I think most Omni folks will recognize that US history has a long bloody substream that re-erupted into light this past week. A new public string of deaths at the hands of police that exploded Wednesday with the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
My editorial comment on this fresh tragedy is that policing in America needs a rehaul immediately. Enabling murderers to hide behind a police badge is in no way good for anybody, including good police officers. Minneapolis has a long dirty history of racism and red-lining, but clearly they aren’t the only American city with a problem. It is a horrible American problem, and the people of color in every community deserve for their white neighbors, friends and community leadership to step in to its resolution. And that includes the cities of Northwest Arkansas. We may try, but our impact is still woefully inadequate.
Fortunately for us, we have good people of color and allies here who are ready and willing to share other options for relationship. I’m thinking of Omni’s friends at the IDEALs Institute at the University of Arkansas, Engage NWA, Building Beloved Community at St. Paul’s Episcopal, and others. They are exploring and building finely honed tools for study, analysis and healing. And they’re willing to share. Please explore links to these groups and see some of the moving and awesome things they’re doing. Even under covid.
Groups like IDEALs, Engage, BBC, Omni and many other groups are part of emerging networks of support for progressive values like racial healing. Progressive values that build up the well-being and rights of people, and planet and community.
Omni folks are well within that orbit. But here we are, reacting with horror at yet another murder of an unarmed, unresisting, nonviolent Black man on the streets of an American city. Some of us are looking for ways to make those personal, institutional and structural ways to change the dynamic we were raised to accept silently. But more…. MUCH more is needed from all of us.
When you are ready for another step toward support for racial healing please reach out to one of these good and inspiring groups. Someone there can help you move past the dark but invisible trap of race training that all of us received from birth.
Maybe it’s not a terrible coincidence that covid and this racial uprising come together. Lessons from both circumstances dredge up deep places that need to be exposed so they can begin to heal. That place where you can breath…. That’s where the human spirit longs to live.