Race

I've been challenged to write a post about racism. OY VEY! I have been pondering this for many days. Do I really want to go there? This is a topic that I can surely write about but never "win" and end up in a circle of heated comments that never end.

It's so charged with emotions, and emotions run us more than rational thought. When I write this post I am going to take my time and show evidence after evidence after evidence backing up my points.

I am sure that this will inspire those who disagree with me to then list some of their own evidence too. But the devil is NOT in the details in this argument. You will always be able to find me someone somewhere who truly is racist, but that doesn't proove that there is a systemic problem of racism, and that a word some columnist used was therefore a racist remark.

There is an emotional problem in this country, not a racism problem. NOTE: I didn't say there is no racism. Caroline Myss calls this "The Culture of Woundology."

Let me end this teaser post with the following story and thoughts:

One day I was driving with friends to a karaoke event. We had to go through a very rough neighborhood at the initial part of the drive. When coming to a light, I saw some young men and this overwhelming feeling came over me to lock the doors.

We all come into this world with this animal instinct, which is supposed to protect us. But our societies have taught us to ignore that which we cannot see. And since this isn't something you can see and something I can never proove it can be interpreted in any number of ways by the people I am with, the people reading this today. And I cannot stop that from happening.

If the people I am with and the people reading this story choose to determine what my thoughts in my head were at the moment, and conclude that they were not upstanding and without racist intent, what can I do? I know who I am. I own my thoughts and actions. And thinking my intent was out of seeing black men, I needed to lock my doors, only serves the person thinking such things, to be upset, angry, etc...and then the focus stays there, in a negative thought pattern.

I cannot live my life that way and I won't.

That day in that moment, I let my body guide me to feeling that I should lock my doors. If you want to suppose I would not have done that if those young men were white, that is certainly your perogative. But you'd be wrong.

You see you don't know me. You don't know that I walk in the middle of the street at night in my own neighborhood which is mostly white, hispanic and Jewish and has million dollar homes. You don't know that I often cross the street when I get that same feeling I did in the car that day, with the big heavy middle aged white man who I saw walking toward me alone, as I was walking alone too.

I don't always cross the street nor do I always feel I need to lock the doors. But I do sometimes. And it comes from an unexplainable place that I trust.