By Kirsten Mowrey
Harriet Tubman stares at me as I approach her. I am walking in the forest behind the high school with my dogs. It is an early spring morning, the sun lighting the sky but not yet risen, trees leafless, robin and cardinal calls in my ears. In 2020, art appeared in the forest: a colorful banded ACAB (for “All Cops are Bastards” used by a variety of groups, both racist and anti-racist) sign, Toni Morrison’s portrait printed on sheet metal and Harriet, in orange and green. While Toni is gone, the others remain, and I greet them as I pass, Harriet in particular. Her eyes reach through time to touch my heart and depending on what is happening in the world, I feel her gaze as accusing, patient, angry, vulnerable, or shocked.
Being white in America right now is a call for attention. Attention to one’s values, one’s power, and one’s intentions. For those of us on a spiritual path, it can be an engaging practice. An opportunity to learn, to practice being present to what is inside myself and what I am putting out into the world. Attending to what is arising in myself is crucial if I am to practice acting with love, kindness, and care for my community. That is true every day, in all times and places. But right now, it feels more important than at other times in my life.
“Dangers to their survival move living systems to evolve,” wrote Joanna Macy and Molly Brown in Coming Back to Life. “When feedback tells them—and continues to tell them—that their old forms and behaviors have become dysfunctional, they respond by changing. They adapt to such challenges by seeking and incorporating more appropriate norms. They search for values and goals which allow them to navigate in more varied conditions, with wider connections. Since its norms are the system’s internal code or organizing principle, this process is a kind of temporary limbo. To the mind it can be very disorienting. Psychiatrist Kazimierez Dabrowski names it “positive disintegration.” In periods of major cultural transition, the experience of positive disintegration is widespread…. Bereft of self-confidence and old coping strategies, we may feel that we and our world are falling apart. Sometimes we panic or shut down; sometimes in desperation we get mean and turn on each other. It helps to recall that in the course of our planetary journey we have gone through positive disintegration countless times. The life living through us repeatedly died to old forms and old ways. Our evolution attests to this, and so does our present lifetime, as we learned to move beyond the safeties and dependencies of childhood. It is never easy. Some of the uglier aspects of human behavior today arise from fear of the wholesale changes we must now undergo”( 44-45).
World falling apart? Check. Get mean and turn on each other? Check. Bereft of self-confidence? Check. Sounds like we are fulfilling Dabrowski’s definition of disintegration, and the question is, what will the outcome be? Cultural transitions such as these take decades, centuries even, and so go beyond my life span. This behooves me to focus on what I intend in my limited lifetime to put forward—affirming my values, my desires for connection and community or toward fear and domination? In All about Love, bell hooks writes, “A commitment to a spiritual life requires us to do more than read a good book or go on a restful retreat. It requires conscious practice, a willingness to unite the way we think with the way we act. Spiritual life is first and foremost about commitment to a way of thinking and behaving that honors principles of inter-being and interconnectedness” (77).
Talking about race is a particular aspect of this disintegration. Consciously responding with connection is the reason I visited the Charles Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. I wanted to stay with these questions: Can I stay in relationship to my whiteness at the same time I listen to the story of my fellow Black citizens? Can I stay in relationship to being white at the same time other white people are keeping people of color from having power, telling their truth, or trying to ignore history? hooks provides guidance again by writing, love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualizing love. This is why it is useful to see love as a practice. When we act, we need not feel inadequate or powerless; we can trust that there are concrete steps to take on love’s path. We learn to communicate, to be still and listen to the needs of our hearts and we learn to listen to others. We learn compassion by being willing to hear the pain, as well as the joy, of those we love. The path to love is not arduous or hidden, but we must choose to take the first step” (165).
Her writing speaks to a robustness in the practice of love, an active engaging beating heart—of love felt in the body. My step was to drive into Detroit at the end of March 2023. A leaden grey sky poured rain onto me as I hustled over the walkway to the museum rising overhead. I walked up the steps and hung my dripping coat on the coatrack to my right. Then I stepped into the glass ceilinged dome that hummed with the rainfall. On the floor, a seamless mosaic of black arms, broken chains, and white cotton centered under twelve flags that hung from the ceiling. A school group gathered opposite me—their voices audible in the dome’s acoustics. It reminded me of the US Capitol in Washington DC where a whisper on one side of the dome can be heard on the other. After purchasing my ticket, I followed the school group into the main exhibit.
To walk into a museum of African American history is to touch grief. Past grief, of a people ripped from their homelands while physically and emotionally tormented, and present grief, of a people seeking recognition, dignity, and equality. At the Wright Museum, the historical/social part of the exhibit is titled “And still we rise” making clear that the move toward equality is not complete.
Those words could also describe the National Museum of African American History in Washington DC where architecture takes that metaphor and makes it reality. The historical exhibit begins in the basement three stories below the ground level entrance. Visitors move through rooms with a minimum of light past exhibits. I visited in August 2022, when summer bright light filled the sky highlighting the darkness. At one point, a boardwalk circles over a dark open space and voices are heard. I could feel the space below me, open air, but I could not see the bottom, only words and phrases spotlighted on the walls. The space is an attempt to give visitors the experience of what being in the hold of a ship transporting people to the Americas from Africa was like. I cried there, in the dark, imagining what it would have felt like to spend months on board, and knowing that the museum was only touching the surface of the experience. It wasn’t able to give me the smell of bodies, human waste, the sounds of the ship, and the noises from hundreds of other people packed into a too small space.
At the Wright, they give you this experience differently. Again, structure mimes metaphor: you walk up the stairs of a re-created fort where captive people were held, then step out into a brightly lit, blue-walled, wooden-floored room. Speakers project the sound of creaking ropes and sails, punctured with shouts and directions for sailors. Though the ceiling is low, the lighting is so bright one could almost be outside. And then you descend into the hold.
At bottom of the stairs, you find yourself in a dimly lit corridor with a wall of unlit three-layer shelves to your left. It takes me a moment to realize that on the shelves are bodies—dark-skinned bodies—all lying at a forty-five-degree angle, packed next to one another on the shelf. Speakers project voices moaning, praying, crying, talking. As I walk the corridor, I pass heads with hair in cornrows and braids, mothers holding babies, and occasionally a pair of feet when someone lies the other way. All the bodies have a tension to them that I recognize—that holding of themselves close and tight when they are trying to maintain personal space and comfort. I am reminded of long plane flights in economy, where everyone contorts themselves to not touch their neighbor in the small spaces. Again, I tell myself that there would have been smells, and movement, and that this can only touch the tip of what the experience would have been like. Turning the corner, I walk past another set of shelves with bodies, eerie in their stillness. Each body is different, clothed with dresses or pants, arms folded across their chest or at their side. It is shocking to see them in their stillness, to know that they represent someone’s great grandparents, ancestors of neighbors, friends, and colleagues.
Exiting the ship hold, I enter into a reconstructed colonial Annapolis, Maryland, complete with a slave auction site and figures awaiting sale. From there I enter another room with a cabin, as would have been on a plantation, and displays of Slave Code statutes, prices for field hands in different states in different years, and cotton production tools. The exhibit then moves into abolition, emancipation, Reconstruction and its failure, leading to Jim Crow laws, and the Great Migration. I walk through Black Bottom, Detroit’s African American district, past the Paradise Theater, a barbershop, print shop, and a dozen other businesses before finishing the exhibit at a round room with photographs of African American politicians and a video screen with political speakers.
As I’ve said before (See The Crazy Wisdom Journal issue #84, “Lovingkindness in Action: a visit to the Arab American Museum”), white is a social construct with fluid definitions. My Greek ancestors weren’t considered white in the early 1900’s, but by mid-century they were, primarily as a response to the Great Migration, in what bodyworker Susan Raffo calls a “conditional belonging.” That uncertainty, the possibility of exclusion, plays on an innate human need for community and turns it into a tool for oppression and domination. It’s an old tool, one that has been used throughout European history, from Victorian policy giving British born citizens more power than colonials, back through the Elizabethan era giving Europeans more rights than the Africans and Americans whose lands they plundered, to medieval Christianity separating out those of “pure” descent from those who had converted. White supremacy didn’t begin on this continent; it was used first in Europe to divide and conquer. Take the story of the Scotch-Irish: as any fan of Outlander knows, Britain engaged in decades of wars to take Scotland, starting as early as the 1300’s. Many of those Scots who lost their land fought in wars to colonize Ireland in the 1600’s and then, when Britain taxed Ireland to pay for those wars, their descendants emigrated to America in the 1800’s, where they settled along the frontier. They brought with them violent histories of unresolved pain from the conquest of their own lands and ancestors. “What white bodies did to Black bodies they did to other white bodies first” writes Janice Barbee in My Grandmother’s Hands.
It is with this legacy of European wounding in mind that Raffo wrote her love letter to white people. “This is a love letter because, with deep love in my heart, I turn to my kin, to those whose families fled deep injustice in their ancestral homelands to come here. This is a love letter because I know that not one of those families came here determined to cause harm in their new home. This is a love letter because I know that, upon arrival, survival depended on figuring out how to be safe in a country where the rules were all different. Not every European who came here settled for whiteness, but most did. Not consciously, but as an act of incremental change, the outcome of a thousand small decisions that chose safety for themselves and their families over struggling with those whose lives most resembled theirs back home.” She ends her letter with a sense of what we have to gain from touching this legacy, this story. “This is a love letter because this isn’t just about ending white supremacy so that violence against indigenous people and people of color ends, although that is deeply important. This is a love letter because ending white supremacy is about choosing human-ness over whiteness, about dealing with the literal trauma of disconnection that allowed whiteness to emerge in the first place. And this is a love letter because within the cycle of violence, even the perpetrator has to heal” (dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/27/1692745/-A-love-letter-to-white-kin-grappling-with-white-supremacy).
I feel grief rise in my chest, emotion swelling, when I read that ending. My maternal great- grandparents fled their village at night to avoid being recruited into the first World War. My own defensiveness around race, my own sensitivities when being with people of color—what if I addressed that by being with my own grief and the grief of my ancestors? The need to flee war, the loss of homeland and community, the difficulty in finding safety and security in a new place? Psychologist Francis Weller writes that we in the West are “conditioned to accept the notion of private pain. This cultural conditioning predisposes us to maintain a lock on our grief, shackling it in the smallest concealed place in our soul. In our isolation, we deprive ourselves of the very things that we require to stay emotionally vital: community, ritual, nature, compassion, reflection, beauty, and love.” Weller goes on to relate his own experience at a grief ritual, describing it as “aware that I had a reservoir of grief in my body but lacked the means of freeing it. I realize now how frozen I was, how disconnected I had become from my emotional body” (Wild Edge of Sorrow, 105). Being present with my own current grief, as well as inherited grief, regarding racial tension and the way itaeffects my community, nation, and state is a large, yet fruitful task. When I feel helpless about another story of pain and violence, I try to be present with the grief arising in me, not halting it or pushing it away. Being with my own grief and mourning my ancestor’s griefs unburdens my heart and makes me more accessible to other’s pain. Giving myself and my grief kindness, attention, love and understanding makes me able to give that out to the world. Thich Nhat Hanh writes in How to Love, “You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself, so build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself”(17). Such simple words, such a difficult practice.
What happens when you sit with the story of your lineage? With the circumstances that made your white ancestors come here? What happens when you tell that story? For some of us, there is no story, or only scraps, a few threadbare strings leading back into nothing. That too is something to grieve, that the lock remained on our ancestor’s grief, giving us nothing to inherit but an endless sense of loss.
“Equal rights for others does not mean fewer rights for you. It’s not pie,” so says a bumper sticker I saw recently. It’s the same with grief—your grief doesn’t negate my grief, so only one of us gets to grieve. It’s both of us grieving and being vulnerable that allows us to reconnect in our common humanity. Grief comes to all of us: everyone’s parents die, illness and misfortune happen to families and friends, not one life goes untouched by sorrow and sadness. In an opinion piece about the 1619 Project television series, Brian Broome wrote, “Many White people watch programs like ’The 1619 Project, and see only a story about White people. That leads to another tragic misunderstanding of why this curriculum is so good for America.
When I watched the first two episodes of The 1619 Project, I thought very little about White people. I was captivated by the story of [1619 Project creator Nicole] Hannah-Jones’s father, a military man who was proud to fly his enormous American flag in front of their modest house. I did not think about White people when she told the story of a Black man who was sent to prison and tortured for the crime of wanting to vote. Nor did I think of White people when she told the story of Black women who endured unimaginable torture and humiliations in the name of “science.” And while I am aware that it was White people who did all these things, I was not thinking about them as I watched. That’s because these stories aren’t about them, which in America is still rare. Instead, my overwhelming feeling was of deep gratitude. Of awe at what Black Americans before me had to endure and what we are still enduring. I felt pride. And I felt like an American in a way that has eluded me for most of my life. I didn’t dwell on the people who perpetrated the atrocities. I found myself drawn only to the strength, resilience, and resolve of the people who overcame them. Those who focus on the idea that telling these truths is “divisive” are centering White feelings about our real history. Why deny Black students the feeling of gratitude and pride that comes with knowing how your people endured—so that they can overcome and thrive?” (Washington Post, 2/5/2023)
Grieving together, white and black, we face our human condition and the legacies our ancestors have given us. As German journalist Stefan Wagner says, when speaking of visiting the concentration camps in Germany, “There is nothing we can do but go there and read, learn, kneel down, and cry.” Grieving together, we can know that we all feel pain, we all need nurturing, we have all inherited cycles of violence. If we remain unconscious, we repeat them. If we open our hearts to our own pain, our own vulnerability, then we can renew thinking and acting from our interconnection, our common inter-being.
The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History is located at 315 E. Warren Avenue, near the Detroit Institute of the Arts. The Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 pm.
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Harriet Tubman stares at me as I approach her. I am walking in the forest behind the high school with my dogs. It is an early spring morning, the sun lighting the sky but not yet risen, trees leafless, robin and cardinal calls in my ears. In 2020, art appeared in the forest: a colorful banded ACAB (for “All Cops are Bastards” used by a variety of groups, both racist and anti-racist) sign, Toni Morrison’s portrait printed on sheet metal and Harriet, in orange and green. While Toni is gone, the others remain, and I greet them as I pass, Harriet in particular. Her eyes reach through time to touch my heart and depending on what is happening in the world, I feel her gaze as accusing, patient, angry, vulnerable, or shocked.