Justice is what love looks like in public.
After growing up in Australia, I came to the U.S. as an industrial design graduate with a dream to become a world famous industrial designer. I started my career at one of the best design agencies in New York, honed my skills for the next decade, collecting patents and awards until I reached a point in my career that many of us reach where I asked myself: “What meaningful contribution am I making in the world?” We really don’t need another comfort gel grip toothbrush. And on a bad day at work, I felt like all I was doing was contributing to landfill.
It was 2009 and in my attempt to find meaning, I picked up a book called business as unusual by Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop. She was the Patagonia for soap and moisturizer, blazing her own trail as a woman practicing socially responsible business. She believed that business should be about public good and not personal greed.
Needing to know more, I went to her website and noticed an ad: Free the Angola 3, 36 years in solitary confinement. My jaw dropped as I clicked expecting to be directed to a prison in Africa. Angola was a maximum security prison in Louisiana, and the Angola 3 were three Black Panthers who were charged and convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. I fell down a rabbit hole that day, one which would end up changing my life. After signing up for the A3 newsletter, I read that one of the three men, Herman Wallace was turning 67 years old and to send him a birthday card. So I did.
Herman responded to my letter within five days of receiving it and I couldn’t believe it. It was the beginning of a five year pen pal relationship. Everything I’d been told by the media regarding maximum security prisoners wasn’t true. Herman was the most spirited man I’d ever met. For someone living in a 6 ft x 9 ft cell for 23 hours a day, seven days a week, for what would eventually be 42 years, he was filled with what I can only describe as love. In a higher state of consciousness by default sitting in an almost empty cell, fighting for his humanity in a system which dehumanized him every single day.
Now that I was connected to Herman, I began to peel back the layers of the criminal justice system by reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, watching civil rights documentaries and reading other books Herman recommended. It was in these pages that I started to learn more about systemic racism, white superiority — and my role in it as a white woman, which broke my heart wide open. Nothing in my world looked the same anymore. I was learning more about freedom, justice, philosophy and equity from a man in a 6 ft x 9 ft cell, for the price of a 45 cent stamp, than any ivy league school could teach me.
I learned that the majority of white people in this country have what I now believe is a spiritual deficiency, a result of centuries of entitlement. We’ve been turning a blind eye to racial injustice when what we should be doing is educating ourselves on how to do better. We’ve been feeling the discomfort, guilt and shame for having the bigger slice of pie, and this inaction has caused marginalized people to die, and to be shot in Walmarts, and by the police. We are still causing harm and expecting the harmed to fix it, but I learned there’s a way through these feelings, and the future of humanity depends on spiritually anemic people acting on them. which I’ll get to in a minute.
My racial awareness grew with every letter from Herman, and every book I read. I remember the way Herman would celebrate my learnings, then ask me what I was going to do with this knowledge?
One day I was so excited to tell him that I’d started meditating, and that it was the closest thing to freedom I’d ever felt. He laughed so hard, told me it was an escape, then educated me with one sentence. “I only feel free when I’m at war.”
I only feel free when I’m at war.
It took me a long time to figure out what he meant by this, until I realized that yes, we’re all human but some people are living a very different experience in this country, one where they literally have to fight and go to war for their humanity, because whiteness has denied them this since the 1600s, and this is very hard to see when you’re the favored and dominant race. But here’s the thing, when you deny somebody else’s humanity, you deny humanity in yourself, and it will take all of us to fight, or in Herman’s words, go to war for freedom.
So what does it take to act on we know?
Nobody alive is responsible for racist laws written almost four centuries ago, but as a white woman, I know I still benefit from them. Bryan Stevenson writes in Nikole Hannah Jones’ masterpiece, The 1619 Project for the New York Times, “Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our prison system.”
We can’t unlearn almost 400 years of racist conditioning overnight, but until we collectively break our hearts wide open and right this wrong, by educating ourselves, and listening to the Black community, or other marginalized group you’re aligned with, and be in relationship with people who don’t look like us, and acknowledge the harm that whiteness has caused for centuries, by getting involved and doing the work, and sharing our learnings with our white family, our silence will only cause more division, more oppression, and more domestic terrorism. Which means more hate crimes and hate groups in America.
But we can do something about it, and we must!!!
The following is what I call the Commitment Curve to Justice — including some of the steps I’ve taken on my justice journey.
It’s important to note that the curve never actually ends, and in my experience, the real converter to get out of our discomfort around race and take action is relationships. Like my relationship with Herman.
We all lost our connection to each other due to a small group of British lawmakers almost 400 years ago, but we can acknowledge what happened, and the harm whiteness caused for centuries, and find our way back to each other if we commit to the curve.
These relationships don’t always come easy, and I’m not asking you to go up to the next Black or marginalized person and ask them to break the struggle down for you, that’s your work to do, and it’s emotional labor for them — read some books first and follow the curve.
It’s hard work, and it’s messy, and it will take daily commitment, but it’s also FILLED with love because JUSTICE is love.
People who commit to acting on what they know carry an unshakable and inspired hope for humanity, fueled by hearts that have been broken wide open. We understand that we are all connected and must love accordingly, and that we cannot believe in love without believing in justice.
As Dr Cornel West says: “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
If you’d like to get involved in this work and explore the “Commitment Curve to Justice” further, email your interest to commitmentcurve@gmail.com.
