Healing Resistance by Kazu Haga

Author:Kazu Haga [Haga, Kazu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 2020-01-13T23:00:00+00:00

My life has been forever altered by everyone I have interacted with and learned from. Indirectly, I have been impacted by everyone who ever interacted with that person. And on and on we go.

For example, Dr. LaFayette has deeply affected my life in a direct way. All of the lessons I have learned from him, all of the wisdom he has handed down, and all of the opportunities he has opened up for me have forever altered my life. To a large extent, he had that wisdom to hand down to me in the first place because of the things he learned during the trainings he received when he was nineteen from Rev. Lawson and from the time he spent organizing alongside Dr. King. Dr. King was in turn heavily influenced by his relationship with people like Howard Thurman and Bayard Rustin. So, in an indirect way, my life has been impacted by all of those people as well.

Similarly, my life has been informed by my former stepfather, a Native man who introduced me to Indigenous ceremony, which is still an important aspect of my life today. He also introduced a lot of chaos and trauma into our home. When I look back at my childhood and think of him, I see a hurt and broken man. I see someone who carried his own heavy burden of pain, for which he could not find a healthy release, so he unleashed it on us. I think of all of those who must have hurt him and contributed to him becoming the type of person he became. All of those people, whose names I will never know, have impacted me.

I have only ever met a handful of people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But I sit here typing these words on my MacBook, a piece of technology that contains minerals like coltan. The mining of coltan contributes greatly to human rights abuses that have taken countless lives in countries like the DRC. My technology purchases contribute directly to the suffering of innumerable people. All of our experiences, traumas, and life lessons are influenced by countless people we will never know. If our traumas are interconnected and interdependent, then so must be our healing and liberation.

A teaching that comes from the Aboriginal people of Australia says, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”4 It’s a beautiful concept and a quote that has become quite popular in many social justice circles. White people shouldn’t be working to defeat white supremacy in order to save people of color. They should be doing it because white supremacy destroys the souls of white people. Male-identified people shouldn’t be working to undo patriarchy because they want to protect women. We should be doing it because we understand that patriarchy rips apart a core part of our own humanity.

Solidarity isn’t about developing a condescending or patronizing savior complex.

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