Reparations
For the purposes of this essay, since Emergent Phoenix is Queer Black Indigenous led, based in the United States and anti-racist, we are focusing on Reparations through the lens of radical Black American feminism. This does not diminish the Reparations also owed to other non-men or First Nations Indigenous Peoples in the United States and beyond, but these are outside the scope of this essay.
At Emergent Phoenix, we challenge all non-black, non-indigenous folks who work with us to begin their journey and praxis (practice) toward restorative justice through Reparations. Initially, we ask folks to come up with a stretch goal (a goal that is doable, yet a stretch above comfort) for bi-weekly or monthly payment in tandem with services provided to you by the Black facilitators here, and eventually to other Black Indigenous people you are in relationships of exchange with. Relationships of exchange are any relationships that you are consenting to giving and receiving with Black and Indigenous people such as a teacher, coach, healer, barber, AND —this is especially important—friends.
I may tell a white bodied coaching client, “You will need to pay me that stretch amount each time you get a paycheck or other income.” This is to get non-black folks into the habit or practice of automatically thinking about & practicing reparations every time one benefits from capitalism, patriarchy and white body supremacy (i.e. getting a paycheck, and gaining access to resources such as education and influence), instead of coming from a place of "what's left over after I benefit as much as I'm comfortable with from capitalism, patriarchy and white body supremacy." (“White” and “Black” here act as the political caste designations connected to physical appearance determined by American governments after Emancipation.)
~
Have you ever stopped to question why it feels easier and more comfortable to give money, time, labor and expertise away to a charity or even a stranger, than it does giving money, time, labor, expertise and financial resources to Black people who you personally know? What is the difference between Reparations that restore right relationship on an embodied level, and Charity which reinforces a privileged power-over dynamic? Has it ever felt overwhelming to serve or even to witness without feeling able to help soothe the distress of poverty, illness, racism or patriarchy for your friends, family, neighbors, partners and colleagues who are Black? Why does overwhelming guilt, shame, deep embodied discomfort, or self-loathing wash over you when your Black co-worker, partner or friend talks about a racist experience (that they survived) at a job or with police in your town, yet it feels markedly less distressing to read about or even to witness a Black stranger being assaulted, abused or perhaps even murdered by police on the internet, a TV show or your national news? Why is Reparations thought of as a special Charity fund for the misfortunes of Black people, instead a kind of tithe towards the unimaginable debt owed to Black bodied people due to centuries of exploitative traumatic capitalism and violent white body supremacy?
One simple response to the above questions is that we humans typically form attachments or embodied energetic connections with people we personally know, recognize, work with or live near, so we feel their experiences more instinctively. This serves the evolutionary survival purpose of making us more likely to care enough to protect and defend and aid those we know and are familiar with if we recognize they are in harm’s way. Community care results from having deep felt energetic connections to other people, and being deeply invested in their wellbeing or suffering as if it were our own.
It is a traumatic experience to witness suffering at all, yet the closer we are to any person, the stronger our attachment, the more energetically linked we are, the more likely we are to experience their suffering as traumatic and vice versa. We experience suffering and joy of those we are attached to on an instinctual mammalian level, including with mammals outside our species (like pets) due to limbic resonance. However, this connection —between witnessing or causing terror and distress in people we are attached to on a limbic system level as trauma —is particularly true of people in our close orbit: friends, clients, patients, students, family, coworkers, neighbors and colleagues, regardless of their race. That is, unless another opposing trauma prevents us from experiencing that felt attachment and energetic connection.
Exploitative capitalism as a system of oppression does not work efficiently if the groups of people benefitting from the exploitation of lower castes, subordinates or the oppressed feel the full weight of overwhelming sorrow and suffering necessary to sustain the oppressive systems that privilege them above others. This is where charity rushes in to give white guilt, class guilt and patriarchal guilt and shame a place to soothe without actually disturbing the power-over dynamic (or of opening up the Soma to the full pain and sorrow of deeply felt oppressor trauma). Charity provides just enough energetic release to make those carrying oppressor trauma in their Somas feel better, without risking them actually doing better on a regular basis by dismantling the inequalitable systems that caused their oppressor trauma in the first place (what many of us imagine would happen if most Americans healed their trauma on a deep level). Charity establishes this disconnect by reinforcing oppressor trauma through power-over instead of allowing in the natural grief, empathy and compassion one might feel without disconnecting from the other’s experience.
~
Reparations is not owed from what is left over after you benefit from your white or adjacent privileges. Reparations are not like charity to be given out of the goodness of your heart, in convenient ways, from your perceived excess. That is not Reparations, again, it is capitalistic Charity. Enslaved Black Americans exploited by capitalism during chattel slavery were not “giving of their excess” out of convenience or “from the goodness of their hearts” in enduring and working under terror-forced labor and sexual exploitation and destitution both emotionally and physically their entire lives, and neither are your Black friends and neighbors. Correspondingly, inherited and ongoing oppressor trauma in white-bodied Somas, —feeling constriction from the guilt and shame of benefitting from chattel slavery— can’t be healed with such a low-threshold energetic response to that trauma. Charity is not an equitable repair to exploitation by racialized oppression that benefits you every day from birth.
To give a blunt example, giving a Black stranger the $5.00 or $50.00 one has left after everything else, does not adequately begin to repair the harm of ones non-black forbearers forcing my Black ancestors to work millions of seperate lifetimes of hard labor, for 16-18 hours a day, for hundreds of years, or benefitting from this harm by proxy as someone who isn’t Black. That energetic (or karmic) debt is beyond ordinary human comprehension, and is shared by everyone who benefits from white body supremacy. In practicing Reparations you are simply making a conscious habit of paying this debt back to the Black bodied people to whom your non-black body owes this energetic debt. The excess you perceive as “left over” is actually only a tiny fraction of the extraction and exploitation of Black bodied people who were never compensated, some of whom you know well and engage in exchanges without compensation or reciprocity. One example of this is the ongoing extraction of emotional labor of black friends without ever considering the cost of that labor to the Black person, or reciprocally providing care and resources to them without needing to be prompted. Black bodies of people you know and don’t know were and still are used, tortured and abused at the pleasure, and for the comfort of white and other non-Black bodies.
As one major repeating trauma, MILLIONS of Black Indigenous American bodies for HUNDREDS of years have met an energetic wall of extractive, exploitative oppression on a daily basis. MILLIONS of lifetimes of repair will be required to restore right relationship on an embodied level between Black-bodied people and White-bodied people due to that alone, not considering Jim Crow, Police brutality, sexual exploitation of Black bodied people, medical experimentation or mass incarceration to name just a few more.
White-bodied and socialized non-Black individuals practicing Reparations in relationship to people they personally know (to begin) simply are doing their part to begin repairing the harm their groups’ oppression caused to Black bodies. In the USA it is rare that any Black bodied person has no contact at all with any white bodied person. Yet, imagine if every white bodied person was stretching to practice Reparations with the Black and Indigenous people they personally engage on any level. Equitable resource distribution would happen very quickly without charity or governments. This energetic exchange would begin to open everyone’s Soma to embodied racial healing just a little, potentially enough for the social constructs of race and even gender to fall away. The entire oppressive system would eventually collapse without much fanfare. And that is exactly why it isn’t being done.
A white person deeply practicing reparations and healing their ancestral trauma will move over time towards choice to live on what remains after paying reparations (in money and other ways like physical labor, emotional labor and time), not the other way around. They will understand that most of what they access as resources was unethically and violently taken from Black bodied people, and it must be returned for a while until that debt it paid. They understand this will likely not happen in their lifetimes unless more people heal from oppressor trauma and will lead others to practice Reparations as well.
When one practices daily, continually being in right relationship in this way, the body, the Soma responds with more opening, releasing the intense overwhelming tension and constriction felt often in the body as white-guilt and self-loathing or repressed grief, and white savior complexes based in white-guilt. This opening of the Soma (the physical organism of the body) is opening to the healing it was repressing before in constriction. Healing is often painful, as a cramped muscle or sprain release is painful, and yet, so is remaining perpetually wounded and not healing. Eventually the constriction is not sustainable, it will injure, sicken and kill the Soma. The choice we all have before us is to begin now or to procrastinate healing until it’s an emergency and lose choice in how to release our trauma when it builds up.
~
Often American folks are constricted by trauma in their Soma so that they are not in choice about the overflow or transmission of their emotions from their Soma to their environment. This means for people with power-over in the social hierarchy, their trauma is causing harm to those they have power over, and frequent, regular repair practices are required to maintain right relationship. This is not an indication of a character flaw, but of embodied trauma that has not healed and continues to perpetuate.
There are many ways to do right relationship repair. The most simple and least effortful way to begin repair is to apologize. This is often inadequate by itself because an apology does not actually repair the harm caused, and does not automatically come with changed behavior. Another way is to change the harmful behaviors as well, yet, this is challenging to do in an authentic way without healing automatic trauma responses within the Soma.
~
Transmitting Versus Transmuting
One of the best ways to complete, release or transform a trauma response that has caused harm or is in response to harm is to transmute it by turning it into something else. This is what a survivor of racism might be doing by taking their anger or pain from racialized suffering and then singing, rapping or writing or dancing about it: transmuting destructive energy of oppression trauma into creative, generative energy. Black bodied people in the US created entire cultures of resilience by transmuting trauma of oppression in creative and healing ways, instinctually. Non-black people must also transmute their oppressor trauma to heal, instead of continually transmitting it to those they have power-over in their orbits, causing repetitive intergenerational harm. Given that the people who are most frequently harmed by interactions with oppressor trauma are Black people in the closer orbit of non-black people, it makes sense for non-Black people to begin practicing reparations with Black people you know personally, live near, exchange with and are energetically attached to already.
Reparations as spiritual and Somatic practice is yet another, deeper more impactful way to transmute intergenerational and ongoing oppressor trauma and harm. The core of repair-ation (action to repair) is to restore right, equitable & reciprocal relationship from traumatic damage done, both by conscious choice and by being a beneficiary of oppressive systems. Often, white people and people assigned male at birth (and other people socialized into power-over in various ways) are not required or are discouraged from observing the full impact of the unchoiceful overflowing and transmitting of their trauma to others, including feeling all their own accompanying emotions. Transmitting is easier than transmuting trauma because in American culture we are socialized to transmit trauma automatically whether by birth or by societal rules, laws and cultural expectations.
However, Somatic practices (embodied practice) and occasionally certain substances (like psychedelics, antidepressants and certain strains of cannabis) expand our nervous systems' capacity to be in choice about our traumatic responses.
~
Trauma is a protective reaction from the automatic brain to overwhelming of the faculties of the Soma (the physiological organism of our human bodies) to actual or perceived threat of harm or danger to the self or to witnessed or perceived harm to another Soma. Trauma can become “stuck” in our Somas on a loop, repeating through our lives and passed intergenerationally through DNA if any trauma reaction is not allowed to complete its cycle and release for any reason. In our modern context, this trauma is a daily occurrence for most Americans due to the racial and gender castes of “oppressed” or “oppressor” we are forced into at birth, and socialized to perpetuate for the rest of our lives.
~
Sometimes because of inherited and ongoing trauma of living in a Black body in the United States, the amount of space I have to hold and separate and observe my emotions is extremely constricted. Some days I have only a small thimble to hold a deluge of emotion, and that thimble of emotions overflows into places I did not chose for them to go consciously.
Trauma sometimes constricts my nervous system to the point where my overwhelming emotions cause my Soma to lose control. This is a trauma response: I am no longer in choice about where the energies of my emotions land, it is an automatic response, like a reflex. My experiences and research with Somatics, some psychedelics or particular herbal allies (each by a different means) expands the capacity inside my nervous system to hold and process — sense, observe, transmute — my emotions and automatic trauma responses. It is as if the tiny constricted thimble releases into an expansive investigational space complete with instruments, organized containers and creative tools to separate, study and observe emotional reactions in my and others’ Somas in an intentional way. With continued practice, I feel more in choice about which emotions to observe, or when and where I want to pour the contents of an emotional container to transmute it. This way, regardless of the type of emotion, I am more able to be an observer and an investigator. I do not as often get lost, unmoored, or overcome by emotions in a way that takes away my choice in the process, especially choice over the response by my Soma.
White bodies overflowing and flailing emotions and trauma about, are impacting Black and other people like me, in their orbit literally. People in their orbit --including me, are being impacted--hit, essentially --with projectile energies of white trauma. Most white-bodied folks are not in choicefulness about the flailing and outsourcing of their intergenerational, structural and personal level trauma. And because of the identities they hold and are socialized into, the trauma that white folks are flailing is particularly toxic and harmful and deadly to non-men and Black bodied people.
White bodies have inherited and socialized oppressor trauma from upholding exploitation and power-over: patriarchy and white body supremacy. That is why some BIPOC describe connection with white-bodied people as feeling "dangerous", "unsafe", and "exhausting". This is why caucusing (e.g., black only, bipoc only, qtpoc spaces) provides necessary temporary relief from the impact of white-body trauma for groups of people who do not hold white, cis and assigned male body supremacy and privileges.
In my body and its associated identities, I carry the trauma of centuries of harm from patriarchy and white supremacy. In my black non-man body, and I am also a Healer. People in pain are drawn to me and I to them, instinctually. To do healing work it became clear to me that I needed to heal my own Soma from inherited and ongoing trauma.
Even though these political designations of Black, White, man, non-man are constructs and not based in facts, the impact of these labels on the trauma our bodies receive — primarily oppressor or oppressed trauma in the United States —is VERY real, visceral and tangible.
When we are not in choicefulness around the traumatic emotions getting in and out of our bodies, we often cast painful trauma into the bodies of others. This is not a theoretical process, it is the direct or indirect transfer of energy from one body to another body.
Following the laws of conservation of energy, this traumatic energy transmission causes pain (as in striking or cutting a body), and harm (as in not allowing that body to feel, or constricting because the impact of a trauma is too overwhelming), and exploitation (extracting or inputting energy from/to a body in a non-consensual, non-reciprocal way as in rape culture, exploitation and all forms of enslavement).
This is not an intellectual exercise, it is literally happening. One way to give our bodies more choicefulness in this process is to regularly clear trauma from the body with somatic practices or use of plant & fungal allies, as well as engage in practices such as Reparations if we carry the trauma of having exploited and oppressed people in different bodies than ours.
If you are a non-black collaborator or client of Emergent Phoenix, and would like to begin your journey towards practicing restorative justice through Reparations with us, please connect with us through Patreon at the Reparations level, or join our Healing Ancestral Trauma Through Reparations webinar (coming soon).
You can also pay Emergent Phoenix directly through Paypal (memo: Reparations) or reach out to Emergent Phoenix through our contact form with further inquiries.
~~
"For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices." —Audre Lorde
References:
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem
The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice by Staci K. Haines
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk
It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to Break The Cycle by Mark Wolynn
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing by Dr. Joy DeGruy
The Case for Reparations in The Atlantic by Ta-Nahisi Coats
