Racism impacts or shapes your muscles of spirit, heart, mind, and body.
Learning
Gardeners on the Prairies and in the North have a very short growing season before the frost descends, and after five months with no green in sight, we tend to overdo things.
So, on a fine June day, after gardening extensively, I shuffled into the massage therapy office groaning and an hour later limped out again, having spent the hour being told to “think happy thoughts and breathe through the pain.”
Five days later I came back, still in significant pain. Fifteen minutes into the treatment at the hands of a therapist who is also an anatomy instructor and somewhat merciless, I was surprised at the absence of pain. I spent the next fifteen wondering if I should tell Alison she could lean in harder today. Finally, I did. She laughed and told me she was working the locked-up muscles far harder than in the previous session. I didn’t believe her and asked how that was possible.
“I can always tell when I’m working with a muscle that is accustomed to being used, almost as soon as I touch it,” she said. “It responds by loosening up; it perceives the pressure as work and responds accordingly.”
And if you’re working with muscles that aren’t used much? “Then instead they’ll see the treatment as an attack and also respond accordingly. They’ll get more inflamed, tighten up more to defend themselves, and healing takes much longer.”
Since you’re reading an anti-racism resource, you know where I’m going. If we who are White accept the bubble White privilege offers us every moment of every day, we never engage anti-racism muscle groups. They sit unused, immobilized by denial, defensiveness, or the refusal to really take in the stories that tell us how privilege protects us.
When we encounter hard stories, metaphorical digging in heavy soil, White unused muscles of mind, heart, and spirit start a process of defensive inflammation, often all out of proportion to the use. Heart nerves send exaggerated messages of pain and attack. Panicked mental muscles seize up and focus on fending off the offending message and messenger instead of taking in the truth being shared. The body itself engages by tightening, and perhaps moving into fight, flight, or freeze states. (What is the Spirit doing? Good question.)
Through it all, I believe, White people are taught to never ask why we’re reacting this way. Instead, we are taught to blame reflexively those naming the truth. We’re taught that overreaction is justified, to never question a lifetime of racist-received “wisdom” that overrules Indigenous and racialized people’s lived experience and social facts.
What I describe here is not about the pain pushed onto Indigenous and racialized people by a racist and colonizing society that includes the church. The racism Indigenous and racialized people face in this country is a lived and embodied reality I cannot speak to, cannot feel in my body. Those reading or listening to this, I invite your reflection on how racism impacts or shapes your muscles of spirit, heart, mind, and body.
It is never the responsibility of Indigenous and racialized people to create or sustain opportunities for White muscles to get a workout. If you choose to offer that space, it is a gift of your choosing. It’s the responsibility of White bodies, minds, and hearts to recognize when an opportunity to engage these muscles is before us, and to accept the opportunity to build stronger, more flexible and resilient muscles—not to ignore the pain but to learn what it’s telling us, and to ask it questions in a spirit of taking responsibility.
No matter how many opportunities for pain- and truth-avoidance are offered, may we each listen to our neighbours with all our souls, and minds, and strength. In the end, may that work lead to less pain and more resilience in all muscles, in all people of all colours, in all expressions of our being. And that is Good News.
Faith Reflection
Please pray with me:
With my bones and muscles,
I feel the ache of life-denying oppression and denial.
With the help of the Creator of all, may my dry bones of liberation live.
With my heart,
I feel the ache of alienation, and I feel the depth of community between all relatives.
With the help of the Creator of all, may I embrace trust, comfort, and healing.
With my mind,
I hold the gift of choosing to learn changed ways of being.
With the help of the Creator of all, I use my mind to sing a new song.
With my breath, expression of the Spirit,
may I breathe in tension and ask it to tell its story.
With the help of the Creator of all, may your story change me.
Living It Out
My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, by Resmaa Menakem, is a powerful body-focused reflection on racism’s impacts on all bodies and lives. The book emerges from and honours Indigenous and racialized, and especially Black, experiences of embodied trauma created by racism. It gives explicit instruction to Indigenous and racialized people and White people. It and other resources show us compassionate ways of disrupting learned responses to racism that are embedded in our bodies.
People who carry White privilege: It’s our work to learn to perceive the systems that create and sustain racism. A first step is recognizing all the moments when our bodies tell us we’re encountering a challenge to White racism. Our bodies react to a perceived threat long before our minds get there, so learn how your body expresses that. Learning to first perceive and then consistently question that instantaneous response is a first step to engaging anti-racist muscle. Many suggestions for healthy disruption are included in the book above; attentive breathing and then attention to the “injury” are key first aspects of the work.
—Julie Graham (she/her) is the daughter of immigrants from the British Isles, born and raised on Coast Salish and Sto:lo territory. She lives on Treaty Six and Métis homeland in Saskatoon, is White, English-speaking, queer, and a sister and auntie. She fell into communications and social justice work as a young adult layperson active in the United Church and has kept at it, mostly in ecumenical settings. She has served BC Conference of the United Church, Ten Days for Global Justice, KAIROS, and Affirm United/S’affirmer Ensemble; she has taught English as an additional language at Sask Polytech. She currently works with the regional councils of the United Church that cover most of the Prairies and North, focusing on right relations with Indigenous peoples, 2SLGBTQIA+ dignity, anti-racism, climate justice, advocacy, inclusive communications/storytelling, and more. She is a gardener, a bird nerd, and an ice art experimenter.
The views contained within these blogs are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of The United Church of Canada.