Remembering who we are for the well-being of all

---

A Romanian piper, a Slovak mother and son, an Italian woman. Photos by Augustus Sherman, chief registry clerk at Ellis Island from 1892 – 1925.

---

David Dean is a longtime contributor to White Awake whose work has formed the core of our annual course, “Roots Deeper Than Whiteness.” David has personally grappled with and constructively organized around issues of identity, justice, and social healing from early adulthood on. This 2018 article represents years of research, inquiry, and guidance from elders and friends, culminating in a synthesis of historical insight into the relationship between racism, capitalism, and the creation of a socially constructed identity that would divest multiple ethnic groups of their inherited traditions and re-make them as “white.”

The argument of the essay itself can be found in its title: those of us who are socially classified as white have roots deeper than “whiteness.” We are people – or, more accurately, peoples – whose identity and cultural center has been manipulated to serve a very specific function within capitalism. When we understand this story, we can more easily divest ourselves of the dysfunctional role we have been manipulated to play, and join with people of color in the creation of a life-sustaining society.

---

I am a descendant of some of the first Europeans to come to the land now known as the eastern United States. Their experiences were not included in the version of European history I was taught, one that glorifies the violent exploits of a small elite while leaving out the ways of life of the vast majority of our ancestors. Instead, their story resembles a similar pattern to those of many European immigrant groups that would come after them: one of people stripped of their rich ethnic identities and given a false racial identity that would turn many against their allies of color and increase their compliance with the corporate exploitation of workers and the planet.

This deeper knowledge of my ancestors past has helped me replace what was once a debilitating feeling of shame about the reality of racism with a clear understanding of how my well-being is directly linked to the freedom of people of color. I believe that recovering these stories of those who came before us can support us all as white Americans to find the emotional strength and political analysis necessary to rebuild lost multiracial alliances and to challenge both white supremacy and the economic system it serves.

~

My ancestors came to Virginia as indentured laborers in the 1600’s. Yet prior to their arrival they did not call themselves white. They were English commoners who resided in rural villages and held cultural practices and forms of folk Christianity that were distinct from those of the aristocracy. Celebration was central to their culture and their calendar was filled with saints’ days. Many were regional and involved particular festivities and ceremonies to honor local sites in nature that had been held sacred since time immemorial.

In Dreaming the Dark, Starhawk tells us that the “Festivals, feasts, and folk customs” of these people “had always provided a source of communal unity. The maypole, the bonfires on the ancient Celtic feast days, the traditional dances and customs, were tied to the seasons and the changing round of the agricultural year.” They spent their days on land known simply as “the commons,” forest and fields the community shared to grow food, tend to their animals, gather plants and firewood, and on which to celebrate. They sustained themselves from this land. For centuries it was their means of survival and cohesion.

Rural Festival. Engraving by Daniel Hopfer. 16th century.

During much of Middle Ages feudal elites remained wealthy by taking most of these peasants’ agricultural production other than that which was required for the community’s subsistence. However these commoners did not passively accept this reality. Their efforts made feudal life a constant class struggle and in its final centuries they, like the commoners of other European countries, successfully ended serfdom and secured more autonomy for themselves. But capitalism was coming. In Caliban and the Witch, scholar Silvia Federici writes,

“Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle – possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide. This must be stressed, for the belief that capitalism “evolved” from feudalism and represents a higher form of social life has not yet been dispelled.”

It began as shipping technologies improved and opportunities for trade increased. Wool fabric became a highly sought after commodity and British landowners began to see that large-scale sheep pasturage would be far more profitable than existing feudal relations. At the same time that overseas colonialism emerged, the theft of land from those who shared and respected it also began in England and all over Europe. An effort arose to evict these English peasants and to “enclose” or fence in commonly-held land for commercial use.

In order to weaken their resistance to enclosure and prepare them for a forced exodus to towns and cities as the exploited labor force that this new economy required, the communal, earth-based, and celebratory cultural identity of the English peasantry was attacked. In The World Turned Upside Down, English historian Christopher Hill describes the attempted brainwashing of this population to believe in the primacy of work and the devilish nature of rest and festivity.

“Protestant preachers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century undertook a cultural revolution, an exercise in indoctrination, on a hitherto unprecedented scale… to create the social conditions which discouraged idleness. This meant opposing observance of saints’ days, and the traditional village festivals and sports, and sexual irresponsibility… it took generations for those attitudes to be internalized. ‘It is the violent only that are successful,’ wrote the gentle Richard Sibbes: ‘they take it [salvation] by force’.”

Notions of the isolated nuclear family and women’s inherent inferiority were also emphasized. If a wife could be subjected to life as the sole sustainer of her family in the home then her husband could be expended of all his energy in the factory. Women, too, were associated with the devil. Federici names the witch-hunts as a tool of this cultural revolution and the movement to take away the commons. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of women were tortured and killed throughout Europe. The century between 1550 and 1650 was both the height of the enclosures and of this genocide in England. Particularly autonomous women were in the greatest danger of persecution. Herbalists and traditional healers, widows and the unmarried, and outspoken community leaders were regularly targeted. Mass government-run propaganda campaigns led peasants to fear one another, effectively dividing and weakening them against the threat of enclosure.

Relentless protest and insurrection, most notably the Midlands Revolt of 1607, was not enough to prevent the eventual outcome. Historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker illustrate the “colossal dimensions of the expropriation of the peasantry” in The Many-Headed Hydra:

“By the end of the sixteenth century there were twelve times as many propertyless people as there had been a hundred years earlier. In the seventeenth century alone almost a quarter of the land in England was enclosed. Aerial photography and excavations have located more than a thousand deserted villages and hamlets…”

17th Century Drawing of the Diggers. The Diggers were a group of poor, revolutionary Christians led by Gerrard Winstanley who sought to reclaim the commons and re-establish agricultural communities for those displaced. In 1649 they did so on St. George’s Hill only to be violently evicted by the English military as shown here.

Communities were traumatized and splintered. The fortunate worked in urban textile mills under grueling conditions, weaving into fabric wool shorn from sheep that grazed their ancestral lands. Most were not so lucky and lived on city streets as beggars at a time when loitering and petty theft were punished with physical mutilation, years of incarceration, or death.

Even with this mixture of urban poverty, hyper-criminalization, and merchant campaigns to encourage the poor to go to overseas colonies as indentured servants, only some willingly left their home country. The Virginia Company, a corporation with investors and executives intent on profiting from the theft of labor and foreign land, began collaborating with the English government to develop a solution to the problems of unemployment and vagrancy. Homeless and incarcerated women, men, and even children, began to be rounded up and put on ships headed to the plantation colony of Virginia to be bought and traded by wealthy British royalists. According to Linebaugh and Rediker, of the nearly 75,000 English indentured servants brought to British colonies in the seventeenth century most were taken against their will. In The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter commented that in this era these captive voyagers would be “lucky to outlive their terms of service.” However at this point in history, they still did not call themselves “white.”

They crossed the ocean with their traditional way of life shattered, clinging to meaningful communal identity only in memory. They arrived to the colony of Virginia through the early and mid-1600s where, according to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, fifty wealthy families held almost all of the land. They worked on tobacco plantations for periods of seven to fourteen years with indentured and enslaved Africans and some indigenous people, two other populations recently torn from their cultures and communities.

At this time forms of racism did exist. Scholar Cedric Robinson tells about the existence of various forms of race-like hierarchy within European societies for centuries. In early colonial Virginia the presence of racism was evidenced by the initial genocidal attacks on indigenous nations, some disproportionately harsh sentencing toward people of color in colonial courts, and the fact that even though chattel slavery had not yet been fully institutionalized, some African and Native people were already spending their entire lives in bondage.

However historians Jacqueline Battalora and Edmund Morgan note that the historical evidence still is clear that all three of these laboring groups in Virginia shared a more similar position in society and stronger relationships with each other than they soon would. It was common for them to socialize and inhabit in the same quarters. They often intermarried and built families together. They toiled in fields side by side and were degraded and beaten by the same wealthy masters.

Many had lived on some form of “commons” earlier in their own lives and some sought to live in this way again. The Many-Headed Hydra includes the following striking examples. In the early years of the Jamestown settlement one in seven Englishmen fled to live within the more egalitarian Tsenacomoco or Powhatan Confederacy, inspiring the Virginia Company to enact a decree called Laws Divine, Moral, and Marshall threatening execution for desertion in order “to keep English settlers and Native Americans apart.”

The Town of Pomeiooc. 1585 painting by John White. Tsenacomoco, otherwise known as the Powhatan paramount chiefdom, was a political alliance of Algonquian-speaking indigenous peoples that occupied the land colonized by the English at Jamestown. While not part of Tsenacomoco, Pomeiooc represents a typical Algonquian settlement. 

As the decades continued, Africans, English laborers and displaced Native people would escape their plantations to form maroon communities in remote areas. One was in nearby Roanoke where this refugee population began to live communally with the land, forming an abolitionist “Mestizo” culture with “emphasis on the “inner light,” and devotion to “liberty of conscience.”” Linebaugh and Rediker write,

“The very existence of the multi-ethnic maroon state was a threat to Virginia, whose governor worried that “hundreds of idle debtors, thieves, Negros, Indians, and English servants will fly” to the liberated zone and use it as a base for attacks on the plantation system.”

The greatest threat to this system however were the laborers still working on tobacco plantations in Virginia and the nearby colonies. In a multitude of organized revolts, first noted as early as 1663 and peaking in 1676 with an armed struggle lasting over a year, this multiethnic coalition came together and attempted to upend the colonial system that oppressed them. As the seventeenth century neared its end and fear of overthrow progressively grew, plantation elites responded with a strategy to divide and conquer the alliances by manipulating the identity of the European population, my ancestors, and giving them membership within an exalted racial group to change the way they found meaning and sought freedom in their lives.

White racial identity did not exist prior to these rebellions. The term “white” was first used as a category to classify human beings in this exact era within Maryland and Virginia legislation that called for banishment or years of forced servitude as punishments for whites, particularly white women, who married or had sexual relations with “negroes, mulattoes, or Indians” and in multiple laws giving slight privileges to poor and indentured Europeans. In Birth of a White Nation, Jacqueline Battalora writes that these included regulations on the treatment of “white” servants, a mandate requiring plantation owners to give food, weapons, and money to them at the end of their indenture as well as a prohibition on whipping any “Christian white servant while naked without an order from the justice of the peace.” These laws were passed simultaneously with the enactment of slave codes that entrenched enslaved Africans and some indigenous people in life-long hereditary slavery with no legal rights and extremely harsh punishments for transgressing their masters. All property that they had been previously given or allowed to earn was confiscated and sold. Profits were to be given to churches to support poor white parishioners. For some time, it was made illegal even to free enslaved people. And people of color who were free would also experience new forms of subjugation. In American Slavery, American Freedom Edmund Morgan writes:

“Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians already free did manage to stay in the colony and cling to their freedom. But it was made plain to them and to the white population that their color rendered freedom inappropriate for them. In spite of being free, they were denied the right to vote or hold office or to testify in court proceedings. And their women, unlike white women, were subject to taxation, whether they worked in the fields or not. These handicaps, together with the penalties for miscegenation, successfully dissociated them from whites, however poor.”

This legislation only slightly improved the overall well-being of poor Europeans. Though they were taught that the expansion of slavery was somehow in their economic interest, it actually devalued their labor by making them compete with those whose bondage forced them to work for free. Anti-racism educator Tim Wise calls this the first of many examples of “Working class white people being harmed by white privilege. Relatively being advantaged, being given a leg up, being given a membership to the club but in absolute terms being economically subordinated by the very thing that gave them a sense of superiority.” Battalora notes that, more than anything, these laws were intended to create “an entirely new bottom to the social hierarchy” occupied by free and enslaved persons of color and to change the psychology of the newly named “white” population. “What’s important in terms of this history is that whiteness itself was never the top dog,” says legal scholar john a. powell. “There was always the elites… the white identity was that middle stratum. That stratum of identifying with the elites and controlling the non-whites.” Some eventually rose to the level of elite-slaveholder, including a few of my ancestors, but most did not.

White identity was created as a tool to cement virtually all colonists of European origin (though most at this time were English), regardless of wealth, into a common superior racial category, creating solidarity along lines of race and reducing it along lines of class. If daily life was not enough to force the internalization of this divisive hierarchy, Battalora shares that readings of the laws at church services were also mandated multiple times per year. As the years went on the ideology grew into the widely spread doctrine of so-called “scientific racism.” Whites were indoctrinated with an idea articulated well by South Carolina plantation owner John Townsend – that despite their poverty, “The color of the white man is now, in the South, a title of nobility in his relations as to the Negro… the poorest non-slaveholder may [still] rejoice with the richest of his brethren of the white race.” The difficulty of life with low-wages was mitigated with what W.E.B. DuBois called the “psychological wage” of whiteness.

Slave patrols. By enlisting working class white men in slave patrols, elites further ensured that white laborers would identify along lines of race rather than class. 

This tactic worked with tremendous success, causing the rebellions to cease almost completely. When viewed in the context of this larger history the magnitude of its impact can be seen. It was the first strategy to significantly halt these English commoners’ centuries-long resistance to feudal and capitalist attack. It did this by manipulating their sense of self and pushing them to identify with their oppressor as part of a superior white race. What remained of their original ethnic and local identities started to be replaced with the culture of this ruling class. Soon they learned to prize individualism, see personal worth in personal wealth more so than in one’s ability to contribute to community, and seek freedom in the often ill-fated pursuit of this wealth (later called the American Dream) rather than in collective struggle for the well-being of all.

A central part of this shift in identity involved the loss of their history – the memories of their traditional ways of life and their struggles to protect them that once connected them to a people, to a place, and to a set of values. Many eventually replaced it with a romanticized history of the same British, and later, white American ruling class that had crushed their communities as well as the belief in their own right to carry on this domination. Thousands of poor white men soon became pawns of empire, whether in militias committing genocide and land-theft in indigenous communities on the western frontier or in our country’s first police forces, built to patrol black slaves in the colonies.

As time went on, a glorified and heavily sanitized history of white American patriotism became a foundation of their self-understanding. They would defend this fragile identity with its corrupted version of the past because it was all they knew themselves to be. Though there have always been whites who have actively resisted this self-defeating psychology, the impact of this identity formation, carried out with legislation and propaganda, should not be underestimated. It caused many to consign themselves to prolonged separation from and conflict with their greatest potential allies in making the “American Dream” that they so desperately desired into a collective reality.

~

The story of my ancestors does not stand alone but is one that was experienced by populations around the world as a small western European elite sought to establish capitalism as our global economic system. The success of this system depended on two processes.

One: The violent displacement of communities from their land in order to use that land for profit and, often, to create a dependent, exploitable workforce.

Two: The replacement of traditional ethnic identities that placed higher value on the welfare of community and the earth with a culture of possessive individualism and hierarchical, divisive racial (and gender) identities in order to bring about compliance with this economic system.

While these processes involved enslavement and were far more genocidal in communities of color, they also happened to the vast majority of Europeans. A significant difference is that our superior racial identity and relative economic advantage kept us from joining in multiracial resistance to this oppression.

From 1500 to 1800, millions of subsistence producers living in village communities throughout Europe were thrown off their lands by powerful aristocracies. Traditional cultural practices were attacked and often outlawed. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes that this happened through the colonization of “entire nations, such as Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the Basque Country, and Catalonia” as well as through the displacement of commoners within the borders of the major western European monarchies. In Eastern Europe Silvia Federici notes that the peasant population was brought back into serfdom. They were forced out of their communities and onto plantations growing cash crops as bonded laborers. “For the first time in human history,” Dunbar-Ortiz tells us, “the majority of Europeans depended for their livelihood on a small wealthy minority, a phenomenon that capitalist-based colonialism would spread worldwide.” However heavy resistance to this displacement and the workplace exploitation that followed was constant.

Some European immigrants did come to the British colonies, and later, the United States, fleeing religious persecution and violence but most were running directly from this economic deprivation. Though also developing in Europe, white racial identity was substantially deepened shortly after each European immigrant group’s arrival. In the 1700’s poor Protestant Scotch-Irish settlers, including some of my ancestors, were placed on the western edge of the colonies and pitted against indigenous peoples. They were to serve as a buffer between Native nations and the slave plantations of the wealthy. Rather than join in coalition with Native people against the planter class, they took on the glorified role of genocidal militiamen of western expansion, carrying out acts of war reminiscent of those done unto them by the British centuries before. Much of the land they stole was subsequently taken by the wealthy, leaving most poor and landless. In the 1800’s non-English and non-Protestant settlers faced higher levels of shaming and marginalization from the dominant society and were often placed on widely accepted racial hierarchies below “White Anglo-Saxons” yet above people of African, Asian, or indigenous American descent. This stigmatization coupled with the opportunity to assimilate into whiteness because of their light skin led them too to replace many aspects of their ethnic identities with white American racial identity.

This does not mean that love and certain positive cultural values were not maintained in our families and communities. But it does mean that a significant internalization took place of capitalist values, a glorified history of the white American elite, the English language, and separation from, internalized superiority to, and often, violent conquest and policing of people of color. At times, direct participation in this violence proved to be the key to greater societal acceptance. Yet the relative social and economic advantages were a pittance compared to the freedom that could have been won with powerful multiracial unity. But they were still accepted as a bribe.

There were times though when continued resistance, in the forms of cultural preservation and participation in labor and anti-discrimination struggles, at times in coalition with black laborers, would lead to forced assimilation efforts. This was the case when thirty million southern and eastern European immigrants arrived in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Laws were passed in over 30 states mandating their participation in “Americanization programs” run by state and local governments, civic organizations, and corporations. Here they would be taught, as Theodore Roosevelt said, that “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.” They were no longer to be Polish-Americans, Hungarian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, but simply “white” Americans. Classes included components such as basic English instruction and financial literacy that surely proved useful and eventually helped some take advantage of the programs of the New Deal – programs from which people of color were barred. But they also contained content on American history, civics, and patriotism aimed explicitly to separate them from their ethnic communities, create acceptance of female subjugation to the home and male exploitation in the workplace, label their traditional culture inferior, and replace their connection to their homelands and local histories with this same sanitized history of the white American elite.

This is why labor organizer Frank P. Walsh wrote in a letter to congress that these programs sought to establish “a paternalism that would bring the workers of this country even more absolutely under the control of the employer than they are now… Americanization means a state of satisfaction with bad industrial conditions.” And it is why George Lipsitz would write in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness that “Many white immigrants and their descendants developed especially powerful attachments to whiteness because of the ways in which various Americanization programs forced them to assimilate by surrendering all aspects of their own ethnic organization and identification.” It is important to note that many of these new immigrants did resist the Americanization of these government programs and the dominant culture to some extent. Segments of the population did hold onto aspects of their heritage and their political activism. Some even went on to become allies in the civil rights movement. Yet many of those who continued to engage in labor struggles did so with a racial bias that kept them from extending organizational membership or advocating for the rights of people of color – ultimately reducing the strength of their efforts.

The “Melting Pot” of the English School of the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. Upon graduation from the Ford Motor Company’s Americanization program, tens of thousands of European immigrant employees would walk into this large “Melting Pot” wearing their traditional ethnic attire, their teachers would stir the pot with large oars, and they would change into suits, grab American flags and walk out of the pot “Americanized.”

~

Like my ancestors and me, many of these later immigrants and their descendants also forgot, in large part, where they came from, their earlier ways of life, and their centuries-long resistance to oppression. But we now have the opportunity to remember.

I have found that learning this history of my ancestors is a process of remembering that I am in fact a human being. Though it is in many ways a tragic one, their story brought me a sense of wholeness that I never knew I was missing. I felt connected to a people, to a culture, and to a home. I realized that I do not simply come from a white cultural void but that I have roots deeper than whiteness. This revelation gives me the opportunity to begin to reclaim them and to honor those that were kept alive; to turn ancestral stories of traditional ways of life and the long struggle to maintain them into family stories that I hold dear and share with future children; and to deepen my connection to these ancestors’ values that prioritized relationships, family, community, celebration, and reverence for the natural world over productivity.

Realizing the depth of my ancestors’ humanity prior to the advent of white supremacy has given me the strength to be accountable to the harms that they carried out in its name. I have come to believe that facing our country’s history (and my own family history) of racist violence, grieving it and seeking to repair it, could be deeply healing for me rather than shame-filled. I believe that heeding the calls of activists of color to address past and present racial harms, and to unlearn our own conscious and unconscious racial biases, should not be shame-inducing, but instead a process of reconnecting to our true heritage.

Knowledge of our past also reveals the pathway to our true freedom. This history discredits current resistance to movements for racial justice seen on all sides of the political spectrum. It lifts the smokescreen caused by conservative extremists’ racial scapegoating and liberal politicians’ lip service to issues of race. Instead, it shows us that the struggle to undo racism is necessary for all of us if we are ever to achieve economic security and legitimate well-being. There are examples throughout our history of white people who have realized this, woken up from the spell of white racial socialization, seen it as a weapon to divide-and-conquer, and taken action against racism for the benefit of all. In certain periods this rise in consciousness has surged.

In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward tells us that Jim Crow was not immediate or inevitable following the Reconstruction period but rather a response to divide and conquer the Populist Party, a multiracial political organization that rose to prominence in the south in the 1880’s and 90’s. The party fought against both white supremacy and the domination of corporate, plantation, industrial, and railroad interests. Leaders built a coalition of newly freed black people and poor whites, telling the latter, “You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars you both.” In Georgia in 1892 when a black Populist organizer was threatened with lynching, “Two thousand armed white farmers, some of whom rode all night, responded to [a] call for aid and remained on guard for two nights at his home to avert the threat of violence.” These people knew that responding to this call was not only moral, but that they would never maintain a political coalition strong enough to achieve their own economic security without deeply sacrificing to defend the human rights of their neighbors of color.

Through the more than three hundred years since the passage of the first slave codes and the birth of white racial identity in North America, these populists do not stand alone among whites who have sprung to action in pursuit of the same genuine multiracial democracy where the human rights of all are met. Activist and Reverend Dr. William Barber reminds us that “the movement for justice has always been biracial… sometimes tri-racial.” The movement for the abolition of slavery, this populist movement of the late nineteenth century, certain multiracial labor rights and communist political campaigns of the early twentieth, the civil rights movement, Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign and more, all included white people. Though far from perfect, they carried out this activism despite the recurring efforts of the powerful to separate them from their allies. It is also in the spirit of these ancestors that we as white Americans must rise to the challenges of today.

Photos from a Southern Tenant Farmers Union meeting where blacks and whites gathered together / circa 1937 / Photo credit: Louise Boyle courtesy of  Kheel Center and Southern Tenant Farmers Museum

Forty years ago, following gains in income and wealth equality from decades of New Deal legislation and recent civil rights laws that finally began to allow greater access for people of color to this economic opportunity, many US business leaders and their political representatives launched an effort to reassert their economic dominance. They mobilized millions of white voters with the message, whether stated directly or spoken in code, that people of color were threats to white safety and financial wellbeing. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander shows us that it was the use of imagery of black female welfare queens, black male predators, and other racial stereotypes that allowed Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., and even Clinton, as well as politicians at all levels of government, to gain and maintain power. Each would go on to promote the mass incarceration of people of color, mass inequality for all, and unchecked corporate pollution of communities and the climate. The centuries-old strategy of using racial scapegoating as a tool to divide and rule was put to work again. Communities of color were hit with the harshest effects. Yet as white folks fell for this trick, the white middle class itself, born of a New Deal that elevated us far more than black and brown Americans, began to disintegrate as well.

Today 140 million people in the U.S. are poor or low-income, a group that contains a disproportionately high percentage of people of color but also includes 66 million whites. The current White House administration does not represent some new movement to legitimately uplift this white working class, but rather the same centuries-old tradition of divisive politics to enrich a privileged few. Day by day, as brown-skinned immigrants and religious minorities are attacked, nearly all of us are threatened by continued attempts to cut Medicare and Social Security as well as a refusal to address skyrocketing costs of housing, higher education and healthcare amidst four decades of stagnant wages.

While in college I studied for a short time in Chile and supported a youth activism program in a poor community there. Students studied their history to identify the causes of injustice in their lives and to gain greater self esteem by seeing that their people had a rich heritage beyond their present suffering. It was called “Nuestra Historia Nos Protege.” In English this means “Our History Protects Us.” It is from this lens that I began to see how my own people, those who were carefully socialized with what Alexander calls “the racial bribe” of whiteness, could also be protected by a deeper understanding of our own.

Reconnecting to this history, to our roots that are deeper than whiteness, allows us to quell feelings of shame with meaningful self-understanding. It also allows us to recognize that our survival in this increasingly unequal and polluted world depends on our ability to ally ourselves with indigenous people and people of color. From this grounded place, we have the opportunity to re-enter multiracial community, witness the wounds of racism with open hearts, and take collective action to both mend these wounds and replace corporate domination with an economic system based on sustainability and care. Our emergence as genuine partners in such a revolution is made possible with the wholeness and self-love that comes when we remember who we are.

New Orleans Saints take a knee (2017) / Anne Braden interviews Rosa Parks (1960) / U.S. Veteran kneels before Lakota elder Leonard Crow Dog during a forgiveness ceremony on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation (2016)

---

Acknowledgements: My gratitude goes out to Eleanor Hancock for being a thought-partner in processing this history, consistently pushing me to persist with this piece when I felt blocked, encouraging me to deepen the analysis presented here, offering editorial support, and providing a platform – through White Awake – upon which to further develop the ideas in this article. I would also like to thank labor organizer Andy Banks for his emphasis on the importance of highlighting the intersection of racism and capitalism, as well as Dave Belden and Alison Espinosa-Setchko for offering their wisdom when it was needed.

---

David Dean is a political educator, writer, and speaker seeking to support the growth of the powerful, multiracial alliances our movements need to win. As a longtime contributor and former Associate Director at White Awake, he has taught online courses for more than 5000 individuals. David has been shaped most by his family’s love and his upbringing in Quaker communities. He loves to facilitate others’ discovery of their own inherent goodness and power to create social change. 

Learn more about David and sign up for his newsletter, Toward Solidarity, at davidbfdean.com. Connect with him on instagram @davidbfdean. 

Lyla June, of Diné and European heritage, is an Indigenous water protector active in the struggle at Standing Rock. Her spoken word/musical recording, “All Nations Rise“, has received almost 2 million views since posted on Facebook last fall. In the post that accompanies the video on FB, Lyla writes: “I want to acknowledge that some of the first Indigenous People’s that were forced into hiding were the medicine women of Old Europe. They estimate that 6-9 million women were raped, beaten, tortured, burned alive or drowned alive for being ‘witches.’ Let us reclaim our Earth Selves no matter what ‘race’ you are and do it soon! The earth may depend on it.”

In the following essay, which Lyla has graciously allowed us to repost on White Awake, she shares her personal story of connecting with loving ancestors from ancient, “Indigenous Europe”. May her story inspire our own, whatever our heritage may be. May those of us who have directly inherited the legacy of European colonization – through our biological ancestry – be empowered to seek healing from the “genocide within”, and wake up to our true nature as children of this beautiful Earth … and may we do this for the benefit of all beings.

The original title of this piece is: “The Story of How Humanity Fell in Love with Itself Once Again”

---

---

I spend a lot of time honoring and calling upon my Native American ancestors. I am keenly aware that my father’s people hold a venerable medicine as well. He has ancestry from the Great Sacred Motherland of Europe.

I have been called a half breed. I have been called a mutt. Impure. I have been told my mixed blood is my bane. That I’m cursed to have an Indian for a mother and a cowboy for a father.

But one day, as I sat in the ceremonial house of my mother’s people, a wondrous revelation landed delicately inside of my soul. It sang within me a song I can still hear today. This song was woven from the voices of my European grandmothers and grandfathers. Their songs were made of love.

They sang to me of their life before the witch trials and before the crusades. They spoke to me of a time before serfdoms and before Roman tithes. They spoke to me of a time before the plague; before the Medici; before the guillotine; a time before their people were extinguished or enslaved by dark forces. They spoke to me of a time before the English language existed. A time most of us have forgotten.

These grandmothers and grandfathers set the ancient medicine of Welsh blue stone upon my aching heart. Their chants danced like the flickering light of Tuscan cave-fires. Their joyous laughter echoed on and on like Baltic waves against Scandinavian shores. They blew worlds through my mind like windswept snow over Alpine mountain crests. They showed to me the vast and beautiful world of Indigenous Europe. This precious world can scarcely be found in any literature, but lives quietly within us like a dream we can’t quite remember.

As all this was happening, I peered into the flames of our Diné hoghan fireplace. These Ancient Europe voices whispered to my heart to help me understand. “See, our songs are not so different from your Diné songs,” they seemed to say with a smile.

In this moment, the moment I first acknowledged and connected with my beautiful European ancestors, I could do nothing but cry. It was one of those messy, snotty, shuddering cries, where my face flowed over with tears of joy and sorrow. It was the cry of a woman who met her grandmother for the first time. I always wondered where she was. What she looked like. What her voice sounded like. Who she was. And now, for the first time, I could feel her delicate hands run through my hair as she told me she loved me. I sobbed and I sobbed and I sobbed.

Intermixed in there were also tears of regret. My whole life I was taught to hide my European “side.” All I knew was that my father came from Dallas and that was all I needed to know. These pale-skinned mothers and fathers were to be forgotten, I was taught. They carried violence in their blood and avarice in their smile, I was taught. They were rubbish, I was taught. There was no need to ask questions about them or think about them, I was taught. Whenever I wrote down my race on official forms, I would only write “Native American,” as I was taught.

But then, as thousands of European ancestors swirled around me and reassured my fearful heart, I wished I had honored them sooner. I wished I hadn’t disowned them. I wished I knew how beautiful they were. I wished I could have seen through the thin wall of time that dominates our understanding of Europe. I wish I could have realized the days when Indigenous Europeans were deeply connected to the earth and to kinship. In my mind I told them I was so, so sorry for forsaking them. But, of course, they did not care. They only held me tighter and assured me they would be with me to the end.

The sweetness of this precious experience changed me forever. I have come to believe that if we do not wholly love our ancestors, then we do not truly know who they are. For instance, I get very offended when people call Native Americans “good-for-nothing drunks.” Because by saying this, people don’t take into account the centuries of attempted genocide, rape and drugging of Native American people. They don’t see the beauty of who we were before the onslaught. And now, I am offended when people call European descendants “privileged good-for-nothing pilgrims.” Because by saying this, people do not take into account the thousands of years that European peoples were raped, tortured and enslaved. They do not understand the beauty of who we were before the onslaught. They do not understand that even though we have free will and the ability to choose how we live our life, it is very hard to overcome inter-generational trauma. What happens in our formative years and what our parents teach us at that time can be very hard to reverse.

They estimate that 8-9 million European women were burned alive, drowned alive, dismembered alive, beaten, raped and otherwise tortured as so-called, “witches.” It is obvious to me now that these women were not witches, but were the Medicine People of Old Europe. They were the women who understood the herbal medicines, the ones who prayed with stones, the ones who passed on sacred chants, the ones who whispered to me that night in the hoghan. This all-out warfare on Indigenous European women, not only harmed them, but had a profound effect on the men who loved them. Their husbands, sons and brothers. Nothing makes a man go mad like watching the women of his family get burned alive. If the men respond to this hatred with hatred, the hatred is passed on. And who can blame them? While peace and love is the correct response to hatred, it is not the easy response by any means.

The Indigenous Cultures of Europe also sustained forced assimilation by the Roman Empire and other hegemonic forces. In fact, it was only a few decades ago that any Welsh child caught speaking Welsh in school would have a block of wood tied to their neck. The words “WN” were there-inscribed, standing for “welsh not.” This kind of public humiliation will sound very familiar to any Native Americans reading this who attended U.S. Government boarding schools.

Moreover, our indigenous European ancestors faced horrific epidemics of biblical proportions. In the 1300s, two-thirds of Indigenous Europeans were wiped from the face of the earth. The Black Death, or Bubonic Plague, ravaged entire villages with massive lymph sores that filled with puss until they burst open. Sound familiar?

The parallels between the genocide of Indigenous Europeans and Native Americans are astounding. It boggles my mind that more people don’t see how we are the same people, who have undergone the same spiritual assault. The only difference between the Red Story and the White Story is we are in different stages of the process of spiritual warfare. Native Americans are only recently becoming something they are not. They are only recently starting to succumb to the temptations of drugs, alcohol, gambling, self-destruction and the destruction of others. Just as some Native American people have been contorted and twisted by so many centuries of abuse, so too were those survivors of the European genocide. Both are completely forgivable in my eyes.

Now I see I have a double-duty. I must not only honor and revitalize my Diné culture, but also that of my European ancestors. This ancient Indigenous European culture is just as beautiful as Native American culture and was just as tragically murdered and hidden from history books.

And so, some years later, armed with this new understanding, I traveled to Europe. I scaled a beautiful mountain in Switzerland to see if I might hear hints of ceremonial songs in the wind. I stepped upon the earth guided by those grandmother and grandfather whispers. I plucked a strand of hair from my scalp and placed the offering upon the earth, still wet from morning dew. I ambled through the forests enchanted by the new sights and smells. And I did see glimmers of visions of the villages of yesteryear. And they were full of Earth People living out harmonious community. And, they had beautiful music.

As the sun went down, I fell back on the grass and looked up to the sky. At the time, I was going through a very painful separation from a person I loved. To my surprise, it felt as if the earth was pulling all the sorrow I was carrying down into her core where she could transform it into beauty. The sky was speaking to me about how I didn’t need to worry, that I would be happy again one day. The earth and the sky healed me that day from the great weight I had carried for months. It was a special reunion with the mountains of my foremothers.

My mountain experiment yielded astounding results: the Great Sacred Motherland of Europe is still alive and breathing and waiting for her children to come home! She is waiting for us to ask her for songs so that we may sing to her once again. She is waiting for us to scratch past the surface of time, into the B.C. period when our languages were thriving and our dancing feet kissed the face of the earth. She is waiting. She is waiting for us to remember who we are. If you hold this descent, or any forgotten descent for that matter, I am asking you to join me in this prayer to remember who we are. I have a feeling this prayer will heal the whole world.

In 2009, archaeologists came across a female effigy believed to be the Goddess of the Earth buried inside of German soil. The radiocarbon dating tests came back. They indicate that this clay deity was molded by European hands 40,000 years ago. 40,00 years ago. This is the time she beckons us to. This is the world she hopes we will remember: where man and woman alike held the soil in their hands and saw the value and sanctity of women and of the Mother Earth. This is the world that still flows through our veins, however deafened we have become to it. With prayer we can learn to hear it once again.

I compare this earth-based, Indigenous European culture to the witch-burning psychosis of the first and second millennia. I cannot help but ask myself, when and how did this egalitarian, earth-loving, woman-honoring culture, become the colonial, genocidal conquerors that washed upon American shores? Could it be that our beloved Indigenous European ancestors were raped and tortured for so many thousands of years that they forgot who they were? Could it be they lived in a pressure cooker of oppression for so long that conquer-or-be-conquered is all they knew? Yes, I believe so.

Our task is to shake the amnesia. To not be ashamed of our European-ness, but to reclaim our beautiful grandmothers, to reclaim our venerable grandfathers, to reclaim our lost languages, our lost ceremonies, our lost homelands and become one with the Great Sacred Motherland of Europe once again. The European diaspora is spread all throughout the world, searching the planet for something that lives is inside. I promise you will hear it when who climb the mountains of Switzerland! Of Scotland! Of Tuscany! Of Hungary! Of Portugal! Of the Great Sacred Motherland of Europe! Just because bad things happened upon her bosom does not mean she is bad.

Our task is to honor our ancestors, even those who caved beneath the weight of systematic destruction and became conquerors themselves. Our task is to remember that we are those beautiful Earth People. The ones whose love and prayers were so strong that they could carry 25-ton blue stone monoliths for miles and miles and build the sacred place of prayer known as Stonehenge. That is who we are. When we remember this, the healing of our lineages comes full circle. When we remember this, we will no longer need to borrow spiritual practices from other cultures (although that can be very helpful when there is nothing else to hold onto.) When we remember this, we will remember that the fates of all beings are intertwined with our own. When I remembered this, I found whole-ness in my self—no longer a half-breed, but a daughter of Two Great Lineages, Two Great Rivers that ran together to make one precious child.

This is the story of how I became whole. Some days, it feels like both fire and water live within me. They dance and swirl around one another. In the morning when I wake up, each bows to the other, honoring themselves as equals, as beautiful. When I go to sleep at night they wish each other good dreams. They teach me how it could have been when Columbus first stepped upon Taino shores: a meeting of two long lost brothers, embracing each other and celebrating their unique cultures. They teach me how things can be for our children in the future.

Because that’s what matters most, doesn’t it? Not how the story goes… but how it ends. We each hold a pen. Let us co-author a story of how humanity fell in love with itself and its Mother Earth once again.

---

All Nations Rise | Performed by Lyla June at the 2016 Black Hills Unity Concert

---

Lyla June Johnston was raised in Taos, New Mexico and is a descendent of Diné (Navajo) and Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) lineages. Her personal mission in life is to grow closer to Creator by learning how to love deeper. This prayer has taken her on many journeys and materializes in diverse ways.

In recent months this journey has taken Lyla to Standing Rock: “In the face of this we pray,” she says. “In the face of this we love. In the face of this we forgive. Because the vast majority of the water protectors know that this is the greatest battle of all: to keep our hearts intact.” (EcoWatch)

Greg Snyder is a dharma teacher and senior priest at Brooklyn Zen Center, which he co-founded with his wife, Laura O’Loughlin. He is also a professor of Buddhism at Union Theological Seminary. As a priest, teacher, and community leader, much of Greg’s work is oriented around peace-building and social justice initiatives. The following post is an interview with Greg conducted by Eleanor Hancock, director of White Awake.

Born in 1969, Greg grew up in a close-knit Pennsylvania Dutch community. At 13 years of age, Greg encountered his first experience of assimilation when his family moved out of this community, in central Pennsylvania, and relocated in Houston, Texas. Greg characterizes this assimilation from an ethnic to non ethnic white identity as a consequence of being poor in a capitalist society, and distinguishes his experience as one of loss. In reflecting on his own story, as well as on the experiences of other people who are socially categorized and socialized as white, Greg points out that when this loss of identity occurs intimacy and connection is traded for positions of relative social power.

Greg’s story is unique, in part, because he has lived through a transition from ethnic to assimilated “white” culture (with all the ensuing white racial privilege that this imparts) within his lifetime. For many white people, assimilation occurred generations ago, such that we may not have the same type of personal insight into this trade-off (of intimacy for power) that Greg brings.

Please note that the Pennsylvania Dutch are a cultural group formed by early German-speaking immigrants to Pennsylvania and their descendants. The word “Dutch” does not refer to the Dutch people or the Dutch language, but to these German settlers (ie “Dutch” = Deutsch = German). 

---

Eleanor Hancock:  What was it like to grow up Pennsylvania Dutch? How was it different than growing up white in the suburbs?

Greg Snyder:  The main thing that was different about growing up in a Pennsylvania Dutch (PD) community, in central Pennsylvania, is that my default identity wasn’t white. I didn’t know people without Germanic surnames – Snyder or Rehmeyer or Schroeder. That area of Pennsylvania was said to be, at the time, the least ethnically diverse place in the U.S.; virtually everyone was Pennsylvania Dutch. We were in the social position of being treated as white — but as a kid that wasn’t our first way of talking about ourselves.

EH:  How did your ancestors come to Pennsylvania Dutch country?

GS:  My family came to the area in two waves. The first wave of Pennsylvania Dutch families was in the late 1680s; another was in the 1720s. One line of my family actually bought our family farm from the son of William Penn, the early Quaker after whom Pennsylvania is named. If you visited local graveyards, in my childhood, all the gravestones bore Pennsylvania Dutch names. So you had a feeling of an internalized “we.” “We are living here; we’ve been living here.” There wasn’t much discussion of who we took that land from. But there was a sense of “we have an identity in this land as a people.” In strict Pennsylvania Dutch circles, like the Amish community, the word for outsiders is “English.” I grew up with a really strong sense that New Englanders and WASPs looked down on us and that we didn’t like them; there was a huge bias in the community against WASP culture that probably had to do with ethnicity and class going back to early years in the US.

EH: Did you grow up speaking English?

GS:  Yes. All of my grandparents spoke Pennsylvania Dutch – which is a version of German dating from the late 17th or early 18th century. It’s a version of German with old constructions mixed into it, so that to modern German ears it would sound odd. Television and our education system has destroyed ethnic communities in the U.S. In the 1950s there were still Czech-speaking communities in Texas, French-speaking communities in Louisiana, and communities speaking PD. All that has shifted dramatically; people began speaking English instead. I wish our elders would have taught us PD, because now it’s a dying language that will soon be gone.

EH:  Were Germans involved in genocide as they cleared the land in your area?

GS:  In short, of course, but maybe not in the horrifically and overtly violent ways we know from other areas of the country. My elders and many of the Pennsylvania Dutch like to say that they lived alongside  the indigenous groups, rather than driving them away. Is it true? Highly doubtful. Maybe some families to a certain extent, but the fact is that the Susquehannock are not there anymore; they were forced to move north and south as a result of wars — joining the Delaware tribe, joining the Iroquois — until finally they were gone. Something happened. And another thing that is very suspicious: the first U.S. school created to re-educate Indian children — to try to drive their culture out of them — was in Carlisle, Penn., right in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country. This school was probably considered compassionate by the Christians  who founded it. After all, the early American prisons were founded by Quakers as places of contemplation. But when the vanquishers  say they were kind to the vanquished, well, it’s not so trustworthy.

EH:  Would you say more about PD culture and the environment you grew up in?  

GS:  On the one hand it’s wonderful to grow up in a farm environment where you go to one neighbor for a lamb shank and another neighbor for potatoes and everyone grows food around you. My family still does that to this day. My cousins buy their meat and their vegetables from people around them and go to the grocery store for packaged, processed stuff. As a child you could go outside with a deep sense of safety in that environment. In summer I could take a bag lunch and be out all day.

I had a deep sense of being Pennsylvania Dutch, of community, a deep sense that this land is the land of my people; we were all farmers. I also had a deep sense that I was not ethnically the same as the rest of the United States. People in the community would wear t-shirts that said “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.” There was an ethnic elitism.

I don’t want to pretend that it’s all wonderful being Pennsylvania Dutch. In fact it was difficult and complicated. It was a community where everyone paid attention to what everyone else was doing. We are talking about a very deep German Protestant patriarchy. The way children were raised, it was “Don’t be seen or heard; fall in line.” That’s one of the shadow sides. There’s a lot of patriarchal violence in Pennsylvania Dutch communities. You were sculpted to be a certain kind of a man. People beat their kids. I don’t know if it’s that way anymore, but when I was growing up it was. Most of my childhood traumas had to do with patriarchy.

EH: How rural were you? What sort of technology and modern amenities did you have?

GS: My mother’s family came from Mennonites; she lived her whole life on a farm. My father lived on a farm when he was young, then moved to a small town. His family came from Lutherans, who are allowed to do everything, including drive cars. Mennonites have cars but it’s a simple life. Although the simplicity of my life was not because of a Mennonite commitment. It was because of poverty. Old farm houses with outhouses. My mother always had a large garden, where we grew some of our food. There were times when we lived in farm houses with other people, and times when we were really broke and we lived in trailer parks. We moved a lot — often because we were unable to pay the rent. Yet where I had a real sense of rootedness and strength was in my extended family. My grandmother’s house was where everybody came together. Sundays and holidays there was a big meal – my cousins and everybody were often there, the elders sitting around speaking Pennsylvania Dutch.

EH:  You and your family had less than the other Pennsylvania Dutch?

GS:  Yes. There were many days, as a child, when the free lunch at school was my meal for the day. We’d go to farmers who had already picked their green beans and we’d pick what was left over.

EH: When did you first become conscious of race?

GS:  I never heard anyone talk about race in Pennsylvania — except once, driving through the black part of town, when my dad locked the doors. When I was 13 my family moved to Houston, Texas, for work. That was the first place I ever heard about race; it was non-stop. I would hear things like “Mexicans are lazy” — while watching literally all the work being done by Mexican Americans. Coming from the outside, that was mind-blowing. Soon after we got to Texas the Saudi royalty was buying up the energy industry, and local stores were selling baseball caps that said “Sand n*****s keep out.” I remember thinking, “Why would anybody buy that hat?”

I came into that culture not as a northern liberal but as someone completely protected from talk of race. In Pennsylvania, if there was any trash talk as kids, it was against middle-class WASPy types who looked down on us.

EH:  Coming from a close-knit Pennsylvania Dutch community, what was the transition like for you? Did you move to a mostly white part of Houston?

GS:  Our neighborhood in Houston was mixed; Mexican and white folks, mostly. What changed for me is that I didn’t have a people anymore. I felt this painfully and I didn’t know how to talk or act with people, and I didn’t understand what unified people. But ultimately it was really good, because I went from thinking that a French surname was exotic, in Pennsylvania Dutch country, to the situation in Houston where I had everyone in my school: South Asians, East Asians, people from the black and Mexican communities. I ended up making friends with a lot of different people — some white, some black, some from China and Vietnam and Mexico and Guatemala. I walked into U.S. racial dynamics that I didn’t consciously know a thing about. I remember asking the dumbest questions.

In Pennsylvania I was a shy boy; I was afraid. We moved around a lot, to new places, and felt alone. But I also had a sense of “we.” So much of that “we” had to do with the land. It wasn’t an abstract we, like “we’re all American.” I am suspicious of that identity and wonder how many folks really walk around with a deep, gratifying visceral identity as an American. Maybe they do. I guess I am just suspicious of identities that seem to have more to do with power than connection.

When I go back to central Pennsylvania and I see that particular landscape, it feels like me. I am that land. I am the people who till the earth on that land. I know that shale; shale is right on top of slate. I used to make chalkboards with my brother, cutting into that ground. It’s sad: in one or two more generations, I think the people I am of will be gone, as an identifiable ethnicity in the U.S. Maybe the Amish will survive, but already assimilated Pennsylvania Dutch are shifting from calling themselves Pennsylvania Dutch to referring to themselves as being descended from Pennsylvania Dutch. Capitalism and whiteness are really good at wiping out ethnic support systems for poor white people.

In Undoing Racism workshops [for white folks], at Brooklyn Zen Center, we have participants state their ethnicity. How connected they are to their ethnicity depends on how far back it got included in the white camp. Italians and Greeks are clear: “I’m Italian; I’m Greek.” They know who they are. While those of English or Welsh background don’t really have any idea who they are; it’s hazy. So they say “I’m just white suburban.” As someone with a Germanic heritage (which has also been wiped away in the U.S.), what I cherish is that I grew up with a sense of a people. The saddest thing for white people, and something they need to look closely into, is what’s missing. What’s missing when you let whiteness characterize you? What have you given up?

During October where I grew up, there was still a tradition of Oktoberfest, which was rooted in a celebration at the end of the harvest. Because of the beer drinking, Oktoberfest has become a gimmick now in the U.S, like St. Patrick’s Day. Yet it actually still had meaning in our Pennsylvania Dutch community. As a kid we had something in February called “Fastnacht” — the night before the fast, the night before you go into Lent. All the churches make fastnachts — little round donuts without holes — and families  would eat them together. There were lots of things like this, that were experienced as an ethnic community. Having a sense of a people, where you live together and do things together — an identity — I think that’s a loss. Of course food is the last thing to go with eroding ethnicity, so fastnachts and Pennsylvania Dutch food are still popular. But I remember having a sense of the year’s progression in relationship to the cycles of the harvest and community religious celebration. When I left Pennsylvania, that was lost.

When an ethnicity falls away for the sake of whiteness, we trade intimacy of connection for positions of power. If you understand yourself as an individual without a people, the only thing protecting you is your social location. We have to interrogate that deeply. What would it be like to be a people that is not rooted in power?

EH:  In antiracist circles ethnicity and class are sometimes conflated, where white is taken to mean middle class. Would you talk about your own experience of ethnicity and class and what you’ve learned?

GS:  When I was young in Pennsylvania, we didn’t have much money and it was obvious, so I was tortured by other kids. Suburbs were beginning to be built in the farmlands, so we began to have a mix of farm kids and suburban kids — sons and daughters of professionals who worked in Harrisburg and places like that. In sixth grade two boys, older than me, decided to encourage the whole bus of children to cheer every time I got off the bus. They would also shove me out of my seat so I would have to sit in the black, wet walkway between seats. They did that for a long time. I think as a kid who was smaller and obviously poor, I was an easy target for this kind of aggression.

In reaction I decided to be better than these rich white kids. I was going to read everything they read. I was going to educate myself, to go beyond all of them so they couldn’t touch me. I gave myself reading lists. One summer it was Russian novels. I would read them all and then go on to the next thing.

Over the years I framed this as a kind of rebellion. But one day – I’d already finished college — it hit me that I didn’t rebel against wealthy white people; I became them. I lost my accent; I can’t even imitate a PD accent anymore, though I can imitate a Texas accent in a heartbeat. So assimilation, I get it. I get how you fool yourself into thinking you’re rebelling and gaining power. Which you are. But you’re assimilating in the process and an enormous amount is lost.

I realized I had been taught to hate myself — where I came from and the people I came from — because the broader world convinced me we were hicks. It’s painful to believe that your customs and your ways of doing things – based on class and ethnicity — are improper, stupid, ugly. “You don’t eat at the table the right way; you have to learn how to hold a fork and a knife the right way.” Bullshit. That’s the WASP way, not the proper way. It would be really helpful if we all stopped all stopped thinking that the WASP way of doing things is the only proper way to do things. I think this is beginning to change.

EH:  What did you do with this realization?

GS:  I went through a process of saying “no, I affirm my Pennsylvania Dutch identity.” So now I have a Pennsylvania Dutch hex symbol on my front door – one of those round paintings that are on barns and front doors all over Pennsylvania Dutch country. They’re paintings that come from Germany; they welcome people. I’m not reducible to my Pennsylvania Dutch identity, but I try as much as possible to go back to my annual family reunions. There’s this huge ritual when we go to the family farm: we visit the graves of all my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my great-great-grandparents and family members tell stories about our ancestors.

EH:  I’ve heard you talk about anger, saying that anger can be different depending on one’s background. And that anger can, in fact, be generative.

GS:  Yes, I’ll give you an example: As a kid in farm country, when you ran out of something you went to your neighbor and asked for it. If you started working in your yard, your neighbor showed up to help you. When my aunt Henrietta got cancer, pies and other food just kept showing up. Here in New York City, I’d never ask my neighbor for anything. In middle-class white circles, asking your neighbor for something can be seen as a sign of shame or weakness: “Why haven’t you figured this out?”

Understanding myself to be in a network of support, I get angry on behalf of my community. I was 9 or 10 when the accident at Three-Mile Island nuclear plant happened; 144,000 people abandoned the area. The U.S. government said no meltdown ever happened, but the leukemia rate for children shot through the roof. It was a lie, a complete cover up. The whole community felt that together. You don’t have that experience if you’re an educated, white middle-class person in a suburb that doesn’t have a dump next to it. Instead everything is individualized. A whole community can experience this kind of violence collectively while a wider narrative covers it up. The collective experience is sometimes the only thing that keeps one from feeling insane in a world that denies one’s experience of reality.

As a Zen teacher, when somebody starts talking about their anger, I see it differently depending on who’s talking. White middle-class, educated persons usually talk about themselves and their anger. It’s usually framed as a single person against the world. I also have students who are working class, immigrants, Dominican, Haitian, black American, etc; they talk about their communities a lot more. I’ve heard some in the Zen community say these people are avoiding their personal work and feelings by focusing on the community. This is not necessarily the case. It is very possible that this is a  felt sense of self that isn’t as strictly individualized in the way mainstream white culture is.

There can be a real difference in where one’s anger is coming from. Is it coming from a “we” or an “I” or both? Some people have never really experienced, outside of their family unit, the anger of a “we.” In our Undoing Racism workshops, those who came out the most pissed off were working-class ethnic whites. I’ve seen working-class white people leave with a lot of anger when they realized what had been done to them. And some became real allies to people of color as a result.

---

This interview was conducted and transcribed with support from Margo Mallar, and edited by Cathy Cockrell. Thank you Margo and Cathy!

---

Photo credits: Rural PA: Nicholas A. Tonelli / Amish Cemetery: Allie Caulfield / Memorial service at Carlisle Indian School cemetery: White Bison / Houston, TX: Joe Wolf / Pennsylvania German barn: Wood Natural Restorations / Blessed Year hex: Dutch Hex Sign

OnBeing columnist Courtney E. Martin introduces her neighbor and friend, Louise Dunlap, whose reflections on land and her settler-colonial ancestors model truth-telling and accountability. Louise offers guidance on how to engage, and a wealth of resources (via links in the text) on decolonizing and other relevant topics. This essay was originally published at onbeing.org and is reprinted here with permission.

---

“To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue.”

So says Buddha. Which is a fitting way for me to introduce you to Louise, my 78-year-old neighbor and friend. She’s a writer, a teacher, and a Buddhist activist. She’s, quite possibly, closed the gap between how she lives and what she believes more than any other human I’ve ever encountered.

Even when it comes to race — a place where so many otherwise impassioned white activists, especially of a certain age, have deep moral failings. Louise may have failed, she may continue to fail in various ways, but she has no delusions about her culpability or the ways in which her freedom is tied up in taking responsibility.

As this letter demonstrates, she is committed to telling truth about her own family’s story and how it’s wrapped up in the larger national history of racialized violence and economic exploitation. She’s teaching me, through these words and her actions, how to walk the maze of human life with more courage, especially at this cataclysmic moment.

– Courtney Martin

---

Dear Courtney,

Just last summer we were on the deck at my family’s place in the woods — you and me and your two little girls — waiting for our friends to arrive for a picnic. Enjoying the dry, hot air, cooled just a little by huge spreading live oaks — a perfect northern California day on the edge of the Napa Valley. We were on this futon where my mother used to sleep outdoors with her grandchildren. Baby Stella had sprawled out dozing and I was telling Maya about sleeping here and sometimes seeing wild animals. I was about to go on about bobcats and skunks, when she startled both of us.

“I see a animal,” she said in her confident three-year-old voice, looking out towards the field. Hardly believing her, I turned and followed her gaze beyond the dark arms of the oaks. And there he was, not ten yards away, lying in a patch of shade surrounded by sunlight — a little buck with upright horns. He looked so peaceful, resting there in the heat of the day, and didn’t seem to mind our excitement, how we passed the binoculars to Maya, showed her how to use them, and praised her clear seeing, marveling at her openness to the natural world.

Next time you’re here with Maya, we have to figure out how to tell her some of the history that surrounds this place. It’s hard to know how the land can be so lovely and peaceful. It’s “ours” only because my great, great grandfather bought it during the terrible period after statehood when the early people of California were being hunted down in what we would later name genocide.

So far as I know he wasn’t in any of the militias that wiped out peaceful villages, killing women and even babies in ways too horrible to tell Maya. But he was in the state legislature when they voted to pay those militias, and likely shared the common view that Indians should be “exterminated” from land that hadn’t already been cleared. That was their code for genocide at the time. I’m guessing my ancestor voted in 1860 — right before the Civil War — to strengthen state laws that permitted kidnapping and sale of Native children into indenture — which was really slavery. Even though he was a union supporter, the census for that year listed two people who were likely indentured Indians living in his own home. In a nearby town, an observer said almost every household had one to three Indian child servants.

California was particularly violent, but the story holds true in different ways throughout the country, whether our white ancestors were actually there for the killing or immigrated later and moved into places that had been conquered. Free land, some of them thought. We know the real story in our hearts but don’t want to look at it. There’s too much fear and grief. But not acknowledging keeps us locked into self-destructive patterns. We’re living with the kind of shadow Jung talked about — played out in our political life, denial of climate change, and lack of true respect for darker-skinned people. As long as we don’t look back, the wound deepens and we can’t move forward. Like with PTSD.

Under the oaks last summer, we hadn’t known the election outcome or seen how deeply into this shadow our country would move.  And now, we’re reeling from it, casting about — so many of us — to see how we can step up our good work, our resistance to new waves of atrocity. Now things look very hard, with a government that seems not to care about the earth or understand that none of us can be free (or our country “great”) unless we embrace those who’ve been left out and repair the harm done to them.

You tell me I have wisdom to impart — maybe because I’m nearly 80 and have spent over half my years focusing on this racial karma. Your trust is a little daunting to me. I’m just as subject to dread as anyone else — perhaps because I know too much about what we’re historically capable of, what some of our revered founding fathers specifically did that has never been grieved or repaired. But I can tell you what I’m doing and encouraging others to do.

• Gather with others. We need to sit down with other people, especially other white people — in person if possible — to share our fears, our heartbreak, and the steps we’re taking. As you know so well, this is where real understanding develops, and the power to move forward.

• Look even more deeply for colonial mind in ourselves. No matter how many friends, courses, or roommates of color we’ve had as white people, there’s more to learn, ways to grow beyond guilt and discomfort into compassion and understanding. One good way is to look back into our own histories on the continent: when did our people immigrate and how did their stories mesh with the narrative of colonization? This makes for great discussion when we gather. After all these years, I still need more looking deeply. Right now I’m stuck about talking to a particular white person whose superior attitude caused some real harm. Why can’t I just tell her about it? To me this says I, myself, still have some of that same colonial mind that I see in others. When I can forgive my own mistakes and love myself, I’ll be free and able to talk with love and equanimity to anyone. But it’s a long process.

• More action than before, especially local action. I don’t mean we should all get busier, but these next four years call us to keep our history in mind in every action and to find new ways to focus our longstanding interests. I’m rethinking my own projects and looking for ones that bring it home to where I live. I’m excited that young friends have returned from Standing Rock fired up about what tribes lived here in our area, what their issues are now, and how to support as allies. The Ohlone people have been organizing for years here to gain a land base and preserve the oldest sacred site in the Bay Area from development. Now many new supporters are showing up to help.

• Remember that positive change is happening. Watching how racial karma affects our body politic and researching family history in the light of genocide can be discouraging, but when you look closely, there are enormous shifts in consciousness. We’re not stuck. Looking back to some of the little known stories of the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s movement, people before us changed some very deep attitudes. And when I worry about how hard it is to decolonize the very mind of a society, I think about how it’s actually been happening over the generations in my own family. Starting with the great, great grandfather who bought this land — so deeply grounded in the racist thinking of Manifest Destiny. Nothing changed much in the next generation, but then my grandmother’s views shifted just a little, and her sons began to express some real questions. On the other side, my mother — descended from slaveholders — became the only white mom I knew in the 1950s who would speak up against the “n-word” whenever she heard it. Consciousness changes are happening right in our own families. Seeing these slow-moving changes in collective consciousness humanizes my ancestors for me and even makes them lovable. Some traditions even say these ancestors are trying to help us undo the harm of their legacy.

And what a time to be doing decolonizing work in America! Dozens of groups are finding remarkable new ways to look at white peoples’ complicity, without the guilt-tripping of the old ways (Louise references White Awake as an example in her original article). Ta-Nehisi Coates has affected us; white people really are starting to wake up.

Many say we wouldn’t be doing these things with the same passion and urgency if another candidate had been elected. We wouldn’t be finding the ways to deal with our founding wounds that I think we’ll see in the next four years — not in the headlines maybe — but in our hearts and our grassroots institutions. Four years from now — 2020, when our next president is inaugurated — will also be the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing at Plymouth, a time that was far more traumatic for both colonists and Indigenous than our schoolbook histories say.

As we hold the ground in our democracy, this coming four years will be a good time for us to collectively look back and change the public narrative, which will mean we can really move forward. I hope that will be a story we can share with Maya the next time we’re up in the woods.

---

Louise Dunlap is a fifth-generation Californian, who has taught writing for 53 years at UMass Boston, Tufts University, MIT, U.C. Berkeley and more. In quiet ways, she is active on many environmental and social justice issues. She is the author of Undoing the Silence, a book for writers. She is now writing about land and her settler-colonial ancestors.

---

Courtney Martin is a columnist for On Being. Her newest book, The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream, explores how people are redefining the American dream (think more fulfillment, community, and fun, less debt, status, and stuff). Courtney is the co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and a strategist for the TED Prize. She is also co-founder and partner at Valenti Martin Media and FRESH Speakers Bureau, and editor emeritus at Feministing.com.

---

Feature photo credit: Steve Corey

Miki Kashtan (international teacher of NVC, author, and co-founder of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication), draws on the complexities of her experience of privilege and oppression as a Jew and an Israeli immigrant to explore the topics of empathy and privilege. The fruit of her inquiry is wisdom and guidance for dominant groups seeking to redress the harm done in their name, by their actions, and/or as a form of inheritance. This article has been slightly abbreviated for White Awake. You can read the full piece here. To access Miki’s latest work, check out her blog “Facing Privilege“.

---

For some years now, I’ve been pondering this sentence I’ve heard, often, from my colleague and friend Kit Miller, director of the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, and former director of BayNVC: “Empathy doesn’t flow uphill very easily.” Oppressed people already know it doesn’t flow downhill easily. As my late sister Inbal put it, when oppression is present, those in power see the oppressed as subhuman, the oppressed see those in power as inhuman, and neither sees the other’s humanity. When there is a strong power difference, and that power is used to oppress a group, empathy gets blocked – both as a precondition for and an outcome of the oppression.

I can immediately see the appeal of the conclusion, or dream, that bringing individuals together from across lines of oppression, and getting them to hear each other’s stories and develop empathy, would be a step towards transforming the oppression. After all, empathy is liberating, whether we receive it in response to our own suffering, or when we open our hearts widely to shine its light on others and to recover our sense of their humanity.

Except that in practice, what I have seen in groups I’ve been part of is not supporting this hypothesis. Instead, what I have seen and heard of, in contexts of power differences, has finally led me to the opposite conclusion. Unless some very specific ways to focus attention and choice are part of the picture, I now believe that the goal of having “both sides hear each other” reinforces rather than transcends the power differences.

Vignettes

1986: I am living in Manhattan, and my very first German friend is visiting. He has had too much to drink, which worries me a bit. Then he starts crying. I learn that both his parents were Nazi identified; his mother was in the Hitler Jugend, and his father in the Wehrmacht. He wails as he recognizes that the violence of all this is deeply situated in his body, and will never leave him. I had never before spoken intimately with any German, let alone the son of Nazi parents. I realize how much easier it is to be on the side of the victim, when morality is on my side.

*

1988: I am in Israel, visiting, in the middle of the first Intifada. I am in a room full of about 100 Israeli women who came to hear from a few Palestinian women, as part of ongoing efforts by women across the lines to create peace. (Incidentally, as has been the fate of women for so long, their work was never publicly recognized when the talks leading to the Oslo accord took place, on ground prepared by them.) Everyone is open, clear, present, curious – until the Palestinian women start sharing personal stories about what happened to their families and beyond at the hands of Israelis. At that moment, the Israeli women become furious and start shouting.

*

2004: I am co-leading the BayNVC Leadership Program with Julie Greene. There are about 25 participants in the program, of which about 8 are men, and yet we count, over the first few days, that much more than half of the time, men were the first to speak in response to a question, and spoke longer and more often than the women in the room. (This is not an unusual occurrence. This is documented statistically, and I have been obsessively observing this phenomenon for decades in pretty much all groups I am part of or lead.) Julie and I decide to dedicate a session in the program to engaging with this and learning from it. At the next large group session, we make the observation and invite a discussion about it. The men protest, crying out to be seen as individuals and not just members of a group.

*

2009: I am in Auschwitz, as part of a nano-delegation of four women: one each from Germany, Poland, Israel (though living in the US), and USA. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time: “In the midst of the ruins of the human heart, we experienced magic amongst us as we walked around the camps, primarily speechless, but united in our quest for love and healing, especially a desire to understand the unimaginable: what made it possible to do it… We tried to imagine being staff at the camp, getting up in the morning to go to work, how to do it. I feel more whole for having done this, for having managed to make some small progress toward being able to imagine what it could have meant. It feels somehow essential to the integrity of doing the work of teaching NVC as a spiritual path to be able to see and understand the human logic that led to these choices.” I am also reminded now, as I am writing this piece, of the moment in which, while reading Alice Miller’s account about Hitler’s life, I felt compassion for the child that Hitler was and the brutality of his life. I knew right then that my own liberation became that much closer for being able to hold him with compassion, even if only as a child.

*

2015: I am talking with an African-American woman about the various ideas I’ve had in preparation for writing this piece. She is excited, and spontaneously shares a personal example. At a gathering specifically designed to explore matters of race and privilege, she is paired up with a white man. When it is her turn, she speaks about how much she wants to be able to have contexts where she can just talk about her experiences as an African-American woman and be heard, without defensiveness, without responses, without being asked, indirectly, to then hear someone else. The agreement for the activity is that each person speaks for themselves, not in response to what another said. She is done, and it’s then the turn of the man she was paired up with. He proceeds to speak about how hard it was for him to hear what she said, and what he wants to be seen for.

Built-in Asymmetry

It is a little later in 2015 in Oakland, and a group of participants in a workshop are listening in as I am talking with my friend and colleague Aya Caspi, also from Israel, who has just come back from leading a small group of Palestinians and Israelis in an NVC Family Camp in Vashon Island, Washington State. The intensity is visible on her face as she tells me some of what happened when Israelis and Palestinians were trying to listen to each other. Aya had a particular concern about how to be open to Palestinians’ pain without dehumanizing Israelis. As I listen more, I realize that Aya, like many Israelis, is only familiar with the official story we both grew up on, even as she is open to the possibility that all or some of it is not true. Her heart is weeping with grief for the plight of the Palestinians, and yet she hasn’t chosen, until this conversation, to look deeply into what happened. I have found sources that, to me, are incontrovertible (though of course others would dispute; such is the nature of major political conflicts), with quotes from early Zionist leaders that leave me shivering with anguish, struggling to breathe. I can barely look at it, and yet I can’t not.

As I listen to Aya and navigate the complexity of the situation – there is this person I love dearly, whose pure heart I trust beyond measure; there is the pervasive and deeply reinforced collective ignorance and denial hanging in the air, even as we both challenge it, of what we have done to get to have a country and language we can call our own after 2,000 years of ongoing persecution; there are the people, a whole group of students, listening to our conversation, watching how we navigate the challenge; and there is the intensity itself, within me – all the pieces suddenly come together for me, and I see a path forward. It is an asymmetrical path, completely different from the simple frame of “we are both wounded and need empathy.” I realize, finally, that this frame itself is a challenge to breakthrough.

This is a path of paradox.

Path of Liberation

I still believe that what I have always intuited and experienced is true, that opening to the humanity of the oppressor is, indeed, a fast track to inner freedom and liberation… EXCEPT I now realize that it cannot be expected of the oppressed person. Given the pervasiveness of pain, suffering, and especially the inner and outer assault on the dignity of the oppressed, this expectation then becomes one more aspect of the oppression, regardless of how liberating it would be if done voluntarily.

Because I am both in privileged groups (e.g. an Israeli Jew, and a person with access to white privilege and untold amount of educational privilege) and in oppressed groups (e.g. a Jew, with the history this entails, and a woman in a world dominated by men), I can recognize the strength and rigor of this kind of commitment. As the one with privilege, I want to remember to always welcome and never expect someone else to hear me if it’s not their complete and voluntary choice; all the more so if that person is a member of a group that mine continues to oppress. As the one without privilege, I experience the space to choose to move towards my own liberation on my own terms, without expectations, without a timetable. I smell the freedom, I want it, and I can only go there when I can, even though I know that going there will accelerate my liberation.

However appealing being heard might be, I now believe that what is most liberating for the oppressor, the member of a privileged group, is to focus, instead, deliberately and deeply, on looking as openly as our human heart can tolerate at the actions done in our name or even by us, with or without knowing, with or without intention.

This is clearly not an easy path. How many of us have enough sense of self, enough trust in our human beauty, that we can continue to hold onto it when we hear of harm we have done to others? Few. This is, in my mind, why the Israeli women became angry at the Palestinian women.

Hearing the suffering of the Palestinian women could not lead to the expected compassion and care because it interfered with the “official story” that was the justification for the treatment of Palestinians. Their real life experience, their basic human suffering, was threatening the trust in the self, making it that much harder to maintain a positive moral self-image.

I still remember, with immense sorrow and tenderness, a time when I acted like the man in the last vignette above. It was 2005, and I was oblivious to the dynamics of what was happening in the room. Despite years of participating in talking, feeling, reading, writing, and struggling to transform relations of power, I was entirely absorbed in wanting my innocence to be seen. I was focused on how much my intention had been misunderstood, clearly leaving unattended the effect: the pain of the African-American woman who was responding to the action I had taken.

Like all human beings, we have a deep need, a true hunger, to be seen in the fullness of our own humanity, especially our own suffering and the meaning that our actions have for us, separately from any pain we may have created in the world. We habitually allow this very understandable longing to make us unable to be fully present to the ones suffering as a result of actions we or members of our group took. Opening our hearts to the effects of our actions is a powerful antidote to that tendency. Of course we need to be seen for every small bit of our humanity. And yet we can only receive this gift from those who choose to give it to us.

---

For more information on the 1988 vignette see: “The Pain, The Anger, and the Hope: Women Peace Workers in Israel,” Magazine of Creation Spirituality, March 1992.

---

Miki Kashtan is a co-founder of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication (BayNVC) and the NVC North America leadership program. She is inspired by the role of visionary leadership in shaping a livable future, and works toward that vision by sharing the principles and practices of Nonviolent Communication through mediation, meeting facilitation, consulting, and training for organizations and for committed individuals. Miki blogs at the Facing Privilege. She is the author of three books (including Reweaving Our Human Fabric: Working together to Create a Nonviolent Future), and her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Tikkun magazine, Shareable, Peace and Conflict, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley.

This interview with Cara Michelle Silverberg gives context, and shares the story, of her creation of the Work that Reconnects Passover Seder, found on our site here. We are thankful for Cara’s generosity in sharing the haggadah, and her story, with us! If you would like to more fully understand how White Awake frame’s this type of cultural, spiritual practice within the context of our work, please see our Community Practice section.

---

 

The WTR Passover Seder draws inspiration from the original Freedom Seder, created by Rabbi Arthur Waskow – a radical elder in the Jewish justice and environmental movements – in response to the events of the civil rights movement, and the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. On April 4, 1969, 800 people gathered in the basement of Lincoln Temple, a black church in Washington, D.C. There Jews and Christians, rabbis and ministers, black and white, used Rabbi Waskow’s haggadah to build a new Passover ritual together.

---

Deep Ecology (and Black Prophetic Fire)

32 years of Passover seders may have prepared Cara Michelle Silverberg to lead the Jewish ritual and feast, but it didn’t inspire a passionate desire to do so. It took the work of activists Joanna Macy and Cornel West to do that.

Joanna Macy is widely known for a body of work called the Work that Reconnects (WTR). Based in deep ecology, systems theory and Buddhist traditions, the WTR helps people take part in the epochal shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. It is a style of group work (usually shared in workshop settings) that uses experiential activities to help participants connect with one another and with the intelligence, self-healing powers of life. The goal of the WTR is to “enliven” and motivate participants to play an active role in the creation of a life sustaining society. Cara first encountered this work in workshops within the Jewish environmental community. She joined the Earth Leadership Cohort in September 2014 and began to immerse herself in Macy’s four-stage spiral of gratitude, honoring our pain, seeing with new eyes and going forth.

“Joanna Macy founded this work in the 60s and 70s to create space for people to feel the grief that came up in the age of nuclear activity,” says Cara. “What she found was that when people delved into their despair in a well-facilitated process, they began to discover wellsprings of hope. She was able to dive into these places with people and reemerge with more powerful tools for personal and collective transformation.”

Understanding anti-Jewish Oppression

“I’m presently in a pretty deep process of understanding anti-Jewish oppression, how it shapes the world that I live in, and how I’ve internalized it. Day to day I live very comfortably. I’m openly Jewish – personally and professionally. No swastikas are painted on my house, my business isn’t being burned, my family isn’t being threatened. But just because anti-Jewish oppression isn’t overtly visible in my day-to-day life doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

When we think of oppression, we often think of poverty, labor exploitation, mass incarceration. Anti-Jewish oppression generally looks different. Jews have historically been allowed by dominant groups to be just successful enough that they maintain an appearance – and to varying extents throughout history, a reality of – power and privilege. Then, when it serves dominant groups, Jews are scapegoated and blamed for overarching societal problems. This is where ideas like “global Jewish domination,” “greedy and wealthy,” and “killers of God” come into play, and the phenomenon has occurred over and over throughout history. Oppression doesn’t go away until and unless there is a massive social movement to transform its underpinnings. Just seventy years ago, one in three Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Was there a subsequent mass movement to transform the anti-Semitism that provoked my people’s slaughter? If so, I missed it.”

Crafting a Freedom Seder around the Work that Reconnects, and the four questions of W.E.B. DuBois

In early 2016, Cara received an email asking for suggestions for kicking off a Work That Reconnects retreat with a Passover seder. The compatibility of the four traditional cups of wine and the four stations of the spiral immediately inspired Cara with ideas and a desire to lead the ritual. Cara had two goals in compiling the Work That Reconnects Passover Seder: 1) providing integrity for the Jewish community whose cultural tradition the seder is based in; and 2) using the broader themes of liberation and oppression to make it accessible to the interfaith and Work That Reconnects community.

“The Passover seder is more than a ritual recitation of a story. It is meant to be a visceral experience in which participants go into ancestral memories and bodily experiences of slavery and liberation. One of the ways we do this is by asking questions,” Cara says. “Critical questioning enables us go deeper into the societal and spiritual structures that hold us back, that divide us, that create oppression hierarchies in the first place.”

In order to meaningfully address current systems of oppression, Cara integrated into the seder a speech she attended by Cornel West on the four questions that civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois wrestled with: How shall integrity face oppression? What does honesty do in the face of deception? What does decency do in the face of insult? How does virtue meet brute force?

The result was a ritual in which Jews could feel the presence of their ancient tradition, and all in attendance were invited to delve into their own narratives of grief and gratitude, oppression and liberation, resistance and resilience. Cara says, “I hope people will use this seder as a launch point for their own community explorations, and make it their own.”

---

Cara Michelle Silverberg works in the field of youth leadership and environmental and social justice programs, with a focus in Jewish and interfaith community building. She is pursuing a Master of Arts in Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. You can contact her on LinkedIn or follow her blog: onthefringesofplace.com

The interview with Cara, and initial draft of this article, was conducted/created by Margo Mallar, a member of the staff at the Insight Meditation Society, a Buddhist retreat center in Barre, Massachusetts. Many thanks to Mara for her contributions to the site!

---

The Earth Leadership Cohort is an immersion in the Work That Reconnects for young folks age 18-30, and was an important piece of Cara’s process in creating the WTR Passover Seder. If you are interested in participating in the 2017 cohort, you can view the complete announcement here.

“Even before Christianity emerged, Jews were a troublesome people to ruling classes of the ancient world, because they had emerged with a revolutionary message, articulated in the Exodus story: the message that ruling classes were not inevitable, that the world could be fundamentally transformed …”

– Rabbi Michael Lerner, from Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin, by Rabbi Michael Lerner and Doctor Cornel West

---

This special seder, created in the spirit of the original Freedom Seder of 1969, and drawing on both The Promised Land Haggadah and The Ma’ayan Passover Haggadah, was created by Cara Michelle Silverberg for a Work that Reconnects (WTR) five day workshop that began the first day of Passover, 2016.

Within her haggadah, Cara integrated embodiment work coming out of the deep ecology movement (spiral of the WTR) and a social justice framing via the “four questions” that W.E.B. DuBois poised to future generations of organizers and civil rights activists – four questions that were given new life through the Black Prophetic Fire of Cornel West in his opening remarks for the Left Forum conference in New York City, 2014.

We hope that our readers will find value and inspiration in this liberatory Passover seder. White Awake has embedded a few links into the haggadah online, to help those less familiar with the form to visualize the instructions given.

Those of you who are Jewish may be inspired to incorporate elements of this haggadah into a Passover seder with your family, friends, and/or community. This haggadah is available to be used and reinterpreted as you see fit.

If you want to hold a ritualized meal that intentionally explores systems of oppression, but don’t have access to Jewish community with whom you can hold a Passover seder, the WTR Passover Seder haggadah might be a lovely source of inspiration for a different type of event. As with all things, it is important to learn the roots and honor the sources of traditions and teachings.

If you would like to read more about Cara’s process creating this haggadah, see our interview with her here. If you would like to more fully understand how White Awake frame’s this type of cultural, spiritual practice within the context of our work, please see our Community Practice section.

---

How to use this Haggadah:

• A circular or square table setting in which all participants can see each other is ideal. This seder was first led for 32 people, sitting at six tables positioned in a open rectangle (with no seats in the center). We set each table with its own set of ritual items – a seder plate, a bowl/towel/pitcher, a plate of matzah, a bowl of charoset, and a bottle of grape juice and wine. We also included flowers on the tables, and four pairs of candles for the candle lighting (tea lights, so they burned out by the end of the seder and were not so tall as to cause a hazard).

• The blessing for lighting the candles in the beginning of the seder was originally composed for a seder occurring on Shabbat.

• Participants take turns reading aloud, except sections designated “Leader.”

• Blessings and text between two ∞ symbols are intended to be read in unison by all present, according to participants desire and ability.

• The notes in [ ] brackets indicate the estimated amount of time necessary for the following section. There are four sections in this seder, which each correspond to one station of the Work That Reconnects spiral.

• Please keep in mind that this is a very long ritual, with almost all of the traditional elements included, and a lengthy discussion around DuBois’s four questions in the middle. To complete this entire haggadah with a group, you will need about three and a half hours.

• Songs used in the seder can be found on their own page, here.

---

---

[OPENING & INTRODUCTION – 15 min]

Kavannah (Intention)

Leader: Let us all take a few moments to arrive, breathe and make silence together. The intention of this seder is to honor the stories of oppression and liberation that have shaped human history, and the experiences of destruction and rebirth that have shaped this Earth throughout all time.

May our stories of oppression and liberation give power to our collective process of claiming the sacredness of life – in every moment, in every species, in every generation. May this seder bring us closer to understanding and being forces of tikkun olam (repair of the world soul).

Introductory Notes

Seder means “order” in Hebrew and is the name of this ritual meal. The haggadah, or booklet we are reading from, means “telling” in Hebrew and refers to the telling of the story of the Exodus. It also refers to the sharing of anecdotes, songs and prayers that relate to our experiences of oppression and liberation.

A Passover seder is not simply a series of ritual actions. It is a process by which we actively engage in an intellectual and spiritual process of questioning the systems of injustice that pervade our world. One way of doing this is asking questions. At some Passover seders, adults even do silly and strange things just to get the children to ask questions! You are invited and encouraged throughout this seder to ask clarifying questions, rhetorical questions, any questions that help to open your mind and heart.

There are many different versions of the haggadah, all designed to emphasize certain dimensions of the Passover story. Some parts of this seder have been slightly rearranged from the traditional order as a way to adapt it to this unique community. This haggadah is inspired by the Freedom Seder by Rabbi Arthur Waskow (a radical elder in the Jewish justice and environmental movements who created the first Freedom Seder during the Civil Rights Movement); The Promised Land Haggadah by Lynn Lebow Nadeau; and The Ma’ayan Passover Haggadah by the Jewish Women’s Project.

While Hebrew is a gendered language, some Jewish feminists and humanists have created blessing alternatives to the traditional masculine gender constructions of Jewish prayers. This haggadah switches between feminine and non-gendered grammatical formulations of blessings in order to honor the mother Earth from which all is born and a world beyond gender binaries. This wording is different from what one would hear at a more traditional seder or Jewish prayer service. For those present who prefer to use traditional Hebrew blessings with masculine grammatical formulations, this is perfectly welcome.

Participants may also choose to use English words such as Creator, Mystery, Peacemaker, Mother of Life, etc. to represent their own concepts of sacred energy. Please feel free to use whatever words feel right to you and refrain from words that do not. Should you feel inclined to listen to blessings and readings rather than speak them aloud, this is also perfectly welcome.

Candle Lighting (when Seder falls on Shabbat)

Sundown tonight is the beginning of Passover and the beginning of Shabbat. We will now kindle the festival and Sabbath lights.

During six days of the week, we work, worry and bustle about, guided by the six directions and their energies of activity and movement – north, south, east, west, sky, earth. On Shabbat, and on this festival night of Passover, we retreat from the world of work and worry, we give ourselves space to explore the transformational power within each of us, and we return to the seventh direction from which we all come – the center, the source.

(Turn out all the lights. Participants near the candles each light one. Recite together:)

∞

Yitromeim l’beinu, t’shovav, nafshenu,

B’hadlakat neir shel Shabbat v’shel yom tov.

May our hearts be lifted, our spirits refreshed,

as we light the Sabbath candles.

∞

Blessing The Children (when Seder falls on Shabbat)

Another traditional blessing on Shabbat is the blessing over the children. While this blessing is generally said by parents for their own children, tonight we will say a blessing for all children as well as the children present here with us.

(Leader offers a blessing for the children.)

[GRATITUDE – 35 min, all the way through the 1st cup of wine]

Miriam’s Cup

This is Miriam’s Cup. (Leader holds up Miriam’s Cup.) When the Hebrews wandered in the desert, Miriam the Prophetess manifested water wherever they traveled. Miriam’s Well, as it came to be known, nourished the people as they wandered.

We will go around the room introducing ourselves by name and sharing a single word about something we are grateful for. As we share, we will pass around Miriam’s Cup and each pour a drop of water from our own water glass into her Cup.

(Whoever is near Miriam’s Cup, begin the sharing and pass to your left. When the sharing is complete, readers continue below.)

This cup, now overflowing with our gratitude, brings our hearts and minds together. It will remain on our seder table throughout the meal, as a reminder of all that nourishes us, even in times of struggle.

(Leader introduces a partner exercise. At its conclusion, Leader brings the group’s attention back together.)

Leader: Please turn to someone sitting next to you, introduce yourself, and take turns completing the following sentence: “I feel truly free when … ”

While your partner is speaking, your job is to simply and lovingly listen – no responses or questions. When I ding the bell, you’ll switch who is speaking and listening. Again, the prompt is, “I feel truly free when …” Please find your partner, and begin your sharing.

(Bring the group back together with a bell and a song.)

First Cup of Wine

Sanctifying a cup of wine is one of the most common Jewish traditions. Wine is a symbol of joy, of the flowing cup of life. By blessing wine, we make it, and the moment we mark by drinking it, sacred. For those of you who do not wish to drink wine, grape juice is available.

Tonight, we will drink four cups of wine (or grape juice), each symbolizing stages in the process of liberation. We begin with this first cup, which honors our gratitude and appreciation for the world and each other. With this first cup, we also recite a traditional Hebrew blessing expressing gratitude for our arrival together in this precious moment.

Leader: Pour just an ounce or so of wine or juice in your glass. You do not need to drink it all at once, but you will want to finish it by the time we reach the blessing for the second cup (about a half hour from now).

∞

N’vareykh et Eyn Hahayim matzmihat p’ri hagefen.

Let us bless the Source of Life that ripens the fruit on the vine.

∞

B’rucha at yah Eloheinu Ruach haolam shehecheyatnu v’kiyimatnu v’higiyatnu lazman hazeh.

You are Blessed, Breath of the World, who has kept us in life and sustained us, enabling us to reach this season.

∞

Urchatz (first ritual hand washing)

Twice during this meal, we perform a ritual hand washing as an act of cleansing and sanctifying.

For this first washing, the seder leader will symbolically wash their hands for all of us. All are invited to raise their hands in the air, look around at the hands of ourselves and others, and meditate upon the sacred work our hands undertake in this world.

[HONORING OUR PAIN – 45 min, all the way through 2nd cup of wine]

Karpas (parsley in salt water)

(Leader introduces a partner exercise. After the exercise, the leader brings the attention of the group back together and readers continue below.)

Leader: Turn again to the person you shared with before in the open sentence exercise. Tap your partner on the shoulder – whoever tapped first is partner A speaking first, and the other person is partner B lovingly listening first. When I ding the bell, you will switch roles. Take turns completing the following sentence: “A form of oppression I see in the world is … and when I turn my attention toward it, I feel … ”

Try to trust your body and emotive instincts and really sink into your feelings. I will ring the bell at two minutes so you can switch who is speaking and listening.

(Bring the group back together with a bell.)

We come now to the karpas – parsley and salt water. The green karpas represents spring awakening, the force that waits behind grief and loss.

To ignite this awakening, we must deeply honor our grief and loss. We dip the karpas in salt water, empathizing with the tears of all those who feel pain, oppression and destruction. We dip, and we join together in the following blessing:

∞

B’rucha at yah eloheinu ruach ha’olam boreit p’ri ha’adamah.

You are Blessed, Breath of the World, who creates fruit of the earth.

∞

Yachatz (breaking the middle matzah)

At any other Jewish festival meal, we break bread and eat it. At this meal, we break bread and later hide it, reminding us that this seder is both a celebration of freedom and a search for it.

At each table, there is a stack of three matzot. Someone at each table may remove the middle matzah from the plate and break it in two.

Leave the two pieces on the plate to remind us of the fracturing of our world and all that needs healing.

Maggid (the story)

This is the part of the seder when we examine the story of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt. We begin by explaining each of the items on the seder plate.

(As readers explain each item on the plate, someone near the item should hold it up for others to see.)

The matzah, or unleavened bread, was the bread eaten by the Jews during their hasty departure from Egypt, as their bread did not have time to rise. The communion wafer used in the Catholic mass is based on the matzah used at the Last Supper.

The maror, or bitter herb (horseradish root), represents the bitterness of slavery – of the Jews in Egypt and of all beings who are enslaved and abused.

The charoset, a mixture of fruit, nuts and wine, represents the mortar out of which our ancestors were forced to make bricks when they were slaves in Egypt. The sweet taste reminds us that all labor has its dignity and satisfactions.

Traditional seder plates include the z’roa (shank bone), which symbolizes the sacrificial lamb whose blood saved the Jewish children while the plague of slaying of the first born took the lives of Egyptian children. The Talmud, a sacred Jewish text, says that vegetarians may use a beet instead of a shank bone because it also “bleeds.”

The karpas (green vegetable) represents the perpetual rebirth and freedom of Springtime, even when the frozen winters have diminished our hope.

The beitzah (roasted hard boiled egg) represents the cycle of life and death.

The orange, first added to the seder plate by Jewish feminists to represent women’s rights and strength in Jewish leadership, has come to represent a wider expression of Jewish feminism and LGBTQ identity and solidarity.

The Four Questions

In the traditional “Four Questions” we ask, “Why is this night different than all other nights?” The act of questioning opens our minds to the possibility that the conventional way things are is not the way they have to be. Tonight, we will ask four questions to examine the systems of power that surround us and to wonder: does it have to be this way?

Dr. Cornel West says: “W.E.B. DuBois, in 1957 at the age of 89 years old, decides to write love letters to the younger generation. It’s almost as if he knew that there would be another wave of marvelous, new, moral and spiritual militancy among a younger generation, who are hungry and thirsty—something beyond the superficial culture of spectacle … He says, ‘I’ve been wrestling with four questions all of my life, and every generation has to come to terms with these questions.’”

(Leader explains how the Four Questions discussion exercise will work.)

Leader: Each table will focus on one of the Four Questions. Your table’s question is printed on one side of a card on your table. Focus only on the question – not the quote on the other side of the table card. You will have approximately 10 minutes to discuss within your group, and then we will all come back together to share one or two points related to each question.

1. The first question: “How shall integrity face oppression?”

– What is integrity? In what part/s of your life do you feel the most integrity? In what situations do you find it hard to act with integrity?

2. That second question DuBois raises: “What does honesty do in the face of deception? What does it mean to aspire to be an honest person?”

– Do you speak your truth? What is the impact of truth telling?

3. The third question: “What does decency do in the face of insult?”

– How do you stand up for your values and beliefs when challenged or offended? How do you stand up for others?

4. The last query: “How does virtue meet brute force?”

(Cornel West on this question: “The last query is, in some ways, the most difficult one, because we don’t like to talk about it—DuBois says, how does virtue meet brute force? Because anybody who has the audacity to be fundamentally committed to integrity, honesty, and decency may sooner or later have to come to terms with brute force, with repression…”)

– Are you willing to put your body on the line for justice? What does this look like for you?

(Leader brings group back together with a bell and a song. Time allowing, each small group may share 2-3 things that came up for them in their discussion. This can also be led in paired sharings, as opposed to whole table conversations.)

Ten Plagues

We now recite the 10 plagues that God wrought upon the Egyptians while the Hebrews were enslaved. As we recite each plague in Hebrew and in English, we remove a drop of wine for our cups, using our small finger to dip from the cup onto our plate. This removal of wine from our own cups reminds us that freedom comes at a cost, that our pleasure is always in tension with the suffering of the world, including the suffering of oppressors.

(All together, recite the Ten Plagues.)

∞

Blood
Frogs
Lice
Flies
Pestilence
Boils
Hail
Locusts
Darkness
Killing of the firstborn

∞

A common, modern interpretation of the Ten Plagues of the Exodus story is that they were not lightning bolts flung by a Super-Pharaoh in the sky, but rather ecological disasters brought about by the arrogance and stubbornness of Pharaoh.

We ask ourselves: Who and what are the Pharaohs of our modern day? What Plagues are these Pharaohs bringing on our Earth? To what extent do we contribute to the onslaught of these Plagues? For each modern Plague, we drop some more wine or grape juice from our glasses:

• Mass incarceration, and the systemic plague of police violence and excessive use of force, especially against indigenous people and people of color.
• Ongoing physical and cultural genocide against indigenous people’s of the world.
• Unheard-of droughts in Africa and the Middle East, setting off hunger, starvation, civil wars and genocide.
• Decimated mountaintops and dead coal-miners in Appalachia.
• Erratic weather patterns that destroy staple food crops and ruin millions of homes and lives.
• Systemic racism, rampant Islamophobia and xenophobia, violence against women.
• Water contaminated by fracking and agricultural runoff.
• Inability of wildlife to successfully reproduce due to massive oil spills.

What other plagues are impacting humans and more-than-human beings across this planet?

(Leader makes time for participants to name other modern plagues.)

Second cup of wine

Leader: We now come to our second cup of wine. We bless and drink this second cup to honor our pain for the world.

∞

N’vareykh et Eyn Hahayim matzmihat p’ri hagefen.

Let us bless the Source of Life that ripens the fruit on the vine.

∞

Rachtzah (second ritual hand washing)

Dismantling injustice takes many hands and many hearts. Deep grieving requires community. As a way of supporting each other now, use the bowl, pitcher and towel on your table to wash the hands of the person to your left, using the bowl as a catchment for the water you pour over your neighbor’s hands. Remember the water of Miriam’s Cup and the deep nourishment this cleansing can offer. As you wash, we will sing a Hebrew song of healing, the words and translation for which can be found in the listing of songs that accompany this haggadah.

∞

N’vareykh et Eyn Hahayim matzmihat p’ri hagefen.

Let us bless the Source of Life that ripens the fruit on the vine.

∞

[SEEING WITH NEW EYES – 30 min, all the way to 3rd cup of wine and singing]

Deep Time (WTR terminology)

On the Shabbat just before Passover, we read the last passage of the last of the Prophets, Malachi, who proclaims on behalf of the Breath of Life:

“Before the coming of the great and awesome day when the Breath of Life may become a Hurricane of Change, I will send the Prophet Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to the children and the hearts of the children to the parents, lest the earth be utterly destroyed.”

This passage reminds us that for healing to come, the generations must turn their hearts to each other. We turn our hearts to the generations before us to honor them, and we turn our hearts to the generations after us to care for them. Each gives us a special wisdom.

(Leader leads a meditative exercise. Afterwards, readers continue.)

Adaptation of the Seventh Generation exercise (WTR form)

Leader: If you are able, please stand with you feet about hip width apart, comfortable and relaxed, your back long tall. If you cannot stand, please sit with your limbs uncrossed, relaxing the weight of your body into your chair, and bringing some attention to the alignment of your back.

Breathe into your belly and lower back, and feel the structure and weight of your body as you stand or sit. (brief pause) Now imagine you are a tree, and the roots of this tree extend downward from your tailbone, connecting you deep into the center of the earth. Flowing up from the top of your spine, your shoulders, neck, and head is the fork of the trunk that leads to branches. These branches extend out above your head, reaching for the sky while the roots extend down into the earth. Breath, relax, and feel or imagine this rootedness in earth and extension towards sky. (brief pause)

Now imagine your ancestors stretching behind you, one after the other, back through time. And imagine the future generations stretching out in a line in front of you, one after the other, extending throughout all time. Is there a message these ancestors and future generations have for you? (brief pause) Do you hear the message, see the message, feel this message? (brief pause) Hold the message or messages you receive in your hands like a precious gem. (brief pause) Notice if there is a place in your body you want to store it, so you can always come back and contemplate this message again. (brief pause)

(Once the meditation is complete, return to participant readers.)

The following Hebrew text is one of the paramount texts Jews are obligated to say as part of the Passover seder. It reminds us that our duty of working towards liberation for all is never complete, that every generation must be part of the struggle for justice and healing. Please read this text with me.

∞

B’chol dor vador chayavim anu lirot et atzmeinu k’ilu yatzanu mi mitzrayim

In every generation, it is our duty to consider ourselves as if we had personally come forth from Egypt.

∞

We thank you ancestors and we thank you future generations for joining us here and blessing us with your wisdom. It gives us spiritual fuel to pursue justice and healing.

Blessings Over the Ritual Foods

Physical nourishment is also essential for pursuing justice and healing. We have almost reached the festive meal. But first, we look to the seder plate.

Each person should take a piece of the broken matzah, as well as a piece of a whole matzah. Each person should take a bit of maror (horseradish), as well as a bit of charoset (fruit and nuts).

As we eat these ritual foods, we contemplate their symbolism. The traditional order of blessings and eating is included below for those who would like to bless and eat in the ritual order. For those who prefer to take in this physical nourishment in your own way, please do so now.

Please also pour yourself more wine or juice in preparation for our group blessing over the third cup in just a few moments – but don’t drink yet!

∞

Motzi Matzah (bread)

B’rucha at ya, eloheinu ruach ha’olam hamotzi’ah lechem min ha’aretz.

Blessed are You, Breath of the World, who brings forth bread from the earth.

Yitromeim libeinu, t’shovav nafsheinu ba’achilat matzah.

As we eat the matzah, may we enter the spirit of our liberation.

∞

Maror (bitter herbs)

B’rucha at yah, eloheinu ruach ha’olam asher kidshatnu b’mitzvoteha v’tzivatnu al achilat maror.

You are Blessed, Breath of the World, who makes us holy with mitzvot and commands us to eat bitter herbs.

∞

Koreich (Hillel sandwich)

The second-century sage Hillel interpreted the biblical commandment to eat the matzah, maror and charoset as a commandment to mix all three together, combining the symbols of slavery and freedom into one “sandwich.”

(Leader encourages participants to create and take a bite of the Hillel sandwich now.)

Bareich (third cup of wine)

Leader: We now raise up our third cup of wine. We bless and drink this cup to honor the new ways of seeing the world that this community and seder has offered us.

∞

N’vareykh et Eyn Hahayim matzmihat p’ri hagefen.

Let us bless the Source of Life that ripens the fruit on the vine.

∞

(Leader brings closure to Seeing With New Eyes section by leading the song “I Am Determined To Walk In Freedom”, encouraging participants to stand, sing, dance, and shake it out! All songs used in the seder can be found here.)

[FESTIVE MEAL & GOING FORTH – 60 min for Chef’s intro, the meal and afikomen]

Shulchan Oreich (festive meal)

Leader: We now get to enjoy our festive meal! This time of eating, drinking, and talking together holds the space for the final stage in the spiral: “going forth”. We hope you will use your dinner conversation to follow up on our discussion of W.E.B. DuBois’ four questions, share with one another the actions that call to you, and talk about how you may be finding new ways to focus your longstanding interests on liberatory social change.

Towards the end of the meal, please listen for the bell so that we can bring our attention back to the whole group, and finish the seder together.

(Leader introduces the Chef, who explains what the meal is and how getting food will work. Clean up occurs AFTER the entire ritual is complete.

Everyone now joins in the meal together, talking and socializing as they please.

When people are almost done eating the Leader brings group’s attention back together. It is fine if people are not seated, so long as they are all paying attention and able to hear.)

Tzafun (search for the afikomen)

Leader: Earlier in the seder, when you all broke the middle matzah to symbolize the fracturing of the world, I took the middle matzah, wrapped it in a napkin and hid it! Remember: Justice and healing is something we must search and strive for and we can engage in this process with joy! Traditionally, all the children at the seder search for this afikomen (dessert). I cordially invite you to find your inner child and participate on a search for the afikomen! Once it is found, we will join back together at the table to conclude our seder. For those who wish to recite the birkat hamazon, this is a good time to do so.

Whoever finds the afikomen will get a prize! GO!

[CONCLUSION – 15 min]

Nirtzah (conclusion)

Leader: Standing O for our chef!

Elijah the Prophet is said to be the messenger of peace whose arrival tells us that the world we dream of has come. We open the door now for a few moments to invite Elijah to join us. Let us make silence together and determine our intentions for how we contribute to this peace.

Leader: “We fill Elijah’s Cup with wine by each pouring in a drop from our own glasses, symbolizing our contributions to this Great Turning. While passing around Elijah’s Cup, we will sing a song in three parts – listen to catch on and stay on a part that you feel comfortable with.” (Leader leads the group in singing “We Are The Ones by Sweet Honey In The Rock.” All songs used in the seder can be found here.)

(Leader facilitates the ritual of pouring into Elijah’s Cup.)

Leader: We now come to bless our fourth cup of wine. With this cup, we recognize the strength and resilience we possess in bringing healing to our world.

∞

N’vareykh et Eyn Hahayim matzmihat p’ri hagefen.

Let us bless the Source of Life that ripens the fruit on the vine.

∞

Closing Words:

All will come again into its strength

the fields undivided, the waters undammed,

the trees towering and the walls built low.

And in the valleys, people as strong

And varied as the land.

You too, God, will find your strength.

We who must live in this time

Cannot imagine how strong you will become.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours

Leader: Our seder is officially complete. You are welcome to continue drinking, singing and helping clean up. Thank you all for your presence and participation.

---

“This hagaddah may be revised, adapted and used in other contexts, in whole or in part. Please honor prior sources and contributors in order to honor the tradition, elders and leaders involved in its evolution.” (C.M. Silverberg, 2016)

White Awake has made slight adaptations to Cara’s original haggadah, in keeping with our website format and organizational focus. If you are not Jewish, please respect that this is a Jewish cultural form. While you may be inspired by this seder to create a ritual meal of your own, please do not hold a seder without participation and/or input from Jews.

Photo credits: Dori Midnight / Bill Wetzel / Ewan Munro

---

Cara Michelle Silverberg works in the field of youth leadership and environmental and social justice programs, with a focus in Jewish and interfaith community building. She is pursuing a Master of Arts in Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. You can contact her on LinkedIn or follow her blog: onthefringesofplace.com

These songs were compiled by Cara Michelle Silverberg as part of the Work that Reconnects Passover Seder that she created for a WTR workshop in 2016. An article describing Cara’s process and inspiration in creating the Passover seder can be found here.

---

---

Mi Shebeirach
by Debbie Friedman and Drorah Setel, based on traditional Jewish healing prayer

G        Em           Bm C   D
Mi shebeirach avoteinu (The one who blessed our fathers)

G                         Em  Bm    C D
M’kor hab’racha l’imoteinu (Source of blessing for our mothers)

Em                            Bm
May the source of strength,

C                                         G
Who blessed the ones before us,

C                               G                          C                             G
Help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing,

C                    D G
and let us say, Amen.

Second verse
Mi shebeirach imoteinu (The one who blessed our mothers)

M’kor habrachah l’avoteinu (Source of blessing for our fathers)

Bless those in need of healing with r’fuah sh’leimah, (complete healing)

The renewal of body, the renewal of spirit,

And let us say, Amen

---

When The World Is Sick (3-part round)
from original song by Silver Mt. Zion, taught at Occupy Wall Street

When the world is sick

Can’t no one be well

But I dreamt we was all beautiful and strong

---

Redemption Song / Mi Chamocha
Hebrew words from Song of the Sea, Book of Exodus
Music and English words by Bob Marley

G          Em                      C   C/B  Am
Mi chamocha ba-elim Adonai

G        Em          C       C/B        Am
Mi kamocha nedar bakodesh

G         Em          C      C/B Am
Nora tehilot oseh feleh

G         Em           C           D
Nora tehilot oseh feleh

G    C              D                G
Won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom

C       D      Em    C      D                   G
Cause all I ever had…redemption song

Translation of Hebrew:
Who is like you among the gods, REDEEMER?

Who is like you, majestic in holiness?

Awesome in splendor, working wonders

---

Sing Our Own Song
Original by UB40, chorus adapted

Part 1: Shoo-bee doo-bee doo-bee dum dum…

Part 2: Bee-dum ba-da-da-da dee-dum-bum…

Part 3: And we will fight for the right to be free

And we will build our own society

And we will sing, we will sing, we will sing

Our own song, our own song

---

Dayenu/ More Than Enough
by Holy Taya / Taya Shere
listen to track here

If only we be gentle and wise.

If only we see through compassionate eyes.

If only we free our true voice to rise. Dayenu.

If only we protect earth mother.

If only we respect sister and brother.

If only we connect with each other. Dayenu.

If only we flow forth in love.

If only we know God below and above.

If only we seed all we dream of. Dayenu.

If only we emanate conscious vibes.

If only we co-create with our tribe.

If only we shift survive into thrive. Dayenu.

If only we embody divine.

If only we take our sweet time.

If only we root as we climb. Dayenu.

I am more than enough.

You are more than enough.

We are more than enough.

---

I Give Myself Permission
taught by Alisa Starkweather

I give myself permission to be all I can be

I give myself permission to be powerful and free

---

Let Us See The Beauty
by Laurence Cole, original words from the poem “The Invitation” by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Part 1: Let us see the beauty every day, and source our lives from

its presence

Part 2: I want to know if you can see the beauty, even when it’s not

pretty every day

I want to know if you can see the beauty, and source your life from its presence

---

Olam Chesed Yibaneh
Hebrew words from Book of Psalms
Music and English words by Rabbi Menachem Creditor

עוֹ ָלם ֶח ֶסד יִ ָבּנֶה

Olam chesed yibaneh…yai dai dai

I will build this world from love… yai dai dai

And you must build this world from love… yai dai dai

And if we build this world from love… yai dai dai

Then G-d will build this world from love… yai dai dai

---

Brich Rachamana
Aramaic words from the Talmud
English words by Rabbi Shefa Gold

Brich rachamana malka de’alma marey dehai pita

You are the Source of Life for all that is and your blessing flows through me.

---

We Give Thanks for Unknown Blessings
original by Ben Bochner, chorus adapted by Vermont Wilderness School

We give thanks for unknown blessings already on the way…

---

We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For
author unknown, music by Sweet Honey In The Rock

Part 1: We are the ones, we are the ones, we’ve been waiting…

Part 2: We are the ones, we are the ones, we’ve been waiting…

Part 3: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the ones we’ve

been waiting for…

---

I Am Determined To Walk In Freedom
African American spiritual song

I am determined to walk in freedom, yes I am

I am determined to walk in freedom, yes I am

Through all trials and tribulations

Persecutions, I am determined

I am determined to walk in freedom, yes I am

---

This Is The Day
taught by Cara Trezise as learned at PYE Global

Parts 1 and 2: This is the day to celebrate all life…

 

---

 

Photo credit: johnninetwentyfive

Charles Eisenstein (author of Sacred Economics) brings valuable post-election commentary in this piece on the breaking down of an old story, and the opening for something new. Especially fitting for White Awake, Eisenstein encourages us not to fall into the blame-game but, instead, to center ourselves in love and possibilities that flow from there. This is an abridged article, reposted from the original on Charles’s site.

---

Normal is coming unhinged. For the last eight years it has been possible for most people (at least in the relatively privileged classes) to believe that society is sound, that the system, though creaky, basically works, and that the progressive deterioration of everything from ecology to economy is a temporary deviation from the evolutionary imperative of progress.

A Clinton Presidency would have offered four more years of that pretense. A woman President following a black President would have meant to many that things are getting better. It would have obscured the reality of continued neoliberal economics, imperial wars, and resource extraction behind a veil of faux-progressive feminism. Now that we have, in the words of my friend Kelly Brogan, rejected a wolf in sheep’s clothing in favor of a wolf in wolf’s clothing, that illusion will be impossible to maintain.

The wolf, Donald Trump (and I’m not sure he’d be offended by that moniker) will not provide the usual sugarcoating on the poison pills the policy elites have foisted on us for the last forty years. The prison-industrial complex, the endless wars, the surveillance state, the pipelines, the nuclear weapons expansion were easier for liberals to swallow when they came with a dose, albeit grudging, of LGBTQ rights under an African-American President.

We are entering a time of great uncertainty. Institutions so enduring as to seem identical to reality itself may lose their legitimacy and dissolve. It may seem that the world is falling apart. For many, that process started on election night, when Trump’s victory provoked incredulity, shock, even vertigo. “I can’t believe this is happening!”

At such moments, it is a normal response to find someone to blame, (as if identifying fault could restore the lost normality) and to lash out in anger. Hate and blame are convenient ways of making meaning out of a bewildering situation. Anyone who disputes the blame narrative may receive more hostility than the opponents themselves, as in wartime when pacifists are more reviled than the enemy.

Racism and misogyny are devastatingly real in this country, but to blame bigotry and sexism for voters’ repudiation of the Establishment is to deny the validity of their deep sense of betrayal and alienation. The vast majority of Trump voters were expressing extreme dissatisfaction with the system in the way most readily available to them. (See here, here, here) Millions of Obama voters voted for Trump (six states who went for Obama twice switched to Trump). Did they suddenly become racists in the last four years? The blame-the-racists (the fools, the yokels…) narrative generates a clear demarcation between good (us) and evil (them), but it does violence to the truth. It also obscures an important root of racism – anger displaced away from an oppressive system and its elites and onto other victims of that system. Finally, it employs the same dehumanization of the other that is the essence of racism and the precondition for war. Such is the cost of preserving a dying story. That is one reason why paroxysms of violence so often accompany a culture-defining story’s demise.

The dissolution of the old order that is now officially in progress is going to intensify. That presents a tremendous opportunity and danger, because when normal falls apart the ensuing vacuum draws in formerly unthinkable ideas from the margins. Unthinkable ideas range from rounding up the Muslims in concentration camps, to dismantling the military-industrial complex and closing down overseas military bases. They range from nationwide stop-and-frisk to replacing criminal punishment with restorative justice. Anything becomes possible with the collapse of dominant institutions. When the animating force behind these new ideas is hate or fear, all manner of fascistic and totalitarian nightmares can ensue, whether enacted by existing powers or those that arise in revolution against them.

That is why, as we enter a period of intensifying disorder, it is important to introduce a different kind of force to animate the structures that might appear after the old ones crumble. I would call it love if it weren’t for the risk of triggering your New Age bullshit detector, and besides, how does one practically bring love into the world in the realm of politics? So let’s start with empathy. Politically, empathy is akin to solidarity, born of the understanding that we are all in this together. In what together? For starters, we are in the uncertainty together.

We are exiting an old story that explained to us the way of the world and our place in it. Some may cling to it all the more desperately as it dissolves, looking perhaps to Donald Trump to restore it, but their savior has not the power to bring back the dead. Neither would Clinton have been able to preserve America as we’d known it for too much longer. We as a society are entering a space between stories, in which everything that had seemed so real, true, right, and permanent comes into doubt.

For a while, segments of society have remained insulated from this breakdown (whether by fortune, talent, or privilege), living in a bubble as the containing economic and ecological systems deteriorate. But not for much longer. Not even the elites are immune to this doubt. They grasp at straws of past glories and obsolete strategies; they create perfunctory and unconvincing shibboleths (Putin!), wandering aimlessly from “doctrine” to “doctrine” – and they have no idea what to do. Their haplessness and half-heartedness was plain to see in this election, their disbelief in their own propaganda, their cynicism. When even the custodians of the story no longer believe the story, you know its days are numbered. It is a shell with no engine, running on habit and momentum.

We are entering a space between stories. What would it take for it to embody love, compassion, and interbeing? I see its lineaments in those marginal structures and practices that we call holistic, alternative, regenerative, and restorative. All of them source from empathy, the result of the compassionate inquiry: What is it like to be you?

It is time now to bring this question and the empathy it arouses into our political discourse as a new animating force. If you are appalled at the election outcome and feel the call of hate, perhaps try asking yourself, “What is it like to be a Trump supporter?” Ask what confluence of circumstances, social, economic, and biographical, may have brought them there.

My acupuncturist Sarah Fields wrote to me, “Hate is just a bodyguard for grief. When people lose the hate, they are forced to deal with the pain beneath.” I think the pain beneath is fundamentally the same pain that animates misogyny and racism – hate in a different form. Please stop thinking you are better than these people! We are all victims of the same world-dominating machine, suffering different mutations of the same wound of separation. Something hurts in there.

We live in a civilization that has robbed nearly all of us of deep community, intimate connection with nature, unconditional love, freedom to explore the kingdom of childhood, and so much more. The acute trauma endured by the incarcerated, the abused, the raped, the trafficked, the starved, the murdered, and the dispossessed does not exempt the perpetrators. They feel it in mirror image, adding damage to their souls atop the damage that compels them to violence. Thus it is that suicide is the leading cause of death in the U.S. military. Thus it is that addiction is rampant among the police. Thus it is that depression is epidemic in the upper middle class. We are all in this together.

Something hurts in there. Can you feel it? We are all in this together. One earth, one tribe, one people.

We have entertained teachings like these long enough in our spiritual retreats, meditations, and prayers. Can we take them now into the political world and create an eye of compassion inside the political hate vortex? This does not mean to withdraw from political conversation, but to rewrite its vocabulary. It is to speak hard truths with love. It is to offer acute political analysis that doesn’t carry the implicit message of “Aren’t those people horrible?” Such analysis is rare. Usually, those evangelizing compassion do not write about politics, and sometimes they veer into passivity. We need to confront an unjust, ecocidal system. Each time we do we will receive an invitation to give in to the dark side and hate “the deplorables.” We must not shy away from those confrontations. Instead, we can engage them empowered by the inner mantra that my friend Pancho Ramos-Stierle uses in confrontations with his jailers:

“Brother, your soul is too beautiful to be doing this work.”

If we can stare hate in the face and never waver from that knowledge, we will access inexhaustible tools of creative engagement, and hold a compelling invitation to the haters to fulfill their beauty.

---

bio / Eisenstein

Photo: Creative Commons – Abhi Ryan

---

Now more than ever, White Awake is stepping up its call – and support – for white people to engage in organized resistance to the systemic force of white supremacist/capitalist/patriarchy embedded in our society. We remain committed to synthesizing spiritual practice with anti-oppression educational materials … and we want to be sure that you and your community have the support you need to bridge the gap between education and action.

To this end, we have prepared a resource guide to help White Awake users prepare for the Trump administration. There are so many good materials circulating at this time – if you see something you think should be added to this resource guide, please feel free to share it with us via a comment on the page.

Many thanks to Hugh Byrne (IMCW Guiding Teacher, and White Awake board member) for his article Our Way Forward Post Election. I have organized this guide around the four central themes Hugh put forward in this piece:

1. Acknowledge and accept the truth (which includes reason based study and assessment of the what we are facing in a Trump administration).
2. Build community and draw strength from it.
3. Practice self care – including personal spiritual practice – and prioritize resilience for the long haul.
4. Develop our capacity to resist what is harmful, and stay socially engaged.

Please note that while most of the materials in our White Awake Manual section are oriented towards white affinity work, this is not a guide for white people organizing with other white people. It can be useful to organize in this way – this is the focus of Showing up for Racial Justice, for example, which is a national network of white people organizing for racial justice that then partners with indigenous and POC-led organizations on a group to group level.

However there are many other powerful avenues of engagement available to each of us at this time, including: MoveOn.org; Standing Rock solidarity; Cosecha; The Movement for Black Lives; 350.org; People’s Climate Movement; Fight for $15; localized Muslim support networks … to name a few. We hope you will join together with people in your area and plug in as best suites your unique gifts, passion, and location.

Wherever you align yourself and put your energy, White Awake is here to help you do this with self reflection and awareness of identity, race, and dominance, and with access to spiritual resources that break down harmful cultural patterns that are the product of the attempt to create a unified “dominant” group.

Now is not the time to despair … but to join with others, strengthen our resolve, practice “radical hope”, and sustain ourselves for the long haul. Who knows what will come. White supremacy is not new, but – like all things on this earth – it’s days are numbered.

In solidarity,
Eleanor Hancock

Director, White Awake

---

Part One: Acknowledge and accept the truth

“In his book, The Wise Heart, Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield describes three qualities of a bodhisattva, or spiritual warrior. First, they acknowledge and accept the truth of their situation—not that it is right or just but that it is a reality. They face the truth, turn towards the difficulties, and shine the light of understanding on them.” – Our Way Forward / Hugh Byrne

The broad nature of the threats the Trump administration poses – as represented by Trump’s cabinet nominations and picks for White House staff, the overwhelming number of judicial vacancies his administration will fill, and other aspects of executive/federal power to which the Trump administration and the GOP have almost unlimited access – are positively dizzying. I make no claims to address all of them here, but will attempt to offer some central resources that assess these dangers.

As a general set of resources on the “who” of the Trump administration, I refer you to CNN’s interact list of appointments, and Democracy Now! as one reliable source of information/starting point for reading up on each of these top picks. Of particular note: Stephen Bannon as Chief Strategist; Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor; Jeff Sessions for Attorney General; Scott Pruitt for Administrator of Environmental Protection Agency; Exxon CEO Rex Tillerman for Secretary of State.

Lest we drown in specifics, I will highlight three articles that focus on a central, existential threat embedded in the Trump administration – fascism. See:

Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?

We have spent two decades studying the emergence and breakdown of democracy in Europe and Latin America. Our research points to several warning signs. … Drawing on a close study of democracys’ demise in 1930’s Europe, the imminent political scientist Juan J. Linz designed a ‘litmus test’ to identify anti-democratic politicians. Mr. Trump tests positive.

Prepare for Regime Change, Not Policy Change

Confidence in the exceptional resilience of American democracy is particularly misplaced in the face of today’s illiberal populist movements, whose leaders are constantly learning from each other. Defenders of liberal democracy, too, must learn from each other’s victories and defeats. Below are some hard-earned lessons from countries that have been overrun by the contemporary wave of illiberal democracy. They could be essential for preserving the American republic in the dark years to come.

Autocracy: Rules for Survival

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.” That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday …

Right about now is probably a good time to balance “inner” with “outer” focus … I suggest you take a deep breath, and assess the truth of how you’re feeling. Notice your thoughts, your emotions, and your body. You may want to do a complete body scan, and give permission for anything tight or uncomfortable to readjust or relax. Do not “will” anything – simply take stock, and give permission.

If particular emotions need expression, take time to let them out. Part of your assessment may be what these emotions need in order to be expressed and fully “felt” – an intimate conversation with a loved one, intense physical exercise, a community gathering that centers cathartic expression … . As my spiritual teacher, Katrina Messenger (White Awake advisory council member), often reminds me – all emotions want is to be felt. We don’t need to overanalyze them, or hang on to them, just feel them.

Now, I would like to suggest you take a moment to reflect on these words:

“To me, hope has nothing to do with optimism: the latter mindset, like pessimism, thinks the future is foreseeable and intervention is unnecessary. Hope for me is the belief in the unknowability of the future, the sense that its outcome is not fixed, and that we might intervene in it.” – Rebecca Solnit (Preface to 20th Anniversary Edition / Savage Dreams)

Ironically, the need for broad social engagement to counter the fascist potential of Trump’s administration could be the force that galvanizes millions of people to reject our “ideological differences” and work together in way we haven’t experienced before. Who knows! This is possible … this #WhiteLash could even be the dying gasps of white supremacy itself. A lot depends on how we respond.

Finally, while we assess the threats that are gathering at the federal level, let us not lose sight of the forces of life at work. Most notably, I would like to point out that an unprecedented, historic display of indigenous strength and leadership has arisen at same time as the 2016 presidential campaign, and the election of Donald Trump. This cannot be seen as circumstantial. There are broad forces at work. To get a better understanding of the forces represented by the struggle at Standing Rock, see our post with updates, heart-centered stories, and current call to action. Another powerful article of sober hope:

The Time is Now: To Defeat Both Trump and Clintonian Neoliberalism (article)

“If Trump is the price we have to pay to defeat Clintonian neoliberalism – so be it.” – Mumia Abu-Jamal

Black Lives Matter, the Black Youth Project 100, Dream Defenders, our reinvigorated labor movements, Socialist Alternative Party, Workers World, the movements for Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners, the MOVE Organization – all of these are organizations by some of our most vulnerable and repressed peoples who have combined with some from elite sectors to fight repression. Their fight will continue.

I wager that the fight of these new growing movements will be greater than the bluster, despair and demagoguery of a Trump regime – even with his henchman at the ready. We can face them down. The repressed can return. They can rise up against the order represented not just by the Republicans but also by President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, two faces of Clintonian neoliberalism.

Where and how we align ourselves, at this potent moment in history, matters.

---

Part Two: Build community

“When Ananda, the Buddha’s attendant, had a moment of insight and went to the Buddha and said, ‘I’ve realized that sangha (community) is half the spiritual life,’ the Buddha responded, ‘Don’t say that, Ananda, don’t say that, community is all of the spiritual life.’” – Our Way Forward / Hugh Byrne

“How do we begin to recover from this shock? By experiencing and building and rebuilding and consolidating community. Community is the answer.” – Angela Davis

As you find your place in the growing networks of resistance to a Trump administration agenda, we encourage you to engage with other people in person – not just online. Real time, embodied community, action, and connection is vital as we face the forces of hatred, exploitation, and (potential) fascism that are about to dominate all three branches of the federal government.

---

Contemplative Action Circles

a template for building close-knit community that centers courageous social engagement, collective resistance, and movement building

Work coming out of the Boston area (initiated within Episcopalian circles, and informed by Swarm) is resulting in a template for tight-knit communities that build the bonds necessary to take risks together and engage in social resistance and transformation for the long haul.

We can learn from these social experiments. I encourage anyone who is ready to build deeper communities of resistance and resilience to put together a circle like this. Make a commitment to practice together for at least 3-6 months (at which point the group can consider continuing, changing the structure, or disbanding). Below is the basic template and vision.

Please note: While we have borrowed the name “contemplative action circles”, what I’m sharing here is not formalized by the Boston group, but rather inspired by their process.

Logistics:

• intimate circles / approx 10-15 people
• meeting in a home, or another intimate setting
• shared food, prepared by participants
• 3 hour meetings, 2-4 times a month
• when possible, make this a “whole community”, multigenerational experience (child-focused activities that take place separate from adult-focused activities may be necessary for portions of the time)

A program for time together that includes:

• spiritual practice
  • this can be based on shared practice of participants, especially when participants are all coming from the same religious tradition or spiritual community
  • can include singing, reading from sacred text, meditation, or any other spiritual practice
  • elements of the White Awake Manual can be adapted for this small group format
  • White Awake will be building out potential community practices as part of our resources, and in collaboration with SURJ DC leadership healing team
• sharing a meal together
• personal storytelling, and empathetic listening
  • see Relational Uprising video for inspiration
  • White Awake is committed to building out our toolkit of relational practices; again, many practices in the Manual section can be adapted
• dedicated discussion, role-playing, or other activity that builds skill set, knowledge base, and commitment to engaged social action
  • in the beginning you may want to designate a couple people who research avenues of involvement in your area
  • you may want to work with other circles of support to build a network in your area that did not previously exist
  • consider the work of organizations such as: SURJ; MoveOn.org; Standing Rock solidarity; Cosecha; The Movement for Black Lives; 350.org; Fight for $15; localized Muslim support networks …
  • study materials such as Momentum webinars, or This is an Uprising, that educate group members on effective, broad-scale civil disobedience and/or local community organizing
  • train together in Direct Action, Active Bystander, and other organizational/movement-based skill sets

Vision:

• that these communities of practice would engage in action/activism together
• communities that include middle to upper class members would work together, and within their networks, to support resource redistribution (see Resource Generation for analysis of resource distribution in the context of collective liberation)
• these communities could become building blocks in local/regional transformation (inc sustainable food networks; municipal models of participatory democracy; solidarity and resource redistribution between over-resourced and under-resourced neighborhoods; etc …)
• these communities could be central aspects of national organizing and solidarity

Your contemplative action circle can be white affinity, but it does not need to be. Regardless of group demographics, awareness of power dynamics between individuals, the development of a shared anti-oppression lens, and group norms around conflict and the expression of trauma are all important to the healthy functioning, and social engagement, of the group.

This development of group culture will of necessity incorporate aspects of study, and key resources already present in White Awake may be helpful in this process. We are actively working on resources that support building a healthy, relational culture – including conflict resolution and sensitivity to trauma.

Commit to principles of Decolonization. As you build community, know whose land you live on, and how you came to live there. This article can help!

Our encouragement, whether you form a “contemplative action circle” or not, is to go beyond the study group. Try to get together with like-minded folks every couple of weeks, at least, support and encourage one another in being socially engaged … and include some element of food, joy, storytelling, and fun!

If you form a Contemplative Action Circle, please write us and let us know how it goes! We want to keep learning from one another, and developing best practices together.

---

Part Three: Prioritizing resilience for the long haul

While community and resilience of the heart are closely tied together, this section is focused on individual practice and self care. White Awake has just initiated a new “Personal Practice” section, we’ll keep building this out to support you in bringing your full self to the work of social transformation. This section is taken entirely from “Our Way Forward” / Hugh Byrne.

“Given the challenges ahead, it will be essential to take care of ourselves—and each other—and cultivate the resilience to work for as long as our bodies, minds, and hearts permit us.

The first rule of resilience is to ‘put on your own mask first’, as we are told when we board an airplane. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we will not have the resources to support others in pain or distress. This is not a luxury—as anyone who has burned out while doing work of the heart knows.

Some of the ways we can build resilience are well known but bear remembering:

• Develop or deepen a practice of awareness that gives you the resources to deal wisely with stresses and reverses while remaining grounded and engaged

• Stay embodied—practice yoga, qigong; take walks, spend time in nature, take in beauty

[White Awake has a new body of work for you to draw upon to “stay embodied” – see Whole Heart Connection resources in our Personal Practice section]

• Take time to step out of routines—when conditions allow, take vacations, go on retreat, observe the Sabbath or other ways of renewing and restoring yourself, creating a ‘clearing in the dense forest of your life’ (M Postlethwaite, ‘Clearing’)

• Bring awareness to diet, nutrition, and sleep and be aware of habitual behaviors and conditioned responses that prevent you from living healthily or that provide short-term comfort with long-term costs

• Stay connected—nurture intimate relationships and friendships that are one of our strongest supports in times of adversity, helping us remember we are not alone.

• Don’t neglect taking care of the business of life—paying bills, taxes, scheduling medical appointments, which can come back to bite us later and sap our resilience if we ignore them.

Paying attention to these areas of life will help create the conditions to stay engaged for the long run.

But the deepest support of all is resilience of the heart: developing an unshakeable faith and trust in the human capacity for goodness and love—even in the midst of greed and ugliness—and in the possibility of our awakening to the truth of our interconnectedness. Authentic spiritual practices that help us cultivate and remember truth, love, and our capacity for freedom can support us on this path.” – Our Way Forward / Hugh Byrne

---

Part Four: Develop our capacity for collective action, and stay socially engaged

Make a commitment to engage, and use community as a way of holding ourselves accountable. You’ll want to study social change strategy; assess local landscape, identify organizations to support (you can find one such list here), and find your own personal calling and community of engagement. This section begins with some general advice from “Our Way Forward”, then continues by highlighting a few specific resources.

Catalog of Resources:

• The Craft of Nonviolent Action and Mass Mobilization
• Learn from the Tea Party’s Success
• The Overton Window
• The Power of a Local Focus (Municipality Movement in Spain)
• People’s Mandate / Exercise our Power
• Get Trained
• Existential Crisis in White America … create a spiritual response

“Resistance can take many forms—from protests, civil disobedience, and lobbying members of Congress to registering as a Muslim if laws are passed requiring Muslims to carry documentation of their religion; from churches and synagogues declaring themselves sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants fearing deportation to towns, cities, and states refusing to work with federal authorities enforcing unjust laws.

There have been and will continue to be pressures to ‘normalize’ words and actions by Trump and his allies that at other times would have been considered unacceptable or ‘beyond the pale’—such as reintroducing torture or excluding people from the country on the basis of religion. The dignity of the office of President can increase pressure to normalize behavior that should not be considered normal or acceptable. This does not mean mindless opposition or resistance for its own sake—but rather resisting what is clearly harmful.” – Our Way Forward / Hugh Byrne

---

The Craft of Nonviolent Action and Mass Mobilization

“There is a craft to uprising – and that craft can change the world.” – This is an Uprising

Ayni Institute / Momentum Training Webinars (and other resources online)

In order to transform our society, we cannot simply settle for what’s winnable within our current political climate: we must create the political climate to win what we truly need.

This is an Uprising (book)

From protests around climate change and immigrant rights, to Occupy, the Arab Spring, and #BlackLivesMatter, a new generation is unleashing strategic nonviolent action to shape public debate and force political change. When mass movements erupt onto our television screens, the media consistently portrays them as being spontaneous and unpredictable. Yet, in this book, Mark and Paul Engler look at the hidden art behind such outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest.

---

Learn from the Tea Party’s success …

INDIVISIBLE: A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR RESISTING THE TRUMP AGENDA

Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen.

Donald Trump is the biggest popular vote loser in history to ever call himself President- Elect. In spite of the fact that he has no mandate, he will attempt to use his congressional majority to reshape America in his own racist, authoritarian, and corrupt image. If progressives are going to stop this, we must stand indivisibly opposed to Trump and the members of Congress (MoCs) who would do his bidding. Together, we have the power to resist — and we have the power to win.

We know this because we’ve seen it before. The authors of this guide are former congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the Tea Party. We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own MoCs to reject President Obama’s agenda. Their ideas were wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism— and they won.

We believe that protecting protecting our values, our neighbors, and ourselves will require mounting a similar resistance to the Trump agenda — but a resistance built on the values of inclusion, tolerance, and fairness. Trump is not popular. He does not have a mandate. He does not have large congressional majorities. If a small minority in the Tea Party can stop President Obama, then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump.

Core elements of Tea Party strategy:

They were locally focused. Form tight knit, dedicated local groups. Understand what motivates your Members of Congress ( it’s all about re-election), and be vocal, visible, and relentless in asserting your agenda to your MoC.

They were almost purely defensive. “A defensive strategy does not mean dropping your own policy priorities or staying silent on an alternate vision for our country over the next four years. What it means is that, when you’re trying to influence your MoC, you will have the most leverage when you are focused on whatever the current legislative priority is.”

---

The Overton Window

Defenestration (blog post)

“Imagine that you live in a room with just one window.  It looks out onto a rather normal scene:  a bit of lawn, a strip of flowers alongside the road, a maple tree in the middle. One night, without your even really noticing, someone comes and moves the window a  few inches to the right …”

The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas the public will accept. If you control the window, you can move policy in the direction that you want. This article makes a few strategic points about how the Left can stop the “purity wars”, get out of defense mode, and join with diverse allies to insist on what we really need.

---

The Power of a Local Focus (Municipalist Movement in Spain)

“Alternative policies will not be enough to create an effective challenge to Trump; different ways of doing politics will also be needed, and local politics has great potential in this regard. As the level of government closest to the people, municipalities are uniquely able to generate new, citizen-led and participatory models of politics that return a sense of agency and belonging to people’s lives.” – Kate Shea Baird, Barcelona en Comú and Steve Hughes, Working Families Party

Barcelona en Comú publishes ‘how to’ guide to winning back the city (article)

On 24 May 2015, against all the odds, the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú won the Barcelona municipal elections and former housing activist, Ada Colau, became the city’s first woman mayor. Similar citizen platforms were catapulted into office in cities across the Spanish state, from Zaragoza to Madrid to Coruña.

Since the election, Barcelona en Comú has been inundated with messages from activists in cities all over the world asking the same question: how did you do it?. That’s why Barcelona en Comú is publishing “How to win back the city en comú” to mark its first year in office. The guide, drawn up by the platform’s International Committee, aims to explain the origins, philosophy, and strategies of the new municipalist movement in the Spanish state to activists in cities around the world.

Recipe for a municipal movement (documentary) (scroll down to Vimeo video embedded on page)

Spain’s Micro-Utopias: The 15M Movement and its Prototypes (article)

America needs a network of rebel cities to stand up to Trump (article)

The municipalist movement need not be limited to the largest cities. Though large cities will inevitably be strategic targets in any ‘bottom-up’ strategy, given their economic and cultural power, all local politics has radical democratic potential. Indeed, some of the most innovative — and successful — examples of municipalism around the world are found in small towns and villages.

Popular Resistance (online resource)

With the corporate takeover of federal and state governments, more people are becoming politically active in new and creative ways. A growing culture of resistance is utilizing nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience as a primary tactic, and is forming real democratic organizations to empower local communities—as opposed to working within the corrupt government dominated by a two-corporate party system and within an unfair, big finance, capitalist economy. PopularResistance.org is a resource and information clearinghouse for this movement.

---

People’s Mandate / Exercise our Power

How To Fight For The Climate During A Trump Administration (article)

The climate crisis is already underway and we can’t waste four years playing defense. We need to drive action at the state level, pushing California, New York, and others to build out clean energy, shift the markets, and tie up the fossil fuel industry. We need to look to the courts, not only to defend regulations, but to start holding fossil fuel companies and the federal government accountable. The Children’s Trust case and the investigation into ExxonMobil become even more important.

We need to challenge private institutions to take action, ramping up the divestment campaign, pushing carbon neutrality, and urging colleges, museums and foundations to become leaders in their own communities. We need to go after the banks, getting them to move billions out of fossil fuels and into clean energy. We need to push companies to green their supply chains and commit to 100% renewable energy. We need to think globally, looking for ways to support fights around the world with our funding, solidarity, and online campaigns.

DefundDAPL (solidarity divestment campaign)

---

Get Trained

Look for training in your area in Nonviolent, Direct Action and Active Bystander Intervention. Reach out to Showing Up for Racial Justice if you can’t find local/regional trainings, and see if they can help you make the connection.

“5 Ways to Disrupt Racism” (video / post-Brexit bystander intervention focus)

Organizing for Power, Organizing for Change (online resources)

Alliance of Community Trainers (Texas based collective / offers training and consulting)

---

Existential Crisis in White America …

… create a spiritual response

“The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes are to have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Where Does it Hurt?” Ruby Sales, episode of On Being (transcript here)

“I really think that one of the things that we’ve got to deal with is that how is it that we develop a theology or theologies in a 21st-century capitalist technocracy where only a few lives matter? How do we raise people up from disposability to essentiality? And this goes beyond the question of race. What do you say to someone who has been told that their whole essence is whiteness and power and domination? And when that no longer exists, then they feel as if they are dying or they get caught up in the throes of death, whether it’s heroin addiction.

We’ve got a spiritual crisis in white America. It’s a crisis of meaning, and I don’t hear — we talk a lot about black theologies, but I want a liberating white theology. I want a theology that begins to deepen people’s understanding about their capacity to live fully human lives and to touch the goodness inside of them rather than call upon the part of themselves that’s not relational. Because there’s nothing wrong with being European American. That’s not the problem. It’s how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality. It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed.” – Ruby Sales

Alt-Right Gathering Exults in Trump Election With Nazi-Era Salute (article)

“To be white is to be a creator, an explorer, a conqueror.” The choice facing white people is to “conquer or die.” – Richard B. Spencer

“All Nations Rise” (video / FB post)

“Some of the first Indigenous Peoples that were forced into hiding were the medicine women of Old Europe. They estimate that 6-9 million women were raped, beaten, tortured, burned alive or drowned alive for being ‘witches.’ Let us reclaim our Earth Selves no matter what ‘race’ you are and do it soon! The earth may depend on it.” – Lyla June

---

Conclusion

“Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.” – Rebecca Solnit

Activists gain resolve from civil rights vets post-election

Maria Varela, a Mexican-American member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: “The Trump election is going to unite progressives in a different kind of way,” Varela said. “Just wait.”

Find your place in the movement, and bring every gift you have – including self awareness, humor, and joy.

Raging Grannies Blockading Entrances and Exits of WA Department of Ecology

The groups are sitting in rocking chairs chained together across the Department’s vehicle entrance. They are telling workers that the Department is closed today for a “Workshop on How to Say No to Big Oil.”

 

 

---