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Creating a Spiritual Practice to Heal and Transform the World

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-4354450

2164-0041

Thandeka,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th U.S. President prompted two immediate responses from the American electorate: the rise of a White Lives Matter Movement (this term comes from Texas-based white nationalist Preston Wiginton’s 2017 article in the New York Times), and the ascent of a Resistance Movement. These two responses, if unabated, together will tank America’s democracy.Progressives can clearly see the racial threat the White Lives Matter Movement poses as Confederate flags are raised; anti-Black graffiti and Nazi swastikas were spray-painted on school walls; lynching nooses are placed on the desks, doors and walls of Black employees and black students; Jewish cemeteries are desecrated; Muslim women’s hijabs are torn from their heads; transgender people are assaulted with increasing regularity; hate speech against Latins become the rallying cry of a political party; and a rising chorus of neo-Nazi and other white supremacy groups shout “Sieg Heil” and “Sieg Trump.”Progressives, however, haven’t seen the political threat they themselves create when following the advice of the group of former Democratic staff members —who wrote the online guidebook “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” —to emulate Tea Party tactics. These staffers watched the rise of the Tea Party close up as its members organized locally to convince their own congressional members to reject President Obama’s agenda. Now these staffers urge Progressives to do what the Tea Party did: resist. If a “small minority in the Tea Party could stop President Obama,” the staffers argue, “then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump.”But this strategy of Progressives emulating Tea Party tactics is paradoxical because it tries to “[build] on the values of inclusion, tolerance, and fairness,” using Tea Party tactics born of ideas that are “wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism.” Resistance fighters thus march, protest, battle, lobby and like the Tea Party, they shut down differences rather than open them up. The result: Progressive Resistance fighters bravely disrupt conservative policymakers’ programs when attempts are made to turn their religious beliefs and vested economic interests into public laws, but then the protesters move on.The protests lack staying power because the protesters are not part of an ever-expanding network of communities millions upon millions strong. Individuals, after all, can resist injustice, as Jim Corbett, a Quaker founder of the 1980s Sanctuary movement for Central American refugees reminds us, “but only in community can we do justice.” We are not yet a community of communities large enough for the task. And we have not yet presented a clear and collective articulation of our social justice work. We cannot say what we, collectively, are for and what binds us together into a united movement.Naomi Klein, in No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, states the problem this way: “The firmest of no’s has to be accompanied by a bold and forward-looking yes —a plan for a future that is credible and captivating enough that a great many people will fight to see it realized.” Klein calls upon us to create this vision for a tangible better life together, although she is not sure what this vision looks like.I propose the organization of a spiritual vision quest for Progressives in concrete racial, political, and experiential terms. The experiential component of this work is of critical importance because keen reasoning is not enough to heal and transform broken hearts. There are broken hearts across the political spectrum, and broken hearts require healing spiritual practices. The enduring power of Resistance work, after all, is emotional stamina developed to create progressive communities that are emotionally bound together by loving kindness and as a consequence have the staying power to stand strong in victory and defeat.I will begin by addressing the racial dimensions of broken hearted-ness because white America breaks a lot of hearts, including those of whites who feel racially downtrodden, maligned, or ignored and set aside. I will then analyze how the White Lives Matter movement uses religion politically to address these emotional issues and create an initiative with enormous staying power. This analysis sets the stage for a discussion of how progressives can envision spiritual practices that create communities with tremendous staying power as they address the brokenhearted and aggrieved feelings of whites in Trump’s America. I end by introducing an experiential component of this work because keen reasoning is not enough to heal and transform broken hearts. Broken hearts require healing spiritual practices.The impetus for this entire project is something many of us know, but have not adequately explained: Trump’s white America. To understand this America, we have to explain the origin of the pervasive feelings and hard-edge realities in these white lives; and we must use America’s own poorly understood history of the racial creation of whites in America for this purpose.Here’s what we know about Trump’s America. White voters of all sexes, ages, education levels, and income levels were the deciding factor in Trump’s election.Here’s what we tend to overlook. Most whites who voted for Trump aren’t self-defined racists or white supremacists. Rather, they’re hurting, angry, afraid, or just downright mad people who are enraged by the way the government mistreats them, feel maligned by other racial groups, resent being demeaned or ignored by the mainstream press, and are fearful that the American Dream is now beyond their reach. Moreover, many of the lives of these voters had begun to resemble the conditions of Blacks and other stigmatized minorities in several critical ways: high unemployment, underemployment and/or low-paying job rates, rising crime rates, and endemic drug abuse rates.These white voters live in places like Grand Junction, Colorado. The town suffered an 11% loss of the workforce (between 2009–2014) because of the collapse of the local energy industry and social collapse soon followed suit: there has been a 65% increase in felony filings; Grand Junction has the highest homicide rate in the state; there’s an epidemic of drug addiction, and its suicide rate is nearly two and a half times that of the nation. Grand Junction exemplifies white America’s worst racial nightmare —whites attacked, exploited and abandoned by other whites.As one of the residents told New Yorker reporter Peter Hessler, who tracked these stats in his July 24, 2017 Letter from Colorado, “I think America is lost to us.” Another Trump voter put it this way, “what [liberals and elites] hate about him is what they hate about us.”They voted for a man who, as president, will make things worse for them materially as he continues to make them feel better emotionally. This twofold strategy of financial diminution and emotional elevation is the heart and soul of white racial attacks against white Americans. Trump is a master player of this terrible race game.The hidden history of white racial identity-formation in America is the race card we need to end Trump’s game against white America. We can use this history to create a new multicultural and multi-racial identity-politics strategy to end the economic and racial duress of most whites in America. The inclusion of white race stories in diversity studies and workshops will not make America great again. Rather, the inclusion of narratives about how whites get trashed in white America will make it possible for whites to work together with other racially discriminated groups to make American democracy great for the first time. We must learn the original rules of this game in order to change them.The set-up piece for our game-changing strategy is a story recounted by Lillian Smith in Killers of the Dream, her autobiographical account of Southern life. Her firsthand experience of the utter bankruptcy of white power and privilege as moral values is found in her reflections on her childhood —before her white racist accounting system begins. We get to watch how the white race book gets cooked.Born in 1897 into an upper class European American family in Georgia, Lillian Smith recounts the story of a little girl named Jamie whom her family adopted and then abandoned when they discovered that Jamie, who appeared as a fair-skinned white child, was actually black.Lillian recalls her initial thoughts and feelings about what her parents had done:I knew my father and mother whom I passionately admired had betrayed something which they held dear. And they could not help doing it. And I was shamed by their failure and frightened, for I felt they were no longer as powerful as I had thought. There was something Out There that was stronger than they and I could not bear to believe it. I could not confess that my father, who always solved the family dilemmas easily and with laughter, could not solve this. I knew that my mother who was so good to children did not believe in her heart that she was being good to this child. There was not a word in my mind that said it but my body knew and my glands, and I was filled with anxiety.This kind of anxiety recounted by Lillian Smith is similar to the tensions that fill the race workshops I conduct around the country. The revelation stories unfolded by white participants unnerve them because the shattered feelings of their childhood are uncovered and on full display. They see how the broken pieces of a broken self were pieced together to carry on a tradition of shattering. Lillian Smith describes how she became part of this tradition:I felt compelled to believe they were right. It was the only way my world would be held together. And, slowly, it began to seep through me: I was white. She was colored. We must not be together. It was bad to be together. Though you ate with your nurse when you were little, it was bad to eat with any colored person after that. It was bad just as other things were bad that your mother had told you. It was bad that she was to sleep in the room with me that night. It was bad. . . .This shift in feeling from condemnation of her parents’ behavior to self-condemnation of her own feelings for differing from theirs is easily understood when we remember that children are hard-wired to adapt themselves affectively to their parents’ values and needs in order to survive and flourish.The interpersonal circumstances between parent and child —not racist sentiment per se —forced Smith to numb, dismember, and finally disown parts of her own feelings that didn’t fit into the honor code of her family’s brigade and were condemned by her parents. She had to buckle up by tamping down her own original feelings.There’s lots of psychological literature about this hurtful way of raising kids. John E. Sarno, M.D., calls this process the “origins of the divided mind.” Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., calls this process the way “the body keeps score” long after the mind has forgotten the game-changing devastating events that dismantled the child’s feelings. Psychoanalytic theorist D. W. Winnicott identifies the source of this breakdown as the toxic nature of the environment in which the child is forced to live.From these neuropsychological and medical perspectives, the human environments like the one described by Smith become environmental hazards first for the child and then for the adult.The environments, simply put, destroy the emotional integrity of the persons they produce. The result of this breakdown, as Winnicott notes, is a pathology in which the self wages war against itself, mind against feelings, head against heart, and reason against passion, because the space between self and other got ruptured.These affective perspectives understand Lillian Smith’s emerging white racism as pathological symptoms of an emotionally compromised self. The pathology —in this case racist sentiment —was created by a toxic emotional environment and then displayed as Lillian Smith’s new emotional profile toward the colored child: the racist face of her nonracial experience of loss, confusion, fear, regret, and shame accompanied by feelings of being at risk within her own white caregiving community because of something “out there” that’s too big to sanely cognize. From this perspective, the origin of Lillian Smith’s white racist sentiments against colored people wasn’t racism, it was fear, distress and upset wrought in her by the behavior of her parents.But what was the cause of her parents’ behavior? Were they similarly traumatized as children by their parents? Clearly, the origin of Lillian’s racism was her parent’s behavior, but what was “out there”, as Lillian put it, that made them so afraid?I hadn’t a clue. But in race workshops I conducted around the country I witnessed, firsthand, strikingly similar responses in my participants to those of Lillian Smith. The original motivation for a racist act was not racial hatred, but fear of abandonment by one’s own kith and kin.These kinds of exposed feelings led me to look for their origin because I had discovered that an act can be racist (e.g. Lillian Smith’s decision to no longer treat colored people as equals), without the original emotional impetus for the act being racist (e.g., Lillian Smith wanting to stay in right relationship with her parents). On display was the emotional pain that preceded the formation of racist sentiments and gave rise to racist actions. I learned of racist acts committed in the service of emotional self-protection from fear of abandonment.What was “out there,” I continued to wonder, that created this endemic condition I discovered within so many white Americans? Were there initial events that caused trauma-readiness profiles that could be passed down from one generation to the next epigenetically? If so, each new generation would be primed by social circumstances to be easily triggered and flooded with fear and loathing, shame and guilt, acute anxiety, the feeling of being at risk of abandoned, and the feeling that there is something so dreadful out there that your home is filled with fear and trembling by something without a name. If this is indeed the case, racism simply becomes a symptom of a far more primal threat to the self, namely, its self-coherence as a rational and an emotional soul.White racism, from this perspective, became the symptom of a primordial injury that shattered the emotional integrity of a human soul. What could be such a primal threat in white America? The answer astonished me as I uncovered of white privilege as a racial ruse against most whites.I discovered three distinct kinds of historical events that might have given birth to this pervasive ruse of white privilege in white America: legal entitlement, disenfranchisement, and ethnocide. The symptom is the formation of white racism, but the sources of this symptom unfolded as narratives of a ruse against whites that frame the abuse itself as a privilege. A note: I expand here upon work found in my articles for Tikkun and other journals, as well as in my book Learning to Be White: Money, Race, and God in America.We often hear how certain policies created legal benefits for whites that made them feel emotionally superior to Blacks. These legal and psychological white narratives are rightfully tracked as devastating and unjust white racist treatment of black people. They portray white folks as the recipient of something unquestionably beneficial for most whites, and rightfully track the devastating and unjust white supremacist treatment of black people. When we look closer we see that whites and blacks were both badly maltreated legally by the wealthy law-making class. The difference is best measured not by one of kind, but rather by one of degree. Consider the following laws:In 1670, the Virginia Assembly made it illegal for “Negroes and Indians” to own Christian (i.e. white) servants. In 1680, the Assembly next made it legal for white Christians to give “any negroe or other slave who shall presume to lift his hand in opposition to any Christian thirty lashes on the bare back;’” and in 1705, masters were forbidden to “whip a Christian white servant naked.” They could still be whipped but now without the added humiliation of being exposed.In 1705, the Assembly required masters to provide white servants at the end of their indentureship with corn, money, a gun, clothing, and —at the insistence of the English governor —50 acres of land. The poll tax was also reduced. As a result of such legal changes in the status of the white “small man’s economic position,” poor whites gained legal, political, emotional, social, and financial status that was directly related to the concomitant degradation of “Indians” and “Negroes.”By means of such race laws, Virginia’s ruling class systematically gave their blessing to lower-class whites, whom they nevertheless considered the “scuff and scum of England” and who now, free in the colonies after indentured servitude, where thought of as the “rabble” of Virginia. The new racial system continued to trash this class. The result was an American system of white privilege that was, as Nancy Isenberg repeatedly demonstrates in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, set up and maintained “as an unbanishable part of the American experience” for trashing poorer whites. White privilege for poorer whites, simply put, was a ruse.Social historian Edmund S. Morgan chronicles the rationale and results of such laws in his path breaking book, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. Until this period, Morgan tells us, class prejudice was difficult to distinguish from race prejudice because the indentured servants of all colors were treated as members of the same race: the poor. Thus when bedraggled, penniless Englishmen and women were first shipped to Virginia, they initially found common cause with the indentured servants of African descent.Virginia’s new racial classification system was designed to breed contempt between these African and European laborers. As Morgan notes,The assembly’s efforts to distinguish [white servants] from slaves went well beyond exempting them from being whipped naked. In an act that created perhaps the most invidious distinction between them, the assembly specifically protected the property of servants while confiscating what belonged to slaves. . . . Thus even the small property previously allowed to slaves who had the excess energy and industry to work for it was to be handed over to poor whites —a highly effective device for dissociating the two.The property taken from Blacks and given to the newly created whites did not raise them to the level of their masters; it did, however, raise them above the status of the Blacks. Now, poor, struggling, wage-earning whites and white indentured servants had legal permission to act like members of the master race, the wealthy, towards the lowest of the low, the Blacks. This elevation made them feel good as their ongoing relegation to second-class citizenship made drove them mad. Social critic W. J. Cash put it this way in his 1941 classic The Mind of the South: Southerners who defined themselves as white suffered “a fundamental split in their psyche [resulting] from a sort of social schizophrenia.” The grand delusion of being white “foreshortened, dwarfed, and all but obliterated” the awareness of their economic and social degradation as people who had been trashed.Why did the Virginian plantation masters elevate the racial status of their white servants, workers and other “rabble”? Slavery. By 1660, it had become more profitable for the “labor barons” to buy slaves rather than the service of indentured servants. Accordingly, in 1660, Dutch ships now exempted from local tax duties, began to bring more Negroes to the colony. By the end of the century, slaves made up half of Virginia’s labor force.This new setup, however, required a new strategy for social control, for the natural class affinities between indentured servants and slaves presented a danger for the masters. As Edmund Morgan acidly notes, Virginia’s early legislators did not have to enact slave laws to begin slavery; they simply began to purchase slaves instead of indentured English servants. As the slave population began to increase significantly, these same colonial tobacco planters, landed gentry, and English-appointed governors, however, did have to generate race laws to create animosity toward the African slaves among the white servile and working classes. To this end, the Assembly legislated white race privileges for a class of persons the wealthy despised and feared: exbondsmen.To understand the fear, we must note that until 1660, the majority of workers on the Virginia tobacco plantations were indentured servants, who were kept in separate servant quarters, supervised by overseers, and whipped as a means of “correction.” Like the eighteenth-century slave counterparts, they were often underfed and underclothed. As indentured servants, they ran away rather than rebel as a class.As freedmen (i.e. persons without house or land) they did rebel. The rebels were rankled by unfair taxes, legislators’ greed, and land use regulations that relegated the majority of the freedmen to the status of workers for hire rather than landowners. Nathanial Bacon, a well-born Englishman serving as a government official, led the rebellion despite the ironic fact that he held wealthy Virginians in contempt because of their “vile [lower class]” beginnings. The freedmen first slaughtered Indians and then turned their guns on the ruling elite. “Bacon’s Rebellion” of 1676 did not end before Jamestown was burned to the ground. Bacon died. The English intervened militarily. Last to surrender was a group of eighty Negroes and twenty English servants.Bacon’s rebellion signaled the potential allegiance between workers of all races, and the threat it posed to ruling elites. Elites were dead set on breaking down this allegiance by giving poor whites illusory benefits that psychologically devastated them, while upholding an oppressive economic system that economically trashed most whites.Consider once again the 1680 law regarding lashing. Their relief from the fear of being treated as blacks, led them to celebrate their identity as whites.Thus the ruse of white privilege. Masters and servants, as American history David Williams notes in Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, who could claim that all their ancestors came from Europe became members of the white race. In truth, of course, the “poor whites” continued to be viewed as an alien race by the elite. As one Georgia planter wrote a friend, “Not one in ten [poor whites] is. . . . a white superior to a negro.” Privately called “white trash” by the elite, the poor whites were publicly embraced as racial kin by the planters (that 3.7 percent of the population who owned 58 percent of the region’s slaves and were dead set on keeping their exploited workers divided by racial contempt).Accordingly, any challenge to racial solidarity among whites threatened to reveal the hidden class system of abuse against most whites, which was cloaked in an anti-black disguise. The antebellum South’s pervasive class exploitation depended on the ongoing generation of an emotionally-fabricated white racial pride.Thus it’s not surprising that writer Hinton Rowan Helper’s 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South, which exposed the race-class link, was feared and rejected: it was publicly burned; a Methodist minister spent a year in jail for simply owning it and three Southerners were hanged for reading it. It was seditious to even think about such things because it could stoke “bad” feelings that would prompt seditions acts. Here is some of what Helper said: “The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks. . . . but they are also the oracles and arbiters of all nonslaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated.”Thus the result: “white” feelings had to be fabricated in whites because the original and primary enemy of most whites wasn’t the Blacks, but the rich.The U.S. Constitution race-gamed its own political system. More precisely, the Framers diminished the voting power of non-slaveholding whites, but made it look solely like an attack against blacks.Here’s how part of this strategy worked. The Northern delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 wanted to count only the free inhabitants of the states as the basis for determining tax rates and the apportionment of members of the United States House of Representatives. The Southern delegates wanted to tally each of their slaves and would ratify the U.S. Constitution only if the new republic would count each slave held in the states of this new government. The compromise reached by the two groups was that slaves would be tallied as three-fifths of a person (Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3).Thanks to this compromise, every five slaves counted as three white men and thus increased proportionately the number of representatives who could be elected to represent the state in the Congress. These extra votes —called the “Negro votes” and the “Negro Count” —swept the first (George Washington) and third (Thomas Jefferson) presidents into office.New Hampshire Senator William Plumer summarized Jefferson’s election mandate this way: “the Negro votes made Mr. Jefferson president. Negro electors exceed those of four states, and their representatives are equal to those of six states.”Slave owners became, in effect, the masters of free non-slave holding white men. Senator Plumer put it this way:Every five of the Negro slaves are accounted equal to three of you . . . Those slaves have no voice in the elections; they are mere property; yet a planter possession a hundred of them may be considered as having sixty votes, while one of you who has equal or greater property is confined to a single vote.Plumer’s study of Jefferson’s election and its daunting implications is groundbreaking because, as he notes, he is one of only a handful of American historians who “mention the fact that Jefferson won it by the slave count.” Yet, as Wills also notes, this election “is one of the most thoroughly studied events in our history.”Why the silence by other historians? Was there something “out there” that was too big to take in? Perhaps it was this fact: the U.S. Constitution not only sanctioned the economic exploitation of blacks, but it also sanctioned the political subjugation of non-slaving holding white voters. One man one vote was not the law of the new land. Wills summarizes the results: “The slave states always had one-third more seats in Congress than their free population warranted —forty-seven seats instead of thirty-three in 1793, seventy-six instead of fifty-nine in 1812, and ninety-eight instead of seventy-three in 1833.”For over half a century, Wills notes, “the management of government was disproportionately controlled by the South.” Wills tells us what this control looked like:Slaveholders controlled the presidency for fifty years, the Speaker’s chair for forty-one years, and the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means [the most important committee] for forty-two years. The only men to be re-elected president —Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson —were slaveholders. Eighteen out of thirty-one Supreme Court justices were slaveholders.”In 1843, John Quincy Adams looked at what the Negro vote had wrought and told the House of Representatives, “Your country is no longer a democracy, it is not even a republic —it is a government of two or three thousand holders of slaves, to the utter exclusion of the remaining part.” This kind of information was treated by most historians as if it were too painful to affirm and too big to know.In short: most of white America’s political feelings about their “democracy” were fabricated because the primary enemy of poorer whites wasn’t the blacks, but the slaveholding rich who created a country that was neither a democracy nor a Republic for most white voters. The driving strategy of this new system of government, as Michael J. Klarman demonstrates in his book The Framer’s Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, entailed a conservative counterrevolution against “excessive democracy.”The experience of immigrant laborers was deeply traumatizing. The pressure to assimilate caused many to undergo psychic and cultural deaths in order to keep their physical lives. The painful result of this process can be witnessed in Black Face. Often rightfully seen for its impact on Black people, it is also useful to see it for its cause —the psychological woundedness of white people.In the beginning of the nineteenth century, at least three-quarters of the country’s industrial workers were immigrants or the children of immigrants and not —as many labor historians have assumed —white Americans whose families have lived on this continent for several generations. (Labor historians Herbert G. Gutman and Ira Berlin laid out their discovery of this history in their essay “Class Composition and the Development of the American Working Class, 1840–1890”).These immigrant workers suffered relentless attacks on their ethnic cultures and character that had the exact feeling of racism. The extreme pressure to assimilate wrought psychic injuries and cultural deaths in order for the immigrants to stay physically alive. Social historian Herbert G. Gutman in Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, offers a few examples of the kind of extermination at these workers faced:In 1895, the New Jersey American Standard called Irishmen who caused disorder as