I was maybe 8 or 9 when I first had the thought, “Why am I me, and not someone else?” I became aware of being aware, if you will. I looked at other people and wondered what things would feel like if I were them and I asked why I had been born into the body that I was in, and not some other body in some other place. In that moment I understood that though I was me - Ashley - I could just as easily be anyone else. This was a powerful revelation for a child to have. It was the first time that I realized that everyone around me had just as deep and rich of an inner life as I did; that the world didn't turn on me and my wants and needs, but that it simply turned, and all of us were seeking the same validation as human beings.
When you boil it all down, our collective explosion of vitriol over current events is pretty simple. We are continuing to dehumanize others as justification for our immoral behavior (torture and police brutality). Some people have no problem with this. Trying to converse with people who have no problem with this is maddening, because you are actually talking about two different things, placing two different sets of values on human life.
My view is "All human beings have dignity and worth, regardless of their skin color, creed, orientation, or criminal actions they may have committed." Not even the wickedest person ceases to be a human being because they rob a gas station or beat their spouse to death or shoot heroin. There are no actions you can take that invalidate your humanness. Due process and humane, ethical treatment are facets of basic human dignity, not to be exempted or ignored because someone broke the law or was perceived to have been a "bad guy." As hard as this may be to hear and digest, commitment to this principle is necessary. To me the greater sin is prioritizing vengeance over ethics.
But this is what a lot of people want. I see it in every argument over police officers leaping straight to the use of deadly force where people of color are concerned. I see it in these arguments over whether the torture - the physical and sexual assault - of terrorists is justified. There is an endless stream of minutiae regarding every one of these killings of unarmed black men. Most of it is geared towards proving that the deceased were "thugs," that they had it coming, that their humanity ceased to be the moment they made contact with a police officer because our culture paints cops as infallible superheroes, whose authority makes them always correct, even when they demonstrably aren't. Michael Brown was rendered a stereotype, an inhuman monster, and this justified his execution in the eyes of millions of people.
This is the dehumanization process at work. It makes us enemies of ourselves; it turns us against our brothers and sisters. Dehumanization is convenient; it strips away context, nuance, and murkiness and renders everything in stark black and white (often quite literally). There's no need to understand the complexities of any situation - or of human emotion and behavior - when dehumanization is a convenient fallback and arbiter of that very human drive for bloodthirsty vengeance. You don't have to think. You don't have to consider the inner life of the human beings at stake. Stereotypes deprive our brothers and sisters of their humanity, every moment of every day.
I hear well-meaning people claim "I don't see race" or "I don't see gender." But this view only reinforces stereotypes and dehumanization. This view is usually espoused by white people or straight people who want a medal for not being proactively evil, people who behave as if reducing everyone around them to a comfortably homogeneous image is progress. Ignoring our differences and diversity - pretending they don't exist so that painful realities need not ever be confronted - only widens the gulf that has opened in American culture.
By the same token, acknowledgement of institutional factors that disproportionately punish and restrict large segments of our population is dismissed as "race baiting," as if people of color enjoy having to remind everyone around them that they are consistently dehumanized. Folks argue about this as if it isn't real - as if the incremental, hard-won social progress made by people of color in the last few decades somehow cancels out 400 years of the ATTITUDES that brought us slavery and Jim Crow, attitudes that persist at every level of authority and are reinforced by deliberate separation and dehumanization of our fellows.
Emmett Till. Amadou Dillao. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. John Crawford III. Tamir Rice. Eric Garner. These are not just names. They are lives that were taken through the abuse of authority and power. And they are lives that were cheapened by the mental gymnastics performed to make their deaths "their own fault." Mental gymnastics facilitated by decades of institutionalized racism and a process of systematic dehumanization that shoehorns their actions into a script, a trope that plays out exactly how we intend it to play out so that we may have the satisfaction of an Other "getting theirs."
Who are we with our hate? Angry, vengeful people, viewing those different from us as enemies. We remain separate from them and thus closed off to any understanding of fundamental, transcendent humanity.
Who are we without our hate? That remains to be seen.
The only solution is to not allow the cruelties of the world to harden us into separation from our brothers and sisters. We must permit this suffering, these cruelties, to soften us into opening ourselves up to forgiveness. This is not weakness. This is not the behavior of a "liberal pussy." This is an affirmation of human dignity, of ethical judgment, of every human being's right to due process in all phases of their life.
"Instead of asking ourselves, 'How can I find security and happiness?' we could ask ourselves, 'Can I touch the center of my pain? Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disgrace—disappointment in all its many forms—and let it open me?' This is the trick." - Pema Chödrön
