““The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, for though the transformation contains the hope for liberation, it also imposes a necessity for great change.” ”
Photo: Zach Boyden-Holmes—The Register/USA TODAY Network/Sipa. Protesters set the 3rd Precinct on fire Thursday, May 28 2020
We humans have a trembling relationship with fire. The blossom of a flame is both terrifying and awesome. Fire is symbolic, destructive, redemptive, urgent, ultimate, angry, violent, dynamic and beautiful. At a Minneapolis protest on Friday, Philando Castile’s mother referred to the burning and looting of the city as an outward expression of what has been happening in Black bodies for generations. The fire has been inside us, she said. It’s been kindled every time a Black man is murdered by the police. It keeps getting lit, year after year and generation after generation.
The solidarity expressed by the owners of burned businesses - their unrelenting support for the protest - should be a full stop for any feelings of qualified support of Black lives. Theft of Black resources and capitalism - built on slave labor after all, source of white privilege, all the ways in which we are taught racism and then taught not to see it- are foundational to white supremacy.
My eyes sting from the acrid smoke of burning rubber and buildings. The air is greasy and has a grained, metallic nature to it. There is an eerie silence as neighborhoods stand watch: it has a lack of traffic and then sudden rushing vehicles, it has gun shots and smoke, and there is a constant but faint hum of helicopters overhead. The fires have gone on for days. Some of the fires were started not by protestors but by white supremacists and hate groups. They fly through our neighborhoods in vehicles whose license plates have been removed, passing over and over again as though surveying. The protectors of the neighborhoods shift their stance a little each time they pass by. When these vehicles are stopped by police or the national guard, the passangers flee on foot. Baseball bats and accelerants are found in the vehicles. White kids drive in from out of town to participate - not in solidarity - but in the looting.
These people have stolen the narrative - or attempted to. I don’t think they know that’s what they are doing. But they won’t abide successful protest. They can’t make space for power in black communities. And so they change the story to center themselves. Thus the pain of Black communities is co-opted and silenced to a premeditated narrative of riots and looting.
Last night I listened to my husband check in with his friends and organize community protection shifts. They are creating neighborhood fire fighting call lines since the actual Fire Department can’t go to a site until the police have been able to verify the control of the site. Many, many friends from around the world have been calling to check on us. He was quiet as the person on the other end of the line spoke. He cleared his throat. He was quiet for a moment. Two. Then he said ‘my city is burning’. Then he cried.
Photo by my husband, Gunnar Carlson
There is a sense that this time may be different. The officer who murdered George Floyd has been arrested. Solidarity protests have spread - licks of flame - across the country. They’ve spread to Europe. Lagos, Nigeria has a solidarity march planned. Support for the protests and wider acknowledgement of the systemic nature of harm have traveled like forest fire far beyond urban, politically engaged dialogue. An understanding of how sick the Minneapolis Police force is - from its white supremacist Union leader to the fact that 94% of the force are do not live in Minneapolis but police a people who are not themselves- has been part of the conversation. The conversation has taken up the militarization of the police in general. Connecting dots between our President’s chronically inflammatory behavior and our systemic racism have been clearly drawn. There is a theme of gun violence across America, so much so that incidents barely register in the news cycles of other countries. It’s hard to keep up with our chronicle of blood.
Let me clarify: it is white people who are discovering this narrative. It is Black and brown voices who have taught us. There is an outrage amongst those not directly imperiled or affected by racist policing, a dawning understanding that this burn is hundreds of years old. We know that the cycle of violence will not end without a decisive break. It’s time for change, we’ve been whispering. About school shootings. About income disparity. About polarized hatred and delusional attempts to manipulate facts. When George Floyd’s murder went viral, white America was traumatized. And, in significant ways, she saw this underlying, inarguable, unhalfassable need for change.
I want to caution us as we read, as we protest, and as we pull back layers and layers of mistaught history and personal feelings. I will not use shoulds or make ultimate statements about what solidarity looks like because it doesn’t work like that. In some cases it is safe to show up at protests or call out a family member, but not in all. Protest is not the only form of solidarity. In fact in some ways you can argue protests are easy: they make us feel better, and they satisfy and emergent need. But systemic change demands economic change, policy change, voting change, educational reform.
Systemic change asks for a deep change of heart, probably a much deeper change than we feel we are ready for. What is coming is going to be hard.
Don’t be complacent, I’m saying. But don’t be overwhelmed, either. We are going to recognize our own complicity and stumble awkwardly with own choices and the mundane facts of our lives. Shame and our own trauma are going to come up. I am asking you to be willing to set fire to that shit and eat your own ashes. As we wake up to the fact that we are living on the crux of a historical moment, we have to also realize that Black people have been living with this in a daily way. Black people have been living this all their lives. Black folks have been living with this for hundreds of years. Keep the shaky feeling of the last few days in perspective.
This is a crisis that is not a crisis. It is neither surprising nor is it new. What we are living with is the inevitable outcome of the underlying patterns in our society. And as Baldwin said, many of us both want change to come and are terrified once we start to examine what change must mean. This is yoga philosophy 101: human beings, families, communities and societies function on patterns, most of them subliminal. These patterns course through the body mind and play out in what looks like destiny. It spills and it soaks like fuel. No cycle of abuse or oppression or self delusion will end unless there is a decisive break.
Disruption of patterns is what yoga is all about. Disruption burns. It is the smoldering frictional heat of discomfort, humility, and bitter shame. It’s like the flush of embarrassment, but this is much older and essential.
Burning heat and sacrificial fire are central to spiritual transformation You’ve heard this before. You know this. You heal in a small way and suddenly you realize a deeper pattern in yourself, one you couldn’t see before. You hit a point, somewhere, where you don’t know what change means but you’re willing to do anything you have to do to to get it. Perhaps you’ve been to the place where you are both terrified, because you don’t know who’ll you’ll be on the other side, and willing. Willing even if what comes next is painful.
I am a yoga teacher and so I will use the words I know from the yogic tradition, but the principle is elementary to spiritual truths. This psychological burning is tapas. Tapas is usually translated as effort. It gets watered down to the physical efforts made in an asana practice but I think of it as the writhing of the soul. Tapas is soulful, terrified, heart tender, hands to the work of the day effort. The teaching goes that when balanced with self-study (svadhyaya) and acceptance (ishvara pranidhana) catabolism happens. Change happens. Freedom suddenly is. This change happens in your heart. It spreads like wildfire through your personality in such a way that it leaves nothing standing. If and only if we can see that tapas is psychological or soulful effort will we understand healing and that healing is never merely personal. It can’t be personal because when our hearts change our relationships change. When our relationships change, our worlds get bigger. When our worlds get bigger communities heal.
I want you to think of tapas not as physical effort, only, but as the discomfort that washes over us when we intentionally interrupt a pattern. Tapas is also our ability to handle this process, or what in psychological circles is called resilience or tolerance. Tapas is those surges of grief, remorse, pain, and clarity. Tapas is shame and the intense personal work of healing shame. I insist: you can handle it. I insist further: your own healing, the getting over your oldest wounds, the breaking of chains so your kids don’t have to suffer in the same way you did, isn’t going to happen unless your healing is also social. Race savvy. Intersectional.
Your anger is sacred precisely because it connects you to the suffering of others. And your grief is holy in that it shows you exactly - but exactly - where it is you need to work. It is critical that you learn to take care of yourself. Do the personal healing you need to do.
But this story is not ultimately or even marginally about your feelings. Real as they are, your feelings are not more important than the truth. You’ve probably discovered, somewhere along the way, that your feelings aren’t facts.
And if your feelings aren’t facts, then centering your feelings is a theft of the narrative. It is the covert version of driving an unlicensed vehicle through a traumatized neighborhood.
Michael Brown, Sr at a memorial for George Floyd at 38th and Chicago, Minneapolis. On August 9, 2014 Michael Brown Jr was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Photo: Gunnar Carlson
Philando Castile’s mother, fallen into the arms of another woman who lost her son to white police, after speaking at a peaceful protest May 28th. Photo: Gunnar Carlson
Baldwin speaks of an energy buried by the rise of the Christian nations. He’s talking of the rise of the United States and American Slavery. I want you to think, long and hard and deeply, about that first part of the sentence. I want you to pray with it, even if like Baldwin and myself you are a stark atheist. What is that energy that has been oppressed now for hundreds of years? What would it mean to see that energy come back into the world?
I’d like to suggest it is the power of Black and brown and indigenous peoples. It is their wisdom, their passion, their love, their medicine. It is their songs, their literature, their dance, their food and their sciences. I think it may be the potency and power of their experience when that energy is not co-opted for white consumption and plagiarism. I’d argue that most white spirituality is both void of the ethics it claims as its justification and composed of the traditions of non-white peoples. I think it is what Black joy can teach us of white women’s shame and learned helplessness, the very fact that most white women do not know how to feel joy without a sense of guilt and breaking rank. Our shame silence has been key to white supremacy all along. The heart of our wounds are not separate from anti-Blackness. This is the meaning of intersectionality.
It is right at the heart of why we’re conflicted. Unlearning racism brings the most personal things into question. Things we’ve come to depend on for our own survival. Precisely what we call holy or sacred. I mean our careers, our parenting, our rituals whether they be shared or private, meaningful or hidden in denial. I mean our friendships and family.
I think we’ll survive such a reckoning. This is hard for me to explain precisely because it isn’t the kind of knowing that comes from anything but direct experience, but I’ve fallen apart and felt better afterwards. I’ve lost my entire world and through a process of healing came to be living a life far better than anything I could have believed possible. So I know that sometimes what looks like loss is actually enrichment. Like down to the very marrow and fretted cells. Before you drop a mask you’ll think you’ll die if you lose the mask. But having set it aside, having known the suddenness and gladness and tumbling soulfulness of being imperfect and vulnerable and finally real, you do come to value sincerity over perfection. You begin to see the preciousness of imperfection. You begin to trust in such processes. You know you’ll be just fine.
I also happen to know that my own experience of being a woman - privately often a shameful, wounded, and comparison riddled thing - has never felt so unconflicted and brave as when I have worked and laughed and grieved with other women.
As much as our world has felt shattered and obscene in the last few news cycles - and it has been both shattered and obscene - I think that energy is emerging. I think we have seen more love in these century long days and generational nights than we’ve been able to acknowledge because on the surface it looks like pain and grief. What we’ve seen is non-violence and compassion. What is it but love that could call a community out of its fear to protect Black owned businesses with their own bodies? What is it but non-violence and compassion that could survive mid-wifing and nursing the babies of your own oppressors? For generations? As tired as I get, I am never not moved and consoled by the voices of Black feminists. I have turned to them over and over again in my own darkest nights. And it’s time for me to ask: if they have done so much to save my life, what exactly is it I have shared with them in return?
I referred, earlier, to the process of fire as catabolic. Not transformational, merely. Catabolism is a process that not only burns and creates energy by its burning but destroys something along the way. You can’t both change and get to keep things as they are. This is the scary part. This is why it’s so hard to do the work of unlearning racism. This is why our white relatives and neighbors and selves are so inclined to counter by saying all lives matter, white lives matter, we’re fine with the idea of the thing but what about me? We’re scared that parity will cost us something. We’re scared that this will hurt. I think we’re scared of Black people and Black communities but we won’t say it. And even if we can get that clear, we’ll have to go further and realize our fear of Black people is just a way of avoiding how scared we are of ourselves if the familiar falls away.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say yes, change will hurt. It will cost us. This is not to say that affording Black people the same rights and privileges as our own will somehow diminish our lives; we’re not talking about pie, as the saying goes; there is enough here to go around. But I think the depth to which we need to change will be hard on us. It won’t be easy. Many, many people are going to resist it.
We should believe in it anyway. We should fight for it even as we don’t quite understand. It’s okay to not understand. But let yourself burn.