Facebook Publication Date: 8/9/2018 20:08

I invite you all to read the article embedded in the comments. I ask that you read it twice: once for what they are actually talking about, people who left white supremacist groups, and again for the path we are on here.

There are similarities. In it, the interviewee speaks to an ‘addiction’ to white supremacy. I posit that this is not only true for those groups themselves, but for everyone in the soup. He talks about ‘disengagement v deradicalization’; in the first, it involves the mere stopping of harmful behaviors, in the second, it speaks to something more deeper, profound, and durable–actual character change.

Which is what we are doing here, I hope. The continuum that we are on, that of ‘neutrality’ in the areas of racial justice, towards, towards stopping problematic behavior, yet keeping the internal cues and biases, to becoming actively anti racist, where it is part of your personality and ethos.

This article tells me a few things. One, that we are never far off from what we say we abhor, and the rooting out of one behavior/attitude insures that there will be another one to confront and destroy; also that the path is never linear.

Put another way, we are closer to the white supremacists than we think. We are them, and putting distance between them and their overt acts of hate, while we harbor the same things in ourselves, but manage to ‘behave better’ and spout catchphrases does nothing to move the needle forward. Derision is not activism. Distance, in this case, is not movement.

Secondly, that it is not enough to have head knowledge. Become a new person who does new things and thinks in new ways is an act of intention, and has no stopping point. The more that is acknowledged and integrated can, if the work is done well, make one want to find other places of disintegration and lack of congruence.

Which leads me to the third thing–that of addiction. If one is addicted to the identity and the perspective, change is more difficult. One cannot cling to an ideology while at the same time work to dismantle it. Which is why we say that the interior work is so important.

Thoughts welcomed.

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