By Kirsten Mowrey

“To imbue physical life with a sense of the sacred is a choice, even an act of will.” —Joan Parisii Wilcox

I stared at the man silhouetted against the murky gray December sky. Strings of blue and white lights arched skyward as he placed them over the turquoise tiled sign announcing in Arabic and English Arab American National Museum.

Walking under the lights felt like a metaphor for the threshold I crossed as I entered the building. I stepped into an atrium that reminded me of dun stone buildings and courtyards, sunnier climates, and warm weather clothes. I breathed in, tuning into my body and the stream of sensations.

Race. Feel what happens in your body when you read that word. I notice a shallowness in my breathing, a tension in my torso, a pause in my heart.

I am so uncomfortable talking about race. I am so uncomfortable using the word “white” to describe myself. I feel ashamed. I feel I am pushing against polite society, like farting in a crowded room. Very inappropriate. Yet if we are living consciously, to do so means to look at and incorporate parts of ourselves, the familiar and the awkward.

Socialization is a long process by which we become enculturated and educated in our culture’s goals, taboos, standards, and beliefs. It is not conscious, but an accretion of present life experience, past events—healed and wounded—and desires for the future. Unless we choose to make ourselves aware of how we have been socialized, we respond unconsciously to events for most of our lives.

Becoming aware of our socialization is part of becoming conscious. Robin DiAngelo writes in White Fragility, “Unlike heavy feelings such as guilt, the continuous work of identifying my internalized superiority and how it may be manifesting itself is incredibly liberating. When I start from the premise that of course I have been thoroughly socialized into the racist culture in which I was born, I no longer need to expend energy denying that fact. I am eager—even excited—to identify my inevitable collusion so that I can figure out how to stop colluding!” (p.149).

My racial guilt could be a wall I hide behind, a bolster to feeling defensive about my whiteness, and a way I unconsciously perpetuate oppressive systems. Or I could do as Audre Lorde suggests: “If it [guilt] leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.”

Practicing being in the world with an awakened heart can be painful and overwhelming. My own heart aches every time I read the news, and sometimes I can only read a little. That is my practice: what can I manage today, now, in this moment? What can my heart turn toward now? What is too much? When I feel myself reaching an edge, it is time to turn inward again, to step away from the outward stimulation. Consciousness practice is a dance of continually noticing where I am in relation to what is in my external environment, whether it is my professional office, the grocery store, walking my dogs, talking with a friend, or sitting with myself.

I try to live consciously to liberate myself and stop collusion with harmful and unconscious behaviors.

While I was schooled in Christianity, I haven’t been a Christian for decades. The foundations are still there, dormant, until confronted by world events: George Floyd, Ukraine, and deportations. Then, I find those educational foundations, like rotting timber hidden by rising lake levels. As I search for an answer to the things I do not want to see, the pain and suffering of the world comes gasping to the surface.

If I am to live according to my values, I need to dig into the mud they are built in to understand myself now and live from my heart, not from past teachings that lurk within.

Donella Meadows writes that changing paradigms—a system’s goals, structure, rules and parameters—is one of the key leverage points to social change. “You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing.” (Thinking in Systems, p.163-64) Facing America’s present and historical racial pain is taking my work to the next logical step, from all I practice out into the part of the world I inhabit.

I chose to begin addressing my ignorance through reading. In 2021, three professional colleagues and I created a white-affinity book group to read My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. It was vulnerable to have conversations about race with other white people to dig into those muddy foundations of my past where my beliefs about race were formed. It was also valuable being with myself and others as we touched raw places.

In the chapter Mending the White Heart and Body, author Resmaa Menakem says, “The most important thing you can do to unravel White-body supremacy—and to mend your own personal, historical, intergenerational, and secondary trauma around the myth of race—is to notice what your body does in the presence of an unfamiliar Black body. Whenever you encounter an unfamiliar Black body, pay attention to your own body.” (p. 206)

As an exercise, I visited museums dedicated to different racial groups and placed myself in situations where I was in the presence of other non-white bodies and practiced paying attention to my physical reactions.

I engaged with one of the largest immigrant communities in southeastern Michigan: Arab Americans. My wife is half Arab, so I have some familiarity with this population. I found in my bodywork practice that beginning with less charged areas of the body is the best way to start, moving slowly toward those that are more painful or unknown. So, I entered the Arab American National Museum, the only one of its kind in the country.

An octagonal platform sat under a modern squiggly metal sculpture that pulsed with lights and bulged with iPads displaying videos. Tiled balconies rose to a simple octagonal dome. The vocals and music from different sources buzzed in my ears as I stepped to the side of the center opening.

Under carved ceiling tiles, deep brown wood framed perimeter displays, items in old fashioned cases dedicated to history, art, science, language, architecture, and music. The religious display cited the similarities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam while displaying texts from all three.

I found my body tensing in response to the center display, the noise from the videos were cacophonous. Was it the music making me edgy or was it being present in the space? I retreated to a side room where work from artists in residence was displayed. The carpeting softened and warmed my sense of the room, and I felt my shoulders relax.

I hustled up the stairs opposite the entrance, under the displayed Arab World Map. This community is often referred to as “Arab”, “Islamic”, “Muslim”, or “the Middle East” but none of these words fully encompasses the diversity of this part of the globe.

The museum brochure dedicated several pages, a map, and several displays to talking about this question: who defines this area, and what do we include within or without as part of the basic process of self-identification? Some of these terms were bestowed by colonizers, not the people themselves—Middle East to what? Great Britain is where most of our terms in English come from, but terms are now in flux as nations define themselves.

WENA is one geography-based term: West Asia/North Africa, common among authors from the region, while MENA (Middle East/North Africa) gets more usage in the United States. Geographically, these terms cover the entire northern part of Africa, as well as the Horn of Africa (Somalia & Djibouti), the entire Arabian Peninsula and western Asia to the Zagros mountains on the eastern edge of Iran. That definition includes Israel, Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan.

To add to the complexity, not all the nations in this area are Arabic speakers, so often descriptions fall back on the countries that are part of the Arab League, a political organization, as a way of narrowing their definition of who they represent. The League still represents a broad swath of the globe, an area with a history of commerce and travel and a diversity of cultures, religions, and skin colors.

The museum’s map defined the region from Mauritania in western Africa to Sudan, including the Arabian Peninsula and north to Syria and Israel but not Iran.

As I reached the second floor, the echoing became less as it was absorbed by carpeting. I turned right into the history exhibits. In the first exhibit, I came face to face with one of our nation’s greatest sources of pain: enslavement. The first Arab American in North America, Zammouri, came in the 1500’s, enslaved by Portuguese traders, taken from his home in Morocco. A nearby map detailed the extent of the African slave trade, including a citation of a Moroccan Arab community in South Carolina in the late 1700’s.

The legal records of the South Carolina House of Representatives ruled that they should fall under the laws governing whites. This meant they were exempt from the South Carolina Negro Act of 1740, which forbid “Negros” from raising food, earning money, choosing their own clothing, learning to write in English, or assembling in groups. (source: South Carolina Encyclopedia/slavecodes). The legal ruling, exhibited at the museum, attests, “Not only to the number of Moroccan Arabs in the South at the time, but also to the nature of the laws, which privileged those classified as “White.”

I felt surprise and shock enter my system, a familiar flush of shame, regret, and grief condensed into a pit in my belly. My reading educated me broadly about enslavement, but the details, the brutality and inhumanity, always took me aback. My chest became tight. I breathed slowly, in and out, feeling the pain bring tears to my eyes. I wiped them away. I stood there and breathed, taking in the truth of the map and the exhibit.

I reminded myself of Pema Chodron, who writes in Welcoming the Unwelcome, “The awakened heart begins with the wish to be free of whatever gets in the way of helping others.” I want to stress this was not me trying to change what I read or pretend it didn’t happen; I was practicing being present with the truth of our nation’s history with race and being uncomfortable with it. In returning to calm and tranquility, I practiced being able to listen more, not less, to what the exhibits had to offer.

I was also practicing love. In her essay “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” bell hooks [the author doesn’t capitalize her name] writes, “The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.”

hooks’s definition of love comes from the famous 1970’s bestseller, M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, where love is “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” I understand that, as each time I extend my capacity for being present with suffering, my own and another’s, when I practice turning toward it rather than away, I am practicing love and therefore freedom. If I am ever to create a different future, I must practice now.

I turned a corner and found a glass case holding old-fashioned suitcases and trunks, similar to ones I had played with as a child visiting my grandmother. Next to them was a sign. Again, I slammed into the wall of white supremacy when I read the words “Classifying race.” It stated, “Race is a cultural classification that changes with time,” citing immigration officials’ irregular definitions.

During the 1880’s, immigrants came from both Africa and Asia, exhibiting a broad physical genome of skin color and hair texture, which led to officials classifying them in a wide range of groups depending on an individual official’s definitions. The sign ended by stating, “Because of these changing racial classifications, we cannot always tell from government records if an immigrant was an Arab.” Again, race was displayed as a social distinction rather than a biological one making classifications blurry rather than concrete.

I thought of my wife and her ancestry searches to learn about her family. Those searches rely heavily upon government records: birth, death, immigration, property. Human error in those documents, let alone racism, extends long shadows into our present. For those wanting to know the stories of their ancestors, the ambiguity of race hangs cloud-like over their efforts.

I continued through the exhibit, pausing again at a glass case with immigrant clothing and a sign about the Asian Exclusion Act of 1882. I kept breathing, moving on to the Immigration Act of 1924, which “In all of its parts, the most basic purpose of the Act was to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity” (code for Eurocentric) (US State Department website, accessed 1/8/23: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act.) and finishing with the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which removed quotas based on national origin.

How did I not learn any of this in school? I knew from previous reading that “white” as a classification underwent tremendous change during the early parts of the twentieth century; my Greek and German ancestors hadn’t been seen as white until fear of African Americans caused changes to their benefit (for more on this, particularly on classifications of Jewish immigrants, see Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race by Matthew Frye Jacobson).

At this point I had moved around a large room that felt smaller because of my focus on the signs and my reaction to them. I went quickly through many of the exhibits about the 1960s and 70s, giving myself time to re-center and breathe more openly before facing the inevitable: September 11, 2001.

As I said, my wife is half Arab. Her ancestry is English on her father’s side, Lebanese on her mother’s. Her family was part of the first mass migration. Listening to stories around her family’s table for a quarter of a century, I heard so much that was familiar to my own family’s Greek oral history: war at home (in my case, World War One conscription; in their case, poverty and famine in Lebanon) and migration to the United States. Settling in with family in one location, (in my case, Maine; in theirs, Iowa) and then moving to Michigan for jobs in the automotive factories.

My wife’s mother and aunt would talk of growing up in Highland Park in the 1930s, their school full of migrants from Eastern Europe, the American South, and Middle East/North Africa. Being raised Catholic in the Detroit area, we shared histories, favorite local places, and food.

September 11th was a terrible day for America, a day of profound grief, loss, and horror. While the entire country felt that grief, Arab Americans were singled out for attention and the Dearborn area came under scrutiny. The museum exhibits a letter sent to citizens in the wake of September 11th, asking them for information. While the letter is polite, it is indicative of a broader public suspicion and racial prejudice built on previous decades of racism. There was no innocence until proven guilty, as the law states.

My wife’s family became afraid of being Arab and spoke of being deported to a camp. They were in their 70s at that time, but they did not think they would be spared by their age, their Christianity, or their pale skin.

It was in this climate that Thich Nhat Hanh wrote Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism. I found the book years later, yet the guidance feels sure. Hanh writes of living in Vietnam during the war. He speaks of the death of friends and students and the great anger within him. As a practicing Buddhist, he wrote, “I didn’t say or do anything, because I knew that doing or saying things while I was angry would create a lot of destruction. I paid attention to just breathing in and out. I sat down by myself, closed my eyes, and I recognized my anger, embraced it and looked deeply into the nature of my suffering. Then compassion arose in me… Hatred and anger left my heart. I was able to see that our real enemy is not man, is not another human being. Our real enemy is our ignorance, discrimination, fear, craving and violence.” (p.11-12)

In talking about September 11th, he said, “The first step would be for each politician to come home to herself. Most politicians haven’t had time to come home to themselves. They are constantly focused outside of themselves. They are rarely in touch with or taking care of their bodies, feelings, mental formations and consciousness. They allow themselves to be carried away by things around them, like their projects, worries, regrets or by meaningless entertainment. So, the first step is to go home to yourself and to recognize the suffering, the pain in you and to know how to embrace and transform it.” (p. 72)

Hanh says our first step is to practice deep, compassionate listening for ourselves, then offer that same depth to others. “Listen with all your mindfulness and concentration. Your sole desire is to give them a chance to speak out. Compassionate and deep listening means that the other person, or the other nation, has a chance to say what they have never had the opportunity or the courage to say because no one ever listened deeply to them before. At first, their speech may be full of condemnation, bitterness and blame. If you can, continue to sit there calmly and listen… Deep listening allows the other person to speak even if what they say contains misperceptions and judgements.” (p.17)

My entire visit to the museum was my attempt at listening, but I reached my capacity with this final piece. I felt cold inside, emotionally wrung out and needing to digest all I had seen. I walked through the exhibits dedicated to sport, art, broadcasting, and politics but I didn’t really see much beyond faces on the wall. I slid my coat on, exited the building and went to restore myself.

Since my visit, I found I have more attention and curiosity for news about this community. I am more able to listen before reaching capacity, more able to hold the pain of the suffering happening in Israel, Palestine, and Iran. It’s a start, a beginning on the road of love.

The Arab American National Museum is located at 13624 Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, MI 48126 and is open Thursday-Saturday.

Kirsten Mowrey is a somatic practitioner and educator. You can find her on the web at kirstenmowrey.com.