accountability is personal
Ma’Khia Bryant, Dante Wright, Adam Toledo, and so many many more. My heart has broken a thousand times over. I pray: May the hands of love wrap around your family and comfort them today and all days. May they never feel alone or forgotten. May we work to liberate ourselves from this long standing suffering of separation, hatred, and punishment.
The fact that Dante Wright’s murder happened 13 miles from where Philando Castille was murdered and 11 miles from George Floyd’s murder less than a year later by the same police force for during Derek Chauvin’s trial… And that Ma’Khia Bryant’s murder by police in Columbus happened only 1 hr after Chauvins conviction should give us chills.
All of psychology and many spiritual traditions believe that if we continue to ignore what is arising in our collective consciousness, it will continue to show up until we learn the lesson, do the work to heal our collective pain, and enact new ways of being. “What you resist, persists.” - Jung 🌀 “Nothing ever goes away until it teaches you what you need to know” - Pema Chodron
The insidious nature of our nations racist formation and its imprint on our collective and individual consciousness has never been reconciled. The psychological implications of ongoing and historic collective trauma are far reaching and life threatening. The daily accounts of BIPOC murder, assault and dehumanization at the hands of the our police are overwhelming. This is a traumatic event that impacts us all whether we are white or BIPOC.
Our trauma responses and defenses might look different:
some of us will watch these events unfold in a frozen state - unable to speak or act;
some of us will escape and look away - pretend it’s not happening or doesn’t affect us or create a fantasy that it’s fake news;
some of us will side with the police and talk about warrants, refusal, and blame the victim;
finally some of us will fight.
As we bring to light this ongoing and historic collective trauma, let us not forget that the economic system of capitalism thrives on dehumanizing a labor force in order to extract maximum profits. Expanding even further out capitalism treats the earth in the same manner rendering all living things as resources to be subjugated, to modified, extracted from, used, and discarded. As we consider our involvement and perpetrator trauma* let us not forget to examine our complicity in capitalism. The ghosts of our ancestors have inflicted so much racialized trauma and pain from the very foundation of our nation and the economic system creates and maintains the conditions on which systematic and institutionalized racism are necessary.
*It is a moral injury to our soul when we dehumanize another person. This injury is largely unconscious and repressed but reveals itself during times of triggers and are defended against by doubling down and enacting the same behavior that caused the injury in the first place. This is personal, familial, ancestral and societal. It is a collective historic trauma and a deeply personal trauma.
We must consider where are we putting our power?
Where are we giving up our agency?
Where are we freezing, fawning, and fleeing?
Who and what are we fighting?
Where are we enacting roles of the perpetrator as we look to police and punish unfairly?
Why are we unable to look at the victim and render them as worthy of our energy, action, support?
Why are we tone policing victims when we should be looking at the systems that created this?
Tone policing, bypassing, repressing, are functions of silence. Silence is the single most destructive force at work here. Are we the boot on the neck that silences the cries for help, furthering the moral injury to our collective soul. This is you. This is me. Don’t look away. Step off. Help lift up. And begin to heal.
Guilt, shame, and defense of these difficult emotions are all a part of the process of healing. These emotions evolve and transform us. The remorse that we might feel can open our hearts towards compassionate truth tally and action.
So if you are looking at this news and feeling a sense of defeat or hopelessness, I hear you. It’s an invitation for us all to go deeper and explore the interconnectedness of this moral injury. We find our lane, the place were our work is most effective: whether it is as a writer for social justice, an water activist, an urban planner, a community activist, a parent, a teacher, a healer. We do the work there - not dismissing the harsh reality of the world and it’s history.
You don’t have to do it alone. None of us were meant to do it alone. Find your people and work with them.
Today, I co-facilitated a Teach In, Heal In with my local community. We learned about the radical resistance to police brutality here in Pomona, we visioned what an abolitionist world would look like. We talked about personal accountability, forgiveness and healing. We grounded it out with a beautiful flower ceremony, laying down our prayers, visions, heavy emotions, fears, called in our ancestors, watched the birds fly overhead, and shared stories of grief and joy in the same complex moments. We ate, we organized, we took turns, and witnessed.
I will say, I think we are in a deep process of collective healing, which isn't always pretty, easy or enjoyable. My heart is breaking, I'm sure yours is too. How do we envision futures of liberation from this space? Accountability and resilience.
My hope is that you will take time this week in your own way, lay down some of heaviness, be present with questions that enliven your imagination to new worlds and then enact them.