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Racism.
A Radical Approach To Racism
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PREFACE – "Baby, I've been thinking"
The song "Society's Child" was written by Janis Ian, a 14-year-old girl, recorded when she was 15.
It is about a high-school girl who tries to have a relationship with a black boy in 1966.
In the first verse, she beckons him to come to her door, tenderly saying, "You know that you look so fine." Her mother calls him "boy" and won't him inside their house: "But honey, he's not our kind." The girl lets the boy know "She says I can't seen you anymore, baby."
In the second verse, walking to school, her fellow students don't see or hear her, except to say "Why don't you stick to your own kind." Her teachers "all laugh, their smirking stares, cuttin' deep down in our affairs," all the while preaching messages of equality - yet unable to simply let this couple be. She lets him know "They say I can't see you anymore, baby."
In the last verse, she proudly asserts that "One of these days, I'm gonna raise my head up high...one of these days I'm gonna raise up my glistening wings and fly." Then the music halts and she sings, a capella at first, "But that day will have to wait for a while. Baby, I'm only society's child. When we're older things may change, but for now this is the way they must remain," her voice pushing through the strain of her anguish, on the last two words. And, in sorrowful resignation, in the end - worn down and defeated by parents, teachers, and society - she herself finally pushes him away. This time, she tells him "I say I can't see you anymore, baby ... no, I don't want to see you anymore, baby." The song ends with a haunting organ riff that chills the spine. Earlier on in the day I'm writing this, I was playing it on the piano for my friend and I started crying - and had to stop playing altogether - at the point in the song when she herself finally becomes the one to shun what she most desired.
As the song (whose full title is "Society's Child (Baby, I've Been Thinking)" moved up the charts -- eventually reaching #14 in the U.S. - it ignited controversy from coast to coast, resulting in the burning of a radio station, the firing of disc jockeys who played it, and a generation hungering for the truth. [Click Here For Lyrics]
As the lyrics progress from "She says I can't see you", to "They say I can't see you", to "I say I can't see you", and finally "I don't want to see you", at 14, Janis Ian was to foretell, in a way, what would happen in the decades that followed in America. Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed his dream of little black kids joining hands with little white kids, and for a moment in the Sixties, a younger generation linked arms, black and white together. In the Seventies, that generation began to move its focus away, tacitly saying "One day we'll come back and deal with this," in fading echoes of the aftermath of the Sixties. Movement leaders walked away from being instruments of societal change and into corporate life. The vision was to fade in the background, save those few who have kept the conversation alive. In the end, the "good fight" having replaced "race relations" with the "politically correct" theme of "diversity" - America swept this under the carpet (pun intended, for now).
Here the main article begins...
In this article, I share my primary personal experiences with prejudice and racism, followed by some learnings. I don't claim to have all the answers, or all the solutions. This article is written from the perspective that I am a white man ... and I own what I say as being from that perspective. And, as always, these are my observations and judgments.
I judge that I'm taking some risks that I might ruffle a few feathers with some of what I say here. One risk has to do with speaking about races as collectives. When I use generalizing language, such as "white people" or "our world", my intention is not to suggest that every individual who is a member of a group I describe exhibits all the characteristics sometimes associated with that group. (The one exception to that is where I discuss "institutional pull", and hopefully that exception will make sense and be clear.) I hold the perspective that we are unique individuals (with individual psyches) as well as constituent members of a number of collectives (each with a single collective psyche).
Note that what I write here is about race and prejudice in the United States. I acknowledge that the ways in which issues of race play out can and do vary greatly throughout the world.
My childhood experiences of race and prejudice
I am a 54-year old white straight man, born Jewish. I grew up, from the ages of 3 to 10, in a white middle-class WASP neighborhood and, from the age of 10, in a white upper-middle-class Catholic neighborhood. Like a great many white children, I had no exposure to what children of color experience, growing up in white-dominated America. I was, in part, raised by our "cleaning lady", Louise, a black woman with a family of her own, with whom my brother and I spent more of our time at home than with our parents. Many American Jewish children growing up around that time were raised similarly.
When I was 6 or 7 years old, Louise had planned to take us to Marshall Hall, an amusement park a little way down the Potomac River, on the Virginia side. (Many, many years later, I was to become aware of how that river is really the modern-day dividing line between the North and the South, rather than the Mason-Dixon line.) A boat known as "The Wilson Line" took folks down the river to the park.
We were unable to go because they didn't allow "coloreds" onto the boat. (The amusement park itself didn't have that restriction, just the boat line.) I didn't understand why we couldn't go. It didn't make sense and no one explained it to me. (Quite possibly, no one could explain it.) I was confused and disappointed.
The only other moment I can recall from childhood involving race was that one day my grandmother choose where to sit, so as not to be near 'schwartze', the Yiddish word for black. I recall asking her "why not", and her response was that they were dirty. And thus began a subtle suggestion that black people - colored people - were dirty people.
When I was 11 or 12, I heard about racial unrest and the civil rights movement. But these were only distant images that were on the television and radio news. In the course of my childhood, I never learned cognitively about racism.
As I grew up, I was sheltered from the matter of skin color. I went to junior high and high schools with kids from many ethnic and cultural backgrounds - black, asian, hispanic, middle eastern - mostly children of a parent who worked for the state department or an embassy. I attended a public high school that was jokingly referred to as a "country club" because it was mostly upper middle-class and lower upper-class. In junior high school, I heard my friends call each other names ...'spik', 'wop', and 'kike', but they just sounded like those silly nonsense words that young kids make up…I never knew that these were racial.
I had my first clear awareness of prejudice at 18 when I had my first black friend, Chuck.. On the walk to my house, Chuck said he was afraid that some “white lady would come out and threaten him.” He said it to be humorous, but it seemed a nervous sort of humor, and I felt that it was a smokescreen for a genuine fear beneath the surface. My mother was never comfortable about Chuck being around. And he didn't strike me as being any dirtier than anyone else I'd met. My second exposure to prejudice was at 19. Upon hearing that I was attracted to a young German woman, my father suggested that I not tell my mother if she and I dated because my mother couldn’t handle that. Again, this made no sense because, though that young woman was German, she didn’t hate or kill Jews.
Most of my adult life, I’ve seen myself as progressive and “color blind.” I never saw race as an issue when it came to offering opportunities or choosing the people to have in my life. When I was 25, I hired the first black person in the company I worked for. I hired him, not because he was black, but because I liked the methodical way he worked. And when I was 33, I had an Asian lover, and at 34 or 35, a black lover. In the things that were important to me, race simply wasn't a factor.
A more recent story
Moving ahead to nearly two years ago ... while I was 52, I spent several weeks in the San Francisco Bay area. (At the time, my home was Washington, D.C.) While I was staying at the home of my friend Brian, he arranged for me to take a workshop at an ashram (spiritual center) and spend the weekend there. On that Saturday morning, he dropped me off at the ashram. Just as Brian pulled out of the driveway, I was told that the workshop wasn't happening and that they couldn't provide a place for me to stay. I tried to call Brian but he had turned off his cell phone. I was several miles from public transportation, and I had no money with me, for why would I need money in such a place? I had been at many retreats in remote places where I left my money behind, knowing that my basic needs would be provided for, and that if anything happened to any of us, the community would rise up in support.
I was told that there would be a brief meeting of a few activists that I was welcome to stay for, but that I wouldn't be able to stay into the evening. I attended the meeting, and at the end, I made a request for a place to stay. A black woman asked me a couple of questions and then said that she could put me up, not just for the night, but for two weeks, so that I could stay in California longer.
I was driven to a meditation center that included living quarters for the teacher/spiritual director and her assistant on the main floor, and three residents on the lower level. The teacher is black, the assistant is Asian, and the residents below were a black woman and two men, one black and one white. In addition to the racial and ethnic variety, all the women were Lesbians. While I had lived among gay men before, I had never lived among Lesbians. And of the two or three dozen regular members of the broader meditation community, there were only two other white people, a straight white man in his early twenties, and a Lesbian about my age.
So I took up my regular stance. As a progressive “color blind” white man, I talked about how skin color wasn't a factor in my life.
During the next few months, I was to go through an arduous (and often charged) growth and learning around issues of race - growth and learning that irreversibly altered my perspective. There were many times where one of the residents would, referring to my behavior, say, "Of course, what can you expect, he's a white man." Sometimes it was true, only I didn't know it. But as I became more aware of the dynamics, it was increasingly obvious to me and to the teacher that the community wasn't able to differentiate between my behaving a particular way because I was a white man and behaving that way because I was Cal, with all of my individual idiosyncrasies.
One day, during a council, the white woman about my age said "You're blind to this. You have to be. You're a white man." I became enraged at her, and I shared what I was feeling. I am not prone to violence, and yet my words were perceived as violent by the women there. (It didn't help that I was the only man in the circle.) The following week, the community shipped my ass off to do a workshop called "White People Confronting Racism." When I returned, there was clearly a rift in our relationship. Yet no one asked me to leave, and in the weeks and months that followed, we slowly and painstakingly worked through this. I was told, "There are going to be people who come through these doors who are going to be angry with you, and some of them will be angry simply because you're white ... and you're just going to have to sit there and take it, and even though it might not seem fair, you'll have to be the one to begin to make changes."
Essentially, she was saying that I was embarking on a journey to take on institutional shadow, and that the first step was for me to have to make changes in myself. It was the beginning of my learning that I was entering a world that was not "my world"...and how things were done in my world didn't matter much to them. Even though it was emotionally painful, I took on learning more about this. I found myself in an environment where it was not acceptable to say "I don't want feedback now", where saying that would terminate the possibility for being offered feedback from that point on. The work I had done to speak truthfully and not withhold, to hold boundaries to keep myself safe, and the work I had done on relationship and on collective dynamics...all this had to be put on hold for quite some time. It was like being in the first moments of Friday night of a NWTA for a year! Finally, after more than a year, it became easier for there to be open conversations about race and gender, and I can now participate in those conversations. What a lengthy initiatory process!
My learnings about skin color
In essence, racism is about power differentials. In the world of humans, people in power don't have to be concerned about their impact. Why would they need to be concerned? Those who are not in power don't (or can't) directly affect them. (Or so it might seem.) This accounts for "white obliviousness," a state of blindness wherein white people are oblivious to the race dynamics or walk through the world with a consciousness of power differentials.
I've learned that, while most people today are aware, to some degree, of racism or prejudice, race doesn't figure prominently into the lives of a great many white people. For some, it only shows up when we are afraid to go into certain neighborhoods, and we can usually just steer clear of those places if we so choose. For others, it has no conscious effect whatsoever.
For people of color, it's doesn't work like that. Essentially, most white folks live in "our world" - the "white world", where white is normal, standard, or superior. In contrast, people who are not white have to live not only in "their world" but also in “our world.” For them, this means that, consciously or unconsciously, they are ever-vigilant of their surroundings and of the presence of white people.
During the last two years, every person of color I've met has helped me understand, in one way or another, that issues of race and class affect them every day. They just don't talk about that with white people ... and this happens at an unconscious level.
If you're white, one possible response you might have to reading this is the desire to jump down my throat and say "I know people who aren't white, they never talk about this, and they don't seem focused on race." If you have such a desire, I offer you the possibility that they aren't likely to bring these matters up to you. You may be familiar with the notion that women act differently when there are only women around than they do when there's even a single man around. I invite you to consider a similar notion when it comes to people of color when they are around white folks. I'll come back to this later...
I've also learned that saying that I'm color blind infuriates many people of color. It's a way of not acknowledging the differences, and is often seen as an indicator of white obliviousness. Why do white men tend to have this blindness that people of color can see quite clearly? One reason I see for this is that the attention of white men tends to focus on individuals and, by extension, small immediate family units, while women and people of color tend to be oriented around community and collective. Many white men tend to develop a sense of fierce independence, striving to not have to rely on anything or anyone else, while more women and people of color lean towards a sense that they are inextricably tied to their collectives, and on some level, know that they can't survive particularly well independently. While white men can and do have the experience of being oppressed as an individual, they are unlikely to have the experience that their entire racial group is oppressed. This presents little to no context in which to develop an awareness of institutional oppression, in contrast to daily awareness that a person of color is more likely to have.
And I've learned that, regardless of how hungry and open I might be to learning about issues of race, people of color have been living in the white world for hundreds of years, futilely trying to teach or influence people who were unable, unwilling, or uninterested in grasping these issues. They are tired of doing this, and most are no longer willing, claiming "it's not our job to teach you that."
Some groundwork about individual and collective psyche
This section may seem a bit heady. Bear with me and I'll try to be brief. Since racism is an institutional matter, I find it useful to explore the relationship between individual psyches and collective psyche.
Most everyone knows that each of us has a individual psyche, consisting of conscious and unconscious, with a set of patterns and dynamics that determine what we are and do. According to Jung, every collective likewise has a single psyche, with the same sorts of patterns and dynamics that are found in individual psyches. So, in addition to being a unique individual, we individuals are also members of the psyche of any of the collectives of which are a member. For example, I am connected to the collective psyche of the white race, the collective psyche of males, of white males, of the U.S., of the San Francisco Bay area, of political liberals, of my clan wave, of an I-group...you get the idea.
Much is available about the workings, dynamics, and patterns of the individual psyche. Unfortunately, how collective psyche works hasn't been explored that much, and the underlying energetic dynamics that operate in a collective psyche are almost never taught or dealt with. And rarer still is an exploration of the dynamic relationship between the individual psyches of constituent members of a collective and the single psyche of that collective, which I find essential to an understanding of anything societal or institutional.
First, let's look briefly at the architecture of the individual psyche. I often visualize an image of the ocean...
Note: Admittedly, using the ocean as a model is limited. To represent this in scale, our ego, at the surface, would be seen as nearly infinitely small, and the bottom of the ocean as infinitely vast. Also, the boundary between individual and collective psyche is more complex than the membrane-like boundary between our individual conscious and unconscious. Further, a psyche is both multi-layered and multi-dimensional; therefore, our ability to visualize in only two or three dimensions makes it impossible to visually represent the relationship between collective psyche and cosmic psyche (also known as the universal psyche), and the relationship between our individual psyche and the universal psyche, which to would require at least a four- or five-dimensional model to illustrate ... and even that would still be crude. This is where we run into the limitations of the mind, and why the mind must simply get out of the way for us to have any sort of relationship with the universal psyche. Okay...enough of that...back to racism.
How racism works in the psyche: Collective unconscious and institutional pull
Because our unconscious shares borders with the psyches of whatever collectives we are a member of, a collective psyche can exert subtle, yet powerful, unconscious influences on the individual psyche of every member. I refer to this effect as "institutional pull". (If you've ever seen an entire group get "swept" like in mob behavior, that's an example, albeit a less subtle one, of institutional pull.) This means that, even if we personally have no direct history related to race, because our psyche is linked to collective psyche at an unconscious level, we are nevertheless affected by, and have a part to play in, the dynamics of race.
This is not about labels or categories, but rather what influences and shapes the dynamics between members of different races, regardless of whether this plays out consciously or unconsciously.
Here are a couple of examples of how institutional pull can show up:
For my first example, many people of color, when encountering a white person, will show undue respect, treating white persons as superior, more important or worthy than persons of color. In addition to the respect being given regardless of whether the person has earned their respect as an individual, this respect is given automatically, most often unconsciously, and different from how they would treat a person who is not white.
When I first began to see this, I began to chalk it up to a cultural difference wherein their culture trained them to be more respectful of people. However, while more respect is given to white people, far less respect is often afforded to people of their own race or people who are of another non-white race. Among both black people and people from India, there are hierarchies based on skin tone. The lighter the skin tone, the higher percentage of white blood the person has - and the higher that person is in the hierarchy.
This differential in respect - either granting undue respect to a white person or having less respect for someone who is not white and of darker skin tone - can even happen among the best of friends, though sometimes it's quite a bit more subtle, so as not become conscious.
For my second example, I'll go back to something I said I'd come back to - the tendency of people of color to not talk about racial issues when talking with white people, even good friends who are white. This may not be a conscious choice. Hundreds of years of oppression at the hands of white people, followed by more than a century of white obliviousness, has trained them well. There are societal patterns that go back generations. For example, because of the control that slave owners exercised over slaves, often not allowing them to “speak unless spoken to” to survive and to connect with each other, slaves had to develop communication mechanisms that they could detect among each other but that were specifically designed to be so subtle that the slave owners would not see.
This still resides deep within the black collective unconscious, and continues to play out today. It shows up in the collective dynamic between the races. For whites, this is amplified when dealing with many Asians, whose facial expressions are so sublimely subtle that white people who did not grow up with certain Asian cultures have virtually no chance of seeing them. (Even white people who are highly skilled or trained facilitators aren’t likely to pick up on them.) And yet, black and Asians have no difficulty in “sending” and “receiving” clear messages. It’s as if they communicate on a different “frequency” than white folks. This difference is all the more stark when taking into account that white men tend to see words as the clearest form of communication, and therefore rely on verbal communication as our primary form...even though verbal communication makes up only seven percent of our communication. The people of color I know put much less credence in the words someone says...they have more trust in the body language and the underlying energies that they sense. And many women often don't remember the words...only the feeling states or body sensations. We get our information through different channels.
Because there is institutional pull for everyone, as a white man, I play a part in the dynamics of race, including the two examples above. For the most part, as of now, white people have traditionally not taken any accountability for these dynamics. If you're white, have you paused to consider, or even detect, when you are receiving undue respect? And if you are aware of this, have you considered your accountability in these situations?
I don't intend to make anyone wrong or deficient in any way. Institutional pull happens at the unconscious level, and has to do with collective energetics, a body of work apart from work we do on ourselves as individuals. Rather than writing another 5 to 10 pages about collective energetics here, I'll return to that topic in a future article.
How this shows up
As a member of three different MKP regional communities, I have the opportunity to read and take part in many discussions on a variety of subjects. Here are some of the notions and concepts I've heard or read from MKP men, and my comments on each:
The shadow angle
At the beginning of this article, I wrote that the issue of race plays out differently in many other cultures. In some Latin American countries, blacks, whites, and mixed-race people associate, become friends, and marry, without judgment from society, and without race ever being an issue. (In those countries, sexual orientation may be the issue.) And for a contrast, in some African countries, the races are even more severely separated than in the U.S.
But rather than believe that some other nation's model is the correct one for us, I sense that what is happening in the U.S. is happening for a reason. There's something being offered to the American psyche for our growth and learning that we just can't seem to be able to see.
My brothers, we live in a "new age." But that new age isn't an age of "peace, light, and harmony," where there are no power differentials and violence doesn't exist. It's a new age in which we are called to realize that we can't actually get rid of anything. Remember that a fundamental principle of shadow is that anything we try to get rid of will just bury itself in the unconscious. (From my first article for the Journal in June 2005: "That which is disowned will continue to operate from the unconscious without our awareness.")
This is why it appeared that we were making progress 40 years ago with the Civil Rights Movement, but then we tried to sweep the idea that we are different under the rug (I won't say "carpet" here!). And so racism buried itself in the collective unconscious, only to puppet us from a hidden place, lurking until it was time for it to rise back into our awareness. And this time, I hold out the possibility that we might not just try to make it go away again, but learn what it is, and find ways that this collective dynamic can serve us.
I also wrote: "Part of my intention here is to reduce the tendency to make the shadow something wrong or bad, and to dispel the notion that we can get rid of anything that's in it. All parts serve ... it's a question of how they serve. Anything that's disowned is likely not to serve what we consciously want or intend." It seems that, the more we try to "solve" racism, the worse it gets. In order to be able to change anything this entrenched, the first step is to acknowledge and understand how it serves. So instead of taking the position that racism is a problem to be fixed or eliminated, I invite us (a) to be curious, (b) to open to how such separation and power differential might serve, and (c) to learn how differentiating people along characteristic lines might serve...all in a way that doesn't produce undesired results. That's a radically different approach to racism.
In the San Francisco Bay area, some of the Zen centers are oriented around a theme of diversity. Of those that I know of, all but one operates from the premise that everyone is the same and that race doesn't have a place in spirituality. I refer to this as "A soul is a soul." Any place, or organization, or region that embraces diversity must strive to see, acknowledge, and endeavor to understand differences, rather than make difference a non-issue.
What to do
So how do we do work on a collective matter?
Last month, in my article about 9/11, I wrote: "...while we have already begun doing individual projection work, very little collective work is done in our society." Before we can embark on that work, the journey begins with questions.
Here are some questions that I've begun to ponder (and I invite you to do the same):
Final thoughts
People of color consistently say to me that "the only thing we want from white folks is to get your act together." In the last year, a number of black folks have said to me that they don't want us to try and compensate for centuries of imbalance and injustice...that simply can't be done. They don't want us to take care of them or be responsible for them. Fundamentally, they want us to be responsible for us.
When they say "get your act together" - what they are referring to is our relationship to the world outside of ourselves, people who are different from us, our relationship to our environment. This means doing our work. Yet, while doing work on ourselves as individuals, may be part of setting the stage for relationship, doing individual work, in and of itself, does not facilitate relationship. Let me repeat this: Doing work on ourselves as individuals, in and of itself, does not facilitate relationship. To imagine so is to maintain a fantasy. If we want to effect change on this scale, we must do our work, not only as individuals, but we must learn to do work in collective ways as well.
I want white men to stop acting like the best thing is for racism to simply be eradicated. Unless we can understand how it came to be, how it has transformed into what exists today, and, most importantly, relate to racism, just as it is, we have no possibility for changing anything.
Rather than trying to include people of color in "our world", as white men, it's up to us to join them. And the first step is to learn about their world. And the step after that is to enter that world...?
With fierce love, Cal
(C) 2006-2007 Cal Simone
Cal Simone is a Jungian mystery
scholar, shadow coach, teacher, writer, and public speaker. He
explores and enjoys the patterns of the unconscious, and he had
dedicated his life to bringing to consciousness that which is in the
unconscious. Before leaving Washington D.C. in January 2005, he
organized face-to-face gatherings between liberal and conservative
voters. He has spoken on the impending end of the oil age, from the
perspective of the American collective psyche, and on our
relationship to powerlessness. He continues to speak and teach in the
Oakland/Berkeley East Bay cities on such topics asimpact and
perception in relationship, how projection works, and the nature of a
man's life purpose. He is on the initiation design team for the Tribe
of Men in the SF Bay area. In the past two years, he has written more
than a dozen pieces for the New Warrior Journal, as well as the
Culture Change Letter and Open Exchange magazine. journal.mkp.org/may.cal2.htm
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