I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. —Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”
Minister Elle Dowd, an anti-racist white activist, challenges the notion that being a peacemaker means being “nice”:
We white people love to think of ourselves as nice…. But too often, niceness is about convenience. It’s about our comfort. It’s about control. It is our pathological desire for niceness that leads white people to look at young Black people crying out in the street and say,
“They should really say #AllLivesMatter.”
“I’m all for protesting, but do they really have to inconvenience other people?”
“No one is going to listen to them if they are going to be so rude like that.”
In other words, “Why can’t they be nice?”…
We say we value niceness, but this kind of niceness isn’t kindness or compassion or accompaniment or self-sacrifice. It’s not Christ’s example of emptying ourselves for the sake of the other. It’s the opposite—silencing and oppressing the other for the sake of ourselves.
Dowd reflects on the desire to reduce tension instead of learning what it might have to teach:
The reason many white people have trouble thinking of nonviolent direct action as truly nonviolent is that it is disruptive by nature, and that doesn’t feel very nice. It’s not supposed to be nice.
Direct action intentionally interrupts our daily flow and rhythm in an attempt to raise tension. This tension isn’t new. It isn’t being created out of thin air. It has always existed for our siblings of color.
For people of color and other oppressed people, the tension caused by marginalization is ever present with very real consequences…. Racism is like being force-fed a poison. Direct action is what happens when people refuse to drink that poison and instead bring a bottle of it to the doorstep of those force-feeding them and demand that they gaze upon the reality of it.
Direct action doesn’t create new tension. It redistributes the tension that is already there and puts it back where it belongs—at the source.
Many people—white people, in particular—have little tolerance for tension. We have been taught to avoid tension. Our conditioning has trained us to recoil from discomfort, to think of it as an inherently bad thing, something to sidestep and evade at all costs. Instead of leaning into tension to see what we can learn from it, we often avoid it. But when we do this, when we turn away from tension, we fail to see the gift that this tension can be in revealing the truth. We miss out on the clarity it brings with it, the opportunity to move forward.
Reference:
Elle Dowd, Baptized in Tear Gas: From White Moderate to Abolitionist (Broadleaf Books, 2021), 41–42, 45, 48–49.
Image credit and inspiration: Toa Heftiba, untitled (detail), 2018, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Two people, different in perspective yet united in a shared value, reach across the divide—not with force but with courage, choosing the harder path of listening, of letting themselves be changed, of loving even when it is difficult.
Story from Our Community:
I have begun to use the term “active love.” In practicing active love, I try to put away all use of fighting and war-based language, but it’s difficult. Our language, as well as our institutions, rely heavily on metaphors of dominance and war. In active love, rather than focus on what I want to end or defeat, I focus on relationship and community and what actions can be taken to open a path toward justice, dignity, and trust. Sometimes I need to stand, to move, even to dance in God’s freedom according to the law of love.
—Kim V.
