Before the next racist shooting, my thoughts about this May 14.
Our South Burlington family recently completed an amiable bike tour along the flat and scenic “tow-path” canal paralleling the Potomac River from Cumberland Gap to Washington, D.C. In D.C. we took time to visit what is commonly called the Black History Museum. This museum is in fact the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and it contains a very special room in which to pause and rest your mind, body and soul — “the waterfall room.”
The waterfall room is a tall, dark-wood-paneled room where visitors can sit or stand around the perimeter of a very large, circular waterfall that pours from a high ceiling, splashing noisily yet soothingly into a pool in the center.
Some folks in the waterfall room have tears. No conversation is needed while people feel free to reflect deeply on inner responses — sadness, fear, anger — they may have had while viewing displays on the lower floors. Displays from centuries of the highly profitable atrocities of slavery.
In the waterfall room, our protective cognitive dissonance — our natural resistance to holding two opposing views in mind at the same time — had an opportunity to begin to fade. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological protection. It works like this: “I am a good person so I would not do those terrible things. Now I can move on.”
As cognitive dissonance is allowed to fade, deeper thoughts are possible:
“I am a good person so I would not do these terrible things, and now I can see that centuries of organized sadism for financial gain has left mountains of injuries for the living to deal with and fix. How could people leave this unrepaired for so long?”
What does this mean for Mother’s Day this year, a time for closeness and pleasant times?
May 14 is also the first anniversary of 10 Black people being gun-massacred in a store in Buffalo by a guy from out of town after he heard Fox News preach repeatedly about “white replacement” theory.
This convergence of the anniversary with Mother’s Day is an opportunity for white readers to help ourselves find an inner “waterfall room” to allow our cognitive dissonance to fade just enough to say something more. Something along the lines of, “I am a good person and every May 14 I will say the names of these 10 potential friends I can never meet because those who went before me never really challenged our slave-holding founders’ deep white fears of losing the money, power and control they held over non-whites.”
Here are the names of the Buffalo 10:
Margus D. Morrison, Roberta A. Drury, Aaron Salter, Andre Mackniel, Ruth Whitfield, Katherine Massey, Heyward Patterson, Celestine Chaney, Pearl Young , Geraldine Talley.
Robert Spottswood
South Burlington
