Why Black lives matter to me, and what I’m doing about it

I want to begin this post by pointing you to a wonderful song whose refrain, “Black lives matter to me” keeps going through my head. adrienne maree brown, the song’s author and singer, is a beloved colleague of mine.

Hopefully some of you now have that playing in your head too as I tell you why Black lives matter to me, and my reasons for and process around supporting the local direct actions being conducted by Young Gifted and Black, Freedom Inc, Groundwork and SURJ, among other organizations and allies, in support of community control of policing.

My first reason for wanting to show up for racial justice by supporting the movement for Black lives is my Jewish heritage. I grew up on stories of the holocaust, and how some gentiles (the “righteous” ones) took action, at the very real risk of their lives, to protect Jews from the Nazi genocide. The message, as I heard it in in my liberal home town of Ann Arbor, MI, was that it is our job to stand up when evil is being done to others.

A pause to contemplate the use of the word “evil.” I’m not at all sure the childhood message I received actually included the word evil, and I don’t usually use it myself, but for some reason it feels appropriate here. Why? I don’t actually believe in the Devil, or a conscious force that impels individuals to do bad things. I don’t believe that individuals are inherently bad or sinful. I believe we have great potential for good – and also great potential for bad. I believe that our experiences, our environment, the larger systems of which we are a part and which shape us deeply, influence us to do both good and bad things. We have some capacity as individuals to choose and change our habitual or unconscious responses to those systemic influences, but that capacity is itself supported or hindered by our environment. Individuals also have some capacity when we act collectively to change the systems that shape us. That too, is a challenging endeavor.

So the “evil,” as I see it, is mostly in the systems, rather than in the individuals. And the systems in question when it comes to racism and brutality in policing are not just the systems of the police themselves, but also the broader social context in which this policing occurs. As my former sociology professor Pam Oliver said in a recent blog post that is well worth reading, “As long as you have a society built around inequality where a major part of the job of the police is to enforce that inequality, the oppressed members of the community will distrust the police no matter how pleasant, respectful and fair individual officers are.”

The second biggest reason I am getting involved in local actions is relationships. I have been working for years to support movement activists, most recently through CORE and by bringing generative somatics to Wisconsin. I have also been working intermittently for years (thanks in large part to the leadership of Barbara Love and others in Re-Evaluation Counseling) on developing friendships and other real relationships with people of color. This means that the lives of Black people and other People of Color matter to me because a number of them are beloved friends and colleagues, and inspiring leaders whose work I admire and whose leadership I follow.

One such inspiring leader is adrienne maree brown, whose song I have been listening to, and who was here in Madison doing facilitation work for us the night of the Dallas police shootings. Reading her wonderful, heart-wrenching blog the past few weeks, I have been thinking about beginning to wear a “#blackband” – a black armband to indicate grieving for the lives lost and my commitment to end white supremacy. It has deep resonances for me with the yellow armbands the Nazis made the Jews wear.

I have been wondering, am I ready? Is this authentic? Are my motivations for wearing an armband or showing up to the protests good ones? I am motivated partly by wanting to get involved with the local chapter of the awesome national organization SURJ, Showing Up for Racial Justice, which is led by one of the most brave, funny, inspiring white Jewish women I have had the privilege to meet, Dara Silverman. SURJ has a growing partnership with generative somatics, which I am trying to figure out how to bring to Wisconsin.

Are these good enough reasons? In the past I haven’t wanted to go to protests “just for show,” showing up to be seen, so that people will believe my heart & politics are in the right place. Do I need to show up to protests to be trusted? I do want to be trusted. I expect to be trusted, which I’ve come to realize is due to my privilege. But am I really trustworthy? Am I really “in” for this, all the way? And do I need to be, to show up?

Really, I’d rather keep going with my life as I’d planned it this week, than cancel meetings and dates to show up for rallies and actions. And, because I am not Black, and not directly impacted (though, I would argue, we are all indirectly impacted, and dehumanized, by white supremacy… that’s another blog post), I can afford to go on with my “business as usual.” Of course, when my own life was on the line with cancer last year, I put nearly everything else on hold. Why not now?

Of course, another major reason I decided to attend a rally last week was that I was asked directly and personally (by a white person) to do so. After being asked, I seriously considered risking arrest last week at the demonstration at the police station. After all, I am in a post-cancer-treatment phase of doing things that I always thought I might do “someday,” and getting arrested for a cause I care about is one of those things. However, I have had some qualms about the tactics of this movement, and I was not fully in alignment with the plan to protest / block / occupy the police station, especially a few days after the Dallas shootings. I feared it would escalate things towards more violence. And, I am more inclined to try to make allies out of the police, than to blame them for what is happening. As I said, what I believe is truly evil is the system as a whole, including the setup that assigns police officers to patrol low-income communities of color, where they of course, then, see more crimes, because they are there looking for them, instead of looking for them in white neighborhoods. I am also by nature (environmental shaping, that is) a conflict-avoider. And, I have years and years of practice as a process facilitator, where it was my job to stay as neutral as possible on the content, not taking sides, working to find common ground and “win-win” solutions. But if I'm trying to learn to follow the lead of people of color, I thought, maybe I should defer to their judgment here, and support the action despite my qualms. They are asking us, as white people, to show up in support.

I went to two planning meetings for the action, and helped make signs for it, and attended it, and supported the people sitting down, but decided that I was not ready to put my body on the line, because of my doubts and because of how new I was to the group. If I do get arrested for civil disobedience someday, I want it to be with people I trust and who I know trust me. Also, one of the Groundwork trainers, Dawn Matlak, who briefed people planning to risk arrest, pointed out that we should not do so out of any sense of glory. Especially in this context, for white people to glorify getting arrested by the police while protesting police brutality towards Black people would really not be thoughtful. Another reason not to plan to lock arms and sit down, since doing something because it’s on my “bucket list” is kind of like glorifying it.

I did make some signs that I felt comfortable with – “Does your badge still stand for justice?”, and “Are you an officer of the peace?” Yet as a newcomer to the movement, I have been reluctant to push my views about messaging. I recently came across this cartoon that explains the problem with “tone policing,” or derailing an argument by critiquing the emotionality with which it is delivered. I have been on both the delivering and the receiving end of “tone policing,” and I am trying to learn where the boundary is between it and giving someone helpful feedback and coaching around mindfulness and the skillful expression of emotions in community organizing work.

I truly believe that we need to move towards organizing from our love and compassion more than from our anger and fear in order to create lasting change. But I also know that we need to make space to listen deeply to anger, fear, grief, and other negative emotions, and that I am only in a position to give useful feedback if someone trusts me – trusts that I can and do hear their pain. While it may be true that you “catch more flies with honey,” avoiding participation in the movement because the tone of the protest pushes my buttons and triggers my conflict avoidance patterns isn’t where I want to be.

And, in another mindfulness practice I’ve been learning, I remind myself to ask, Am I sure? Am I sure that angry expressions towards the police will only escalate things in a harmful way? Am I sure that nonviolence in speech, tone, and action is always the best and only strategy that will work? Or have nonviolent approaches worked historically because of the tangible contrast that has usually been present between violent approaches and nonviolent ones? Perhaps history is unfolding and the arc of the universe is bending towards justice in the only way it can.

Yesterday afternoon I went to paint signs again, and to support the logistics for the actions planned for today. While I was painting on canvas (and enjoying it – my experience with peace activist Kaz Tanahashi’s mindful calligraphy workshop a few years ago really helped me with the brushwork!) I got to listen to some young white activists sharing tips on handling bodily functions during sit-ins, and talking about their hopes and disappointments about school, work, and love. Having put off a bunch of work to go help out, I wont be attending the actions themselves. For now, you will find me, not on the front lines or at the barricades, but writing about it in the middle of the night, donating money to the supplies and bail fund, and in the back room, building relationships through painting signs and listening deeply to the stories being told.