June 2, 2020
The Salome Institute stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and with all activists fighting for change on our streets, in their writing, their healing work, their judicial activism, and their organizing. This support is unequivocal and unqualified.
I continue to channel Kali and Salome in these times. I believe ultimately in the necessity and beauty of peace, justice, love, and the true oneness of existence, but I also feel and honor the rage right now. I honor the rage and the grief that has not been heard and must be heard. It is the righteous rage of protection and love that says, never again will a Black Woman be shot in her home. Never again will a Black Woman be shot in her home by men whose salaries and uniforms her own tax dollars paid for. Never again will a Black Man be suffocated to death. Suffocated to death by a white man who joined the police force to channel his sadism, knowing that year after year, he would be protected in terrorizing people who had no recourse. Never again will a 25-year-old Black Man be hunted down and murdered by white men like it was a game, a game they knew they could win because their weapons and connections would shield them. Shield them as they have for hundreds of years.
Never again.
Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Lorenzo Dean, Eric Reason, Christopher McCorvey, Christopher Whitfield, Atatiana Jefferson, Dominique Clayton, Pamela Turner, Botham Jean, Antwon Rose II, Stephon Clark, Ronell Foster, Aaron Bailey, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and on and on and on… we see you. We are sorry. We see you.
I am navigating day after day, perhaps hour after hour, my own response in these times. I have waited for this rage to emerge. I have prayed for this rage to emerge. I have felt confused for decades about why this rage has not emerged with this force and in these numbers, and I am grateful for the rebellion. If we want change, alchemical, transformative change in our society, it is incumbent on all of us to participate.
We can participate internally as we raise consciousness. We can participate in our communities. We can participate with our money. We can participate with our skills. We can participate with our voices. We can participate with our platforms. We can participate with our writing. We can participate with our art. We can participate with our votes. We can participate with our feet and our bodies in the streets.
How each of us participates on any given day is for ourselves to navigate with truth and honesty. We cannot hide, nor can we grandstand. This is a collective uprising that needs each of us, in our own ways, for fuel and for transformation. This is an opportunity for the healing and creation of a society, a society that has been unequivocally racist and abusive from the first moment a white man stepped on this soil; racist in a thousand interweaving and suffocating ways. It cannot go on.
My own process is slow. I am never much for knowing what is right or appropriate in any given moment. I am not often in-step with time. I never quite know what is popular or what is current — this was as true in high school as it is now. I mostly read dead authors and books, not tweets. I am terrible at social media. I am uncomfortable on social media. But right now, I am fighting my own fears. I know that while I love the Black Writers of the past, in this moment of action, I need to bathe in the Black Voices speaking with urgency each day. I am melting old grief that has kept me frozen in action while staying present with the depths of history that keep me alive and able to participate at all. I am learning who to listen to now. Who to trust now. I am learning from Black activists and thinkers of this moment and will continue to take my cues from them.
Some of the resources that I have engaged with recently and historically, I humbly offer here. I am not the expert so I mean this as a humble beginning so as not to stay silent, nor encourage silence.
More than anything, if there are just two things I know to do right now, it is to take my lead from #blacklivesmatter organizers — to not question their tactics nor positions — and to read the voices of Black Women. I was not handed the books of Black Women in school. I was not taught that their words are often the most extraordinary, radical, embodied, mind-altering words. I was taught, implicitly, that they are invisible. So reading their words has been core to my reeducation for years, and it will continue to be. This is part of becoming conscious, seeing what is hidden in the unconscious of all of society. Black women live in the shadow of patriarchal white supremacy. They know it in their bones. And it is in the shadow where, if we do our work, we find the gold.
Find the books, lectures, and podcasts of Black Women (and Black Men) and learn from them. Learn from them now and for years to come. They do not speak in the same voice, so listening to one is not enough. It is not the job of Black People to save our democracy. It is not their responsibility to speak. But if they are speaking, we can listen, learn, elevate, donate, protest, and vote.
Brittany Packnett Cunningham, AKA @MsPackyetti
Kimberlé Crenshaw and the AAPF
Fanny Brewster, The Racial Complex
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
bell hooks, Killing Rage
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle
Richard Wright, Black Boy
Some places I’m sending funds:
With love and solidarity,
Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute
“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” - James Baldwin
James Baldwin wrote regularly about the unconscious projections implicit in race relations. I’ve long read his work in dialogue with Jung’s.
Our May 31st salon dove into (stumbled through) some of their writings and what we can learn from them.
Referenced work includes: James Baldwin’s “Letter From a Region in My Mind” & Carl Jung’s “The Undiscovered Self”