Al Lun: What are my pervasive thoughts from today's lessons?

I have seen the videos before.

It was George Thompson, former president of Diversity Council, running a race awareness session at Rochester Unitarian Church, who showed that. As I remember now the group was mostly white. There were two African Americans, there might have been a Hispanic, but I don't remember for sure now. I might have been the only Asian.

What stood out in my mind about that group was that there was a person there - a woman - who could pass easily as white told us her experience as part native American. In fact, she identified herself more to her native American heritage than white. That itself brought home the message from the video -- what exactly is race? One would think that she would want to cling more to her whiteness especially in America and maybe in the world, being white (as we have talked about and I have personally observed even outside US) has subtle privileges. Why would anyone who could pass as white chose the other identity.

I didn't ask her that question. Now years later, let me speculate. Eckhart Tolle in his book A New Earth talks about pain body, which is the idea that every human being has some backdrop of sadness. Pain body explains why occasionally for no good reasons we have bad moods. Thoughts pop into our head as if from nowhere that causes us to suffer, a flash of sadness, anger, or negativity. He says that nations and races also have pain body. It is a culmination of negativity, anger, betrayal, greed, shame that collectively tag onto a country or a people. He claims you can feel it in the air. And America because of its exploitation, and massacre of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans, has a particular heavy pain body.

That might explain why someone would choose her Indianness vs white Americanness as an identification. In her case the pain body of being a white American might be stronger than the privilege that came with it. It's the ultimate decision to identify with victims instead of with the conquerors. Come to think of it that was the message from Kevin Costner's movie Dances with Wolves.

And conscious of of this then in order for white Americans to be happier or more at peace, they must work for atonement, -- it is their collective pain body that they must heal --- this is true regardless the claim that it was generations past who had commit ed the atrocities.

It's only when they dedicate themselves to equality and to right what was wrong, could they begin to find peace of mind.

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Watching segments on the post-war housing and financial boom to white Americans to the exclusion of blacks, I am reminded the importance for all Americans to be vigilant. The remnants and residuals of systematic depriving black people of economic grains is a persistent bondage and yoke. There is complacency and ignorance of the historical fact. African Americans in general are left far behind the starting gate. Some say we no longer need affirmative action. I say until the playing field is truly level, we must lend a helping hand to fellow citizens who have been systematically left behind to have a head start.

It is the moral thing to do, it is atonement, and it is also the only way we can reduce our pain body.