(This Photo is from 25th Hour, A Spike Lee Joint, one of CxD’s favorite movies of all-time and a film that’s essential viewing again, today. I’ll ask that you to watch this scene further below because it shows a first step to unravelling our collective gordian knots of anger and oppression)
Welcome Friends to the Fuck You! Edition of CxD, an edition I never imagined myself writing. If you’re reading this on Sunday morning, I’m sorry. Maybe a mimosa will help.
Mimosa
1 ounce fresh squeezed orange juice. Don’t use that store-bought bullshit. Get some real big ass oranges whose skins you can feel, and squeeze the juice out of them with your bare hands.
5 ounces cold dry sparkling wine.
Pour both into a chilled flute glass and gently mix with a bar spoon or knife if you ain’t fancy.
Mimosa in hand, this is a longer than usual edition of CxD, written from my heart to yours, so I hope you can set aside a few deliberate minutes in which to read it.
Character by Design is fierce work, genuine transformation is often painful, and I’m suffering along with everyone else during this time of upheaval and rage and fear and sickness and protest and the squeegeeing of our spiritual eyes; but of course I’m also suffering way less than people who have been killed, or brutalized, people who have been on the protest front-lines, and who have endured generations upon generations of cruelty and systematic injustice and hatred. Maybe it’s quickest to say We are all suffering and there are none of us who are not responsible.
But if there’s a path forward, here’s my view of the initial steps that I think differ from a lot of what I’ve heard spoken about already out there at large, whatever that means.
1. The hardest work by far is reaching those who have constricted their minds into closing––this might very well be your mind and my mind to whatever varying degrees. Close-minded in the sense that information or sensibilities that we don’t already agree with are unwelcome and turned away. No new views or perspectives are allowed in. Like a black hole out of which light cannot escape, the mind’s door is locked shut to seeing something new. A lack of compassion quickly follows. There are many causal reasons for this, about which later.
2. How do you know if you have an open mind or a closed mind? Only one question is necessary: How often have you been able to say “I was wrong”? Or “I made a mistake.” Or “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize my actions had that kind of impact on you.” Or even “I disagree with you, but this relationship matters to me, so I’m willing to hear you speak, and I’ll reflect back to you what you said, to make sure I heard you correctly.” Do you usually blame everyone but yourself?
3. People whose minds are more closed than open will not open them upon hearing facts, reason, or finely constructed logical appeals. You will not argue successfully no matter what. This has been an extraordinarily painful lesson for me to learn deep-down in my bones, and I often still resist its reality and monolithic force. But when I do resist, I’m the one who suffers. Appeals to reason do not work when a mind is closed.
4. What alternatives remain? Sometimes none. When the other person does not care enough to maintain an authentic relationship with you or with their community, and is not willing to have conversations out of fear or anger or conflict anxiety, you cannot make them. You must instead bow to what the relationship has brought and walk away. As the months or years pass, maybe they will find the loss intolerable and will be willing to talk again. Maybe not. It’s not up to us, often, and that, too, is extremely painful. Bow to this pain and ask for Grace.
5. We are now at the beginning of another wave of a powerful co-operative movement to begin deepening our individual and collective understanding of the systemic injustices and history of our nation and to better understand how the oppressed truly live and feel. To that end, this is the most thorough collection of resources for awakening our consciousness: bit.ly/ANTIRACISMRESOURCES
6. The above work of understanding is necessary, but something more fundamental is needed. That’s because understanding, to a large extent, often remains intellectual and made of thoughts. It leads to the problem I named above: we won’t change others or ourselves through the intellect alone. What we need is a direct path to the emotions and feelings that are hard-wired into our nervous systems; those are the actual first-responder maps through which we see the world.
7. It is these internal structures––these parts of ourselves––that need not just understanding, but acceptance. Understanding your history is not enough. You must also unequivocally, open-heartedly, accept it.
7. Because if we can’t accept the emotional parts of ourselves, we have zero chance to not only understand but to accept them in others. And until genuine, complete, non-judgemental acceptance is achieved, we will fall back to intellectual gamesmanship which, I promise you, is not anywhere close to the target of transformation. You will be left screaming in anger at someone who will scream back at you.
8. In this particular context––the year 2020 and its gifts of killer hornets and viral pandemics and systemic abuses of power and the ensuing protests––many of our internal parts are really fucking angry. We cannot skip over getting to know these angry parts of ourselves. Rather, we must turn towards them, and listen. Just––fucking––listen. What might this part say?
9. I was working in a high school with Teach For America in Jersey City on September 11th, 2001, less than a mile away from the World Trade Center. Everything changed in that moment. After the grief, the anger didn’t waste any time. Spike Lee, who directed 25th Hour, was one of the first artists to write an artistic testimonial about what this anger was saying and doing to us.
10. For anything that I’ve written so far to make sense, you have to watch this 5 minute scene from 25th Hour all the way through because there’s an unexpected surprise at the end.
The set up: Edward Norton’s character is arrested for drug possession and has a full day in NYC to tie up loose ends before starting his prison sentence. Here he’s in the bathroom at his father’s bar:
If you do nothing else, watch this! ☝️
11. All of us get fucked over eventually in ways big and small, sporadic or systemic, and then we get angry in retaliation. We blame everyone and everything until there’s nothing left but the all-encompassing Anger itself. Whether you are on the privileged side or the side of the oppressed, or still pretend that you’re not involved, this angry part of us will keep your mind closed shut if it is not first fully seen and heard.
Note: This step is NOT a “there are equal troubles on both sides” argument; rather, in order for Anger to become productive, we must all see it first so that it doesn’t govern us, so it allows our minds to open as wide as possible to all the creative solutions waiting to be discovered. You cannot be creative from a place of ego.
12. If this scene’s angry constrictions and the acting out of our protective mechanisms were the only option, then all of us would truly be left fucked and hopeless, intoxicated and corroded by our own anger with nowhere left to go.
Notice carefully, though: after Ed Norton’s character truly let his Angry part speak––to himself, in a moment of genuine refection, both literal and metaphorical, without turning away––that part of him had an occasion for insight which transforms to a recognition and acceptance beyond understanding. It is here, at this holy cross-roads after the intellect has exhausted its explanations, that Ed Norton realizes “I am responsible.”
13. All of us are racists because all of us have angry parts like this. The difference is that some of us are willing to do the work of listening to these parts of ourselves, understanding their pain, and then going forth into the world and never speaking from these parts, but transforming their pain into acceptance and that acceptance into understanding and that understanding into wholesome action that the wise would approve and that makes an attempt to heal the world. If there is anger in you, what is its source? Go to the mirror. Ask. And listen. Your mind will open.
14. So: If we do this hard as fuck work, if we design our character deliberately with this small but essential step, then all of us have an opportunity to prove W.H. Auden’s dark prophecy wrong:
“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
15. The rhetoric professor in me found this model of teaching how to meet those in denial extremely skillful, courtesy of rachel.cargle:
If you found today’s newsletter valuable, and you think it could do some good out there in some small corner of the world, please share it. A passive keeping-it-to-yourself is no longer the way if transformational shit is to get done.
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Terrific edition, my friend! So much to chew on. Rene' and I started reading White Fragility last night together to start working on ourselves in the first uncomfortable steps toward living our lives as Antiracists. If you don't understand the nature of the problem, you can't be a part of the solution! First step of many I want to take. Thanks for the resources you list... so much!