Raising Cain...

Coloring my first experiences in the South

I had mixed feelings about my family’s move to North Carolina. It appealed to my love for exploration and discovery, but meant I would be farther away from extended family and home places. In balance, it was a pretty significant rupture. My anticipatory narratives about the move drew upon military metaphors and American Civil War history that was still, in 1957, less than 100 years old. I was a Yankee. What would happen when people in my new neighborhood found out?

I find a couple of things about this recall quite revealing. What's implied (and confirmed in more recent meditations on these recollections) is that I already had a view of the South and a way to think about living there, all in the absence of any actual experience of such. The narrative suggests I had internalized the North-South conflict -- there's "them" (Rebels) and "us" (Yankees) -- and understood that the Civil War was not really over.

Silent Sam, a controversial statue of a Confederate soldier on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As with many other confederate monuments in the South, some see the statue as a symbol of historical remembrance while others see it as a symbol of racial oppression. The monument has been a site of protests since the 1960s. Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

Equally interesting to me is a sense that people of color had, in my own psyche, either been rendered invisible or otherwise objectified in the worldview I held by age 9.

Over the next few years I would also preserve -- in conscious memory -- experiences that would later make alternative narratives to this colorblindness, this invisibilty, possible:

In Chapel Hill, a gas station near our house had a "No Coloreds" sign on the door. A neighbor who managed a Howard Johnson's gloated about chasing n*****s away from his restaurant with a shotgun. Housing was still segregated, as were public schools, more than 3 years after the decision in Brown v Board of Education (yes, of Topeka, Kansas, an hour-and-a-half from where I grew up).

Under legal pressure, the university had admitted three African Americans to its law school in 1951, and the first undergraduates entered UNC in 1955, two years before we moved there. While UNC laid claim to a progressive attitude toward integration, testimony by Black students who enrolled says otherwise. I vaguely recalled that my parents got involved with a boycott of the Carolina Theater. I decided to do an Internet search to see if I could learn more about civil rights activity in Chapel Hill while we were there, and about this protest in particular.

Protests outside the Carolina Theater, Roland Giduz Photograph, North Carolina Photographic Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

 

I found a photo and a little about the protest fairly quickly. When I dug deeper to learn about Chapel Hill's demographics in the 1950s and 60s, or who organized the Carolina Theater protest, or who led civil rights work in the community, my initial searches bombed out. However, I eventually found a link to the doctoral dissertation of civil rights historian Yonni Chapman: Black freedom and the University of North Carolina, 1793-1960. Chapman shed some light, in his preface, on my difficulty finding alternative narratives to the white supremacy view that pervaded my experience in North Carolina:

As I surveyed the secondary sources about black lives in Chapel Hill, it turned out that while a great deal had been written about the town and the university, very little had been written about African Americans. Published works generally ignored or distorted black contributions to local history, particularly the black freedom struggle. References in these sources to African Americans were scarce and often patronizing. (xiv)

I also found a reference to organizing by students at UNC that likely related to my parents' engagement in the protests. "In November 1958," writes Chapman, "the Campus Y Human Relations Committee launched an initiative to reduce discrimination in Chapel Hill restaurants and theaters directed against black UNC students." Their fact-finding efforts revealed that the Carolina and Varsity theaters, as well as most of the restaurants in town, had strict segregation policies. After a survey showed that 67% of the students supported equal privileges for all UNC students, four of the group's leaders met with white business owners to negotiate their request for equitable access. According to Chapman, the owners showed signs they were moving toward this goal when negotiations fell apart in February of 1960. Two days later, Black students from Lincoln High School staged a sit-in at the Colonial Drug Store farther west on Franklin Street in the black community.

In Chapman's analysis of this series of events, I not only connected the dots to personal memory, but gained insight into a significant piece of my own story. The shift from a white, rural, conservative culture into a white, urban liberal one happened when my mom remarried and we moved to the university setting of Chapel Hill. I definitely understand my step-dad -- a white liberal sociologist -- as a primary influence on my evolution in this lineage. Chapman caught my attention with these observations:

The evidence seems to suggest that this support was extensive and that some students were ready to put a great deal of work into challenging Jim Crow….At the same time, some of the weaknesses of white student support for black freedom are illustrated by the fact that the Campus Y students were seeking an end to segregation for UNC students only, rather than for all African Americans….As would turn out to be the case time and again, good intentions and liberal methods would prove to be ineffective in the confrontation with power....However, many of the students had their hearts attuned to freedom, and they learned from their failed efforts. In particular, the bold actions of the black high school students seemed to stir many of them to thoughts of more aggressive action. (pp.320-322)

 

[Commemoration of Chapel Hill’s Peace and Justice Plaza, August 28, 2009.] "Civil-rights historian Yonni Chapman, Rev. J.R. Manley, Freedom Rider George Houser and NAACP chapter president Eugene Farrar were among those who celebrated the unveiling of the new historical marker." (Archives of the Carrboro Citizen)

Chapman's work clearly reveals a dynamic presence of Black citizens in Chapel Hill as a key force for racial justice and social change. Yet, in the five years we lived there, I recall seeing only a few Black people, and meeting even fewer. One occasion, in particular, had a profound impact similar in significance to that with the "colored man in Bogue".

At that time we had moved farther from the center of town and the junior high. I usually walked or rode my bike to school. My route took me past the home of a classmate whose family had a friendly cocker spaniel. One morning as I passed by their house, their dog came racing down the hill into the street. At the same moment, a car had made a left turn from Franklin Street, and hit the dog.

I went to the dog immediately to see if I could help. The driver of the car stopped and got out. He was a Black man, probably in his 40's or 50's, dressed in a dark suit and wearing a hat, very similar to the kind my Grandpa Fred and many other men wore back then. I pointed to the house where the dog lived and said I could go up and get someone. I remember that this man was very gentle with the dog, and said he would take care of it. I told him that Dr. Vine's¹ office was down the street and that he could take the dog there. He nodded and said several times that he'd take care of it. I helped him pick up the dog and put it into his car. Intuitively, I sensed that he didn't want anyone else involved. I trusted that he intended to help the dog.

The short story is that neither the man nor the dog ever showed up at Dr. Vine's hospital. My classmate and her family never saw their dog again. Beyond that, I don't know what happened. I felt very sorry that a family lost a beloved pet. Because I assumed that a promise to "take care of it" would include taking the animal to Dr. Vine and re-uniting the dog with his owners, I also felt betrayed.

Another interesting piece of this recollection is that, when I did tell others what had happened, I intentionally avoided saying that the man was Black. Did I do this because I understood how dangerous it was for Black people in this environment? Was it the implicit message I had intuited based on how this man responded? Or some other reason yet undiscovered? I don't know for sure.

I do know that both systemic oppression and the fear-based violence against Black bodies back then continues today in the United States. I don't judge that man for his choices that day. I carry this memory as a reminder that white supremacy hurts everybody.

We left North Carolina in the summer of 1961. That fall, integration of Chapel Hill schools began on a small scale. In researching this post, I listened to many interviews of students who went through this. I can't help but wonder how my life might have unfolded had we stayed longer.

In my next post I'll look at my high school years in a small, mostly white college town in Ohio, and an integrated community in Cleveland suburbs.

^{_____________________________}

¹My dream job back then was to be a veterinarian. I had found a mentor in Dr. Louis Vine, whose veterinary hospital was on Franklin Street close to where we lived. I often went over there a few hours on Saturdays, and Dr. Vine would let me watch him treat his furry patients. After each one, I would toss any used materials into the trash and wipe down the exam table with disinfectant. I also helped calm the animals during this process which built the confidence I drew on that day to help that injured dog.

Related links:

John Kenyon Chapman Papers, 1969-2009 (Louis Rounds Wilson Special Collection Library at UNC)

These interviews at Oral Histories of the American South with people who grew up (or went to school) in Chapel Hill really helped me understand my experiences there better: Walter Durham, Fred Battle, Raney Norwood, Sheila Florence, Kathryn Cheek, Thurman Couch, Joanne Peerman, Gloria Regester Jeeter, Charlene Regester,  Floyd McKissick.  

 

 

 

 

Coloring my life

I liked to color when I was little, though it wasn’t necessarily my favorite thing to do. I did not like the white or black crayons. Especially if it was a box of just eight crayons, leaving only six "real" colors. White pretty much disappeared on the white paper of most coloring books. Of the two, I found black a little more useful, for hair (if there were people in the picture) or for pets and farm animals. Unless the box was big enough to have a flesh crayon, I preferred not to do pictures with people in them. I don’t remember experimenting with other colors for skin. I did not consciously think of human beings in terms of color until I was six or seven.

I remember that day, though – where I was, what I was doing -- like I remember when President Kennedy was shot and the Challenger blew up. My grandpa said he had to go see a colored man about some lumber in a little town not too far away from where they lived in western Kansas. My curiosity exploded. I asked if I could go along.

As we neared the town my excitement grew. What color would the man be? Purple? Green? Orange?

Nicodemus, Kansas. Frank Thompson/Flickr

A man – not really dark black but more black than brown as I recall – came out to greet my grandpa. I recall some disappointment that this “colored” man was just black. When I attune to the memory of that experience, I sense that I was also confused, not really understanding what the “colored” designation meant or why it was used in relation to this man. No other human being I had ever met had been categorized like this.

Listening to myself tell this story during an anti-racism training more than fifty years later, I understood this experience in terms of a download of sorts, my initiation into a culture of white supremacy. More recently I have also understood it as an upload. As children we absorb beliefs and expectations of our family and society that remain unconscious until some life experience like my encounter with a “colored man” in Bogue brings some of its meaning into conscious awareness.

When I wasn't visiting my maternal grandparents, I lived on a farm near Wakefield in the Flint Hills of Kansas, then briefly in Manhattan until the summer after 4th grade. That man was the first and last person of color that I remember seeing until my family moved to North Carolina around 1957. I place my meeting with him as the day I began to color my life.

Enduring questions about this experience centered on how this man happened to be there at that time and, later, what streams of life brought us together, and why. I discovered some possible answers as I began writing this post. Mostly by intuition, I found my way to the history of Nicodemus (est. 1877), a small town east of Bogue that, today, is celebrated as the only remaining western town established by African Americans during the Reconstruction Period after the Civil War.

Nicodemus, Kansas National Park Service photo

I remember hearing a little about Kansas history in grade school. It was mostly about settlers, and a little about Native Americans who were there first. What I heard about African-Americans was only implied through the white lens history of Quantrill’s Raiders, the sack of Lawrence, and the anti-slavery opposition by the abolitionist John Brown and his followers. To a third grader’s heart and mind, these accounts of “bleeding Kansas” generated a fair amount anxiety. What I got from my teacher, Miss Frances, though, consciously or unconsciously placed the Kansas anti-slavery movement and Kansas entry into the Union (1861) as a free state on the right side of history. And that part of Kansas history made it attractive to the Black folks who founded Nicodemus.  

As a citizen journalist, psychoanalyst and social justice activist, I’ve spoken of this process of socialization into a white supremacy culture in many pieces, in both private and public spaces. My intention now is to tell a whole story and to bring it more completely into a public sphere. More posts to come.

 

See also:

The African American Mosaic: Migrations (Library of Congress)

Nicodemus, Kansas (website for nicodemuskansas.org)

Exodusters page at Wikipedia

pdf: Promised Land on the Solomon

pdf: History of Nicodemus -- Solomon Valley Heritage Alliance

Links to posts in my Truth and Reconciliation series

Healing the collective trauma of American lynching

Many things trouble me about the dark era of lynching, but several features in particular blow my mind: Lynching was still going on in the United States until I was 8 years old, if not longer. Some of the lynchings drew huge crowds of white Americans, sometimes as many as 10 to 15 thousand at a time. Accounts of lynchings reveal an over-the-top savagery in attacks on bodies of people being lynched. Relatively few white people -- including clergy -- spoke publicly against lynching, and for many years, neither federal nor state governments did anything to stop it.

As I was writing my previous post in this series on truth and reconciliation, I already knew that the next post would focus on lynching. I just wasn’t sure how to narrow that focus for a blog post, since lynching is a huge and complex subject with multiple levels of meaning shaped by many variations of lived experience, past and present.

The answer came this week, which is, for Christians, a holy week remembering the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In a series of meditations and connections through the Internet beginning Thursday, April 2^nd, I was inspired to zero in on lynching as a form of mob/state violence intended to evoke terror and thus control a feared “other”.

In 2002, while in Atlanta for a workshop, I had the opportunity to see James Allen's Without Sanctuary at the Martin Luther King Center. This exhibit -- which James Cone describes as "a kind of pornography"¹ -- features photographs of lynchings in the United States. Photographers who took these pictures printed them as postcards and sold them at public spectacle lynchings² to white people who came to watch.

Many years later, I’m still thinking that seeing Allen’s collection was, for me, an experience in the real, that place of immediate, raw experience -- of injury, astonishment, horror, or terror -- that can’t yet be put into words. Beyond all other questions arising from my exploration of America’s lynching history, this question of trauma has been one of the most compelling. As with other forms of outrageous violence, it’s likely that everyone involved -- unless they somehow were not a human being in the first place -- not only suffered psychological trauma but passed impacts of that trauma on to their descendents.³

 

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, was among those who spoke out publicly against lynching and inspired Black resistance to it. Photograph by Mary Garrity from c. 1893. (This version of the original has been edited.) [Wikipedia]

 

Before I saw Allen’s exhibit, I was vaguely aware of lynching but had never heard people really talk about it. Just as many people today think American society is “post-racial”, I must have assumed lynching and its impacts were all in the past…nothing to see here, move along. Though it’s taken me a long time to talk about it, I have no question that I lost my innocence and ignorance of lynching that day in Atlanta. I have come back to it many times since, though, exploring my experience, inviting new layers of meaning to emerge and be spoken, if only to myself.

Now I’m sensing a shift of energy with all of this. In the past few months, and especially during this holy week of Easter, I understand more than ever that a movement to open the record, to heal trauma and other consequences of lynching is underway. It is firmly anchored in the spiritual dimension of life, and flows from there. It won’t be about how far we can get our minds around it, but how far we can get our hearts around it.

I love the way James Cone brings all these connections together in his conclusion to The Cross and the Lynching Tree³:

The cross of Jesus and the lynching tree of black victims are not literally the same—historically or theologically. Yet these two symbols or images are closely linked to Jesus’ spiritual meaning for black and white life together in what historian Robert Handy has called “Christian America.” Blacks and whites are bound together in Christ by their brutal and beautiful encounter in this land. Neither blacks nor whites can be understood fully without reference to the other because of their common religious heritage as well as their joint relationship to the lynching experience. What happened to blacks also happened to whites. When whites lynched blacks, they were literally and symbolically lynching themselves—their sons, daughters, cousins, mothers and fathers and a host of other relatives. Whites may be bad brothers and sisters, murderers of their own black kin, but they are still our sisters and brothers. We are bound together in America by faith and tragedy. All the hatred we have expressed toward each other cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us—a love that empowered blacks to open their arms to receive the many whites who were also empowered by the same love to risk their lives in the black struggle for freedom. No two people in America have had more violent and loving encounters than black and white people. We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus. No gulf between blacks and whites is too great to overcome, for our beauty is more enduring than our brutality. What God joined together, no one can tear apart.

 

For further exploration:

Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Equal Justice Initiative, 2015)

Legacies of the Cross and the Lynching Tree (This article is an adaptation of the Conclusion to The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone, Tikkun, 1/26/12)

The Cross and the Lynching Tree (James H. Cone, Kindle Edition, 2011)

Christian Soldiers (Jamelle Bouie, Slate, 2/10/15)

Easter Reflection: What Story Are We Telling? (Shannon Dycus, The Mennonite, 3/27/15)

Good Friday in America (Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, Fellowship of Reconciliation, 4/3/15)

America's Willful Ignorance of Our History of Lynching Feeds Racial Hatred (Christen A. Smith, Melissa N. Stuckey, Alternet, 3/24/15)

Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America (James Allen, 2000)

________________________________________________________

¹ Cone, James H. (2011-09-01). The Cross and the Lynching Tree (p. 98). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition.

² The Equal Justice Initiative's recent report, Lynching in America, identifies public spectacle lynching as one of six features of terror lynchings. Most of such lynchings shared one or more of these features. See p.6 in either the pdf summary or the full hard copy report.

³ In the final chapter of Lynching in America, Equal Justice Initiative addresses issues of trauma and healing from the legacy of lynching in some depth. See pages 62-73 of the full report, available from EJI.

⁴ Cone, James H. (2011-09-01). The Cross and the Lynching Tree (pp. 165-166). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition.

Collective shadows and the culture of violence in the United States

This weekend in Selma, Alabama, people have gathered to remember the 50^th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday”. On March 7, 1965 -- in an extreme act of state violence -- Alabama state troopers brutally attacked civil rights marchers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an expression of solidarity to secure equal voting rights.

It’s significant to me in light of this collective remembering that by far the strongest connection I made in my reading of An Indigenous People's History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) and The Cross and the Lynching Tree (James H. Cone) was to violence. From the beginning, violence pervaded colonizers' relationships not only to the land, but with Native Americans, Black people uprooted and brought here as slaves, and, later, any others perceived as a threatening in some way. This behavior – in one form or another – has been carried on against other “enemies” by colonialist descendants.

According to military historian John Grenier, American settlers created a fighting tradition that featured destruction of noncombatants, villages, and agricultural resources. For successive generations of Americans soldiers and civilians, the killing of Indian men, women, and children became a defining element of their first military tradition and thus part of a shared American identity.^[i]

Though this first way of war lost its centrality after 1814, Grenier stresses that Americans must not forget that it has remained part of US military heritage.  In similar ways, the Civil War, strategic bombing of Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II, and the Vietnam War, represent other military campaigns in which the United States “blurred or even erased the boundaries between combatants and noncombatants”.^[ii]

There is another point made by Grenier that I find especially interesting in light of the pervasive shadow (and not-so-shadow) culture of violence that exists in the United States today.

It’s significant, says Grenier, that in the 1790s, settlers tired of what they saw as governmental and Army incompetence to secure the frontier, and so focused on destroying Indian villages and food supplies themselves:

They were unabashed in declaring that their intentions were to drive the Indians from lands on the western side of the Appalachian range and claim those lands as their own, whether the nation-state of the United States wanted them to do so or not.^[iii]

Reading this, I thought about how this vigilante mentality evolved later into lynching of Black people and, to some extent, other minorities. I believe the same shadow of violence found expression through Jim Crow laws, segregation, attacks on voting rights, and, more recently, mass incarceration. Violence (and genocide) against Native Americans continued through the system of reservations, boarding schools, corporate land grabs and broken treaties.

I think it’s likely that many other kinds of both subtle and overt bullying and violence trace back to the same foundations. I think it’s all present anytime institutions or individuals try to make objects out of subjects. In my own profession, for example, I came to understand that diagnosing so-called mental illness by imposing a label based on a DSM checklist is an act of violence. It has nothing to do with life as any person actually lives and experiences it. It is attempted soul murder.

This culture of violence will continue to fragment people, communities and social institutions until we – the collective of US citizenry -- acknowledge the violence that operated beneath the ideals of freedom and brotherhood that we continue to tell ourselves is what America is all about. As a nation, we need to bring our history of violence into the light. Until we can do this, we need to remember all of our bloody Sundays.

---

[i] John Grenier. The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (Kindle Edition Locations 185-186, 203-205).

[ii] Grenier, Kindle Edition Locations 251-254).

[iii] Grenier, Kindle Edition Locations 240-245).

 

Related links:

Burying Vietnam, Launching Perpetual War (Christian Appy, 2/8/15)

Race and Revolution: Reckoning with racial injustice past and present (Goodman, 3/5/15)

March 7, 1965: ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma, Alabama (Richard Kreitner, 3/7/15)

It's a Non-Stop Land Grab From the American Indians (Bill Moyers, 12/26/14)

 

I'll be writing more about collective shadows and shadow work later; here's a great article in the meantime:

How We Contribute to the Collective Shadow (Diane Hancox, MA; 11/17/11)

 

In this presentation to the US Army War College, John Grenier reads from his book, The First Way of War:

 

 

Related articles

Lessons in the Language | The Media Co-op

Re-name Selma Edmund Pettus bridge, petition

Truth and reconciliation, honor and healing, and another leap into the deep end of the pool

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism —the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. -- Roxanne Dubar-Ortiz in An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Revisioning American History) (p. 2, Kindle edition).

I wrestle with questions about black dignity in a world of white supremacy because I believe that the cultural and religious resources in the black experience could help all Americans cope with the legacy of white supremacy and also deal more effectively with what is called “the war on terror.” If white Americans could look at the terror they inflicted on their own black population—slavery, segregation, and lynching—then they might be able to understand what is coming at them from others. Black people know something about terror because we have been dealing with legal and extralegal white terror for several centuries. Nothing was more terrifying than the lynching tree. -- James H. Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Kindle edition).

  Slave trader's business in Atlanta, Georgia, 1864. Photo by George N. Barnard [Wikipedia]

 

Earth has a long and troubling history of oppression and exploitation -- humans against one another, the land, air, water and other species. Fortunately, humanity has many ways to bring love and justice to bear on the consequences. As a justice activist, I’ve engaged in a lot of them, but the focus that has inspired me most and longest is that of healing and transformation, both personal and planetary.

Events that have unfolded or intensified in the past few months -- police brutality and resistance to it emerging with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Native American and First Nations resistance to the KXL Pipeline, corporate land grabs and other challenges to sovereignty and protection of sacred lands -- lead me to believe it’s time for another leap into the deep end of the pool. I’m thinking that this will take the form of a personal truth and reconciliation (honor and healing) process.

Specific ideas about this came in moments of introspection, but they clearly were infused with voices calling from the frontlines of the resistance. I thought about my connections to these struggles, connections beyond those that have come as a result of involvement in social and environmental justice work.

 

Photograph from the mid-1870s of a pile of American bison skulls waiting to be ground for fertilizer. [Wikipedia]

 

Among my ancestors were settlers who arrived here on the Mayflower. And some who were slave holders. I am a descendant of colonists, people who anchored ideas and values of white supremacy into this land and built a nation upon them. Sometimes it's difficult, in light of ongoing oppression and exploitation in the United States and elsewhere, to integrate the realities of my lineage. But for reasons that I’ll explore in a future post, distancing from ancestors delays transformation and healing -- for everyone.

I’ll also detail in a future post how I determined where to jump in. For now, the short story: on November 27^th last year, while others came together to celebrate Thanksgiving, I curled up alone with An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Just before Christmas of 2014, I found the portal into the past of my slave-holder ancestors through The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by James H. Cone.

The ideas in these books don’t support the version of American history or the “American Dream” I grew up with. As I write this post, I have finished both books. The places they took me were intense and, some of them, unexpected.

From Raising Cain to Resurrecting Abel

The quote is from MLK's 1967 speech, Where Do We Go From Here?  Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

Recently I changed the name of this blog (and another one at WordPress) from Raising Cain to Resurrecting Abel.

In my world view, the Biblical story of Cain and Abel is, in part, an allegory related to a specific episode or enactment in the early spiritual history of mankind on Earth. In particular, it encodes some specific information about ancient patterns of relationship that became anchored so tightly into the fabric of planetary life that we, as a human race, continue to struggle with it.  This relational pattern is — for the human collective — as enduring as what we might call a personality trait at the level of psychological development and expression.

And we see it every day. We know the pattern by many names: master-slave, racial caste systems, haves and have-nots, privileged and oppressed, structural racism. How those relationships play out, and the efforts of peace and justice activists to transform them, have been the focus of this blog.

What is it that draws people to justice work? For me there is no one answer, but, certainly, the notion that we are accountable to one another in some fundamental way seems to be at the heart of it. And with that idea has come a question: if we are accountable to each other (and to other species) how are we to be, know, and act in our lives to bring harmony for all life on Earth?

Hexagram 43 of the I Ching has some clues, I think...at least I seem to come back to it almost every time I ask myself this question. A major idea here is that one must "fight without quarter" if good is to prevail over evil. Then follows a pretty significant "however":

 

In a resolute struggle of the good against evil, there are, however, definite rules that must not be disregarded, if it is to succeed. First, resolution must be based on a union of strength and friendliness. Second, a compromise with evil is not possible; evil must under all circumstances be openly discredited. Nor must our own passions and shortcomings be glossed over. Third, the struggle must not be carried on by force. If evil is branded, it thinks of weapons, and if we do it the favor of fighting against it blow for blow, we lose in the end because thus we ourselves get entangled in hatred and passion. Therefore it is important to begin at home, to be on guard in our own persons against the faults we have branded. In this way, finding no opponent, the sharp edges of the weapons of evil become dulled. For the same reasons we should not combat our own faults directly. As long as we wrestle with them, they continue victorious. Finally, the best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good.[1]

I have long been curious how (specifically) ancient Cain consciousness won out ("Cain slew Abel"), setting the pattern for modern structural oppression. It seemed to me that knowing the details might be useful in very practical ways for justice work. When I put the question out to the universe, I got the sense that the original dynamics were in fact being re-enacted in ordinary affairs of humankind. So, for the past few years I've been looking at American politics -- as a ripe example -- to see what details are hidden in plain sight.

 

I'll tell the long story in future posts.

 

But here's the short story, and the reason I renamed my blog: Hexagram 43 is, for me, a blueprint for the core practice of justice work in a new Earth that is emerging -- cultivating awareness, intention and skillful means for making energetic progress in the good. And one thing this means for me is to focus on resurrecting Abel consciousness rather than raising Cain's.

---

[1] Richard Wilhelm (Translator), Cary F. Baynes (Translator), (1950, 1967). The I Ching or Book of Changes, Bollingen Foundation Inc., New York, N.Y.

 

Related Posts from this blog's archives:

Raising Cain: rediscovering ancient roots of structural racism

Cain and Abel in the 21st Century

See also: Shasta-Alaska 11 -- Resurrect Abel Consciousness (9/5/14, Healing Haven Under Hilarion)

Related articles

Anger, Privilege, and Invisible Injustice: What Cain and Abel Have to Do With Ferguson

The Genesis of Justice

Tenn. Lawmakers Join GOP Attack On 'Revisionist' AP US History Exam

I took some time today to read some of the course and exam description of this "new framework" -- it is fairly explicit about some ideas that have been left out of history classes far too long, for example, development of a "rigid racial hierarchy" in the United States, and exploitation of people who were already here when European colonists showed up.

If you follow links in the article you can get to a number of articles/documents that reveal both sides of the question to explore some of this material for yourself. I hope people will not stop at the surface arguments being raised in TN and elsewhere. We need a fresh analysis that uses new ways of thinking, not the old belief systems that perpetuate mindless, heartless oppression. It's time to dig deep for the buried treasures of history and bring them into the light.

The Republican National Committee in August voted to condemn the new framework and the College Board's "radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation's history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects."

via talkingpointsmemo.com

Related links:

RNC Resolution Opposing AP US History Exam Originated With The Religious Right (Right Wing Watch, 8/13/14)

Tennessee GOP senators target 'revisionist' AP U.S. History (The Tennessean, 8/28/14)

AP US History Exam fact sheet (pdf, 507KB)

AP United States History Course homepage

The College Board website

Related articles

Lawmakers call for hearing on new history course

Critics: New College-Prep Curriculum Paints U.S. History in Horrific Light

Not Satisfied with Just Science, the GOP is Now Trying to Dumb Down US History

Push back against AP U.S. History rewrite

"City Upon A Hill": RNC Denounces High-School History Exams

Raising Cain: rediscovering ancient roots of structural racism

Black and White Feather [Photo by Cathie Bird]

My inner call to an anti-racist journey did not come at some immediately recognizable, definable point in time, wasn’t really in the realm of epiphany. It was almost more retrospective, and maybe even more of a renaming or reframe or focusing on a narrower segment of what I’d been calling spiritual path.

In my spiritual tradition, the Biblical story of Cain and Abel is viewed, in part, as an allegory that reveals early spiritual history of the race of man on Earth. In particular, it encodes some specific information about ancient patterns of relationship that became anchored so tightly into the fabric of human life that we, as a human race, struggle with it yet today.  This relational pattern is — for the human collective — as enduring as what we might call a personality trait at the level of individual development and expression.

We know the pattern by many names: master-slave relationships, caste systems, haves and have-nots, privileged and oppressed — these are the coarsest terms for it perhaps, but I think there’s a wider arena of re-enactment than we think in 21st Century America. Not that this hurtful relationship doesn’t operate elsewhere on the planet, but some people involved in anti-racism work say that the situation in the United States is unique. For this and other reasons I’m focusing on what I see and experience here in the United States.

In the society in which this pattern became entrenched, an experiment to explore the denser material dimensions of Earth had gone very wrong, leaving a certain segment of that society unable to access powers and talents that we all have as spiritual beings. For those who retained access to these powers, there arose a question of responsibility to those who had lost them. Some believed there was obligation under spiritual law and principle to help their brothers and sisters find their way out of their entrapment. Others apparently were enjoying “privilege” and became more interested in maintaining the status quo.

This is where the “brother’s keeper” clue comes in. We have brother’s keeper questions all over the place today, one of the most urgent and visible of which is fair access to quality, affordable health care. And it’s not only about being brother’s (and sister’s) keepers — if we decide we are keepers, then how should we “keep”? Mighty questions, indeed. And harder to answer without getting deeper into the roots.

The ancients had eventually managed to structure their society so as to exclude the “have-nots” from any meaningful participation. I wonder sometimes if the brother’s keeper question can become a distraction that never really allows us to take a hard look at the larger problem of how our institutions are structured. If that structure serves one segment of society to the exclusion of another, then we can keep our sisters ’til we drop, but may fail to re-empower anyone to truly share in the adventure of nation-making and keeping each other.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the earliest structuring of institutions in the United States gave privilege of citizenship only to white males. Those ancient battles of the privileged Cains and Abels took place geographically on land that is now within the borders of the United States. We are at ground zero for prototypical systemic racism. What our society and its institutions reflect today is a re-enactment of a civil war that we will do over and over until we get to the old history, the hidden truths that will explode the delusion of privilege if they can be spoken.

So this is the spiritual history of Earth, as I understand it, that fires my enthusiasm for an anti-racist journey. It also fuels my interest generally in work for social and environmental justice. I thought this was an important piece to document as part of the journey because for me the spiritual dimensions are of utmost importance.

I don’t remember what side I was on back then but, today, I’m casting my lot with the Abels, the ancient ones who argued on behalf of helping their fallen brothers and sisters back into full spiritual consciousness. Part of my anti-racist journey is about raising Cain — first and foremost, that of Cain consciousness that still lives in me. I don’t think it’s ever about killing some part of yourself off, but raising it up to a higher level of expression.

I hope to get back soon with more blogging on how I see Cain and Abel alive and well in the 21st Century USA.

I wrote in a little more detail about the historical Cains and Abels on another blog. If you are interested and open-minded, you can read it here.

An afternoon in Atlanta...

Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia [Photo by Cathie Bird]

I went to a workshop in Atlanta several years ago and went down early just to see some sights. I had planned to go to the Carter Center for sure. When I got to the hotel, I looked through some of those what-to-do-while-you-are-in-town things they always have in the room. I was especially interested in sites close to the hotel so I could squeeze in as much as possible. Honestly, it had never occurred to me that the Martin Luther King Center was also in Atlanta, nor had MLK popped into my mind when I thought about my trip. When I saw the information, I felt very strongly that I had to go there.

I did end up going to the Carter Center first. Interestingly, the current exhibit there included a bunch of U.S. historical documents from the Library of Congress — I think there was a Louisiana Purchase paper and a letter or draft of something that Abraham Lincoln penned, among other really, really old stuff. Being in the same room with these things brought up a lot of feelings and thoughts about being a U.S. citizen…a stronger feeling of connection with the nation’s past. After I looked at the exhibit, I went out on the grounds — very beautiful with flowers, trees, water, open space. I sat on a bench to meditate but could not focus, and felt like I had to move on to the MLK Center.

I got majorly turned around and confused by the Atlanta street system, so lost a few minutes there, but finally found the parking area for the Center. On the way to the building I passed by the statue of Ghandi on the grounds. The path to it was all pavement and concrete and, unlike my visit to the Carter Center, there was no question that I was in the heart of a city.

Once I scoped out the grounds and all the things to do there it was clear that I did not have time to do everything, so I just tuned into my heart to see where it would go. I settled on a walk up the street to the King family home, then down to Ebenezer Baptist Church and finally back to the main visitor’s center to check out exhibits there.

Of all the things I experienced within these few blocks of Atlanta, two things are very present in mind, body and soul even today, seven years later. The first was my visit to Ebenezer Baptist. Inside you can sit in the pews and listen to a continuous audio presentation of various speeches by Dr. King. Just hearing his words in his own voice was awesome, but the other thing that impressed me so deeply was what I would call the spirit of the people who’d sat there before me. I think something leaked into my soul and out into my heart from that place that day: a desire to be truly free of the mental and emotional chains that I know I will feel as long as any other person on this planet is oppressed by another.

The second extraordinary experience of that day happened across the street at the MLK visitor center. I’ll save it for a later post. Quite frankly, I’m not sure yet what to say about it.

On the path...

Thanks for dropping by!

I believe that the desire to make one’s life matter is shared by all people. And thank the heavens that each person has her or his own story about mattering. I realized on my 12th birthday that making my life matter had a lot — and maybe everything — to do with contributing to peace, justice and liberation of the true self of every person on Earth. At the time, of course, I did not necessarily put it in those words. In time, I came to realize that the only life I can truly liberate is my own.

I’m more than a little bent out of shape about the fact that some five decades later, I am still unearthing pieces of history that I needed back when I was 12 (or younger) but never got — information that would have gotten me to where I am now a lot quicker. I’m going to talk about those pieces of history on this blog. And I’m going to talk about what I am discovering about institutionalized racism in the United States, my indoctrination into that system as a person of privilege, and the process of liberating my true self — a self that I believe is, among other things, inherently anti-racist.

I will also post links to related articles, books and videos, and may include brief notes about any thoughts or reactions I had.

I am finally beginning to understand just how important this is to me, and I’m ready to raise a little Cain.