Bishop Michael B. Curry, whose father was a civil-rights activist, argues that racial justice requires both systemic reform and inner transformation. He traces how oppressed people internalize the dynamics that subjugate them, citing Rwanda's genocide and the U.S. civil-rights movement's shift toward spiritual awakening in the late 1960s. True healing demands changing both laws and hearts.
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When you're dealing with systemic oppression. And clearly we have racial issues in the US but we've also seen it all over. All over the planet. You know, there's a government or a people really doing their very best to take away hope in a whole nother culture.
Right.
And, you know, we're talking about war crimes, we're talking about just horrible stuff. How do you bring hope and love back to a people when they've been in a situation like that.
In a parallel way to an individual? Parallel. Yep. Let me go back to the. I mean, in my own story. Yeah. I grew up with a father who was a civil rights worker. He was a pastor, was doing civil rights stuff, both, you know, so I always grew up assuming, you know, if you're church, you're supposed to do you. You know, you do spirituality and social justice all wrapped up.
They come together, right?
Yeah. It's like that's what Jesus did. That's what we do. So, okay, so that's. So that was kind of the world in which. And this was this. I grew up in the old black communities in the late 50s and through the 60s, and then I went off to college and there was an evolution, because when I was younger, the reality of slavery still lingered through segregation in the consciousness of the community. It really did. There were. And people like Frantz Fanon, who wrote the Wretched of the Earth, and a lot of people who looked at the dynamics of oppression talk about. Psychologists, talk about internalizing the oppression, where the oppressed actually internalize the systems and the dynamics of oppression into themselves. And so you get these patterns of self hatred and self loathing, and it comes out in ways that eventually you try to mimic the wider system or culture or whatever it is, and finish your own. So by the late 6th, when the civil rights movement got really going in the early days, it didn't deal with this. It didn't deal with it directly. But as time went on, there was a realization that, yeah, laws have to be changed. Yeah, economic arrangements have to be changed. All that stuff has to happen. But there was a spiritual awakening that happened in the late 60s when it was the young Turks who were saying, well, wait a minute, just getting our civil rights isn't enough. What about our humanity?
Yeah.
And that's where you get the black is beautiful kind of stuff. Beginning to end. There was a period of that. What that tells me is it's a very similar kind of thing to having how you overcome negativity in your own Life, I mean, you've got to deal with it. You've got to coach, you've got to one, you can't ignore the outward circumstances that created it. You gotta do something about that. But that's not enough. You've got to engage the inner spirit and you've got to. Because ultimately it's gonna be that inner spirit that's gonna give you the capacity to make it over the long haul. If you just deal with the outer circumstances, that's not enough. And so I saw, and I think about it, growing up in the black community, I mean, you know, where all of a sudden, you know, when I was growing up, the darker you were was considered not great. You know, you needed the lighter you were. I mean, black people come in all hues and complexions, but light skin was considered beauty. That was where the beauty, which again, is taking the cue from the wider culture, you know. And so eventually the black is beautiful kind of, you know, went overboard. Of course, these things go a little bit overboard, but eventually it norms out where you realize beauty is beauty, you know, it's where you don't fall for the color game. I was at a friend from Rwanda who said the same pattern of internalized oppression played out in Rwanda where one group was more favored because they were light skinned, one tribe because they were lighter, of lighter complexion, facial features were more. They weren't European, but at least pointed in that direction where the other were clearly more African, even looking more West African than East African, if you will. And he said some of that was behind the struggle between Tutsi and Hutu that led to genocide when the Hutu, the more dark skinned, more African tribes, rose up against the Tutsi, who had tended toward a little bit more light skin or, or more chiseled features, more East Africa. He said that internalized oppression fed into what became genocide. Wow. And Frantz Fanon in Wretched of the Earth talks about this. I mean, he. And he was talking about it from the perspective of Algeria and the Algerian rebel. He was a psychiatrist and he was talking about it from that perspective. That's why the inner self must be engaged as well as the outer self. It's not just. Not enough just to change the outward laws. You got to change the laws of the heart. It's got to both have to happen. And I think that's true with racial justice and healing in our culture. It's got to be both.
