The lives we live reflect not the reality of the world, but the way we think about the world.
Caucasians — aka white people — make up barely over 10% of the global population.
Let me say that another way: People of color comprise almost 90% of the world’s population.
In the United States, the majority of the population will be people of color within the next 25 years. In children under five years old, there are already more children of color than “white” children. So this is not some abstract possibility. That generation will grow up and be the majority very soon.
The presumptive white privilege that has created racism is an adopted mindset by white people based on our belief in our “rights” as taught to us by a history written by white men. That history is stil written as if it were the dominant experience of the world. It is not. And it never has been.
A snowflake is a derogatory term often used by white supremacists to deride people who speak out against racism and prejudice. The term means “overly sensitive with an entitled sense of uniqueness”. Which is completely ironic, of course. Not just because most snowflakes aren’t as “white” as non-snowflakes, but also because the opposite a snowflake’s individuality and uniqueness is the idea of the common man. Which, spiritually translated, means that we are all equal and all one. Precisely that which non-snowflakes deride — sometimes violently.
Ever since I was a little girl, I was drawn to close friendships with people who were not Caucasian. Many of my dearest and most treasured friends over the course of my lifetime have been African-American, Jewish, Asian-American, Middle-Eastern-American, Native American, Indigenous Peoples, African, Jamaican, Hispanic/Latino/Latina. From the time I was a little girl, for reasons I can’t explain in words, I felt that my own culture was infinitely less complex and compelling than other cultures. I had a sense that those cultures were somehow more holistic than my own.
As I little girl I heard Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr say, “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. Nonviolence is an absolute commitment to the way of Love.” In the face of the horrific violence of racism, I understood both the bravery of his choice — and that spiritually there was no other way.
Later, when the concentration of my art history major in college was African art, I remember hearing the words form follows function and lighting up from the inside out. African art wasn’t objects for objects sake. Each piece of art we studied — and that I had grown up with in a house full of African, Asian, South Pacific and Native American art — had a meaning that reflected a culture that saw religion and ritual and daily life and ancestral history and the natural world as all connected.
Many years later, when I became an ordained interspiritual minister, it was this same holistic viewpoint that drew me to see all spiritual practice as connected and connective in this way.
As a little girl, watching the Civil Rights movement on television, I could not understand hatred toward people of another race. It literally made no sense to me.
As a college student, I participated in a campus-wide seminar led by my fellow students of color where I came to understand that this supposedly colorblind attitude did not mean I wasn’t racist. Simply by assuming that the white worldview into which I was born and in which I was educated was “the norm” made me inherently racist.
That threw me. And yet I knew it was true.
This month’s heart-centered practice is the practice of wholeness. Earlier this month I wrote about the fact that the words whole, wholeness, health, healing, health, and holy all have the same root word. None of these words mean anything if all of them don’t exist.
We cannot be healthy unless we are whole. We cannot heal unless we live as a whole. We cannot be holy unless we are healthy. And we cannot be healthy unless we live out from a place of wholeness.
So if the world we live in is the outward manifestation of our beliefs, then how do racism and bigotry and prejudice even exist in a world that is thoroughly and completely a world of mixed colors and races and religions and ethnicities and histories?
It exists because racism bigotry and prejudice exist in each of us. It is In each of us who learned from books that lied about life and were purveyed as the truth. It exists in us because we learned it and then began to live it. It exists in each of us because we were taught to fear those unlike us. So each time we succumb to that fear, the roots of racism, bigotry and prejudice are fertilized and watered by that fear.
Whatever is in us ripples out into the world.
We project our beliefs out into the world and all of us live out the consequences.
This is why however vital — and it IS extremely vital — it is to continue having conversations about the reality of racism in our society, this false divide is never going to heal unless we have a major paradigm shift and begin living Love.
Right now global leadership seems a mostly Love-less affair. Most of our leaders act in order to maintain their power and of privilege and their position in the world. We are not hearing the language of Love from our leaders, let alone seeing it mirrored out in their actions.
Which is perhaps why living Love may seem like a pie-in-the-sky answer to the myriad horrific woes of our world. But I assure you it is not.
Imagine that this were a Twilight Zone episode and every single person in the world received the same inoculation. A vaccine of Truth and Love that filled with the each person with the fundamental and unshakeable knowledge that all we are here to do is to love one another and our planet and to be loved in return. Because that is what we know when we are born. And it is what we know in the most meaningful moments of our lives. And it is what we know when we are on our death beds.
When we really get honest with ourselves, we know this to be true: All any of us want is to love and to be loved and live our lives feeling that Love.
So if we were all given that vaccine, what would happen? Would racism still exist? How could it? Would we still want to defend our positions and our territories to the point that we would kill for it? How could we? Would senseless violence happen because of racism, bigotry, prejudice or mental illness? No.
Does this sound ridiculous?
Then let me put it another way: If each of us approached every single situation in our lives with Love as our language, Love as the basis for all our beliefs, Love as the impetus for all our actions, would the world look the way it does? No.
Do we need to still have conversations about racism and bigotry and prejudice? Yes.
Do we all need to unpack our own beliefs to see where we are racist and bigoted and prejudicial against anyone “not like us”? Yes.
But at the same time we all need to realize one fundamental thing: No one is “not like us”. We are ALL the same. We are all human beings whose fundamental language is Love.
In other words, we are all snowflakes. Unique individuals all made of the same stuff.
We are all here to be and do the same thing: To love and to be loved.
We all want the same thing: To be able to live a life where we can freely love and be loved. Love ourselves. Love our families, Love our friends. Love our communities. Love our world.
So to live Love IS a game changer because it understands that this world will never be whole unless Love is our guiding ethos in everything we do. And we can only start with ourselves.
Love must be our litmus test.
Love must be our GPS.
Love must be our Bible, Torah, Quran, Tao Te Ching, prayer beads, prayer mat, ancestral rituals, kachinas, candles, incense, dreamcatchers, statues, crosses, crowns.
This is an inside job. Unless each of us lives Love, our world will never be whole.
Living Love is whole, holistic, holy, healing, healthy work every single minute of every single day in every single thought in every single action.
We must all become heart-centered practitioners guided by Love. There is no other way to heal our world.
So today let us all keep having the challenging conversations about racism and bigotry and prejudice we must have. Let us all keep looking deep inside for the glitches in our own operating systems. But as we do that let us do it from Love, as Love, with Love, through Love, in Love.
Let us learn — each of us — how to do our part in loving one another and our world. Whole.