Q: Does it have to be spiritual healing? Do we have to get all mysterious and mystical about it? Can’t we just talk it to death, or read some books?
A: Don’t think I wasn’t tempted to subtitle this little book “Into the Woo with White Racism.” I was. But as you have seen, I forbore.
We have been talking White racism, and ourselves, to death, for lo these many years. And we may die, but White racism has stayed alive and well and kicking—and killing. There’s a long list of suggested readings at the end of this book, all of them saying deeply intelligent things that are extremely useful and well worth reading, and yet it seems that the more that’s said and written about it, the more White supremacy shrieks and digs in its heels. Or we may come away from all our reading and talking feeling guilty and ashamed, which are the opposite of healing. As Hazrat Inayat Khan said, “By talking about it, by discussing and arguing it will not come.”
The human brain is a complex marvel, a thing of many parts, and not all of those parts talk to each other. When we say things like, “Part of me feels like x, but then another part of me feels like y,” we’re accurately describing our brains at work. Our lizard brain in particular is not inclined to listen very much to our fine, well-informed frontal lobes, if it can even hear them, while our frontal lobes have not a clue to the toxic stuff bubbling away in the lizard brain. This is why we’re so often confused, and hurt, and angry when we’re called on our unconscious racism. How could we possibly have that thing if we don’t have even any inkling of having it?
In addition, White supremacy really does act like a drug, which explains why White people so frequently react to being called on our White racism like addicts defending their supply. It would also explain why so many White people are in denial about all of it—personal racism, systemic racism, and the relation between the two—and also why, as are so many alcoholics, White people comfortably ensconced in the fantasy of inherent superiority are expert at compelling other people to walk on eggshells around them: the flashing bright red “Do Not Disturb” sign is always on. Too many of the nonverbal parts of our brains are tied up in our assorted phobias, and White racism, like alcoholism as the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous Bill W. once described it, is cunning, baffling, and powerful. If there’s a spiritual solution to addiction, there is certainly a spiritual solution to White racism, which is another disease that tells us we don’t have a disease. Trying to talk ourselves out of it is like trying to talk a person with an advanced case of alcoholism out of drinking by the application of rational arguments, and by the same token that there is no amount of guilting and shaming that can persuade an alcoholic to quit drinking, the only thing that can liberate us from the clutches of White racism is a healing power, or powers, greater than ourselves.
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