BLM
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can change until it is faced.”
In 1970, I was twelve years old when race riots broke out in Asbury Park, NJ just five miles down the road from where I lived. According to the NY Times, forty-six people were admitted to the hospital with gunshot wounds in one day alone. My mother told us kids we wouldn’t be able to visit the beaches and boardwalk of this resort town that summer; we didn’t completely understand why, only that there were “troubles” down the road from us. I have a memory of driving in the car through Asbury Park at that time, in a predominantly Black part of town, with my mother saying: “lock the doors.”
Photo by Clay Banks
This month marks the 50th anniversary of those events, and as I unpack and examine the roots of my own internalized racism, I finally can acknowledge an uncomfortable and embarrassing truth: I grew up afraid of Black people. Only now am I beginning to understand the nature of “systemic” racism and how it affects us. I was not a bad or intolerant child; rather, the cultural system and conditions in our country — specifically the enslavement, oppression and violence directed at Black people in the United States — produced that fear in me as a white child. Those Black teenagers in Asbury Park in 1970 weren’t bad or “dangerous” youth; no, they were a product of systemic racism too that led to feelings of anger, frustration and hopelessness that inevitably erupted into violence. My fear was on one side of the race tornado and the riots were on the other, but we were all in its path of destruction.
System forces — Why they matter
Every system exerts forces that act upon those who are a part of it; this is an inescapable truth. To pretend otherwise would be like dropping a stone in the middle of a pond and saying “no ripples please”. Every day in our history for 400 years, another heavy stone of racism is dropped into the pond and the effects ripple out across the waters and touch each and every one of us, diminishing and dehumanizing us all in different ways.
If I don’t recognize these system forces and how they unconsciously affect me, then I am not truly free to do much of anything about them. As Assagioli noted, “We are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified.” It doesn’t matter that my childhood fear has fallen away; those forces of systemic racism are still very much in play and continue to produce white privilege and black oppression. How, then, can I participate in and contribute to an ongoing process of change that is guided by the understanding that Black Lives Matter?
Several weeks ago a young Black woman with her two children walked up the street and right past my house. Not an unusual sight in many places, but here in the predominantly white state of Vermont where Blacks make up just 1.4% of the population, it’s a lot less common. That was the day I realized it was my civic and moral duty to make a “Black Lives Matter” sign and put it up on the front of our house where this woman and her children would see it if they ever pass this way again.
In psychosynthesis terms, systemic racism is a “primal wound” in the collective psyche of our nation that results from an experience of not being seen for who you are. It is primal because this lack of empathic mirroring carries with it the threat of annihilation or nonbeing. John Firman and Ann Gila wrote: “When I look out at the world and I am seen, then I exist. But when I look out at the world and I am not seen, then I do not exist.” Putting up that sign on our house felt both like a personal declaration of solidarity and also a way to bear witness and say “I see you”.
what is emerging
The urgent evolutionary movement now underway full force is that the trauma and deep wounds of systemic racism are being surfaced and penetrating the consciousness of a broad cross section of society. They are no longer being ignored or brushed away. Wounds that are repressed fester and become infected; only those that are faced can be healed.
These are painful times and they are also hopeful, promising times. The black community’s frustration, anger and outrage are being seen, and the white community is beginning to reckon more honestly with its own historical misuse of power and privilege. I can feel my own anger growing and I welcome it, because it means that I am waking as if from a coma or deep unconsciousness that is part of what allows systemic racism to persist.
Something is emerging now, we are living our way into a future that holds the promise and highest ideals of who we might be. I need to pray every day that I remain awake, that I not go back to sleep: Black Lives Matter.
The next Psychosynthesis Professional Training program with Synthesis Northeast starts September 2020.
Applications now being accepted.
MORE INFO: www.synthesiscoaching.org