Healing and hope

Coming out of two days of a Resource Generation board meeting I have a re-energized hopefulness for the work we do.

There are vast questions, great risks, and headache-inducing complications every step of the way that sometimes freeze me in my tracks with fear. At this moment, though, I can see past the fear. I see exciting challenges and necessary growth; a life force and lifeline for me and my community.

The first day of the Board meeting, we broke into race caucuses (white folks and people of color) and told 3-minute long money stories.

I listened to story after story of histories of violence, racism, exploitation, genocide and greed. I told my own family's history, which reflects all of these atrocities. I felt the weight of the trauma caused by our ancestors, and by the systems that continue to perpetuate all this same shit in implicit and explicit ways.

And I had a new level of clarity about the healing that white folks, particularly those of us who benefit from class privilege and wealth accumulation, need to do. We have some mad trauma to uncover, mourn, and heal from.  

If my great-great-great-great grandfather could make hundreds of human beings his own property, if he could whip them or hang them on a whim, if he could rape and manipulate women, if he could disown his own children...holy fucking shit. His insides, his mind, his heart, his spirit must have been brutalized. In order to enact such cruelty, in order to think that was the way the world was supposed to work, what was he thinking? What was he feeling? What kind of de-humanization happened to his soul, that he was able to dehumanize countless others?

One of the first concrete "lessons" I remember my mother teaching me as a young person was that bullies were bullies because they had been bullied. That whoever was treating me or anyone badly was doing that because they had been treated badly themselves. I should stand up for myself and for what was right, but I should have compassion for their spirit, having been broken somewhere along the way in order to be able to try and break mine.

I still believe this (or try to). That no one is born a bully. Or born believing that whipping or raping or bombing or manipulating or hurting anyone else, in any way, is an okay thing to do.

I need to have more faith in humanity than that if I'm going to survive.

I also need to truly face the effects of generations of trauma on the perpetrators - my people.

On what it passes down to me, the intergenerational dehumanization.

On how I was born into a level of numbness to violence that is part of keeping systems of oppression in place.

On how implicitly and explicitly, my spirit must be crushed in order to be able to allow for the crushing of others'.

I have a renewed understanding of, and hopefulness for, the thawing we need.

I have a renewed engagement with the question of what kind of healing needs to happen for us to truly recover from these legacies.

To not get bullied into being another generation of bullies.

To actually face our histories, to be able to not just learn and hear and speak them, but actually feel the weight of them.

To uncover and reclaim our own spirits and our own humanity.

To stop the buck at us.

* I feel compelled to make note of the use of the word 'trauma.' It is the most appropriate word I know to convey what I'm talking about. And, I know it is sometimes thrown around in diluting ways. In no way am I attempting to compare or rank the trauma I'm talking about with the trauma experienced by those who are directly targeted by oppression.