This story is by a white man whose white wife was brutally raped by an African American man. He wrote about his struggle not to racialize this single act:
There are large violent acts, I have written elsewhere, but no large healing acts. The work of healing is a matter of small acts of attention and care sustained over time. Is this perhaps among the things Dr. King tried to teach us by his insistence on nonviolence in theory and practice? A commitment to nonviolence constantly forces you back to the bedrock realization that structures of inequality and exclusion are enforced by particular blows to particular bodies inflicted by particular hands. And it challenges you to seize the occasions for resisting violence that are all around you. In mysterious ways, more by grace than design, it too has the power to rearrange your molecules—to make you more whole, less afraid, more alive to human possibilities.
How do we work on acts of healing? Because even for those of us who have not experienced such large violent acts, healing the damage racism has caused is hard work.
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April 28, 2008 at 8:21 pm
macon d
Wow, thanks for linking that, a powerful article, especially the idea of abuse rearranging one’s molecules. How, indeed, does one recover from that. The intense focus on non-violence does seem like a possible avenue toward healing, even if it’s hard to feel that along the way.
I also think that asking unwitting abusers to wake up to their own tendencies helps, be they white, male, heterosexual, or middle class, or other empowered-majority categories.