America’s Racial Karma

Excerpt from Dharma teacher Dr. Larry Ward’s new book, America’s Racial Karma. Reprinted with permission from Parallax Press.

The bridge of mercy lies deep within us and among us, however well it is hidden by clouds of conflict, cruelty, and hatred. I know this to be true when I bear witness to my own life experience. I come from mercy; I exist because of it. I was adopted at the age of eight months by a Christian couple, Roy and Viola Ward. Circumstances could have made this young family homeless, but we took refuge in the attic of Marion and Ollie Tindal, who offered my parents shelter in their home and extended the grace of their mercy to us. I went on to become their grandson, and my parents would go on to adopt three more children, who would become my siblings.

Mercy’s bridge rests on the solid foundations of human evolutionary resilience, brain neuroplasticity, and spiritual awakening. Our species’ wiring for compassion and the desire to eliminate our racialized suffering provide the real potential for our social imagination to grow.

I was overjoyed when I first came across the figure of the goddess of mercy in Buddhist traditions, because I had already experienced her presence as this living energy fully embodied in my life. My mother, Viola Paris, was an embodiment of the energy of mercy in everything she did.

Mercy is, first, offering a safe space for those who appear to be other. How do I recognize when I am in such a space? Well, my body relaxes, I feel at ease, and my nervous system is no longer in a state of hypervigilance. In a safe space, I am nourished by the taste of being welcomed just as I am, with my skin just as it is, and all my gifts and talents can reveal themselves with joy, encouraged and supported enough to learn and grow. We feel beloved. While I can share many stories of gratitude toward mercy’s bridge in my personal life, the invitation of this book is to invite us all to cross mercy’s bridge. This land we call America has been anything but a safe space. Healing ourselves is difficult because the racialized wounds of time in this society are, in fact, unforgivable. It seems that as a culture we take great pride in our capacity to be unmerciful.

You may say upon hearing this, “I am not like that!” This is a response conditioned by individualism, with its consequential dissociation from being together in the stitches of our social fabric. Look at the prison system in America if you want an example of our collective fragmentation: the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with 2.3 million people in prison, and of those people, one- third are people of color*. This could not happen in a society of merciful people guided by justice and integrity. Like it or not, we as individuals acquiesce to America’s Racial Karma daily. Our rampant devotion to individualism has allowed us to hide from acknowledging our historically ever-present tragedy.

We need the experience of what I call deep mercy. Mercy lies in our mindful actions of thinking, speech, and behaviors toward ourselves and one another. We may not seem as if we are capable of collective deep mercy, as expressed in acts that restore a sense of shared humanity with one another. Yet these acts of mercy are not absent; in fact, they are the invisible web that sustains living connection and progress in human history. We have survived as a species by crossing its bridge again and again.

And now we must make another historic crossing to consciously journey from the quicksand of afflicted self-cherishing, the grasping, clinging, and attachment of mana that is the axis of the wheel of America’s racial karma. The racialized bodily habit energies living in our hearts and minds are not indestructible objects; they are the results of intentions embodied individually, collectively, and systemically. The spiritual and social work of healing America’s racial karma requires a new conscious intent of living together in individual and collective safety, wellness, justice, and profound meaning. Who wouldn’t want that?

I still remember attending my first seminar on Black Heritage and White Racism in 1970s Chicago. It was a mix of Black and white adults learning together over several days of discussing race in America. It was unsettling to be with strangers energized by the barely contained emotional charge of fear, anger, and grief combined with the discomfort of our social conditioning. It was a very good experience that led to more programs like it, which have evolved into today’s diversity and inclusion trainings. However, looking back now, I realize this is where I witnessed the power of unprocessed trauma and its paralyzing effect on any significant change in our relationships with one another. Today’s White Awareness and People of Color affinity groups have a better chance of moving through the frozenness of the past with the tools of trauma resiliency to help them.

Mercy’s bridge is kept alive by the energies of deep justice flowing back and forth, the truth of suffering beyond the constrictions of the law. It is the justice of our precious bodies being respected and loved concretely as divinely human. However many rituals of forgiveness we may perform, if they do not touch the storehouse of racial afflictions in our consciousness, they offer little to me because even forgiveness is not forgetfulness. Mercy means to surrender cloaking ourselves from ourselves and experiencing a shared vulnerability that we’ve likely never felt before. It invites surrendering the fateful silence of centuries robbing us of our own humanity.

It is an invitation to cross thresholds of healing so our racialized consciousness may become profoundly humanized, to care for ourselves and our planet. We are each connected to one another in ways that support the growth of our healing capacities. We have forgotten so much of what can heal us, right here, right now. Our collective heritages are filled with remedies beyond the veil of the colonial heart and mind. These healing thresholds are already with us inside our body-mind and all around us, above and below.

* See Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).