Openly Challenging Our Racism
From a talk by Tim Jackins at the East Coast North America Leaders’ Workshop, December 2022
We’ve worked on racism for decades now, with good effect. I think we can be pleased that we have done this work consistently for this long. I don’t think anybody needs to be dissatisfied with themselves about it. We also keep realizing that there is more to do. It’s clear that there are still things that confuse us.
Our societies were built on racism, and we all grew up in these societies. We grew up around people who didn’t question racism and its effects. It was part of the natural order. Nobody questioned it. It was just the way it was.
If we were lucky, we had some people around us who did challenge it, who did question it, who did move against it, so we got some contrast between what was happening almost everywhere around us and what might be and should be different.
There are no racist tendencies inherent in the human mind. When a child is born and looks out at you, they don’t care who you are. They don’t care if you are family. They only care that you can look at them and be aware of them, that you can be human. We RCers know this more than most people. We try to look and be present and not have it twisted and distorted by distresses. We try to be fully there.
As we discharge on racism, we realize how “deeply set” the distresses are. They were all around us from our first days. Those of us with European heritage grew up hearing that we were superior in every way. It was seldom challenged in our families, schools, jobs, and elsewhere.
Because we haven’t acted out the distresses as fully, we can feel superior to people—for example, those in white supremacy groups—who show these distresses more openly than we think we do. In fact, the distresses have been part of our lives as well. It is good to have some control over them, but they can still play a role in our perspectives.
So, we get to continue this work.
SHOWING OUR DISTRESSES MORE FULLY
I think we have racist distresses that we never mention to anybody. They are our private little burden that we try to keep out of sight. We try to control their effect on us. We haven’t been able to fully look at them, admit them openly, and discharge on them. We still feel too guilty and too ashamed for having that material [distress]. But we know that no one’s material is about them. All our distresses and irrationality happened because of the conditions around us.
We know how people get hurt and how it affects their thinking. We know that the rigidities that distresses put in can be removed. How do we use what we know as we keep working on racism?
Discharging happens more easily when we trust someone, when we have some hope that they will try to understand and not unthinkingly react to what we say—that they will think about us and the way we were hurt and not confuse us with our distresses, and our behavior because of those distresses.
Our progress in Co-Counseling can be examined along the path toward more trust. As we’ve developed relationships in which we can more fully count on [rely on] our counselor, our sessions have changed and developed. We can tell our counselor a more personal version of our story and have some assurance, or at least hope, that they can listen and not “react.”
We need to do this with the hurts of racism. We need to show the distresses we still “work” to control. I congratulate you on the degree of control that you have developed. But I don’t want it to interfere with discharging all the distress.
So, one of our challenges is to show someone the distresses that we have had to “clamp down” [suppress and not show].
What makes us behave less than intelligently with somebody who is targeted by racism? What little things do we need to counsel on that we push out of the way?
Every time we’re restimulated in an interaction, part of us disappears. A little of us is unavailable for the interaction we were trying to build and maintain. People who know us well, especially in RC, have some idea of our commitment to ending racism. They see us try. They see us improve as the years go on. But enough of these little things happen that our relationships are affected.
So, we get to work on the hidden things. We get to tell somebody what we still feel we need to hide.
Oppressive societies like ours create the conditions that hurt people badly, and then they blame the people for being hurt. We can learn to be openly unashamed about having been hurt. We can be unashamed for carrying the damage that the society inflicts on everybody—that makes everybody ashamed of it, embarrassed enough to hide it, even in a context like this one in which we can do the work to free ourselves from it.
BEING WHITE
One way to work on racism, among many, is to look at what it means to be white in our societies.
We didn’t choose to be white. We didn’t choose for society to be structured in this irrational way. But as white people we benefit from it.
How have we benefited from it? Well, what would your job be if you weren’t white? What would your living situation be? What would your neighborhood be? What would you pay for housing? How would you be treated by the structures that have power?
Because we who are white are not treated in racist ways, we get to avoid certain hurts and distresses. What are you thankful that you missed, that you dodged, because racism identified you as white?
What makes you happy that you are white? Where are you relieved that you have life the way it is?
What are the racist stereotypes that still restimulate you? When someone says, “It’s a Black neighborhood,” what comes to mind? What are the pictures frozen in your mind that you haven’t been able to tell people? I think we know that these restimulations are just that—restimulations. There is no reality to them. The pictures are constructed of distress recordings.
Our oppressive society needs us to be at odds [in conflict] with each other so it can keep functioning. It needs us to believe that our life is somehow superior. It needs us to not want to be someone else because that would be worse. Such hierarchies are inherent in class societies.
CHALLENGING RACISM CONSISTENTLY
For quite some time, racism has been the biggest tool in keeping oppressive societies in place. It’s not the only tool, but it’s been the biggest one. It’s the one that we need to challenge most consistently and openly. We need to discharge on it and get it out of our minds.
We also get to challenge the effects of our material long before we discharge it all. We discharge it more quickly when we challenge it, because part of any distress recording is the message that we are helpless to change it. So, what else do we need to do? What actions do we need to take against the limitations that the distress tries to put on us? If we didn’t have racist material, what would we do?
(Present Time 211, April 2023)