You ever hear people talk about a concept like unconscious bias? We got to get rid of these types of terms. They’re not really serving anyone. Today we’re going to talk about a concept that I think will be helpful for you when you too are trying to understand why are these people acting racist? What the heck is going up with racism? Let’s talk about it.
So let’s think about one of my clients. His name is Charles. Charles immigrated from a different country and all of his education from the other country was not recognized in Canada because Canada tends to do that sometimes.
So he had to start by being able to get a job as a janitor in a high school. You know, as a janitor, he built up his English, built up his ability to do the work. He had no issues at his work until he then decided to be a teacher at the same school that he was a janitor in.
Well, all of a sudden, it wasn’t that the students gave an issue to him, but the other teachers did. It wasn’t that it was only the teachers. It’s also that the upper management all of a sudden gave an issue.
It’s almost as if while he was a janitor, everything was good. But as soon as he dared to try to upgrade or as soon as he tried to get this upward mobility, there was this glass ceiling that confronted him. All of a sudden, his English wasn’t so well.
All of a sudden, his French wasn’t so well. All of a sudden, there were questions about whether he was really a good teacher and all of those kinds of things. You know, this may not necessarily be something that you yourself go through, but many of us have heard about the proverbial glass ceiling.
The Binary Complex Trauma Cycle
I needed to try to understand why racism was impacting some of my clients and how it was impacting them apart from this excuse of its unconscious bias. That’s the reason why there’s microaggressions. That’s the reason why you get lower pay compared to your contemporaries who just have less melanin than you.
So the binary complex trauma cycle is a way that helped me to understand and to explain to people what it is that’s actually transpiring. You might have heard me mention the element about melanin. It’s because I believe that race is socially constructed, meaning it’s kind of as if we’re just playing dress up.
This is a role play. It’s not a real serious thing. We’re just going to say depending on how you look, if the lights are on, that determines how I need to treat you, whether I need to respect you or whether I need to disrespect you.
This make-believe nonsense thing that actually has serious ramifications on whether we are shot and killed by police or whether or not we die during childbirth for the black maternal mortality rate, which is three to four times higher depending on if it’s in the U.S. or the U.K. or any of these things. It’s just to know that even though this thing is ridiculous, it has real world impacts. So I needed to have an explanation for why these things take place and that’s where the binary complex trauma cycle came from.
The Four Elements of the Cycle
Here are the four sides or the four elements of this thing. You’re going to see white supremacy insecurity on the left. At the top, you’re going to see soul murder, which I’ll describe what it is in a bit.
At the right, you’re going to see black suffering and at the bottom, you’re going to see validation of oppression. Let’s talk about these four sections starting with the left. When I’m talking about white people, just know that even if you don’t consider yourself as white, depending on the level of melanin in your skin, you have benefits that people with darker skin don’t have.
You can benefit from whiteness even if you don’t consider yourself as being white. It goes in this way. There are people who are white who just happen to be white, but there are also people who buy into the full privilege and buy into the replacement of their species because immigrants are coming in when it really is just simple math. It’s just white people have less babies than non-white people.
White Supremacy Insecurity
Here’s the basic idea. I call it white supremacy insecurity because most of the white supremacists have low self-esteem. Think of the mass shooters. Think of your politicians. None of them have good relationships.
They probably have terrible intimacy with their partners if they have any intimacy at all. A lot of times, even if we do say that white men are at the top of the ladder, I’ve never met a white man who really believed he was at the top of the ladder because the thing is make-believe. It has some benefits, but there’s also some elements with it.
We say white supremacy insecurity because it’s an insecure power structure. It needs to do everything that it can in order to maintain its power. The key thing is that whiteness must always be seen as pristine.
It must always be seen as powerful. It must always be seen as the most lethal, strongest, all of those things. The way how it does this is by projecting its weakness or any of its flaws into something else.
Soul Murder and Social Death
And that’s going to move on to our second section. The second section relates to soul murder. Soul murder is a concept developed by Shengold and there are other researchers who have developed what happens after soul murder, which is a social death.
These are some terrible things, but the process is really violent and it’s intentional. It needs to be violent. It needs to be vile as difficult as possible. Soul murder is oftentimes referring to the fact that when there’s narcissistic violence, when a person’s really trying to cause a lot of harm to another person based on maybe their hurt ego or their hurt way of looking at the world, then they’re going to do all the most disgusting types of violence to another person to the point where that person might internalize this level of violence and think that they themselves are bad.
When soul murder occurs, and this can be through genocide, this can be through the microaggressions, like it’s the range of violence, of racial violence that takes place, sometimes what will happen is a person will then end up being socially dead. Social death is not only that the person might feel as if they’re socially defeated, but it’s also that society treats them as if they’re not even really a factor in what it is that’s going on.
So their voice for voting isn’t as important. What they say in the workplace isn’t seen as important. Their language, they always have an accent that’s a problem and all these kinds of things.
Black Suffering as a Construct
But this is a process. It’s initiated from white supremacy insecurity. And then there’s multiple ways of harming another person or projecting negative things into someone.
A lot of times it’s a projection of the negative beliefs within whiteness into something else. And that leads to Black suffering. When we talk about Black suffering, there are some people who are Africans and then the first time that they are ever seen as being Black is when they immigrate to Canada.
All of a sudden they’re being stopped by the police because of their skin complexion. But back when they were in Senegal, when they’re chilling in Ghana, when they’re in Ethiopia, there might have been ethnic issues but there was never your skin complexion because we all look like we’ve been under the sun. Just know that Blackness is not something you choose.
It’s actually something that the society puts you into. Even though there may be some people who might not believe that they are Black, just know that the racist police officer doesn’t care if you come from this part of the country or this part of the globe or whatever. It’s that the society sees you in a way where suffering must take place because of how you are or because of how society sees you.
Black suffering is almost the opposite of white supremacy insecurity. Where white supremacy insecurity is meant to distance itself from anything negative, Black suffering is when the body of that individual becomes associated with suffering. So then the Black person’s music is bad. The belief that Black people are lazy even though our ancestors were worked to death. The belief that we are not that attractive despite the fact that there’s a lot of white people that spend a lot of time tanning themselves to look like us.
Just know that hypocrisy is part of this. Everything that we do is bad but our music is always at the top of the billboard chart. This hypocrisy needs to be there in order for this system to work.
Validation of Oppression
But when Black people, when the person who has become Black or has become associated with the trauma believes in this thing, that leads to internalized oppression. We’re going to the fourth section. The validation of oppression is when both sides believe it.
When it happens that the white supremacy insecure society or the group believes in the degradation of the negative aspects of the Black person, when the Black person or even people around them, but specifically them, when they internalize it and they themselves believe that they are bad, this justifies the violence. There are theories that talk a bit about how with violence it needs to progress from delegitimization and dehumanization and then you can do the genocide.
You need to call people animals, you need to call them cockroaches, and you need to make it so that the laws are against them and then you can do the violence towards them. It’s never just a specific jump. If we think about abusive relationships in general, the abusive relationship just doesn’t start with violence.
There’s usually flowers and then there’s the microaggression and then there’s flowers and then after there’s the isolation, the financial control, and then there’s flowers again, dinner, maybe lunch, and then after there’s the violence and then there’s flowers. An abusive relationship cannot continue if there aren’t these flowers and these gifts. But it takes two to be able to maintain this type of cycle.
When we have it that the person who has become Black believes in their suffering, the white supremacy insecure system has been able to remove any doubt that it itself is pure and innocent and that someone else is negative and all of this. It validates the oppression and the cycle then continues. Because whiteness is unable to take into account its own flaws, because then it wouldn’t be white anymore.
Someone has to be Black. It has to create and recreate Blackness. It has to create and recreate racism.
Healing and Breaking the Binary Complex Trauma Cycle
For Charles, he’s just in a system. He didn’t choose that. It’s just that because there’s this upward mobility, if he’s a good teacher, it means they’re not.
It has nothing to do with him. As good as he gets, in fact, the better he gets, the more the pressure must come down in order to maintain the cycle of what is white and what is great and what is Black and what is not as great. This is the binary complex trauma cycle.
So what do we do to heal this? We got to heal the negative beliefs that he has internalized about himself. We may not be able to change the racism and the laws that are discriminatory or the random microaggressions and the race-based traumatic stress that’s in our society.
But just know that we can make it so that we’re not validating this stuff. We can make it so that we refuse it and that we confront it. You might have seen that I’m talking about the binary complex trauma cycle, but just know because it’s a socially constructed identity, you can easily look at this in terms of it being male or masculinity and femininity.
You could look at it like able-bodied versus those who have disabilities. You can look at it from cisgendered, heterosexual, and gay people, LGBTQ. It’s because these things are socially constructed. It’s just a game that we keep playing.
The idea is, as an anti-racist, is to say game over. We’re done with it. We recognize that this is all ridiculous.
It’s not helping us. It’s not strengthening anybody. Once we refuse to play into the game, we can then change the rules, which is the purpose of why we must heal first.
This is another episode of a weekly consult, and I want to thank you for being a part of this. You know the drill. We need you to like.
We need you to share. Let’s use the algorithm to our advantage. Subscribe to this.
Let people know what’s up. We are doing anti-racism weekly consults, and I’m just going to keep doing this for the time being, because I’m getting a lot of positive feedback for it. If there are comments, suggestions of what you’d like to hear, let me know.
Let’s keep this thing going. Until then, I’m David Archer. Many blessings.
Heal the trauma of the past. Recognize your awesomeness, and hope you have a great rest of the day. All right. Peace. Take care.
See more of my