We have ALWAYS....

Image from: @artissam_lines on Instagram: this is how I see my KUFIYAH, it’s ‏an indestructible nation.

We must speak, write, act, move, breathe, see, hear, feel, know, and remember, so we can return to ourselves, return to each other, and the soil under our feet.

Over the past few weeks, after nearly two months of intense facilitation of racial justice and anti-racist practice spaces - I was able to be held. My medicine has been my somatic abolition sisters whom I practice with weekly, and the communal space in which somatic abolition siblings hold space with and for each other as we are held by brother Resmaa and our fellow siblings in community.

Within these facilitated spaces over the past two months, the amount of whataboutism that I have heard (and what my co-facilitators and co-workers are hearing in the global development space) is mind-numbing. In many of the conversations I have facilitated on anti-racism, the quick rush of white folks and bodies of culture whose internalised oppression has overridden their bodily connection, to cause them to hastily exclaim, “…what about gender discrimination, what about casteism, what about homophobia, what about,

what about,

what about?”

That quick rush is not fragility (please anti-racist practitioners let us stop using this word because it gives white folks a pass from doing the actual work required) but the unwillingness, inability, and lack of knowledge on holding and how to hold the actual factual experiences of the physical, emotional, communal, psychological representation of the bodily oppression of people (globally) by white supremacist systems and structures.

‘For the oppressors, "human beings" refers only to themselves; other people are "things." For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence.’ -Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire1

Recently I had the opportunity to partner on behalf of The Racial Equity Index2 with Partos3 to hold an in-person conversation on Anti-Racist practice in organisations with Dutch and Dutch-based DEI practitioners. The conversation was held at The Black Archives in Amsterdam - a space rich with history - history saved by ancestors and passed on through generations. “The Black Archives documents the history of Black emancipation movements and individuals in the Netherlands.4”

The Black Archives team shared with the group the journey of the Archives, the collections within the archives, the struggles The Black Archives team faced in establishing and maintaining the Archive, the history of Black Dutch resistance, and the meaning of the Archives interlinked with all liberation movements today. For me to be held within The Black Archives, speaking about and facilitating a discussion on anti-racism within a sector predicated upon white supremacy and colonisation was a full-body visceral experience - it would have been a disservice to have it be anything other than that for myself.

But one piece of information that was shared by The Black Archives team landed in my body with such weight:

The Black Archives team shared that it was just this year in 2023 that the Dutch apologized for slavery5.

It was just this year in 2023 that the Dutch apologised for slavery.

It was just this year, in 2023, that the Dutch apologised for slavery.

Apologised for slavery.

In 2023.

So much of the practice of somatic abolition is a practice of presence with what our bodies are receiving and amplifying. Our bodies are receivers and amplifiers and every part of our body is engaged in this two-way signaling of situations around us and happening in the world. And as I sat in the space of The Black Archives and listened to these words of an apology all I felt in my body was aching pain in that moment. I felt nauseous in my gut, heat in my limbs, prickliness in my skin and yet I had a 10 min break to sit with all of this and metabolise it so that I could be present for the 30 or so people in the room as we moved through the discussion on anti-racism.

After the break and after the room gathered again I reflected to them what The Black Archives team had shared, and the reality of the recent apology and asked, “What is required for an apology?”

What is required for an apology?

Some folks said, “To be accountable, to be in someone else’s shoes, to be aware, to listen…..”

And I listened and said:

…The one word I am not hearing is Pain. What is required for a true apology is the acknowledgment and the feeling of someone’s pain.

We are sitting in this Black Archives, wrought with words, pain, and the history of ancestors and all that Dutch people have been taught in the Netherlands is a paragraph about slavery.

So when you only know 1 paragraph about slavery - how can an apology be rooted in anything substainsial required for justice?

I went on to speak about the reality that we have deemed whose pain is palatable to us - those of us who live in and have ingested white supremacist systems and ideologies (nearly all of us) have been conditioned to see some people’s pain as real and felt, and others as not real (this is why medical racism is real6, why Black bodies were experimented upon7, why racial trauma still isn’t acknowledged even now by medical and therapeutic practitioners). This reality is so clearly represented in the real-life pain and genocide of the Palestinian people. We see day after day their pain being questioned, being othered, and being diminished because white supremacist structures and people within them have deemed Palestinian people and their humanity unworthy.

I then asked folks in the room - “…so what does this apology actually mean?”

And someone responded:

“It means nothing.”

—-

I am still, in so many ways, processing this experience. But one resource that I am holding on to that held me during this facilitation which I also shared with my siblings and sisters in somatic abolition is this:

Our liberation struggle are generations old. There was no greater evidence of this for me that day than to be in The Black Archives. A space built so carefully by ancestors who ensured their stories and liberation struggles would not be lost. As brother Resmaa reminded us all, “…In the face of imperialism, In the face of colonialism - that is what we have always done. We have resisted being flattened. Our histories, our stories, our bodies. We have transgressed. They thought they crushed us with their boot and did not realise we were seeds.”

Our stories have not been lost.

Our Stories Have Not Been Lost,

They are thrumming through our bodies.

The interconnectedness we have across oceans and From The River, To The Sea - is generations deep, and no matter how much people try to take away our stories and the physical representation of our stories and bomb them to pieces - they are within us.

Our work is to try to get free together. To fight together for our liberation, our freedom, our humanity. And the reality and the KNOWING is that we have always fought for our freedom. We of the lands, the diaspora, our ancestors, our foods, our cultures, our vibrancy, our stories, our bodies - We have always fought for our freedom. From the blood-soaked earth of every genocide that oppressors have inflicted upon us, to the bones of our ancestors buried in mass graves, to the massacres and genocide of unarmed people - babies, young people whose lives were and continue to be severed short - our hands, our stories, our bodies know the struggle of our ancestors, our lips know the words we cry out at marches,

our bodies know,

our bones know,

our cells know,

and our spirits know.

For we have always fought for our freedom.

We will liberate ourselves by any means necessary.

We have always done so.

We have always done so.

We have always done so.

We are now moving through the cracks in the system our ancestors bled to create. Keep breaking these cracks wide open so that the exposure may continue.

Keep speaking, writing, acting, moving, breathing, seeing, hearing, feeling, knowing, and remembering so we can return to ourselves, return to each other, and the soil under our feet.

In Solidarity Always,

Uma

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