Why the Lived Reality of Slavery and Brutality Threatens Our Collective Security
I have lived most of my life in fear even though I have only recently been able to acknowledge it. I have tried to counter it with rage or even love but as long as it still lingers, there is always a chance that I and everyone around me may be forced to pay a terrible cost since fear has a way of making you break all the rules.
I first became aware of this powerful effect of fear while standing guard at the back gate of a Canadian base in West Germany during the mid 80s. The Bader-Meinhof gang had recently conducted an attack at a nearby American base and we were on high alert.
Our commanders countered that threat by giving sidearms to the non-military spouses who checked ID cards at the gate. To support them, I and other aircraft technicians, took turns standing with our rifles aimed at the windshield of each vehicle as they entered the base. I must have looked very threatening in my small armored shelter only thirty meters away, but the truth is that I was terrified on my first watch.
Weeks earlier, another technician had fired live rounds into the woods when he heard shots from our local infantry on exercise. As a result, the magazines on all our weapons were now empty. I had ten live rounds in a magazine in my pocket but as each car approached, it felt like it was miles away. I was not ready if anyone attacked.
Dropping even further back in time, I often felt that way when I walked through the doors of my high school as a young black man growing up in Montreal. When would somebody say something that brought back the shame and self-loathing that came from being identified with a race of people that could so easily be dominated, humiliated and killed for four hundred years without anyone seeming to care.
Back then, my brother and I would watch the news in disbelief as young black men were shown bloated and hanging from trees or shot down in the street. Even when some of these killings were captured on camera, no one was punished for it. What made it worse was that some of those doing the killing were cops. “Why have they allowed it go on for so long?” Was a question that haunted me as a child. “There must be something wrong with us.” That seemed like the only logical explanation when I thought about slavery, the frequent killings and the situation in South Africa.
I felt better when I did not have to look in mirrors. Since everyone around me was white I sometimes forgot about the color of my skin. Later, I even forged friendships with the other misfits and social outcasts that sat on the fringes of teen society. Even so I was not ready when one day my friend, at the time, told me three jokes with the word nigger in them. I should have done something after the first one but shame and self loathing robbed me of my intellect and will. It took several minutes for me to even react. I did nothing until after he jokingly protested “Aw c’mon you gotta have a sense of humour? Those were funny!”
But how do you explain shame, pain and self-loathing when it magnifies those feelings just to begin expressing them? How do you you put the strange feelings into words. It is exhausting to think of even now.
I don’t even remember changing desks. Suddenly I was sitting numb and lost at a desk near the middle of the class of thirty kids instead of at the back where I normally sat with my witty, white, former friend.
Later, I was angry at myself and swore that next time I would be ready. The next day I walked into the school angry and remained that way for days. Few people met my gaze for long and I relished the power of it. I would at least be able to attack now if it happened again.
That’s all I wanted as I sat at the back gate in Germany. I wanted a chance to defend myself if I was attacked. So between vehicles I practiced switching magazines even though I knew it was against regulations. While I practiced, the fear diminished even though I knew that I would not be able to switch magazines in time to effectively defend myself.
This was also what I found about being angry all day in high school. It was ineffective overall since it also robbed me of my intellect and made me unpleasant to be around. Soon my grades plummeted and I found myself an outcast even from the fringes.
Still, I held on to my anger since it held the fear at bay. I even found new ways to wield it. My brother and I both agreed, with a blood oath, that we would go to South Africa and start a revolution to free the tens of millions of black people who were essentially being held prisoners by much fewer white people.
We were angry and militant but not quite angry (or brave) enough to go right away. Instead, we signed a pact that said we would go if things did not improve there within five years. After that, a strange peace settled on me knowing that there was now a focus for the rage. This alone seemed to ease my fears. I felt as if I had taken charge and knew deep down that I could do whatever was required.
A similar thing happened while I stood guard at the back gate that first day. In violation of the regulations, I replaced the empty magazine with the full one and extended the tip of my cocking handle. I could now cock the weapon and fire in under a second if attacked. I was now certain that I was the thing to be feared.
It is an unsettling thing to know that you are capable of extreme violence. But you also gain respect for yourself with that knowledge. I knew that I was a nightmare walking in my last couple of years of high school, ready and almost relishing the thought of someone pushing me over the edge. I was curious and almost eager to see what would happen.
But during that time, a catholic nun offered me a vision that provided a possible third way. She said that we change the world every day whether we want to or not. If we treat ten people with love in our hearts it will change the way they interact with the next ten people that each of them meet and so on until we have affected millions from just one day’s interactions.
I quickly did the math and found out she was right. In fact the idea seemed very similar to the South Africa plan in its audacity and weaknesses. Both ideas seemed radical and unlikely to succeed unless I had a lot of help. But it seemed to me that Sister Barbara Fiand’s ideas were fundamentally sound, and much less dangerous.
And on top of that I was filled with a sense of well-being and purpose when I lived in the way she had outlined or at least with that as my goal. I also realized that killing people in order to force others to live a certain way would come at a cost the world would be paying for generations. The grimy residue of slavery that currently taints all of our psyches can attest to that.
But the truth is that, in spite of this third way, I still sometimes feel the fear and rage. Although I am past sixty, with friends that are good police officers, I often experience a familiar tightness in my chest when I walk by a cop in body armor and a sidearm or when one talks to me in an aggressive way.
Something deep down in me wonders if one of these times will be when I slip over the edge and fully release my rage. I could easily have been George Floyd so many times if one thing or another had gone differently. It is strange to feel the two forces of love and rage at work in me at once but I have the sense that many others are struggling to hold similar polar opposites.
The white kids in my school and in thousands of other schools across North America saw the same brutal images as I did. It would not surprise me if some of them judged me worth less as well even though their Christian values tell them not to judge. No matter how one may have internalized it, the lived experience of slavery and brutality descends deeply into all of our psyches even if it shows up differently when it festers up to the surface in each of us. Many of those white kids may may experience a sort of instinctive bias that there is something inherently wrong with black people. Later, when they see people that are prone to violence, it confirms their suspicions.
They, like me are dealing with the current day costs of hundreds of years of slavery and brutality. Some of those white kids may now even privately experience these deep unsettling feelings while publicly adopting a new philosophy. One that they believe is ethically sound and will create a safer world for all.
But it is not the philosophy that one race is held superior that threatens our collective security but the lived reality of it through slavery and brutality. What has been learned through five hundred years of direct experience cannot easily be undone, especially by a few classes in sensitivity training.
But knowing the nature of what afflicts us all may help us to understand how people can continue to behave in ways that frustrate and anger us. Better yet, knowing that we all just want to find a way to be safe may point to a possible but difficult way to achieve the collective security that we all crave by confronting and expressing the truth of what has gotten us here.
