TBD

Blogpost #3

by Melanie Roque, Melissa Deeken, Bobby Martin

So let’s assume that by the year of 2020 — with our social media heavy, tech savvy, hashtag trending communities, we have come in contact with someone, something, somewhere, somehow that has brought us to the word racism. We may all have different views, opinions, and feelings about this word and how it may or may not impact people today. We cannot deny we hear of it, we see stuff about it, we cross paths with people everyday who proclaim that they embody it. Even if we do not feel or experience it ourselves, even if we don’t understand it, even if we think that it is all in the past or that we are good people and therefore it doesn’t apply to us… The word keeps coming up. Racism. Again and again. But why?

People are hurting.

“When a person tells you that you hurt them, you don’t get to decide that you didn’t.”-Louis C.K.

People. Are. Hurting. With all politics, religion, beliefs aside, people are hurting…. And hurting deeply. We cannot begin to move past this controversial word until we understand the “why” behind it. There are a thousand things that can be said about racism and still not even come close to fully naming the endemic. So let’s just start with something that we all CAN grasp.

Pain.

“Racial trauma is real. The result is that people of color are carrying unhealed racial trauma. The physical and psychological symptoms that people of color often experience after a racist experience, repeatedly, is trauma.”¹ No matter where we are on the spectrum of understanding or caring about racism, we know pain. People of color are in pain. Black and brown bodies are in pain. When racism is at the forefront, PAIN is under it all. When pain isn’t tended to, it grows. And over the years it can become even harder to heal if we don’t face it.

On a human to human level, we understand hurt. We relate to hurt. We’ve experienced hurt. Pain is universal. Trauma is universal. Sicknesses are universal. Even though we experience them all differently, we all experience them at some point. Ibram X. Kendi refers to Boyce Watkins’ interpretation of racism as a “disease.”² It’s a disease that has impacted Americans of all colors for centuries. And yes, that includes whites. Many of us don’t even realize that we are even sick and need to be healed. Because of the way in which we respond and deal with pain, many of us white people are oblivious to the fact that we too have pain that has not been processed and addressed.

We may not be able to escape or heal all of our pain in this lifetime, but we can make it more manageable to where we become closer to mending our wounds and creating rooted transformations — including a world where racism is in the margins and love is in the center. Resmaa Menakem explains what he has coined “clean pain” and “dirty pain.”³ It’s important to take into consideration how we deal with our own pain so that we not only heal on deeper levels but also prevent ourselves from projecting it onto others which spreads the pain… like a disease.

This is exactly what is at the core of racism.

Menakem goes as far as to say that in order to heal our pain and begin to foster long lasting change that we need to work through the pain that is in our bodies, more specifically pain relating to racism. He offers several body centered practices that encourage readers to observe, reflect, sit with, and work through the triggers that come up around racial tension and ideas that are embedded in our physical bodies. He states, “White-body supremacy doesn’t live just in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies.”⁴ Many times, good intentioned white people don’t consciously choose to be racist. But because racism still lives in their bodies, they respond in a way that is reflective of this pain instead of their hopes.

By connecting with our bodies in this way, we are becoming present with the trauma and the pain that lives in our unconscious as a result of ancestral and intergenerational trauma that has been passed down. “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying “peace, peace” when there is no peace.” Jeremiah 6:14.⁵ Instead of covering up our pain and others’ pain and continuing onto more centuries of more racism and pain…

Let us heal and be healed.

Endnotes:

1. Sheila Wise Rowe. Healing Racial Trauma: The Road to Resilience (InterVarsity Press, 2020), Audible: Ch. 6.
2. Ibram X. Kendi. How To Be An Anti-Racist (Penguin Random House Audio, 2019), Audible: Ch.17.
3. Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas, Central Recovery Press, 2017), 26.
4. Ibid., 23.
5. Rowe, Healing Racial Trauma, Audible: Ch. 6.

Bibliography

Kendi, I. How To Be An Anti-Racist. Penguin Random House Audio, 2019.

Menakem, R. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas, NV, Central Recovery Press, 2017.

Rowe, S. Healing Racial Trauma: The Road to Resilience. InterVarsity Press, 2020.