"Anti" Movements

To borrow a phrase from Erick Godsey (one of my current favourite podcasters), “It’s been a minute”. Since I last wrote, we sold our home, chauffeured the kids around to various March Break events and, y’know, experienced one heck of a spiritual breakdown and re-awakening as a family. All good stuff. I’ve thankfully been feeling the call to write once again, so saddle up - it’s going to be a fun ride!! 🤠

Now how to follow up that opening paragraph? Ehh - I guess I’ll just get to it!

In the early days of the Freedom Convoy, as the movement was gaining momentum, I posted the following on a private forum (slightly altered to protect the identify of the individual mentioned):

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I'm hoping that this lovely community can help me process something weighing on my mind and heart since last night.

In the midst of an epic Instagram Story scroll session, mostly checking out videos of the Freedom Convoy and getting super high vibe shivers, a very different story popped out. The story pointed back to the post of a BIPOC woman reporting that she has been receiving violent and racist messages following another post in which she "educated" (quotes are my own) the public on the relationship between the Freedom Convoy and White Nationalism. She posted 3 examples of such messages, and indeed, they were absolutely terrible, the type of vitriol that no human should ever be subjected to.

This woman, it turns out, is an Antiracism Educator. I've seen/heard a little here and there about Antiracism, though admittedly more from the detractor side, so I spent some time on her Facebook page to learn more. It was quite an...unsettling experience I must say. 

The premise of Antiracism (from my understanding) is that, in order to achieve racial justice, white people must do more than simply be "nonracist" (i.e., not themselves possess any racist inclinations) but must actively strive to dismantle any signs of racism they might encounter in their lives - e.g., calling out microaggressions and educating other white people on antiracism principles, as well as continuously checking their own privilege. According to Antiracism, there is a clear bifurcation: if one isn't actively antiracist, one is a complicit racist.

As I'm taking all this in, I'm feeling a lot of cognitive dissonance. I'm feeling like there's a whole lotta negative vibes going on here. I'm feeling like this is fundamentally the wrong approach - that we should all be helping each other rise up TOGETHER rather than kicking down one group of people to punish them for another group of people's suffering. That hyper focusing on race will more likely serve to exacerbate racial tensions than facilitate equality and peace. That it's a tough enough job for people to do their own deep work without being expected to "fix" things for others. That there's a real victim mentality at play here. And, with respect to the negativity this woman received following her "public education" post, that (from an energetic standpoint) "What you damn damns you back". 

As I type all the above out, I feel guilty. Guilty for using terms like "victim mentality" in this context (even if my felt sense is that there is a truth here). Guilty for even suggesting that the premise of Antiracism might be off-kilter. Antiracism theory proposes that my feelings of cognitive dissonance and, subsequently, guilt, can be attributed to my own privilege, and that my White Ignorance prevents me from identifying this cognitive dissonance accurately for what it is. 

So I'm sitting here with all this, on the one hand feeling like I trust my intuition, I know I'm a kind, loving person, and that there's a lot about Antiracism Theory I'm simply not buying. On the other hand, that doubt creeps in - am I simply dripping in White Ignorance?? This all certainly *feels* like gaslighting, but the last thing I want to do is be insensitive or disrespectful to the BIPOC community given the struggles they have endured and the equality they, of course, deserve.

All this to say, given [forum name’s] core value of reverence, I thought this would be a perfect place to unpack my cognitive dissonance and this overall experience. Please feel free to share anything that may come to mind and heart on this topic.

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As I hit the Submit button, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would people fundamentally agree with my perspective? Was I about to be further educated? A mix of both? My post received 9 responses, and the unanimous sentiment was that this movement deserved a big, fat 👎. A few specific quotes:

• “Compassion doesn’t operate from dogma. Having rules to enforce inclusivity is a contradiction. I like people. I think I can trust that and it’s enough.”

• “Pondering these ‘movements’, it seems pretty clear that they are, in both covert & overt ways, serving a primary purpose — to further divide people.”

• “What’s deeply troubling to me is that I used to have a really big heart for racial justice work. But somewhere along the line, it just left me. […] I’m also more tense around my POC friends than I used to be. Now it feels like race is this huge chasm between us and I have to tiptoe for fear of saying something unintentionally terrible.”

• “My kids are mixed race hispanic and white, with Central and South American indigenous, and European ancestries. […] They have friends of other races. […] My son’s guitar teacher is filipina. They don’t have to be ‘educated’ on anti-racism, they just know the truth of oneness in their very being, from lived experience, and their own genetic inheritance.”

So, all in all, I felt “better” about things following the closure of this thread.

But not really.

Because SO much of how Western culture operates these days seems to be based on the core premise of these “anti” movements. (Of course antifa comes immediately to mind, as well as various centrally-organized initiatives such as antihate.ca.) And try as I might to see these movements in a more generous light, the single message they convey to me strongly is that “in order to make things better, we need to find the bad guys and knock them down”.

In other words, war mentality. And what does war mentality lead to? Wars. And we just so happen to have a terrible one happening as we speak. Coincidence? Unlikely.

In my forum post, I alluded to what I believe to be a Universal Truth - that “what we damn, damns us back”. A more neutral, but equally truthful way of phrasing this is when we look for something, we find it. I’d like to unpack this a bit more here.

As I mentioned within my post, upon “educating” the public on the link between the Freedom Convoy and White Nationalism (and she didn’t mince words, I have to say), the antiracism educator was energetically welcoming examples to support her point. And while of course I don’t believe she deserved the vitriol she received back (no human does), I thus wasn’t surprised by it. She was basically like “Roll call!! Will those angry, racist humans who *are* out there please raise your hand?” and said angry, racist humans were happy to oblige. If someone were to take out a megaphone at a Leafs game and ask the same question, they’d surely get several hits as well. (Not that these folks would likely call themselves out within this more public context, but you get my point.) On a similar note, big media outlets clearly had a very strong agenda to paint the convoy in a negative light, and so they found and highlighted the crap out of the very few examples they could find - That Single Confederate Flag (though the jury’s still out on whether or not that was a plant), the handful of out-of-line protestors dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the “defacement” of the Terry Fox Statue (though, I would personally argue that adorning him with a Canadian Flag and a “Mandate Freedom” sign stretches the definition of defacement - but I digress).

Now, of course there are some compelling examples where seeking out the negative does lead to a positive - for example, the not-for-profit Operation Underground Railroad is involved in the rescue of human trafficking and sex trafficking victims, and has a wider goal of eliminating sex trafficking world-wide. This is a cause we absolutely should be invested in at a global level.

But making the argument that a movement buoyed by a collective desire to preserve well-earned freedoms and fend off tyranny, and, might I add, a movement attended by humans of all races, religions, genders, sexual orientations (and, really, all the ways one can slice and dice identity), is, at its heart, a White Nationalist movement is a wild goose chase at best, and a complete and utter fabrication at worst.

“But ending racism isn’t a wild goose chase,” you might say. And I absolutely agree. But why, then, are we not aiming at the target here? Why are we not having more open, vulnerable conversations about where racism (and other sentiments of true hate) actually still exist and what to do about this? Why not have humans of all races working together to make amends for the past and figure out how we can best move forward toward achieving true equality for all? Why are we looking for racism and other forms of intolerance where it fundamentally doesn’t exist? Why (according to Antiracism Theory) are white people tasked with making everything right, but we’re not allowed to ask our BIPOC brothers and sisters for guidance on how we can go about doing this?

It just doesn’t make sense to me. I truly welcome any and all viewpoints which can help make it make sense. But if your argument centers on the premise that “you simply can’t understand because you have white privilege” then you’ve lost me. Starting out from a state of defeat and powerlessness is no way to solve the big problems of humanity.

But let’s end on a positive note. Fritzi Horstman is the Founder and Executive Director of the Compassion Prison Project (CPP), a not-for-profit with the mission of transforming prisons and communities through compassionate action. I first learned of Fritzi’s work in Gabor Maté’s incredible documentary The Wisdom of Trauma, and subsequently listened to her inspiring interview with Charles Eisenstein discussing her short film Step Inside the Circle. The film poignantly illustrates how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are disproportionately high within the prison system (among inmates and staff alike), but also that deep healing and rehabilitation is truly possible within an environment grounded in the values of forgiveness, empathy, love and deep community support. Yet another example that when we look for something, we find it - but in this case “What you bless, blesses you back.” This, to me, resonates within my core as the foundation from which to build a more beautiful world.

Give it a watch. It gets me every time. 💔❤️️