Fingering the Tribal Wound

Dear Friend and Reader,

There’s something that I’ve had on my mind since the Presidential Campaigns began that’s hard for me to talk about. I’m not sure why I’m afraid to mention these things, but I do suspect that it has to do with being judged in a negative way.

So in the Planet Waves tradition of being as genuine as possible, I’ve decided to come clean to you all right here: I have noticed that there is an African American man running for President and also a woman running for Vice President.

It’s a rare time in America: two minorities are vying for power over our country. It seems to be bringing up a lot of emotion about rights and wrongs, yet I don’t hear anyone talking about it. It makes me wonder if there’s not some kind of fear involved in everyone else’s decisions to keep quiet.

I have sat at many a dinner table and not one person, save one with a negative opinion, has mentioned this fact. I think there is a tradition of silence among us. I have some experiences that I’d like to share with you to further illustrate this fact.

When I was in college I had the privilege of volunteering as an English tutor for a Korean student. As part of the curriculum, I was expected to contribute to an online bulletin board comprised of other English tutors.

The purpose of the bulletin board, I imagine, was to develop team skills, networking skills and the benefit of talking to other people who were doing the same thing that I was. The conversations that took place within that board never got too animated until one day I asked a question. Years have gone by and I am paraphrasing what I asked, but it was something along the lines of: “what were some expectations everyone had about their exchange students? What did you discover was right on and what did you learn was false? Do you think you participated in any stereotyping?”

The answers that returned were a sleety mix of denial and anger that I would ever suggest such a thing. Such a thing? From my side of the aisle, I was simply asking if these fellow tutors engaged in a process I thought of as perception: perceiving and anticipating the differences between our culture and their culture.

But the line between observation and stereotyping was much more blurry for those other folks. Instead, they denied any thoughts that they had of whether or not these exchange students, who were mostly from Korea, could be different in any way from us white folks going to school in Upstate New York.

In my opinion, these people purposefully put on blinders and refused to see how they were different from the other people out of fear of being labeled as racist. In many respects, I see this over and over again: race and cultural diversity is the big elephant in the room. It’s something you see when you look at a person, but you can’t tell to anyone else.

I had a second experience similar to the first when I got my current job: I have a problem that some people would call a big mouth; I would call it an inability to tolerate niceties for no good reason that I can see.

Needless to say, I work with many impoverished people from minority communities and the day came when I had to describe a client to another worker. I started out with her height, her hair color, her fashion sense, her weight, getting more and more nervous each time my co-worker failed to recognize who I was talking about. I felt a certain fear rise up in me, both at what I was about to say next and at the hesitance I felt at saying it: “she’s black.” I said softly and then in an attempt to smooth over what I felt was a grave travesty, I asked: “do you mind if I describe her as that?”

Over time I have come to realize there is a certain veil thrown over race and class. Being classified as a white American (though in certain crowds, I am included as a minority based on my Sicilian status, go figure) and also being middle class has afforded me the opportunity to live amongst people who pretend to have no idea that people who come from different cultures often times also look different. And that it’s ok to see that they look and act different.

If it’s not ok to admit when someone is different, I would argue that that in itself is a form of racism. It’s racism by homogenization: it’s erasing all possible facets of individuality a person might have by saying it does not exist. If there was no veil there, I wouldn’t have felt that fear of offending someone by saying what I feel is a basic adjective. I do not think I am alone in this trepidation.

Now, I feel I must reiterate what I am saying because race is such an explosive issue. It’s not that no one is different and therefore nobody’s problems are real. It’s that everyone is different and everyone is faced with a myriad of issues, some stemming from their cultures, some not. It is not a cookie-cutter mix of issues given to each of us. In this manner, we are all similar. Basically, we are all the same because we are all different.

Noticing the differences between one thing and another is a basic animalistic tendency that goes back as far as the first mammal was able to pick out which was a berry and which was a beetle.

Today we are faced with a tremendous amount of discrimination that we must handle before we can make proper connections with one another. There are things that can be observed and things that must not be inferred. There are things that we can expect from a person based on certain circumstances, yet there are characteristics we cannot assume come with everyone of that ilk.

Living life in this manner is like being born every day. Everything is new and yes; the possibility to hurt someone and ourselves is out there, but it’s a chance that’s worth taking for the greater picture. But how are we supposed to do all of this for one another when many of us are fighting an uphill battle against accepting ourselves?

That brings me to Chiron and Aquarius. Eric has written a lot about Chiron, as has Melanie Reinhart. Richard Tarnas has mentioned it a few times too. What everyone, including myself, suggests is that Chiron is about dealing with a wound or a weakness that tends to create an individual attitude in a person. Chiron is the energy of the differences between things.

A Carnival mask from Allposter.com.

In Aquarius, the sign of humankind, it presents us with a picture of a wounded group of individuals. Toss Neptune in the same sign, and what you have looks like a group of people with many differences and the need to elucidate those differences, but being unable to accept that they exist. Does this ring a bell for anyone?

When Hillary Clinton was running neck and neck against Obama, I heard many women utter that it was about time a woman made it to the White House. But when I ask my African American co-workers if they’ll vote for Obama, they shake their heads and demur that “it’ll never happen”. What makes one difference more powerful than another one?

In my opinion, the answer lies in the ability to accept the difference. I would suggest that there is a layer of complacency nestled amidst all the turmoil towards change lately. Perhaps what my co-workers are being influenced by is a belief that an African American can’t ever make it to a place of power in this America. The higher ups have said so. The risk involved in questioning things like that is the same as the risk involved in realizing certain properties between people: there is a fear of judgment inherent in the hesitation to judge.

I feel that the cloud that hangs over our progress is the long list of grievances committed against us, the growing minority, by the shrinking classes of power. For one thing, my grandmother still has a picture of John F. Kennedy hanging in her stairwell where she keeps a picture of her sons and the late Pope. I work with people who were little children when Martin Luther King was assassinated. A few weeks ago I heard a radio broadcast about the church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. The father of one of the young victims is still alive. During the interview he confessed to the interviewer that he still hasn’t cried and he’s not sure why.

And just recently, a custodian from the George Fox University in Oregon discovered a card board cut-out of Obama hung from a tree with a note referring to the student minority of that school taped to its back. I bring this up because I feel there is a growing chasm between what we see and choose to see and what we feel is right and wrong and our refusal to talk to one another face to face about it. Much of the struggles of power have to do with fear of what’ll happen at the hands of the enemy. In my opinion, we must invite a process into our lives that dissolves the concept of enemy in order to move forward.

Who knows what kinds of things could get fouled up if everyone was able to see differences in one another and actually look forward to reconciling those differences? It would no longer be a question of a woman or a black man in the White House, but rather someone different from the ones who have been there for so long.

I suggest we try to make ourselves as uncomfortable as possible when it comes to questioning why we are hurting and who is holding us back. We must look at our own selves, our differences, our weaknesses and our points of pride with an unjudging eye.

Wall Street is wavering like the tail of a dead squirrel due to certain revelations that have to do with values and truth. Meanwhile, an article has just been released stating that voters are looking for image rather than imagination in our current candidates.

It’s one thing to notice skin-deep differences. It’s quite another to go deeper than that. I invite all of you readers out there to open half-closed eyes in the name of maintaining societal norms. It’s ok to be a judge. And yes, you will also have observations made about you. No, they are not lethal.

That little anecdote I mentioned above, about the berry and the beetle is an important image to focus on for the changes that are occuring. That little bit of discernment was introduced into our evolutionary skill-set for the purposes of nourishment. Perhaps it’s time we stop using differences as a reason to starve ourselves of experience and instead begin to let differences in as a means of completion.

Merry Met,

Genevieve