Читать книгу The Art of Waging Peace - Paul K. Chappell - Страница 15

The paramedic gently removed the small fragments of glass from my bleeding hand. “You won’t need stitches,” he said. A police officer stood nearby, keeping a close eye on me.

“You are lucky the glass shattered the way it did,” said another paramedic as he filled out a report. “Otherwise you could have hurt yourself a lot worse, or injured someone else.”

It was March 2011, and I had been living in Santa Barbara for over a year. The paramedics and police were called to my apartment because I lost my temper and punched out a large window in my living room. I lived in a second-floor apartment, and breaking the window caused big shards of glass to spill onto the sidewalk below. Now that I had come to my senses, I breathed a sigh of relief, grateful that no one got hurt. But half an hour earlier, I had been in a completely different state of mind. I had wandered into one of the deepest and most dangerous parts of the labyrinth of trauma. I had become lost in the dark tunnels where rage is born.

These tunnels were constructed during my violent upbringing, but also as a result of events that happened hundreds of years ago. My father was born in 1925, and I was born when he was fifty-four years old. Growing up in Virginia under segregation during the Great Depression, his upbringing was shaped by the aftermath of slavery and trauma of racism. To protect me from the pain he experienced, he taught me to think like someone living before the civil rights movement.

“White people can’t stand to see a black person succeed in this country,” he told me. “They want you to fail, and if they see you doing well they will try to ruin your life. You’ll be a lot safer if you don’t trust them or anyone else.” It might sound like my father was filling my head with paranoia and nonsense, but he was actually passing down a survival technique that had saved the lives of my ancestors. Frederick Douglass explains the conditions that caused mistrust to become a survival technique for African Americans:

To describe the wealth of Colonel Lloyd would be almost equal to describing the riches of Job . . . He was said to own a thousand slaves . . . Colonel Lloyd owned so many that he did not know them when he saw them; nor did all the slaves of the out-farms know him. It is reported of him, that, while riding along the road one day, he met a colored man, and addressed him in the usual manner of speaking to colored people on the public highways of the south: “Well, boy, whom do you belong to?” “To Colonel Lloyd,” replied the slave. “Well, does the colonel treat you well?” “No, sir,” was the ready reply. “What, does he work you too hard?” “Yes, sir.” “Well, don’t he give you enough to eat?” “Yes, sir, he gives me enough, such as it is.”

The colonel, after ascertaining where the slave belonged, rode on; the man also went on about his business, not dreaming that he had been conversing with his master. He thought, said, and heard nothing more of the matter, until two or three weeks afterwards. The poor man was then informed by his overseer that, for having found fault with his master, he was now to be sold to a Georgia trader. He was immediately chained and handcuffed; and thus, without a moment’s warning, he was snatched away, and forever sundered, from his family and friends, by a hand more unrelenting than death. This is the penalty of telling the truth, of telling the simple truth, in answer to a series of plain questions.

It is partly in consequence of such facts, that slaves, when inquired of as to their condition and the character of their masters, almost universally say they are contented, and that their masters are kind. The slaveholders have been known to send in spies among their slaves, to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition. The frequency of this has had the effect to establish among the slaves the maxim, that a still tongue makes a wise head. They suppress the truth rather than take the consequences of telling it.¹

Most African Americans born in 1980 are five generations removed from slavery, but I am only three generations removed. My father, who had me at fifty-four, was old enough to be my grandfather when I was born, thus a generation was skipped between me and him. Furthermore, my grandfather was raised not by his parents, but by his grandparents, two former slaves named Wyatt and Frances Chappell; thus another generation was skipped. Wyatt Chappell was born a slave in Alabama in 1835 and Francis Chappell was born a slave in Virginia in 1842.²

Although I look Asian, I was raised to see the world like a black person living in the nineteenth century. If two of the generations separating me from slavery had not been skipped, perhaps I would have grown up with a more trusting attitude toward white people. My mistrust was not based solely on what my father told me. It was also reinforced by the racism I experienced as a child in Alabama.

As a child I tried to hide the fact that I was part African American, because to me it was bad enough being half Korean, since I was often bullied because of my Asian eyes. No matter how hard I tried to hide my African American blood, however, my parents reminded me that people would eventually find out. The army classified me as black in my military records, but when I was growing up my father always told me, “The army is the only place in America where black men are given a fair chance.” In 1990, when General Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highestranking position in the military, my father added, “Just look at Colin Powell. He is the highest-ranking soldier, and he is black! Where else in America is such a thing possible? Have you ever seen a black president?” My father died in 2004, before the first African American president was elected.

Mistrust was a survival technique that kept my ancestors alive for many generations, but in the army I no longer needed mistrust to survive. I saw my white comrades as family, and race did not matter anymore. I would die for them, and they would die for me. When I moved to Santa Barbara as a civilian, my military comrades were replaced by complete strangers. In order to protect myself, I resurrected the old survival techniques I had learned from my father. I relied on mistrust for my safety, regressing back into the fearful mindset of my childhood.

Spiritual change requires us to strengthen our ability to trust, because to truly love people we must first be able to trust them, and trust also creates the conditions that make strong communities possible. But when mistrust becomes a survival technique, people often have great difficulty letting it go. Many hold on to it just in case, even when it is not needed, because they would rather be safe than sorry. The difficult task of releasing mistrust is actually a common human experience that transcends race, because betrayal is not limited to the trauma of racism. Countless people have been stabbed with the dagger of betrayal in relationships, friendships, and in the workplace. Is there any hope for all those who have been betrayed, and who now hold on to mistrust as a way of protecting themselves? Is it possible to trust again?

When we look at the life of Frederick Douglass, we see that human beings have an incredible capacity to overcome their feelings of mistrust. Douglass shows that we all have the power to trust again, no matter how much we have been hurt. During the nineteenth century, Douglass worked with many white people toward the creation of women’s rights and abolition of slavery, after spending much of his life unable to trust white people. As he explains, he could not even trust their kindness:

I went one day down on the wharf . . . and seeing two Irishmen unloading a scow of stone, I went, unasked, and helped them. When we had finished, one of them came to me and asked me if I were a slave. I told him I was. He asked, “Are ye a slave for life?” I told him that I was. The good Irishman seemed to be deeply affected by the statement. He said to the other that it was a pity so fine a little fellow as myself should be a slave for life. He said it was a shame to hold me. They both advised me to run away to the north; that I should find friends there, and that I should be free. I pretended not to be interested in what they said, and treated them as if I did not understand them; for I feared they might be treacherous. White men have been known to encourage slaves to escape, and then, to get the reward, catch them and return them to their masters. I was afraid that these seemingly good men might use me so; but I nevertheless remembered their advice, and from that time I resolved to run away.”³

Martin Luther King Jr. said the mistrust African Americans feel toward white people remained well into the 1950s, especially in the segregated South. Remnants of this mistrust still exist today. I often hear people say, “Slavery ended a long time ago, and race shouldn’t be an issue anymore. Why can’t we all just be colorblind toward the issue of race? Why can’t African Americans simply let go of the past?” But the problem with race relations in America is far more complex. A United Nations fact sheet on slavery states: “Even when abolished, slavery leaves traces. It can persist as a state of mind—among its victims and their descendants and among the inheritors of those who practiced it—long after it has formally disappeared.”⁴

To improve the health of America and heal the racial trauma from our past, we must all do our part to rebuild trust with each other. This is a challenging path, and the first step involves recognizing that it is possible to trust again. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated this by developing strong bonds of trust with white people. Even Malcolm X, a controversial civil rights activist, demonstrated our remarkable human ability to gradually overcome mistrust.

Malcolm Little was born in 1925, the same year as my father. He later changed his last name to “X,” symbolizing the Africans who lost their names when taken to America as slaves. Malcolm X said he inherited his light skin when a white man raped his black grandmother. Describing how his childhood was affected by racism, he explained, “The Ku Klux Klan burned down [my family’s home] in Omaha . . . When we moved to Lansing, Michigan, our home was burned down again. In fact, my father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan.”⁵

Turning to a life of crime, Malcolm X spent seventy-seven months in prison.⁶ He often called white people “devils” and said, “I don’t care how nice [a white person] is to you; the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind. He may stand with you through thin, but not thick; when the chips are down, you’ll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes subconscious conviction that he’s better than anybody black.”⁷

Later in his life Malcolm X had a change of heart due to honest selfreflection and life-changing personal experiences. He said, “I tried in every speech I made to clarify my new position regarding white people—‘I don’t speak against the sincere, well-meaning, good white people. I have learned that there are some. I have learned that not all white people are racists.’”⁸

Toward the end of his life Malcolm X realized that our shared humanity transcends our racial differences. His understanding that he belonged to a global human family continued to grow until he was assassinated on February 21, 1965, at the age of thirty-nine. One month before his death, he said: “I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being.”⁹

Two days before his assassination, Malcolm X said the following during an interview with Gordon Parks:

I realized racism isn’t just a black and white problem. It’s brought bloodbaths to about every nation on earth at one time or another. Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant—the one who wanted to help the [Black] Muslims and the whites get together—and I told her there wasn’t a ghost of a chance and she went away crying? . . . Well, I’ve lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument [that all white people are racist]. I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then—like all [Black] Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man’s entitled to make a fool of himself if he’s ready to pay the cost. It cost me twelve years. That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I’m glad to be free of them. It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country. I’ve learned it the hard way— but I’ve learned it.¹⁰

If Malcolm X could overcome so much adversity and learn to trust and forgive many of the people he had once hated, it reveals a lot about our own human capacity to develop trust and forgiveness, despite the obstacles that life throws at us. I have worked to overcome my own feelings of mistrust, and although I have made progress, it hasn’t been easy. I have struggled to abandon mistrust as a survival technique, realizing that when my parents warned me about the dangers of not being white in America they did not tell me lies. On the contrary, they told me their truth. They were describing life as they had experienced it and trying to protect me from the suffering they endured.

My parents raised me the best they could in difficult circumstances. Interracial marriage did not become legal in all U.S. states until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Although interracial marriage was illegal in nearly all the southern states prior to 1967, white people were not the only ones opposed to it. Marrying in 1975 when interracial marriage was still controversial in many parts of the country, my parents did not feel welcome in African American or Korean communities. Many Koreans did not like that my mother had married a black man, and many African Americans did not like that my father had married an Asian woman. This rejection made my life journey much more challenging. A strong community can protect children from some of the worst aspects of racism, such as self-loathing and low self-respect. Martin Luther King Jr. grew up in a strong black community where his father and other African Americans helped him recognize his full dignity and worth as a human being.

I did not grow up around any African Americans or Koreans other than my parents. Because I was racially isolated when dealing with racism, I developed intense feelings of self-loathing and I began to hate the African American and Asian blood that flowed through my veins. When combined with my violent upbringing, this led me deeper into the dark tunnels where the siren song of rage became louder, louder, louder.