How we perpetuate oppression through self-suppression.
Photo by Nate Neelson on Unsplash
Oppression is the inevitable byproduct of suppression and repression.
Suppression is when you consciously bury something about yourself that you've deemed "bad" or "wrong". When you suppress something about yourself, you're actively trying to push it out of your awareness.
Repression is when you unconsciously bury it (usually as a form of self-preservation or defense). This is a common instinctive response to more severe types of explicit trauma, like physical and sexual abuse.
The reason why this matters, especially right now, is this: what we have repressed and suppressed in ourselves, we will oppress in others.
It makes sense, really, because if we've made something about ourselves wrong, either knowingly or unknowingly, and shut it down, we definitely are going to find that same thing about others wrong and try to shut it down, too.
In fact, using this convenient system called "the world is our mirror", we can actually do quite a bit of self-healing. If we simply investigate our judgments and what we don't like about other people and institutions, we will quickly discover what we judge and don't like about ourselves! And then we can do something about it!
In that vein, it's important to understand that suppression and repression, which occurs when we believe something is wrong, are actually the things we need to heal right now.
Because when we no longer feel compelled to suppress and repress ourselves, we will no longer feel compelled to oppress others.
And for that reason, being outwardly anti-racist and insisting on police reform is simply not enough if we want to truly transmute the root cause (our fear of power, our systemic belief that there is such thing as right and wrong, and that being wrong deserves to be punished).
To be clear, I said not enough — not useless.
Let me illustrate why.
First of all, I'm not sure who holds the mandate to the threshold of adequacy of anti-racism, but if such a role exists, its existence is purely to do one thing: distinguish right and wrong, and exalt righteousness and punitiveness.
In this case, the belief that there is such thing as right and wrong, and that being wrong deserves to be punished, continues to thrive, when actually this very belief system is the thing that needs to transmute.
It is far too easy to pat ourselves on the back and say job well done with our focus myopically on anti-racism when actually all we've done is relocate the oppression.
For example toward people who we deem as not anti-racist enough. Or toward Trump supporters. Or toward people who aren't wearing masks in public places. Or toward people who believe in and spread conspiracy theories as gospel. Or toward anti-vaxxers. Or toward pro-lifers. Or...
(are you seeing the pattern yet?)
Secondly, it's important that you understand that when you righteously make others wrong for their behavior or their beliefs (in the way white people have done toward BIPOC for centuries, and in the way I'm seeing many anti-racists do toward those they deem as being not anti-racist enough in the past few weeks), you are actively oppressing them. It's a form of violation. It doesn't matter if they are wrong (by your evaluation, or by the validated collective evaluation of your community).
What you are doing is feeding into a dysfunctional relationship dynamic that will have one result, and one result only: they will begin to suppress the behavior that causes them to be oppressed. The fissure of division that is running rampant in our collective society only gets bigger from there. This is how we perpetuate oppression, suppression, and repression.
I think we've all experienced enough history to know how that turns out. So my suggestion is that we take heed and stop doing that, pronto.
There is something beautiful about what's happening right now, that I'm sure many would not immediately qualify as beautiful: things that were once an intrinsic part of the dysfunction of society are now rearing their ugly heads all over the place. We are all in the fortunate disposition to look straight at it. And many are shocked and horrified (by the way, this is how privilege works).
While I understand that there are many who are suffering, we have an opportunity to also appreciate why this uprising, complete with all the different opinions surfacing out of it, is a good thing, lest we risk oppressing the very thing that needs transmutation, through attempting to silence it.
This is one of those moments in history where learning to hold space for dissonance builds the sort of resilience required to actually transform something that has been going on for millennia.
When dysfunction gets loud, we're in the home stretch, in transformational terms.
And let me be clear, the dysfunction, in this case, is not racism.
The dysfunction is the belief that there is such a thing as right or wrong. Racism is "just" the convenient screen of our own projection.
So if you care about racism as an issue (which I really hope you do!), do yourself a favor and instead of spending hours a day lecturing people on social media and getting into fights and blocking them and hysterically trying to pull the veil back even further on people who did not ask for your feedback, start spending a considerable amount of your waking hours exploring all of the places within yourself that you have made wrong or otherwise negated.
And start unpacking that.
Being anti-racist = being against oppression.
And being against oppression = being against suppression and repression.
And being against suppression and repression = believing in the ultimate perfection of the full and complete expression of the universe (which means there's no such thing as good/bad or right/wrong),
***including yourself.***