Racism is complicated because it comes from without and within. “As above, so below - as within, so without” they say, hearkening back to the Lord’s prayer “as on earth so it is in heaven.” But I have a hard time imagining this injustice in heaven as it is on earth. So where does it come from? The clouds, the earth, without, or within? Racism within our bodies creates a racist environment for another. If it is within you, it becomes without - if left unchecked. I believe the antidote is love.
Wherever you see it, woven into systems or institutions like the justice system (a dying god in its own right), it is reflected on us - the stories of each race illuminating our individual skin tones and uniting us in color. And separating us in color. We can no longer pretend we are one. On the horizon is a great purging from within “the system,” a great future we’ll speak into existence, where people are accountable and kind and free. Laws will be written, cities will gather, rallys will rally, and nothing will change if the heart of the individual remains closed. It is the nature of the human to be shaped by culture, the culture that surrounds us and raises us. Without building new culture both in the workplace of lawmakers and big tech, schoolyards and small businesses, we remain… the same. So let me ask you this: What do YOU want to change about YOU? “Society” for all it’s faults, is the scapegoat upon which we place our troubled conditioning. The thing is, once you realize how much it’s changed you, it’s up to you to change it. Do not keep your eyes closed, my friends; because “society” is us. It’s people.
If you’re asking me to see racism as systemic, institutionalized, and historic, I can do that. If you’re saying revolutions need work on all fronts, then I’m here on the individual front, asking myself and anyone else who has claimed their personal sovereignty: consider just how powerful you really are. Thousands stand together in protest, but the brave and singular minorities within the hidden pockets of institutions are now being asked to speak up. Outnumbered and constantly spoken over, silently witnessing injustice, the individuals embedded into these systems are exactly what we wish they weren’t: people. When they stand alone, we stand alone. It is for this reason I am writing today on the importance of individual sovereignty and interpersonal racism.
Let me reiterate: we did this. I maintain we are one human race and I stand by my dream of seeing us united. On this macroscopic level of species, there is no “they” - only “us.” Even if racial trauma wasn’t an alchemical external force that has never once altered your inner state - first, I would say that’s unlikely. Second, your inner state is exactly the antidote for healing racial divides in society - from the inside out. As Macklemore says, “No law is gonna change us, we have to change us. Whatever God you believe in, we come from the same one.” Later in the song he says, “America the brave still fears what we don’t know.” I would argue he’s talking about ourselves. We don’t know what we’re capable of, we just know we don’t like it.
A lot of the rhetoric I’m hearing right now is that ‘we need to acknowledge the sins of our ancestors and the racism they created.’ I can only assume they’re talking about white people, perhaps they think my ancestors owned slaves and I should be punished for their mistakes - because I’ve certainly been blessed with an existence because of their work (I think that’s true for everyone actually, I think that’s how it works). But to be honest, on a personal note, I’m not sure if my ancestors ever owned slaves, or even if they were all white. I would guess so, since I have British and German ancestry as far back as my family knows, but is there even a way to know if they did or not? Is there a way to fact check my entire lineage, to grade their travesties like a report card, so that I, the latest of centuries of my forebears, may carry their sins on my shoulders so the world may see how, in my nobility, I have taken on responsibility and the burden of MY racism that MY ancestors created? I don’t think so. I also think that by saying, “We need to acknowledge the sins of our ancestors,” that we are, on some level, acknowledging it. By saying these words to each other around the kitchen table we are in fact starting the conversation. By gathering in the streets, we acknowledge the facts publicly. But it seems what some people want is not conversation; they want crucifixion. The bloody rage, not at the person before them, but the sin (or guile, or darkness) they perceive within the person - they want to not only banish the person but banish everything they stand for to the ends of the earth. A total wipe of culture. So it doesn't seem that everyone on the playing field wants Equal Opportunity because they seem perfectly content stripping the opportunity of someone they disagree with. Besides, what else does acknowledgement look like if not a conversation between human beings, or public protests or vigils? To speak and be heard and understand and change? This is acknowledgement: to accept the truth and existence of such things, especially if they are a part of our story. When we deny that society is doing this, we deny our own progress.
We forgot that acknowledgement is only the first step. Despite how easy it sounds to accept our ancestry and acknowledge their tribulations, the burden of ancestral trauma falls into your lap whether you like it or not. I believe we’re responsible for unraveling and understanding familial trauma as much as we can - but our responsibility is not to carry it through this lifetime as a yoke, or a burden. (Or is it?) Good people who do good things can live and die without knowing their lineage, so I don’t think it's a prerequisite for individual healing. To work out your own upbringing is enough for one lifetime, and can provide enough healing light that it shines on every life you touch including your future generations.
Furthermore, my ancestors had their time. This lifetime belongs to me. The power of my bloodline is most potent in the present - and the lessons of cultural trauma and somatic sovereignty that have been passed onto me now belong to me. What I choose to do with these voices in my head now rest entirely on how I use the voice in my throat.
So here’s what I’m proposing: freedom as an inside job. We can never and will never be able to choose how others interact with us, nor expect their bodies and minds to produce the responses we want them to. We are the utmost sovereign of our individual bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. It is here we have the most power. Period. We could however predict the way culture will unfold based on institutionalized prejudices, watch the way it molds people and watch the way systemic opinion becomes personal opinion. Even if our lawmakers, teachers, parents, and politicians were always “trying their best,” hindsight remains 20/20 where things have gone wrong and right. When we have the ability, we have the obligation to stand up against ineffective leadership when it holds power over us. Like my mentor Paul Linden says, “Power without love is brutality, love without power is weak and ineffective.” Power is a separate essay.
Systemic racism, or any institutionalized injustice, begins and ends with the individual - but not before it brutalizes thousands in between. This is why honest and transparent leadership in our local and federal governments is so important. But then again, hidden culture within closed systems will always remain hidden from those not privy to the system - so we look to their actions. To quote Charity Croft, “Love is justice in action.” Leadership is qualified by the safety of the populace it serves. If they are not safe, they are not served. But I’m not here to talk about systemic safety today - again I posit: safety as an inside job. You alone cannot change the world, let alone the laws written behind closed doors buried beneath thousands of pages of code. You alone do not represent your family, your race, your nation, or your species. (Like Boramir says, “Not with 10,000 men could you do this - it is folly.” That is the POINT of the FELLOWSHIP. That is the point of teamwork, of family, of tribe, of community. The reason we come together is because we can’t do it alone. There is (I think) African proverb that goes like this: “When you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Before (or after) you are a member of earth, or a country, or a country, or a state - you are most importantly sovereign unto yourself, where you can live and die by your own values, and where honesty and transparency have more effect on your daily life than any government ever can (or will). The prerequisite for a felt-sense of safety would be range and freedom to move in your environment in the way you need to. If freedom is an inside job, then it can be cultivated through a felt sense of safety, which is an inside job too because it’s just that: a felt sense in the body. Do I feel safe right now? What would help me feel safe? Where are my boundaries? Where do I feel love? Where do I feel hate? What do I let into my life? What do I hold onto? These are questions to be explored somatically - because we hold onto our values dearly, and we hold onto them in our bodies. If I do not feel safe in my skin, then I am not free.
And though there are many tyrants, ready to enslave the masses for personal or party power, the tyrant I am most susceptible to is the one I create myself. The tyrant within. I keep myself trapped when I accept inner tyranny, in whatever form it takes: intolerance, superiority, insufficiency, scarcity, prejudice, discrimination, inferiority, or supremacy. Some of the most haunting words on this concept come from Dr. Jordan Peterson, “You cannot play slave to your own tyrant.” Well as it turns out, you can. But it always leads to travesty.
To live in palpable freedom is to stay awake to these inner tyrants while continuously confronting my own. Because consciously beating back tyrannical power means loving the people involved (or intrinsic) in corrupted systems insofar that you are NOT intimidated by their god-complex - because you have confronted your own. When you free the inner tyrant, you free the inner slave. We make taskmasters upon ourselves, playing the victim of our own corrupt power. It seems we have no other choice. So to contextualize the matter, we acknowledge our ancestry. Why are we here? Where did we come from? Why do I think that? Where do I feel that? How do I know that? Because the feelings happening in my body… I’m doing that. What I do - or don’t do - that’s on me. How I speak, how I act, how I feel - it matters. It makes an impact. Am I freely choosing to relive my habitualized patterns?
Maybe my shadow isn’t as hidden as I think, maybe I’ll find the answers I’m looking for if I’m brave enough to ask. Maybe my habits are as far as I have to look, my friends, my support system, my feelings towards others. Maybe our bodies are the liberation we’ve been looking for. Maybe the answer’s been here all along.
Rising up against injustice, reaching out, speaking up - it takes on several forms. There is no rule saying it has to be explosive. In fact, fire is only one of the elements. We have many more tools at our disposal than we think. Because we matter, our voice matters, how we behave matters, and how we attain our goals for the future is dependent on the future itself, and all of its inhabitants. We cannot prepare for the seventh generation if seven days is as far as our eyes can see. We were not born to resist each other - we were born to resolve. It is not tragedy that sets us back, it’s not being able to work together through tragedy that keeps us from building a better future for ourselves and future generations. We resist each other in the worst possible times to resist: during crisis. This resistance must subside, lest we suffocate the future. If you think we didn’t have a crisis before Covid-19 came along, then of course you don’t think we have a crisis in the pandemic. We are being asked to heal ourselves; heal our metabolic diseases and our communities and our immune/nervous/enteric health - how we handle ourselves and work with each other has come into a grave limelight. America can’t get along - how hysterical. How hilarious and self-deserving our own destruction feels in my home. A purple state in a gray nation, everyone eager to not pick a side and step back to watch the city burn. The only people to step forward these days do so to get a better angle to record crime in the streets. At what cost shall we continue to fight each other? How much longer are we going to sow the seeds of anti-Being into our culture, insisting on its corruption and destruction? If we really believe black, white, brown, tan, green, purple, gold, blue, yellow, red, or silver lives matter… then we need to start acting like it. From the inside. Confront your own demons.
The children are listening, the future is coming, and our ancestors are begging us from the underworld to not repeat their same mistakes. Like a wise woman once told me, “It is in our evolution to say no more.” It is in our bones, our blood, our earth, and our nature to grow, expand, push, pull, break, heal, harden, soften, rise, fall, erode, and decay. It is in our best interest to work for peace, to aim for compassion, to meet resistance with empathy. Let us bring back these platonic ideals of communication: "To argue without quarreling, to quarrel without suspecting, to suspect without slandering." It is time; because we are running out of time.
Birthing a new world is totally within our power and right. But we must be careful not to burn down every ancestral structure in the fury - simply because something is old, or even outdated, doesn't inherently mean it’s useless or doesn’t deserve love. When we forget the pain of people we can't see, or their virtues, we dishonor their existence (or their memory). Improve upon what you think is good: in yourself, in your story, in your home and community. Make better what you can make better, and take on no more. If everyone focused on something they could do better, imagine the change we could see in the world. But who says most people aren't already trying their best to make the world a better place? Assume they are, and do your part: love them anyway. But if it's time to speak up, it's time to fucking speak up. Because if you're the only one witnessing low-key corruption, then you're the only one who can stop it. Stop it for love. Speak up for the future.
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