It’s Not Every Walk
Have you seen the post? It lists some of the names of Black people who were recently killed or experienced racism while doing everyday things like walking home. It’s incredibly powerful and I’m sure I’m not the only one that cried reading it.
As a white woman married to a Black man for 25 years, raising Black sons and mixed-race daughters, the first time I saw it, I was actually in the middle of compiling my own list. It was a list that I wanted to send to my White family and friends. I was feeling so much pain, frustration and anger. It hurt that my family and friends didn’t seem to understand our pain, were focused more on the “good” police, or the riots than on the murder of a Black man. I’ll admit that I was also frustrated with myself for not speaking out more over the years, for not telling them the many situations of racism, racial discrimination, or racial trauma we had experienced as a mixed-race family.
Let me be clear. I am speaking from my White experience and to fellow White folks. I can’t speak to the Black experience. But, I can speak to an experience of living in two different worlds—a world where I experience privilege and advantage if I am by myself and a world in which I witness racism when I am with my family.
That frustration led me to start a list of where we have experienced bias, racism or racial discrimination most of them targeting my Black husband and sons:
Going for a walk
Playing at the park
Playing tennis
Being in our front yard
Going shopping
Eating at a restaurant
Applying for a job
Doing our jobs
In airports and airplanes, schools, malls and churches.
Of course this wasn’t an exclusive list. I stopped here, even knowing there were so many more to add.
The first item on my list was walking. We’ve lived in our neighborhood for over 20 years and I walk several times a week. Never have I been stopped by police while walking. Yet, my Black son was regularly stopped and questioned when he walked to work. Walking. I thought about it more and realized what keeps the system of racism going, what is even more insidious, is that it’s not every walk. If it were every walk we’d all pay attention more and the injustice would be more apparent.
Even more insidious and more traumatic, you never know which walk it will be. When it’s not every walk You never know when you can fully enjoy and let your guard down. When it’s not every walk You never know when the tiger of racism will jump out from behind the bush. That uncertainty adds to the trauma; adds to the need to stay alert and keep the sympathetic nervous system engaged, never able to fully relax.
When it’s not every walk it’s easy for others to dismiss and then for those experiencing the racism to second-guess themselves, leading to a collective/societal gaslighting that has supported and perpetuated racial inequity and racism.
But, as the anti-racism model, Racial Sobriety points out, the dysfunction of racism and the factors that support it are similar to the dysfunction in families and the factors that support the addiction or abuse.
One of the aspects of abusive relationships/abusive families is gaslighting—as I read, think of how this not only applies to abusive relationships in families, but the abusive relationship of racism, racial hate, racial trauma and racial discrimination:
While I don’t normally quote Wikipedia, I appreciate their definition of gaslighting. As you read it, think both of the dysfunction of abusive families and of the system of racism.
“Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes including low self-esteem. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's beliefs. Instances can range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents occurred, to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.”
It may not be every walk, but if you only focus on the walks that are fine, you’re contributing to the trauma; if you only focus on the walks that are fine, you’re contributing to the gaslighting; if you only focus on the walks that are fine, you are perpetuating the dysfunction.
Y’all know I’m not just talking about walks. So if you’re focus is on the fact that everyone has equal access to jobs, everyone can just work hard and get what they want; we’ve proved it—Blacks and Whites alike can even be president….just look at James (the one Black person on the leadership team) you’re contributing to the dysfunction, the trauma the gaslighting.
So let’s talk strategies.
From that same racial sobriety model, their strategies are to talk, trust, and feel.