and rip and eat raw flesh. In many descriptions of these orgies, there is also significant gender-bending that takes place, both for the god, and for his followers.
Once again, Apollonian/Dionysian reflect an archetypal polarity that lives in all our psyches, and in the collective psyche of the culture. To the extent that one is made good and acceptable and another forbidden – to that extent what is forbidden rises up in an exaggerated and destructive way.
Dr. King was right, of course. People who have voices don’t need to riot. And rioting brings about its own opposite. Suppression and choking off of vital air. Once again, the answer seems to be to find a societal form where both Apollonian and Dionysian are allowed and given equal value.
Some of it happens through sports and large music events. Is it then any surprise that for a very long time, the only forms of expression that Black community has been allowed is through sports and music?
As long as the White folk hold on to the Apollonian end of the spectrum (academia, philosophy, economics) and offer the Black people the Dionysian end (sports, music) – no real social recalibration will be possible.
What about privilege?
We are hearing a lot of conversation about structural privileges that come with being White. Indeed that is true. One of the best definitions I have heard about white privilege is that your white privilege does not mean that you were not hurt or did not suffer in your life, but that it did not happen because of the color of your skin!
I completely agree with this definition.
But for myself, I find myself in a more grey space.
So, I am a woman of color. In that sense, I belong to the “oppressed” category.
I also come from a country, India, with a history of colonization that goes into our deep past. The most recent two hundred-year stint of British colonization was only the last of a series of invasions and colonizations. Each was different, and each brought gifts with it, in addition to brutality and degradation.
In my own ancestry, I can trace both indigenous Indian DNA, as well as that from the Vedic Aryans. I will leave the subject here because it is not my intention to enter this charged area of political controversy. But suffices it to say that ancestrally, I am neither purely Black, nor purely White.
Additionally, when I was a young person growing up in New Delhi, India, I believed, like most of my friends, that we had totally transcended the caste system. It was only prevalent in rural India, especially in the undereducated “cow belt.” So, when I went on to finish high school, then college, then a Master’s and a PhD degree – I honestly believed that I had done it all on my own power. My own hard work. I am ashamed to say that as a young person from a Brahmin (uppermost caste), I had poo-pooed India’s reservation quotas from minorities (the so-called Scheduled Castes and Tribes).
Only now, decades later, do I see the hubris of this belief system. The fact that today I am a faculty member at a prestigious Ivy League medical college in New York City, United States, has everything to do with the fact that I was born into a Brahmin family, and not a Dalit (lower caste) one.
We were lower middle class. Often at the end of the month, we only had rice, lentils and potatoes to eat. School fees and books had to wait for my father’s next month’s paycheck. But, there was not even a question that education was important, whether you are a boy or a girl. So, as I went on, collecting degree after degree, what was pushing me along, unbeknownst to myself, was a two thousand plus-year old trajectory of education – of being a scholar and a teacher. I do not think I would be here today without that implicit privilege.
So, today, I live in a nice neighborhood of New York City, and have the education and the consequent financial security that many people born and bred in this country don’t.
I may not like it, but it is a fact that I have a set of privileges that can make a blue collar white American angry at me – for taking away what they believe is rightfully theirs. Is it? I do not think so. If anyone has claims on this land and what it offers, it is the First Nations people of this country. But that again is not the subject of our current discussion.
The point I am trying to make is that in some ways I am the under-privileged (color, gender, cultural beauty norms). In other ways, I am over-privileged (education, finances, job satisfaction).
There are of course many other criteria that define our place in the intersectionality profile, e.g., gender and gender preference, sexuality (normative or not), disabilities (physical and mental), family structure (normative nuclear family or other), free vs incarcerated, and so on.
I believe that this kind of analysis applies to all of us. We are necessarily intersectional, rather than falling into neat buckets of oppressors and oppressed.
The medicine of intersectionality: allyship
I think the real medicine of fully inhabiting our seat in the intersectional space is that we get to be true allies for everyone who is under-privileged in any arena where we have more privilege than them. And we get to receive their allyship in the areas where we are under-privileged.
And both are done without a feeling of one-up-man-ship.
We start to see the world less as a Black and White construct, but more as a web of relationships. Interwoven. Like Indra’s Net. Or the web woven by Grandmother Spider.
We then also begin to see our society as a complex multidimensional matrix, rather than a simplistic good/bad dichotomy. And this does not mean that good/bad dichotomies don’t exist and some people, in some patterns of privilege, are not all the way on one end of the bell curve. In those situations, we get to show up as allies. But in this case, our allyship originates from a deeper sense of interrelatedness, of kinship that is also able to locate the “other” within our own psyches, and hence does not become exclusionary and punitive. I believe this is really the magic of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Or the magic of Restorative Justice, rather than punitive justice.
And finally, the blessing
I believe that the final gift, the deeper medicine, of accepting our intersectional identities and our roles as allies without totally othering the “perpetrator,” is that we are invited into a blessing. We bless ourselves, and we bless each other.
Blessing, very simply, is an expansion of space. A blessing allows us to relax the tension and soften the rigidity of a fixed identity. We reach out with the best in us, toward the best in the other. All the while not ignoring, or minimizing what is broken.
In the final analysis, a blessing is allowing the one who is suffocating – whether inside ourselves, or out on the street, a breath of fresh air. So both may live, and the difficult conversations can unfold.