Regeneration and anti-racism are connected. Because living a regenerative life means giving more than you take. And putting greater value on acts which nourish other beings’ existence than personal gains.
Anti-racism is regenerative too, as each effort made towards culling the shadows of supremacy within you and society, contributes to dismantling the degenerative systems which uphold racism, marginalisation and oppression. Systems which were built to prevent Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour from thriving.
Both regeneration and anti-racism are political. Because the foundational fabric of our society is degenerative. As by default, it worsens the lives of other beings through human and planetary exploitation, financial hoarding and power abuse.
These degenerative norms are built into our laws and policies, reflecting our collective values, values which lead us to support a racist power we call ‘Government’. A Government who gifts itself and other white-skinned (heterosexual cis-gender non-disabled) humans with violent levels of power and privilege.
As the recipients of this privilege and power, we have a choice: we can be degenerative, and continue to support and a system which trains us to embark on careless acts of degradation and apathy throughout our day. Or, we can use our privilege to be regenerative, and contribute daily to nourishing the radical path being led by BIPOC folx towards a future grounded in racial, economic, climate, environmental and social equity … A regenerative way of life lived for 12,000+ years before European boats met their ancestral shores – which, despite European’s genocidal efforts to halt – they’ve continued to lead and fight for.
It may make you uncomfortable, as it does me, to settle into the reality that everything we have come to know, must change. But greater and longer-lived ‘empires’ have risen and fallen before. ‘America’ is only 244 years old, and ‘Canada’ 152, ‘Australia’ 119’, the British Empire itself no more than 417 … mere blips in the course of the human story. Empires built to die, fed off racism, supremacy, thievery and lies.
In the four-part ‘tree anthology’ I wrote in response to Covid-19, with the earth as our root, human governance as our trunk, human culture as our collective crown, and seeds as the power of change and transformation, I placed capitalism and the racist powers who proliferate it as some external thing (namely: Icarus).
But what a conversation with @the.mirror helped me realise, is that racist power is the tree itself. This tree is terminally ill from root-to-tip, with a complex and cumulative disease of supremacy whose branches have now spread across the whole of humanity. Only the tree’s destruction can prevent further production, growth, and proliferation of supremacy’s spores, which have been festering and spreading for 600 years or more.
Thus it becomes our duty to rip this diseased tree from the earth. Strike a match and set it ablaze as it has done to each idea, book and body which challenged its course. Its smoke signalling our collective intentions to our ancestors. Its ashes buried alongside the rest of the hazardous waste of humanity.
** please note: Degenerative thinking dwells in every aspect of our collective reality, the clothing we wear, the food we eat, the beauty products we slather, the houses we dwell in, our travel habits, the banks we hoard our money in, the people we vote for, our spiritual practices, and so on. If you step back and look, you will find shadows of supremacy in everything, built to take life, not support it.
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