Day 89 The Belief Borrowers; and, How You Came to Believe What You Believe

The New York Times has seen days of considerable turmoil since they published Senator Tim Cotton’s incendiary Op-Ed on Tuesday. Over one thousand staffers and reporters of The Times objected to the piece. The Opinion page editor has resigned.

In an article detailing the story, the author wrote, “‘American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment,’ Wesley Lowery tweeted of the Times debacle. ‘We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.’” Wesley Lowery is the white, male reporter who began the cascade of truth after the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

Attorney General William Barr “said he did not think racism was a systemic problem in policing, though he acknowledged general racism in the United States. ‘I don’t think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist,’ he said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” ‘I think we have to recognize that for most of our history, our institutions were explicitly racist.’” Uh, what? Could it be a little more they-went-thataway?

Um. And Archie Bunker wasn’t racist, right? Puh-lease.

“Marcus Shadwick, 23, who attended a rally on Sunday in Spokane, Wash., said that systemic racism was its own disease. ‘These protests are bigger than any virus,’ he said. ‘These protests are a cure for a virus that’s been going on for 400 years.’”

Three and a half years ago, Thanksgiving Day in the United States followed the presidential election just like it does every four years as reliable as Greenwich Mean Time. What was different about Thanksgiving 2016 was that I lost count of the phone calls I received from Monday-Wednesday of that week asking me for advice about how liberal adult children could deal with parents who were rabid Trump supporters on our already-dubious national day of thanks. Trump-supporting parents appalled those liberal adult children and made them want to cover the ears of their own children so they weren’t exposed to the rhetoric of hate that elected the Cheetoh-in-Chief.

I said the same thing to each one of my callers. First, don’t drink. The inhibitions come down and you could foment real argument at the table. Second, agree to disagree, change the subject, move on. Third, distract. “Emma, why don’t you tell Nana and Pops about your school field trip?”

This morning I wish I could have a do-over. I wish I’d stopped at agree to disagree. Why? Because I’ve spent almost four years watching the Cornered-Badger-in-Chief use distraction in an attempt to keep our focus away from what’s really happening—in front of our very noses.

Eleven nights of protest have gone on all over the world. Protests against racism, against police brutality, against a system so infiltrated with white privilege that we who are white cannot even see it.

Does that shock you? It should.

Let’s return to the journalistic turmoil for a moment. “‘When an organization loses a journalist as talented and as fiercely committed to the truth as Wesley Lowery, its leaders need to ask themselves why,’ said Felicia Sonmez, a national political reporter who clashed with Mr. Baron over a different tweet. ‘We need more reporters like him, not fewer.’”

Not all of us are professional reporters, true. But all of us are reporters in a different sense. We all tell stories about our experiences to those we encounter. Those stories are reports, aren’t they? We report on our reality without even thinking about how we came to think what we think, or how we came to believe what we believe.

Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Hers is the first book I bought when I wanted to learn more about the prison system and racism in this country. In this morning’s Times, she wrote “America, This Is Your Chance.”

I have to agree. Every experience we have is a chance to consider both what we believe and how we came to believe it and why we believe it, ergo, it is also a chance to change what we believe.

She begins, “The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously said that ‘the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.’ Today, the same can be said of our criminal injustice system, which is a mirror reflecting back to us who we really are, as opposed to what we tell ourselves.”

Who are you really, Beloved? There is a difference between what we tell ourselves about who we are, and who we are on the inside, authentically. This is why anti-oppression training, as valuable as it is, goes only so far. Anyone can learn new vocabulary. Anyone can learn new behaviors. If you want to do that, please, it’s a grand idea.

I am asking you and me to go further than that though. I’m asking us all, new vocabulary, new behaviors notwithstanding, to examine your real beliefs, what you believe from the inside out. I can learn to say African-American, but if I’m thinking instead in racial epithets, it doesn’t really matter how woke my language is, does it?

Ms. Alexander again, “I will not pretend to have a road map that will lead us to higher ground. But for those who are serious about rising to the challenge, I will share a few of the key steps that I believe are necessary if we are to learn from our history and not merely repeat it.

“We must face our racial history and our racial present. [the bold is hers] We cannot solve a problem we do not understand. ...  A majority of whites persistently deny the scale and severity of racial injustice that people of color endure.”

William Barr anyone? Some days when I read the comments from the administration, all I can do is shake my head in disbelief. What world is he living on? Because it’s certainly not this one.

What do you believe about the scale and severity of racial injustice that people of color endure? What are you saying aloud on the outside, yes? But what are you saying in a whisper within? Are you, like the Pharisees and the Sadducees of scriptural notoriety practicing ‘vain repetitions?’ Are you saying the words without thinking the thoughts?

Ms. Alexander goes on, “We must reimagine justice. The days of pretending that tinkering with our criminal injustice system will ‘fix it’ are over. The system is not broken; it is functioning according to its design. ... People are right to wonder—is this justice? Can’t we design alternative approaches to poverty, drug abuse, mental illness, trauma and violence that would do less harm than police, prisons, jails and lifelong criminal records? Fortunately, the extraordinary protests sweeping the nation and the globe are beginning to have an impact.”

What do you think about justice—the concept? What do you believe constitutes justice? Are you for ‘liberty and justice for all’ or just for some? Dig, Beloved. Dig deep. No broad strokes here. No “racism is wrong.” It’s too big. And when our beliefs are too big, we are often merely distancing ourselves from the problem in order to avoid uncomfortable emotions. Barring genuine pathology, no one ever died of being uncomfortable. But plenty of people have died because of unexamined belief systems.

Do you have ideas about how to handle poverty? The scourge of addiction? A complete lack of a mental illness infrastructure? Trauma and its treatment? Violence in all forms? What do you really believe about these things? Really believe. Not the party line. Not what you ‘borrowed’ from your parents, or heroes, or coaches, or teenage cool kids. But you, at your core. What do you believe?

Return to Ms. Alexander, “We must fight for economic justice. We cannot achieve racial justice and create a secure and thriving democracy without also transforming our economic systems. ... We must work to create an economic system that benefits us all, not just the wealthy. If our nation was not so deeply divided along racial lines—and if so many white people were not revolted by the idea of their tax dollars helping poor people of color obtain education, housing and social benefits—we would likely have a social democracy like Norway or Canada. Achieving economic justice requires we work for racial justice, and vice versa. There is no way around it.”

Ah. Money. Here is where the rubber so often meets the road. Our beliefs about money are crucial to economic recovery necessitated by the novel coronavirus. Without economic justice, we will continue to perpetuate the systems that have caused these eleven—and counting—days of protests.

What does money mean to you? What did your family teach you about money? What have you taught your children about money? Is money a driving force in your life? Is safety, security, life itself wrapped up in financial well-being? Do you believe we all deserve the same? Do you like what you believe about money, Beloved? Do you need to have a serious look at the beliefs you’ve borrowed over the years and update your Money Policy? Borrowed money beliefs are some of the most insidious. They need excavation. They need the light of day. They need logic. Really, money beliefs need love.

And here is her stunning conclusion, “Our only hope for our collective liberation is a politics of deep solidarity rooted in love. In recent days, we’ve seen what it looks like when people of all races, ethnicities, genders and backgrounds rise up together, standing in solidarity for justice, protesting, marching and singing together, even as SWAT teams and tanks roll in. We’ve seen our faces in another American mirror—a reflection of the best of who we are and what we can become. These images may not have dominated the media coverage, but I’ve glimpsed in a foggy mirror scenes of a beautiful, courageous nation struggling to be born.”

Just as I am calling for all of us to look within, to seek out and find our deepest, inside-out beliefs to see if we’ve borrowed them or ever examined them at all, the same calling for all of us to look within applies to our expectations of the future. What do we want for ourselves? What do we want for the world? How do those things converge? What am I willing to do to launch and sustain my vision?

I agree with Ms. Alexander. The mirror offering us glimpses is foggy. But any mirror at all is better than the funhouse mirror we’ve been gazing into with horror for the past three and a half years.

Opinion columnist Charles M. Blow in “Allies, Don’t Fail Us Again” this morning laid it down. How’s this for an internal ouch of reluctant, belated recognition? “Many of the white liberals who supported the movement had been moved by embarrassment, moved by images of cruelty rather than the idea of genuine, equitable inclusion.”

Again, I point us to beliefs, and belief systems. Mr. Blow is writing about the Freedom Summer of the Sixties, but it applies now as well. I am indeed embarrassed by the casual, hand-in-pocket imagery of Derek Chauvin’s blasé, business-as-usual murder of George Floyd. Worse, horrified. It is effortless and immediate for me to react to cruelty. No, cruelty is unacceptable. What about you?

Mr. Blow again, “We must make sure, make a statement, that this is a true change in the American ideology and not an activist-chic, summer street festival for people who have been cooped up for months, not able to go to school or graduate, not able to go to concerts or bars. This is not the social justice Coachella. This is not systemic racism Woodstock. This has to be a forever commitment, even after protest eventually subsides.”

What do you believe about follow-through, Beloved? About the necessity for it? About your personal part in it? About what you are called to do in it? About who you have to confront both in your life in the persons of those who hold divergent beliefs from you and within your precious self who might not have lived the examined life in quite this way?

As Mr. Blow insists, “[W]e must resist efforts to simply pacify and quell, to simply stop the awful images. We must strike at the root: that the entire system operates in a way that is anti-black, that it disadvantages and even punishes blackness, that part of your privilege is built on my oppression.”

Look openly at your own beliefs. I, an educated white woman, have assumed a privilege that is built on the backs of the oppression of others. Are you questioning as I am? We must. Because otherwise we are complicit in the cruel and usual bias that created it in the first place.

Mr. Blow, “We will have to come to see and accept that this system of oppression has been actively, energetically designed and deployed over centuries, and it takes centuries of equally active and energetic efforts to dismantle it. ... We must make ourselves comfortable with the notion that for the privileged, equality will feel like oppression, and that things—legacy power, wealth accumulation, cultural influence—will not be advantaged by whiteness.

“How will our white allies respond when this summer has passed? How will they respond when civil rights gets personal and it’s about them and not just punishing the white man who pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck? How will they respond when true equality threatens their privilege, when it actually starts to cost them something?”

Mr. Blow may very well be right. It may take centuries, but even centuries won’t do it if we don’t start. Start now. Start within. We are not taught to examine our own belief systems any more. We are rarely taught critical thinking any more. But we must bring our unique ability as human beings, the ability to witness ourselves, into play immediately.

We must examine our lives beginning with the external evidence of mirrors all around us all the way into the depths of our souls. We must utilize the brilliance of the Socratic Method to follow his useful advice, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com  

© Dr. Susan Corso 2020 All rights reserved

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