Standing up to Oppression: It’s Now or Never
Responding to anti-Black racism, oppression, and ecological collapse — a wake-up call to radical love in action — in the streets and in community.
Something deep inside of me has shifted. The violence and extraordinary callousness of George Floyd’s murder, in the ongoing sequence of killings, and the ongoing protests, has woken something up, pushed me into new territory. For many of us, it’s shown us with such stark clarity, how far we, as Americans, have to travel, how much remains unhealed and unresolved. I’ve recently found myself saying internally, “I will not stop until it’s done.” This has become my own personal commitment — to work for justice, for healing … knowing that it is a journey beyond the span of my lifetime.
Since protests and demonstrations started in late May, I’ve attended as many as I can. I’ve done my best to show up with the energies of connection, embodied presence, and compassion — to bring this out into the streets, to meet people, and to listen. Sometimes voices have been angry, sometimes sad, sometimes joyful, sometimes full of celebration. All of these are important. It has been a gift to hear them all, even those I don’t agree with.
I am a white American and a Buddhist monk. I know that my experience is deeply shaped by white privilege; If I want, I can choose to turn away. But as a monastic, I commit not to. I’m writing to my people, to white culture, but also to everyone who has power and privilege in some form. It’s time for us to take responsibility. I want to invite us, my fellow Americans with power and privilege, but also people around the world, to not look away, to not go back to business as usual. How can we see, and more importantly, feel, that this is our struggle too? For white people, we may have been taught over and over that this is not about us—but it is, on the deepest level. This is about us stepping out of numbness and disconnection to reclaim our humanity and become accountable. None of us, across all humanity, will ever touch true dignity, will ever be whole, as long as people and beings anywhere are oppressed. Life on Earth is of one fabric—we are all related, we are responsible for each other.
We must be willing to sacrifice our position, our status, our wealth, our comfort — perhaps even, our lives — if we want meaningful change that will last for future generations; if we want a just future to be possible. Looking into our hearts to find powerful ways of taking action may lead us to the true freedom we seek.
Iam part of a community of resistance called The Mindful Rebels that is committed to ecological and social justice through meditation and nonviolent direct action. Recently we have had the chance to sit in meditation at a local park, joining a Brooklyn community that has recently formed, Meditating for Black Lives. There have been meditations for three Sundays now, with perhaps from 500 to 1500 people. It has been an amazing gift to attend these practices, to be guided, to connect, to meet old and new friends, to feel the momentum and power building.
What if we were all sitting in public and corporate spaces—and in our neighborhoods — listening, connecting, building community and demanding justice with our bodies? We could resist harm and injustice and at the same time begin to heal the roots of this suffering within us.
We know it’s not just physical attacks, it’s also psychological attacks that we are facing. So as a collective we can come together and heal that psychological trauma. — Brittany Micek, Meditating for Black Lives
We can see that the forces of oppression and injustice are being challenged through evolving and emerging culture. People are reclaiming ancient and instinctive modes of human communication, respect, reverence for life, cooperation, and equity. Along with nonviolent activist movements calling for racial justice—Black Lives Matter (BLM), The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), and Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), there are abolition movements, youth empowerment movements, neighborhood resiliency projects, urban gardening movements. There are ecological justice movements, such as Extinction Rebellion NYC, supporting direct democracy efforts through citizens’ assemblies. There are communities offering nonviolent communication training, inclusive and engaged meditation training, communities centering indigenous wisdom, and communities leading restorative justice circles. There are so many creative communities of resistance and transformation.¹
It’s time to call for radical change throughout our societies — time for deep economic, social, political, and spiritual change—to show up with our bodies for that change. It’s time to align with Black leadership in defense of Black lives, to support the movement for social justice. Listening to an online call led by The Movement for Black Lives, speaking to climate justice leaders, I heard their invitation to rise to the occasion: to speak out, to align, to work together, and to step forward courageously in solidarity and with trust. It’s time to take radical and uncompromising action grounded in presence and love.
Now is not the time for inaction.
We don’t want incremental change.
Now is the time to keep Black people safe.
Now is the time for humility and following Black leadership.
This is a revolution, not a perfect process.
Find your lane.
Invest in the Black community.
Do your homework.
— From a Movement for Black Lives online call for environmental justice leaders
It’s a now or never moment if there ever was one.
For me, there is one element of action that stands out as an important first step at this time — it is our principled and organized resistance to the forces of harm. Taking action in this moment of crisis is essential. It allows the sharing of new cultural information, inspires a collective movement for humanity, and creates necessary zones of safety for processes of healing and transformation. Overturning the police state (defunding or disbanding police forces), stopping the school-to-prison pipeline, and the prison-industrial complex are all essential and necessary first steps in protecting Black lives, LGBTQ lives, POC and indigenous lives, and so many other vulnerable people at this time. This is our collective rise to human dignity and justice for all; this is about everyone’s freedom. In our collective transformation of oppression, we must begin by protecting life, but especially the lives of those in the greatest danger. We must protect people from the ravages of capitalistic exploitation, racism, nationalism, and ecological destruction.
We must also listen to people’s voices, establishing collective local decision-making and community control. We must end the military-industrial complex, pay reparations, re-establish indigenous sovereignty, and protect all species. It’s time for wholly new processes of governance globally, systems of governance where everyone’s voice and everyone’s needs matter. In the U.S. it’s time for a new constitution, written by the people and not the privileged class. All of this is possible, but we must make space for new patterns to emerge. To do this, we must begin with radical noncooperation and resistance to the forces of harm on an international scale. The most effective pathway forward is actively working against racism and oppression in all forms, using all known healing practices, skillful means, and organizational principles — most importantly, the strategies and methods of nonviolent civil resistance.² Nonviolent resistance grounded in love has proven itself again and again as the most powerful means of affecting social change.³
The essence of nonviolence is love. Out of love and the willingness to act selflessly, strategies, tactics, and techniques for a nonviolent struggle will arise naturally…. Nonviolent action born of the awareness of suffering and nurtured by love is the most effective way to confront adversity.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change
Around the world, we see not only increasingly aggressive military and police states, such as the U.S., but also growing wealth inequality, diminishing social care systems, and increasing corporate power, among other harmful patterns. Though painful oppressive patterns have been at the very foundation of societies around the world for millennia, remarkably we have come to an entirely new moment in human history. From the vantage point of the long sweep of human history, it is possible to see that the current American — as well as global — uprisings in support of Black lives, are inviting us to wake up to an extraordinary and painful reality.
We as a species have come to a crossroads, a place of unfathomable reckoning. In the very near future — within this century — 100s of millions, if not billions, of human beings and countless numbers of our fellow species are under immediate threat of perishing through warfare, famine, disease, and the collapse of ecosystems. And underlying and driving many of these threats are the oppressive and dominant social forces of our modern societies, within which racism is so deeply embedded.
We should make no mistake about this. The wealthy and privileged, many of us reading this, may avoid the impacts of climate and ecological crises almost indefinitely under the current status quo. All the while, the most impoverished, the racially and socially oppressed, are threatened most and are already dying and suffering most — today.⁴ The forces that drove Derek Chauvin to kneel on the neck of George Floyd are the very forces that drive our nation to abandon Black people in climate disasters like Hurricane Katrina and that make Black people two to four times more likely to die from COVID-19.⁵ These are the same forces that drive the destruction of ecosystems through resource exploitation in the Global South. Racism is climate and ecological destruction. It is pandemic, disease, and the destruction of life and livelihoods for those made most vulnerable by our societies.
The forces that drove Derek Chauvin to kneel on the neck of George Floyd are the very forces that drive our nation to abandon Black people in climate disasters like Hurricane Katrina and that make Black people two to four times more likely to die from COVID-19.
And yet, the pathway of healing and transformation is available. It is possible, at this moment, to make a pathway of healing, resistance, connection, and cooperation universally available to all. If we work to open this pathway, we will be able to transform the forces of racism, oppression, and ecological collapse that we currently face.
One key element of this pathway is the healing of intergenerational trauma—the wounds of violence and oppression, and the deep levels of racial conditioning that most humans now carry. Resources for this work are rapidly becoming more available through trauma therapy, awareness training, community-centered trauma resolution, and other community resilience practices.⁶ Making the inner healing journey is essential for all us. Supporting people on their journey and opening up spaces for people to heal is essential. Yet not all of us have access to support, and not all of us start at the same place. We must increase access to healing and community support for those who need it most. Our inner healing and awakening must go together with the transformation of society; these are not separate. This is the transformation of consciousness at an individual and collective level.
Another important element is our personal and collective recognition of where we as human beings, (through race, geography, and other factors) are positioned within these systems of oppression. This must include deepening our education on the history of how racism and other discriminatory forces operate. We must all recognize and name not only the advantages, privileges, and benefits that we receive through oppressive systems, but also how these systems are harming us and people we care about as well. This allows us to see our interconnectedness and shared responsibility within these current structures.
We can each then see more clearly how we may take steps towards our collective liberation and the transformation of oppression. For white people in the U.S., it might mean understanding clearly how systems of oppression and racism create power and privilege for us, how we hold onto it, and how we can dismantle it. We can attend trainings within communities that are actively educating and helping people to face internalized patterns of racism and oppression. For Americans in the U.S, it means seeing how the Global North exploits the Global South for material gain. Everyone living in the modern world needs to do this reckoning to see the many ways in which we fit into, contribute to, benefit from, or are harmed by systems of exploitation, racism, violence, and oppression. From this understanding, clarity about our actions will begin to emerge.
This means real energy and real sacrifice. It might be meditating with a community in a public space to disrupt or call attention to harm. It might mean joining an organization such as SURJ, or a climate and ecological justice movement. It might be financially supporting Black-led organizations such as BLM, M4BL, or The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). It might mean changing our livelihood, how we live and work, and how we use money. It might be participating in protests, or a hunger strike, or joining collective debt or tax refusal. It might be writing, making art, offering education, healing, and support, or doing our own inner healing work. But most importantly it means stopping, listening, and learning—stepping out of our comfort zones to build relationships and build communities. There are countless powerful actions available to us that will allow us to take steps on the long journey towards collective liberation.
If we are to have a real possibility of profound transformation on a global cultural scale, then all of these elements must weave together into one continuous tapestry of creative resistance, love, community, shared power, equity, justice, and healing. The forces of structural oppression — establishing material wealth and power for the few at the expense of the many — are deeply ingrained in our social patterns, and will not be moved without resistance.
I encourage everyone to join the struggle for justice with humility and courage, with our bodies and our lives and hearts on the line— through personal sacrifice and personal healing. I encourage us all to join communities or urge our existing communities to engage, to be part of the nonviolent revolution grounded in healing and love in action. Being part of such a community means listening deeply, practicing cooperation, and making real commitments.
It is a now or never moment. What are your intentions and commitments? Are they compelling you to act from a place of love? Are you standing on the side of justice, or will you allow oppression, violence and destruction to continue?
Where do you stand at this most crucial time in human history?
Photography: Sahar Coston-Hardy, Alex Nawrocky, Claudia Mann
[1] Paul Hawken. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. (Viking Press, 2007).
[2] Gene Sharp. The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Porter Sargent, 1973). This three-volume work details the principles and methods of nonviolent action.
[3] Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011). This work discusses the effectiveness of nonviolent action as opposed to violent methods of resistance.
[4] We’re Not in This Together by Ajay Singh Chaudhary discusses the ways in which climate and ecological crises impact people differently according to wealth and status.
[5] Erika Stallings, Systemic Racism Is Killing Black People During the Pandemic.
[6] Trauma Resource Institute (Community Resiliency Model), and Somatic Experiencing Training Institute.
