Let's be honest, when some of us non-Black people hear Black people express Black pain, we just want to join hands with them in a circle and sing an interracial spiritual. Or we are quick to suggest alternative ways of dealing with the problem, such as "being patient."
First, we need to wake up. Rosh Hashana may be New Years, but it's more of a somber, reflective holiday. How have we sinned, how can we learn, and grow? The ram horn (shofar) is blown- a single note. This year I pray that we white people don't try to force a false unity or push reconciliation before we've soberly acknowledged history, truth, and consequences. As my friend Hassan Xavier Henderson once pointed me to Rev. Dr. Yolanda Pierce, "Don't rush to the language of healing, before understanding the fullness of the injury and the deepness of the wound." This requires humility, and any talk of need for patience should be about our own.
Every year in Israel is the observance of the day of remembering the Holocaust, including a part of the day when Jewish people stop what they are doing, even pull over on highways and stand beside their vehicles, and pause for a two-minute reflection. It is not simply a month where students are subjected to Jewish moderates who non-violently resisted the Nazis- every one, child and adult, has to disrupt their lives to acknowledge Jewish pain.
There is no equivalent near an American Yom HaShoah (the aforementioned holiday) to acknowledge its racism, despite the fact that 9/11 happens every day for Blacks. America wants its Black folks to "get over it," something I don't hear told to any other people in such an ardent way. We should not suggest to Black people "right and wrong" ways to deal with suffering. We might offer our quick "fixes" by giving advice to Black people,
but a part of it is that we do not want to be asked to share the burden of "feeling with" them something so heavy. We don't like messy things, don't we also tell our fellow whites "God won't give you anything more than you can bear?" Regrettably, I have said this to someone when I was younger.
Just because *we* white people have been taught ways to resolve or disassociate from conflict for whatever reason by doing x, y and z, giving "silver lining" platitudes or "sucking it up" or whatever, does not mean that we should assume our experiences are translateable to Black people's (or anyone else's besides us) experiences of pain. Plus, if we tell ourselves to "suck it up" every time we suffer, we're going to resent those who are vocal when they suffer, because we really don't want to suck it up, so we secretly envy those who express pain. And if we detach from our own pain, we just prescribe detachment to others, even others in situations that are foreign to us.
Everyone is a mystery- "I am that I am" (Exodus 3:14)- let us not forget the holiday of the Jewish Pentecost (Shavuot) just because it's the furthest away. YHWH defined its self by speaking to Moses its name "I am that I am (ehyeh asher ehyeh) in a way that preserved the uniqueness and independence of the Creator before defining Israel with speaking the Law/Covenant. Yet we attempt to destroy the uniqueness and independence of Black people every time we suggest to them, "don't you think that by dwelling on it, you are making it worse?", the implication being, "I **know** what you are going through well enough to **know** how to fix it." There is no mystery of the other there, just projections coming from the self.
The risk of identifying with Black pain to the point of doing stuff like this, and the underlying fear of being disrupted and overwhelmed by expressions of Black pain to the point of trying to silence it,
is the fulfillment of participating in a historical tradition of minimizing, denying, repressing Black expressions of pain and frustration and anger. It is complicity in oppression in that it silences the oppressed and tries to name for them what they have experienced. It is control-freakness.
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Healthy breakdowns:
James Baldwin told his Black people, "You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you." We have to make this shit easier for them by holding in our mind that every relationship we have will involve the other person and our idea of the other person,
therefore the relationship will involve the healthy disruption of our idea of the other person, and that we need to welcome this disruption despite how much it hurts our expectations when they say things that trouble us. We can sit with the discomfort, and hold their pain and show that we understand it- we should not try and change it, because we don't understand it.
A healthy breakdown is realizing our significant other, our parent, our leader, or in this case, Black folk, are not who we think they are. Let us mourn this in private and practice patience and bearing their message in public.
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A Rosh Hashanah prayer:"Tekiah: The first sound of the shofar blasts us from our complacency. We thought we were all united, unified, undistinguished. That first, single note breaks down our illusions. We are not whole like that one piercing note is whole. We know that we are separate, broken-apart from each other.
Shvarim-Teruah: We stutter, tremble. Now I see that I am different, distinguishable, separate. Am I less-than you? Am I alone here? How bad is the damage between us?
Tekiah: We grasp for the imagined unity. One note, one people. We hope, we aim for acceptance.
Tekiah: I reach out to you. Do you see me? The note pierces, crescendoes, and then stops.
Shevarim: Another look. Three separate notes ring out. We are so different. Cut off from each other- me from you from her. I see how different you are from me: skin, hair, clothes… Even our upbringings aren’t as similar as we had thought. How can I talk to you? How can you understand me?
Tekiah: I am heartbroken. I reach out to God. Perhaps God will accept me as I am.
Tekiah: In this world where I cannot truly see you, my friend, you, the person sitting next to me in the pew, you, my neighbor, how can I reach out? How can I understand? My soul cries out for connection.
Truah: We are so broken-apart, perhaps there is no hope. The more I look, the smaller the pieces seem to be. They are so small, they string together like beads on a string. How can I find that string that will bring us together?
Tekiah Gedolah: The Kotzker Rebbe taught that “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart”- Having seen how broken apart we are from each other, we can now begin to heal, to return to the wholeness that was once only imagined- and to make it real. The shofar breaks us apart, and then brings us back together- together with ourselves, together with God, and finally, in acceptance, together with each other."
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A methodology of tension:
We cannot have cheap reconciliation. White people have to know just how bad it is by listening and connecting to folks like Ta Nehisi Coates (please right-click his name and open a new tab to read the link), and have to see people of color as subjects with separate experiences instead of objects, that is, instead of extensions of ourselves and our assumptions. If some Black folk challenge our way of seeing things, it should humble us into reminding ourselves that the world is full of other people with their own experiences, wills, and standards, and that we are like them, no more or less subjective.
That is, we don't get to be like Trump and say a judge is biased just because he is Mexican as well as American, we don't get to assume that Black people voted for Obama just because he was Black (how do you explain Ben Carson if that's the case?), we don't get to divide them into "good, smart, hard-working, nice Blacks and emotional/paranoid/extreme Blacks (or clever Blacks who are "playing the race card/milking it")" because the "good ones" will just end up being those who agree with us, and the "bad ones" just get labeled that because they passionately disagree. Disagreement reminds us Black people are not our pets or pawns, it reminds us they have wills of their own that we cannot control with our words.
Black people have an alternative story of America to tell, a view of human evil from a perspective we cannot witness, with implications which ask us to address this story with both emotional and material levels.
Because bearing witness by being a container, a space, for holding the Black pain, we'd be shaken from our complacency, perhaps this makes every expression of it, every demand stemming from it, a shofar blast,
a blast asking us, like Rosh Hashanah, to take stock of our inventory - in this case, our inventory of showing up for racial justice.
Here's one way I show up: very uncomfortable conversations I have about racial justice with other, more racist (as opposed to the "me/not racist vs them/racist" binary) white people - their ignorance make me feel alienated from them (my cousins and friends),
but I can relate to these white people anyway because my common frame of white reference of having or potentially having *been there* where they are now, in their ignorance
this links me to them on the same thread. Our pieces are small and isolated, but we live on the same string. Paradoxically, the more conversations like this we have, the less of a chance humankind will be isolated. Tension like this will build up some of these white folk's capacity to not be fragile, and can thus make them more likely to be mature enough to handle the truth. The first cut is the deepest, but they can become more resilient. Because we have established relationships with them - hopefully without fear of abandonment and shaming ("you are bad!") - they can hold us as both criticizers and people who love them, and not dismiss our challenges that easily.
We can reflect their irrationality back to them, by noting implications of their words and being Socratic, not to shame them so they can lick their wounds; but we will have to break their illusions, to stroke the innocence out of them (read Another Country by James Baldwin to see what this looks like). Telling Black folk to "get over it" or telling them how to feel, or teaching them about how they should handle it, is placing the onus of responsibility on the victim (Black folk), when instead we white people know the locus of racism is coming from white folks, our very cousins.
We should be focusing on white folks causing the pain, not managing Black folk's pain.
Likewise, most talking about rape prevention spend their energy talking to women, which has a place sure, but at the cost of stopping actual men doing the raping, making excuses for them. Rape prevention should prevent men from raping, not simply talking to women about how to avoid getting raped. We need to cut off oppression at its source, including in this case of racism. To cut it off at the level of our own mouths which silence the oppressed or make excuses for the oppressor or blame the victim.
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Outro: Toward a new American religion.
Since Black pain is silenced ritualistically, since Black bodies are broken ritualistically, since Black families and communities and identities are shattered ritualistically, it will take nothing short of daily ritual to fight racism.
Anti-Blackness is a true American religion, so we have to make a religion of destroying "whiteness" - whiteness being the power to maintain the trail of bodies, families, identities and communities shattered in the name of safety, control-freakness, and self-obsession,
and the professed innocence and exoneration, and knee-jerk denial and dismissiveness behind the willful ignorance, and self-absorbed criminal negligence, fueling the moral apathy of the majority of America toward Black suffering.
So let us begin our new year by observing the first holiday, Rosh HaShana, with intentional tension.
So we need to to make some more space for Black pain. A lot more space. The breakdown of our ideas of unity and healing must be our prelude to the experience of being one note- an experience of unity that has conditions of tension. For the congregation to qahal ("gather together" in Hebrew), distinctions among the American "tribes," along the lines of racial grievances, have to be named and addressed.
The famous time in the Bible this was ignored was when Israel's United Kingdom of David and Solomon split among its fault lines. Grievances were ignored because expressions of suffering where returned not with acknowledging the wound, but with compounding of the suffering. And that is the American story. As Malcolm X said, "If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is in there." We won't even look here in America at the fault lines, on a political level, because to acknowledge them would put capitalism and the political control of Black communities under threat
Here in fault lines is tension - the constant tension in the field between "you" and "I" - as methodology. Let another year of chaos begin; but may it be intentional, for the greatest purpose of all: justice.
Because between "you" and "I," in the flaming border, humility and learning can take place, interdependence can be recognized, and all claims of unity have to come from interdependence instead of uniformity. Unity as uniformity collapses difference, acts like fault lines do not exist. And on a spiritual level, we may all be one, the indwelling spirit is the same in us all. Yet the fault lines, the in-between spaces where uncertainty and lack of control makes us vulnerable, are where all white people's growth and responsibility must take place.
And only by us wading through the messy muck will YHWH see us worthy of being in the place of the indwelling spirit for ever and ever. Not because heaven and hell necessarily exist as afterlife, but because our ability to achieve true inner peace - joy built on dynamism and spontaneity and social exchange of relating to others deeply and sharing joy (all of which implies the messiness that is the other side of vulnerability and spontaneity and social interactions)- is arrested by our immaturity, and gives us only empty prayers and hollow meditations built on the false peace of control-freakness, shielding from feeling hurt, and the static of emptiness and self-absorbed isolation.
http://racebaitr.com/2016/07/21/black-rage-god/ "Black Mourning and Black Rage are Justified by God" by Hassan Xavier Henderson
