Different Worlds: Race as Bodyscape

I am no expert on racial politics. And after the events of the past week, I am doing more listening than speaking. But I wanted to jot down at least a few reflections that feel relevant from a blog concerned with how we live on and in the world.

As I have learned from the over 50 monks I have interviewed in the past six months, Holyscapes are not so much domains, as they are worlds. A person or a group of people can develop a rich and unique relationship with a place yes, but that relationship develops and changes over time. And God can move us or touch us differently in places we have been to hundreds of times. The subtle change of light, season or circumstance can light up a place in ways that we have never before experienced.

I know that for some of my fellow white people it is hard to understand the black community’s fraught relationship with police. It simply doesn’t fit most of our experiences of the world that a cop would just kill someone for no reason. And while hundreds of white people are also killed each year by police, as a share of their population, black communities suffer much greater loss at the hands of law enforcement.

This is not a binary position. The police and black communities suffer. One can be pro Black Lives Matter, to want structural change, and not wish anything close to the senseless shooting that happened in Dallas. One can be in favor of egalitarian, community-based policing without tolerating the racist, militarized hyper-masculine mentality that contributes to the mistrust and friction with police that exists in many black communities. Uniform or not, when we shed each other’s blood, we cannot tell whose is whose in the pools that form on the street.

But much like the world of an Indigenous person, or the world of Catholic monk differs radically from my own when we walk through the same forest, if I were to walk down the same street in New York as a woman or a black man, I would be walking through a totally different world.

Racism is not just about burning crosses or swastika tattoos. It is about the world we carry around inside of us and how that world converges with the world outside of us. All too often I have seen fellow white folks react to violence in similar ways: violence by another white person seems to say nothing about white people in general. But violence by black, brown or Muslim people tells the white person everything they need to know about black, brown or Muslim people in general.

Perhaps this is biology as much as it is culture, but it cuts to the center of why these conflicts talk past each other so often. We are living in different worlds. So I would humbly ask my fellow white people to not only put ourselves in the shoes of the other, but to at least try to understand their worlds as well.