Blackout Tuesday
Reading time: 1 minute, 30 seconds
I wasn’t going to write a blog this week because it seemed like the time to shut up, listen, read, and hold the space— 🔇🙏🏻🙏🏾🙏🏼🙏.
Then this blog post started composing itself and, I realized, for me, writing is a way of listening. A way of sifting through, integrating, and observing, particularly any pointy places showing up inside myself.
For example, that pointy place around what I should say or do to show up for human kindness, justice, and equality.
As the black boxes surfaced in my Instagram feed on Blackout Tuesday supporting George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, I thought: Do I post a black box? I want to be a part of a society, a world, where anyone, and everyone, is free to be who they are. I want to do my part to carry the torch for oneness and peace.
On the other hand, I also wasn’t interested in empty virtue signaling. (Virtue signaling = the sharing of one's viewpoint on a social or political issue in order to garner praise or acknowledgment of one's righteousness from others who share that point of view).
In the end, I decided not to post the black box but, instead, to listen carefully to what was being said, go inside, and take a good look around. Here’s what I found:
Denial (and some other stuff, too).
I’m no stranger to the deep dives and “integrating the shadow” as they say. I’ve committed the past 20+ years of my life to investigating, and unraveling, the religious, social, political, and psychological conditioning that has tried to tell me who I am and/or who I should be. I’ve done endless healing and digging to get underneath that egoic programming and suss out the essence of what I am.
As a result, I know the “me” that shows up as a “me” in this world is, basically, well—let’s call it computer code. 🖥️ This “self” called “me” is a jumble of code in the form of concepts, beliefs, perceptions, emotions/sensations, psychological tactics, and programming (with some organs, bones, and tissues thrown in there) masquerading as a person. Person is just a thought / label for what’s actually here: what some might call, simply, Awareness. This is what we all are. All of us. Black, brown, white, Asian, trans, queer, tree, bird, table, water, sun, moon, bear, sky—these are just names/labels we have come up with to describe the indescribable. To label the un-labelable. We have taken mysterious, undefinable, inseparable, unknowable flowing Awareness and conveniently divided it into subjects and objects. All of this labeling is simply thought layered over something that can’t be thought. Mind story. Programming. Computer code. That’s it.
Welcome to the Matrix.
I’d be denying reality to pretend the particular code that comes with any programmed “me” didn’t include racial and other biases. This is the key point that seems to get so easily lost. We’re all encoded with these biases. To pretend otherwise is to take a big trip around the self-deception racetrack. We aren’t born encoded. We’re programmed. The kind of programming that seeps into us like vapor from the world around us, often invisibly so, like any other beliefs, religious, political, or otherwise.
After listening carefully this week, I see more clearly now why it’s so damaging to deny that the racism code isn’t part of our programming by telling ourselves we are “good people,” “spiritual,” and/or “not Racist.” We may very well be good, caring people, but the reason why it’s damaging to deny the code is there is because by denying it—by denying any un-owned part of ourselves—we remain unconscious of it and by remaining unconscious, we remain unconscious of all the subtle, seemingly innocent (and not so innocent) ways we may perpetuate the problem. As Ibram X. Kendi put it, “Once people come to grips with the real definition of racism… they can stop denying that they may have racist ideas, that they may be supporting racist policies, that they are doing nothing in the face of racial inequity.”
Do I always set clear boundaries with family members/friends when they make what might be considered racist or other discriminatory comments? Do I pay attention, really pay attention, to how I benefit from my white privilege? Have I taken the time to SEE these how these systemic issues continue to play out?
What is denied can’t be healed, what goes unchecked/unobserved continues—individually and collectively. 💔🌎 I know from my own healing work that pain from past trauma must be listened to, heard, and acknowledged in order to make way for the new. Healing ourselves, and our world, begins with genuine open-heartedness.
“We can say ‘Peace on Earth.’ We can sing about it, preach about it or pray about it, but if we have not internalized the mythology to make it happen inside us, then it will not be.” - Betty Shabazz
Yours in de-programming the program🌼,
KB
