I recently had the rewarding experience of interviewing civil rights leader and Kingian nonviolence trainer Bernard Lafayette for a film on nonviolence. He told a story I\u2019ll likely never forget: After he, the late John Lewis and many others had succeeded \u2014 not without much trouble and grave risk \u2014 at integrating a lunch counter in Nashville, he asked his friend and noted \u201carchitect of the Civil Rights movement,\u201d Jim Lawson, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we just go on and integrate the rest of the city\u2019s segregated facilities?\u201d Lawson\u2019s reply, he said, was one of the most profound lessons he ever learned: \u201cNo, Bernard; we\u2019ve taken the first step. Now let them do the rest.\u201d Why? Because \u201cWhat was the goal?\u201d Lawson asked. Not to integrate a few lunch counters. The goal was to \u201cchange the minds and hearts\u201d of the people who were maintaining segregation. \u201cAnd only love can do that. And that\u2019s the power of nonviolence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In shifting focus from the use of excessive force by police to racism, the movement for Black Lives also took an important step. It dug deeper than the immediate issue, or the \u201ctrigger event\u201d as it\u2019s called \u2014 the murder of George Floyd \u2014 to the underlying, systemic, much larger problem that made such a murder possible. Now we can take an even further step, it seems to me: from dismantling the structures of racism in policing or whatever to healing the very root of that abomination, in the human heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Working on underlying causes we often find ourselves eliminating problems permanently \u2014 and taking care of related problems along with them. By tackling material inequality, for example, the Scandinavian countries found that inadequate healthcare, crime and the totalitarian tendencies sweeping the rest of Europe in the 1930s also dropped significantly (as George Lakey describes in his book \u201cViking Economics\u201d). In our case the collateral benefit will be tremendous, as I\u2019ll describe further on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The present moment is, as Detroit-based co-liberation theorist Tawana Petty, says, \u201can opportunity to deepen the question.\u201d If police brutality is a symptom of racism; racism, in turn, is a symptom of violence. And what is violence? The ill-will that arises from the failure to perceive the other as a part of oneself; a kind of failure of the imagination that prevents us from seeing the interconnectedness of life. We all suffer from this lack of imagination to one degree or other \u2014 but that\u2019s exactly where we can make a difference. The degree of this alienation can be changed. Our contemporary culture is changing it all the time \u2014 in exactly the wrong direction. Our cultural spaces are flooded by violent movies, books, video games and other demoralizing images. In sports, in business or (perhaps most damaging) in politics we find a prevailing style of aggressive competition. Even in science: A few years ago, papers complained that the French had discovered more new elements than we did!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In all these ways we are feeding the paradigm of separateness of which racism is perhaps the ugliest \u2014 but by no means the only \u2014 outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Racism is debilitating our country, and current circumstances have brought it to the forefront. As a spiritual progressive, dedicated to healing, I believe we should consider using a two-track approach: We can undertake long-term efforts that address racism in our minds, the way an express train takes you all the way to the last stop \u2013 and at the same time we can go on doing just what we\u2019re doing now: dismantling the structures of racism in sector after sector of society. The \u201cexpress\u201d tactic changes hearts and minds directly, though it takes time; the \u201clocal\u201d changes them indirectly but starts immediately to eliminate their outward expression in our institutions and practices. With the latter we are \u201cstopping the worst of the damage,\u201d as Joanna Macy advises, and with the former we\u2019re working on the long-term, deeper task of \u201cchanging the culture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How? A school superintendent in my county recently said that children should learn about racism from an early age. Well, what if they learned about the unity of life, from whatever age? What if we all did, for that matter? I went through school all the way to a PhD without hardly ever hearing the term, much less learning that there are ways we can bring it into reality. In a world that seeks harmony, race would be seen for what it is: an aspect of diversity, not misunderstood as a threat of difference. It would resonate with the basic organizing principle of life itself, diversity. Not that \u201crace\u201d is a hard-and-fast biological reality: It isn\u2019t. It\u2019s a social construct, and a fraught one at that. But the point remains that by deepening our grounding in the awareness of unity, any perceived differences will be interpreted as examples of diversity, not reasons to create otherness. Race would then participate in the strange paradox that it\u2019s by becoming who we uniquely are that we find our creative place in the connectedness of the whole. Howard Thurman discovered that, \u201cI can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be,\u201d and Martin Luther King added, \u201cand you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.\u201d In other words, we complete each other, and when we begin to realize that, as Thurman said, \u201cinstead of spreading [us] out so the margins of the self fade and vanish away, it deepens and intensifies [our] essential sense of uniqueness without the devastation of a sense of being different.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Altanta-based activist and mother Amisha Harding, whose \u201cCourageous Conversations for the Collective\u201d is a good example of nonviolence and fierce anti-racism, put it this way to one of my friends recently: \u201cYes, Black lives matter. But why do they matter to you? It needs to be personal.\u201d They matter to us because only when I know you to be fully human can I be. The recent statement from the Native and Tribal Colleges and Universities includes Wi\u010boni wak\u0307an<\/em> \u2013 or Life is Sacred (Lakota) \u2014 and Naahi\u0142ii beda\u2019iina\u2019 nihi\u0142 danil\u012f<\/em> \u2013 Black lives matter (Navajo).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Changing a cultural mindset is a long-term goal, but when we begin to address racism at its educational and cultural roots, we find ourselves furnished with three strategic advantages. We find ourselves, first of all, in the classic nonviolent position of liberating the oppressor as well along with the oppressed \u2014 and hopefully on some level they are aware of that. Hence the disarming appeal of what Tawana Petty calls \u201cco-liberation,\u201d the importance of which needs to be emphasized. In one of his most profound insights Thurman wrote, \u201cThe burden of being Black and the burden of being white is so heavy that it is rare in our society to experience oneself as a human being.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the main planks of Gandhi\u2019s famous Constructive Program was \u201cheart unity,\u201d which is what we\u2019re really talking about here. Heart unity means being grounded in a sense of empathic connection with others, wanting to make some kind of contribution to their welfare despite any differences on the surface \u2014 be they even differences of wealth and position, not to mention race. It does not mean that for you those differences \u201cfade and vanish away,\u201d as Thurman says, but they no longer interrupt your sense of connection; if anything, they enhance and enrich it. It does not mean \u201csame-ing\u201d the other, as john a. powell, Director of U.C. Berkeley\u2019s Otherness and Belonging Institute calls it, where the other is invited in provided they assimilate to oneself. Rather, they are invited in precisely because they can contribute what they uniquely are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, we\u2019re now carrying out what we might call a \u201cstealth\u201d operation, where the opposition doesn\u2019t realize that you\u2019re a threat until it\u2019s too late to stop you. Gandhi argued against the first boycott of British goods that the Indian National Congress proposed in 1917 \u2014 not because he was opposed to boycotting; far from it. He was opposed to tipping their hand before they were ready to carry through on their threat. A few years later, after he had begun to revive the Indian homespun fabric industry by promoting spinning in every home, he then called on Indians to light the bonfires and burn their British cloth. Ten years later he did it again, with the Salt Satyagraha (resistance campaign), about which the Viceroy literally wired to London that he was \u201cnot losing any sleep over the salt campaign\u201d until it was too late to stop it without losing the empire in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third, we are no longer simply against something, namely racism; we are also for something, namely our undeniable native interconnection with one another, and all of life. Steps are already being taken in this direction, as numerous communities are exploring (or have already instituted) restorative justice and alternative policing, transitioning to more nonviolent models of community harmony alongside or instead of simply defunding the police. Here we would simply carry that approach deeper, into the implied cultural narrative. A positive goal, on any level, has a much more encouraging effect on participants; often it makes the difference between their giving up or staying at it for the long haul, what Central American activists call firmeza permanente<\/em> which is so often critical for a movement\u2019s success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now the collateral benefit I mentioned earlier: Once persons liberate themselves from the pervasive propaganda of separateness, release themselves from alienation and begin to get a taste of harmony, why stop there? It could go on to embrace unity with nature, and bring an end to the ruthless exploitation of our planet and other beings that is an \u201cexistential threat\u201d to the progress, if not the continuation of life on earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With this approach, to repeat, we would by no means drop the changes we\u2019re implementing now in everything from healthcare to voting rights to community policing. But it could mean prioritizing them somewhat differently. It might mean \u2014 I think it probably should \u2014 changing our conversations from being scapegoating and problem-oriented to liberating and solutions-oriented, in the spirit of Ibram Kendi\u2019s \u201cHow to Be an Anti-racist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n To the extent that we encourage people not to patronize cultural media that insist on carrying out the old story of competition and violence, and turn instead to the new science and timeless wisdom about human connectedness we will find it easier to complete the job of anti-racism, which is to expose racism for the tragic absurdity it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lessons from the civil rights movement and its leaders point to an important two-track approach to ending the abomination of racism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":51313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,46,76],"tags":[35,73],"region":[65],"series":[],"article_type":[],"class_list":["post-51309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-indigenous","category-racial-justice","tag-gandhi","tag-police","region-north-america"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n