reflections on reckoning & healing for white-bodied people

The intensity white bodied people feel when confronted with the horrors of racism can feel overwhelming - like bracing, like sorrow and even like grief. And while it is intense, it is not grief (perhaps grief over the loss of ignorance) and so requires a different approach to the processing and meaning-making of it. And, perhaps more importantly, it requires a more intentional approach to how we create multi-racial spaces that do less harm. All too often the intensity of those unprocessed emotions spill over in multiracial spaces (the phenomena of white tears) and without careful intention ends up centering the emotions of white bodied people, instead of the centering the racialized harm that is often the reason for gathering in the first place. This weakens the foundation of the multiracial coalitions we aspire to build: narrowing the spaces for processing the trauma of anti-Black racism or - worse - equating it to the pain that white bodied people feel about that trauma. How might we create higher integrity anti-racist spaces that center those who have been harmed by racism by better understanding - and thus building more appropriate and adjacent support systems - for white bodied people to process their role in racism? 

How might we understand what white bodied people are experiencing? Playing off of Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 idea of “unpacking the invisible knapsack,” Resmaa Menakem advances our collective thinking by writing of the “embodied plantation backpack.” Like McIntosh, he suggests that once we understand the contents and weight of that backpack, we are also able to put it down. But first we must understand the weight of centuries of behavior and conditioning that white bodied Americans carry. Menakem describes:

“On American plantations in the 1600s through the 1800s, there was little rule of law as we know it today. With few limitations, each plantation owner was the sole local authority who did whatever he pleased. If you were an enslaved person on a plantation, its owner could torture you, kill you, or sell you at any time. He controlled your body and your choices. He could rape you for pleasure, production, or profit. He and others had unfettered access to black bodies. On his land, which had earlier been stolen from its Indigenous inhabitants, he was a despot and, effectively, a god.

Plantation ethics were not built on justice or morality. They were built on violence, raw power, and racial domination, and there was a feralness to them [...]. This was the plantation owner's creed: I do whatever I want, to any Black body I want, whenever I want, using every tool at my disposal: fear, humiliation, scripture, incarceration, violence, murder.”

From Jim Crow to the Capitol Riots, from the prison industrial complex to the extra-judicial state-sanctioned killings of Black people by the police, this deeply entrenched conditioning towards dominance and violence is carried within white-bodied Americans today. It manifests from the subtle to the atrocious: a belief the safety and comfort of white bodies is more important than the safety, needs or survival of all other bodies; a lifting up of the white body as a neutral standard against which others are compared against; and a belief that whiteness entitles white bodies to privileges that others do not have (often wrapped up in narratives of meritocracy). A pawn to economic systems, white bodies - and the violence they perpetuate - are the foot soldiers of an economic order dehumanizes even themselves for the sake of capital. The weight of the “embodied plantation backpack” leaves white-bodied people without culture or a sense of ancestry, dehumanized and themselves owned by myths of separation and scarcity. Once this is realized, how might we go about both putting down the backpack while also healing from the harm carrying it has done?

New research emerging from the psychological study of military veterans introduces frameworks that might be helpful, specifically the concept of moral injury. Moral injury is a term described by Brett Litz of Boston University and his colleagues in 2009 as the psychic fallout of “morally injurious events, such as perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress [one’s own] deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” Two years later in 2011, psychologist Jonathan Shay describes it slightly differently: “moral injury is present when 1) there has been a betrayal of what’s right [in the soldier’s eyes] 2) by someone who holds legitimate authority 3) in a high- stakes situation.” A key distinction between these two definitions is where the origin of the injury resides -- one is located in the individual who fights (Litz) and the other locates it within the system that asks them to fight (Shay). In the case of racism, both sources of moral injury are appropriate to consider for white-bodied people. To enhance our understanding, the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab adds that, regardless of the source, there are three overlapping features of how it manifests: in our bodies, in our institutions and within our country. Moral injury in the body might manifest in the following symptoms:

As the research on moral injury increases and improves, so does the treatment for it. The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab suggests we understand moral injury “less as a disorder and more as a response that calls for shared responsibility.” One innovation that is showing positive outcomes was pioneered by a VA chaplain and a psychologist at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia. This innovation involves the co-facilitation of a 12-week Moral Injury Group (MIG) for military veterans that aims to: provide education about moral injury, cultivate the collective responsibility for the consequences of warfare, and hold a brave space to co-process the symptoms of moral injury. A recent study of this approach shows its impacts are promising - noting decreases in suicidality, religious struggles, and depression, along with increases in posttraumatic growth, self-compassion, and life functioning. 

A few features of this program that could be applied to white-bodied people recovering from racism-related moral injury include: a close knit small cohort, education about moral injury, the development of personal testimony, tactics to identify and release shame, and the adaptation of the program’s Community Ceremony --  a hallmark ceremony in the VA chapel, immediately following Week 10, that brings together VA staff, family, and friends of MIG Veterans as well as the wider society. The ceremony is critical in shifting the locus of healing from the individual body to the collective. 

Today, and in our lifetimes, in our bodies and in our communities, through Black-led multi-racial coalitions, we have an opportunity to break the conditioning left by centuries of anti-Black racialized violence and oppression. For white-bodied people to be able to show up in those coalitions with presence and grace, we need to carefully imagine and create the containers for our collective transformation.

exploring time as a carceral force

After watching the play Hamilton, adrienne maree brown remarked that it was like looking at baby pictures of a person who later abused you. Where did that innocence, that purity, that beauty go? As a country whose foundations are genocide and the atrocity of chattel slavery, it is clear we have not faced - nor metabolized - what those foundations mean. James Baldwin writes that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The need to collectively face - to grieve - the legacy and continuing adaptations of our original sins feels like a project whose day has come. But when it comes to public grief, what do we do with time? “Time heals all wounds” is a known platitude. Popular discourse argues that “too much time” has passed since the end of colonization and chattel slavery to do anything about it. “It is so long ago - no one directly impacted is still alive” is sometimes cited, assuming grief only resides within an individual’s body. While time can be an element of healing, in this essay I’d like to explore time as a carceral force. As it relates to public grief - or facing ourselves - how is time deployed to dismiss, oppress and maintain a societal - and economic - relationship to death that is predicated on racism and capitalism?

What is time? In the modern context, time is often used to signal human progress. The Oxford English Dictionary describes time as “a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience.” What is the material reality we are demarcating and for whom? Derek Thompson fits this question squarely into colonialism and the rise of Industrial Revolution as he writes in The Atlantic: “The creature became the creator: The economy re-invented time. Or, to put things less obliquely, the age of exploration and the industrial revolution completely changed the way people measure time, understand time, and feel and talk about time.” Time, therefore, has been a measure of capitalistic and colonial exploitation. Thompson continues: “in colonial campaigns like the First Boer War and the Third Burmese War, British commanders tied little clocks to their soldiers’ wrists.[...] the innovation proved extremely useful for coordinating troop movements.”

Can this tool, this measure we call time, be used to both optimize violence and also heal from it? It is in this contradiction that we can explore deeper understandings of how the hegemonic national psyche refuses grief. And, perhaps more nefariously, a concept or construction we use to deny our essential humanity is paradoxically marketed as a salve.

Significantly, the spectacle of Black death in and at the hands of the hegemon of the United States is - in a sense - timeless. Writing about the horrors inflicted by white terrorist Dylan Roof, Claudine Rhakine writes that “the spectacle of the shooting suggests an event out of time” (Millstein, 28). Rhakine continues:

“We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in the ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police or warehoused in prisons. Historically there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained, or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against.” (Millstein, 29)

If time is an attempt to quantify a rate of change, then so has time in the United States been metered to a cadence of death and violence -- recapitulated as productivity and progress. The unsaid - or what has been made invisible or erased in the name of production - is that such so-called progress depends on unlivable lives and what Butler calls “ungrievable deaths.” Progress, in the capitalist sense, is both measured and fueled by the ungrievable deaths of Black, indigenous and people or color. As a society, we maintain this racialized power arrangement by avoiding grief and using time as the accomplice in that logic system. The transformative force of grief threatens the power structure. But at what cost? What might be possible if we re-negotiated our collective relationship to grief - grounding it in what we know from a more deeply human perspective - and re-imagined the systems that restrict it?

Grief exists without time. Wounds do not heal if they are left alone, or processed in isolation, much less told their pain is not real. Grief is not held only within one body, one life - but grief is so deeply human that it connects us across generations and geographies. In Alternating Mourning, they writes to grief: “I am feeling about you the way waves feel about the shore. You come at me in endless loops, your moods, the looks on your faces, my lost ones, more alive by the minute, and the color in your faces tinting with the seasons.” (9)

Grief is a public good. By denying grief, we deny our essential humanity - cutting ourselves off from the essential materials that make up democracy (or the promise of one). As Terry Tempest Williams writes: 

“The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up—ever—trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?” 

How can we live in a democracy if we do not know democracy in our hearts?  By repressing grief, we repress democracy. Millstein writes: “the work of grief, and spaces for it, as something that similar to water and libraries, should be freely, healthily and publicly available to all.” (4)

Grief is resistance. Millstein continues: “Over human history, loss also became the impetus for rebellions and revolutions, including those that challenged — and still do — the instrumental logic of capitalism, which inherently turns us into mere things, commodities, thereby privatizing and wholly debasing our lives.” (8) Benji Hart writes: “Let grief be part of the movement-building process for which we allow hallowed space, and let it build within us the compassion, wisdom and rage that propel us into new battles.” (23)

In the coming months, as reasons to grieve seem to compound each day, it feels important to sit with these questions, this grief and these possibilities. How can we sit in and surrender to the transformational power of grief in a way that changes us? 

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/a-brief-economic-history-of-time/510566/

public grief & direct action: a vision for canopy collective

The words below are the byproduct of the love & wisdom of Zuri Tau, Dannielle Thomas, Anjali Benjamin-Webb, Fernando Perez, danielle miles, Ari Bassin, Will Byrne & myself. The process for these words to emerge was shepherded by Zuri and the International Lab for Liberatory Research.

Canopy Collective | Our Why

As Judith Butler tells us, an “ungrievable life is an unlivable life.” A society where its people cannot live “livable lives'' is no democracy at all. The history of chattel slavery and the ways in which those unhealed woulds - those ungrieved lives - have metastasized, plagued and permeated every aspect of America is tearing us apart. We believe that until those lives can be honored and the truth can be really received and integrated by our society, we will not be able to fully heal. The field of transitional justice, which studies how societies reckon with gross humanitarian abuse, shows that those that fail to reckon with past harms falter in attaining full democracy - beset by problems of social cohesion, trust in institutions, civic engagement, and respect for the rule of law. This is where we are today in the United States.\nLearning from the canon of grief studies, we heal in a spiral. Pain and harm turn into the rawness of grief, which settles into the acceptance of mourning and only then can we arrive at grace, or healing. In the U.S., we have not - as a fulsome we - properly or publicly grieved what has been lost and who has been harmed by the hands of racism. Transitional justice work echoes this same pattern: we miss the opportunity to be whole, if we skip over the truth of what we are healing from. Only through grief and truth can we be collectively transformed into a more honest, more human country.

Canopy Collective advances racial equity by transforming the deeply held narratives that stand in the way of justice and healing. We do this in two ways: First, we will launch a national citizen-led truth-telling initiative that aims to engage millions of people of African descent. Led by organizers and artists and steeped in liberatory research methods, this initiative will explore the wide spectrum of harms of racism and vision what healing looks like. Each year, the products of this research will become a public art installation or immersive experience for all. Second, we will bridge Americans into the deep wisdom and leadership abroad in truth and repair, normalizing these efforts as proven tools in the upkeep of democracy, and providing inspiration as we chart our path. We will do this through a podcast miniseries with Vox and a transnational community of practice. The series will take listeners across the world to explore the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa and Sierra Leone; Germany’s restitution paid to Jews after the Holocaust and its continuing program of “working off the past” in memorialization, education, and policy; reparations to over seven million victims of Colombia’s fifty-year armed conflict; and indigenous justice programs for Native peoples in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, among others. All of these stories will focus on how societies helped their citizens confront challenging truths in the past to pave the way to meaningful repair, belonging, and reframing of collective identity.

We believe this initiative is innovative in the following ways:

• From distant experts to proximate leadership: we center those who have been harmed to describe and define the harms, generate what is owed and vision the healing.

• The products of research are public art: instead of white papers, our inquiries result in public installations that are immersive enough to evoke emotion, provoke reflection and shift paradigms.

• From American exceptionalism to transnational solidarity: instead of a posture of exporting democracy, we create communities of practice focused on truth and repair.

• From truth-avoidance to grief as a door to collective transformation: counter to American white-dominant culture, we believe that only through grief can we arrive in mourning and through mourning can we arrive at grace.

• Led by organizers and artists: while vital to democracy, are infrequently “valued” as productive, especially outside of election cycles. One reason our work will begin in Georgia is to harness the organizing capacity that was grown in 2020 election cycle. 

The How: High Level Plan

0-6 months: finalize learning strategy, inclusion criteria for pilot locations, national organizing partnerships. Begin and complete majority of global research and storytelling for podcast content, convene first network meeting of US reparations activists and global leaders.

Year 1 (months 6-18): Release 8-part podcast miniseries with Vox, reaching their 37.4mm unique monthly listeners and beyond, promoting the truth-telling work throughout. Complete first five pilot localities for truth-telling work, culminating in a place-based public art installations that generate interest from other localities. Launch Canopy Collective website as an organizing and mobilization tool and set sign-up targets.

Year 2: truth-telling work begins in ten new localities, funding secured for additional locations with a finalized scale plan. Complete after action research and learning in year 1 locations.

Year 3: truth-telling begins in additional 20 localities. Week of public grief and art becomes more mainstream. 

Year 4: Truth-telling work begins in over 100 new localities, enabled digitally and guided by the leads in previous years.

Year 5: Week of public grief and art becomes a national holiday. Cities begin experimenting with Canopy Residencies - city-sponsored roles for organizers and activists to lead truth-telling initiatives.

Year 8: A bipartisan Federally- sponsored, grassroots-led reparations program is passed with overwhelming support.\nYear 9: Reparations program begins.

Year 10: Canopy Collective film is released, documenting how together we transformed the American national identity