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Searching For Racism

In the quest to find the source of racism and inequality, conscientious Americans today are like fish on a quest for water. I think I discovered the source of racism by the time I was four years old. The majority of white Americans realized something was ‘out there’ around May 25th, 2020, as they watched George Floyd die.

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My Vision is to Contribute To The Healing of The Collective Consciousness of The World*

*My vision of contributing to healing the planetary consciousness may just consist of me healing my body and mind of inter-generational trauma and letting the rest follow. We’ll see where it goes.

Jimmy had been sitting over by the porch that day when one of them came around. The man asked my Jimmy, “Who’s that white woman over there?”

Mamie was taking care of little Jimmy just like his mama. Jimmy said, “She ain’t no white lady, sir. She ain’t nothing. She’s just my auntie.” He was around about eight.

A. M. Davis
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Not Again.

Someone on a Facebook livestream kept bringing up Kenosha. He talked about how some people are empathic and need to retreat from the world. Others are always reacting deeply. And then, two days into the latest state sanctioned attempted murder, I read about what happened to Jacob Blake. I really don’t keep up with news or social media.

I said, ‘not again,’ about me having to process something painful. I don’t mean, ‘ouch.’ I mean distress because I don’t know how to find my way out of it at the time. Until the one day I’m done with it or it’s done with me. Not again.

I didn’t watch the video, but the news of a black man in the process of getting into a car with his kids inside of it, to drive away because they were his kids and he knew he had a right to do that, it did knock me down, and it took me awhile to stop reeling from it. I talked to a therapist who said that my having the capacity to take something in and feel is not a bad thing. I wasn’t real sure she understood. So, I told her that I had to drink ginger tea all day for stomach pains and I couldn’t focus, then the next day I was up at 3:30 in the morning, unable to go back to sleep. And she said something like, “yeah, well, this is what we’re living through, and it’s a lot.”

Jacob Blake and his children.

The corporations, as everyone witnesses, are doing their corporate thing with their ‘caring’ poses claiming to care about my Black life mattering. Trying to look good. I wonder who they are trying to impress. Me, a black person? No. My spending power is crap. They just want to look good and perhaps even feel good…? I still don’t quite get it. Perhaps it was one company’s idea to do that and they all followed, awkward and stupid.

Some white people in this country, especially here in Berkeley, have genuine concern, much the way someone slowly wakes up from a extensive, protracted lie, and makes adjustments. Like finding out your partner has been lying to you the entire time you have known them. Their whole persona was a fabrication, a shell to make them look better than they were. Suppose they were traveling across the world being a hit man for hire, say, instead of teaching high school and you find out. You might spend a week sitting at the kitchen table over coffee with a friend, and recount all of the times they wore sunglasses on rainy days. Then the next week, you might move on to their having a college degree without knowing the correct city of their supposed Alma Mater.

I think that people who are the farthest away from the sweet wholesome goodness of American normal see the cultural lies the easiest. I look back at grade school at the white males that were encouraged along the most wholeheartedly. I think that those sweet wholesome goodness American normals would be the last to believe that someone like me, having known me as a child, is actually smart and competent because they are the least likely to drop the narrative; that they received the grades because they were good and wonderful and they will always know what to do. It is a pretty seductive narrative to feed a young mind, and I imaging the ego hardens around it such a narrative.

I, on the other hand, was scorned. Not outright, but by the attitude of white (and a few black) teachers who scorned me for reasons beyond my control. I was confronted with huge discontinuities in logic between what I was told and what I observed and knew to be true. I spent my young life connecting the dots with a nimble young mind.  I can’t see my ego (personality) completely but it’s been through a lot of painful adaptation of being torn down and rebuilt since I have become an adult.

If I had the power to raise my hand and stop that painful dismantling, I’m sure I would have done that on the first round. And so I’m left thinking about things a lot. And I don’t necessarily listen very well to instruction on the way life is. I look at things for a long, long time before I form opinions, and even when I do, I’m up for changing my mind. I sit there in the midst of painful misinterpretation, and I just watch my notions and beliefs wash away. Beliefs about who I am and what I believe, only because I was once a little black girl in Oakland having to hold so much of what most people would not want to put a child through. Feeling so much.

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I Am More Than This

I don’t know if I have good advice for anyone about getting through this time. I am struggling. If pressed to say anything, I’d tell other black people, talk to other black people, as much as possible. You suffer less if you live in a shared reality. Be with wise folks, if at all possible.

An African American Dharma teacher said in a recent online retreat for people of color, people will be having nervous breakdowns. I believe him. I wish it could be easier. He said this in answer to a question from woman who expressed physical symptoms of stress. I have those symptoms. Insomnia, sadness, stomach upset. I get a few hours’ sleep and I think I have this conundrum licked. Then I spend a night without sleep and I wonder if I will survive these times, then I get some sleep and feel a little better, and the cycle starts again.

By the way, white people; don’t go to your black friends or acquaintances or co-workers for any solutions to your angst, guilt, or sadness. We are treading water. We are in a land filled with people who forgo their higher thought processes when they see us walking down the street or sitting across from them in job interviews. You will do it anyway, ask us to make you feel better. I’ve seen it. At the last community where I lived, one of the founders, a white man, asked, after the current president was elected, “Black people have had to deal with a lot of adversity and stress. How do you do it?” He asked me this. I answered “How do we do it? On the whole have high blood pressure, heart attacks and we die.”

We don’t always do that. Some of us persevere because of a simple truth. Some know that we are more than this. I am more than my body. Simple. But it is not an easy truth to live in the day-to-day. Anyone who has tried knows this. I have been meditating and looking at my mind, paying very good attention to it for years for the purpose of healing childhood and inter-generational trauma. I have been saying to my mind, “I am more than this.” And I still struggle with getting through the nervous breakdown and beyond it so that I can get on with the business of healing myself, humanity, and the planet.

If I never thought of meditating, I might be blissfully unaware of any feelings out of the ordinary. But I do meditate and I’m glad that years ago, I had a jump on how to get through this day by meditating. Now is a good time to start a practice if you don’t have one. It is not a great time, but it is the only time you have. I don’t feel at my best right now, but I know I am lucky because I have a practice.

I was listening to a talk where I live here on full presence mindfulness, and I believed that Rinpoche was talking about us having an effect on reality with our thoughts, or that is what I took from the talk on the reading. I’ve heard it before, manifesting reality. And, I’d call what we’ve done with the planet and the culture of humanity ‘feedback on our collective thought processes.’ This culture could benefit from nearly every one of its people trying something else in the way of thought processes, something other than or in addition to what we have been thinking.

This is what I believe and say about these times when I am in a zoom circle, and when I start talking to the black people among us. I say with certitude that we are all prepared for these times, or we would not be here listening and hearing each other’s words in these conversations.

The legend of Harriet Tubman is now a movie, but before she was a movie title, I learned about her in Sunday school growing up. She is not a suggestion that there is someone out there that we must wait for to rescue us. Her legend is about us all having the potential to be despised, enslaved, beaten and hit on the head with a lead weight, and turned into a superhero with eyes in the back of our heads. I understand the problem with the superhero narrative. It simplifies the goings on in the world down to good versus evil, as it declares war on something. Okay. Let’s call her an alchemist of situations and circumstances by way of her thoughts and beliefs. Let us suppose that this time is very critical, and it’s challenging to our nervous systems because we are solving the dilemma of how to save ourselves from extinction by shedding the unsustainable ideas in our minds.

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