Justice, vengeance and the practicalities of civil discourse

When justice gets personal

Sometimes the universe works in mysterious ways and you’re not quite sure what you’re supposed to learn from a negative experience. Other times it works in very obvious ways, and you know exactly what you are being asked to see. 

My last essay “Silence, violence and the death of civil discourse” was, at its heart, a lament on the current state of public discourse and a call for us to move beyond the repetitive cycles of polarisation and cancel culture, to civil, restorative and generous ways of navigating difference and conflict. 

Whilst I didn’t say it directly, one of the assumptions underpinning this essay was that this is ultimately about choice. That the bridge from the nightmare of polarisation to the dream of healthy dialogue is each one of us choosing to do things differently. 

But perhaps not so.. 

The evening that I published the essay, I was at a team dinner for a project I am working on when one of my colleagues said something racist that really hurt my feelings. It sparked a whole process of  unravelling within me that led me to hypothesise that our ability to have civil discourse about challenging topics may be far less about us making the choice to do so, and far more about us having the skills and capacities to have better conversations. 

To explain this hypothesis, I’m going to unpack this encounter in detail and then explain what I think this very personal encounter can teach us about the collective. 

This actually feels really difficult to write, and I’m quite certain it’s not my clearest piece of writing, precisely because it’s so personal. But I wanted to write it while I am still up close and intimate with my own process so I can share it honestly. 

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So what happened?

There were around 30 people at the dinner and the people at my table were mostly people I was meeting for the first time. We were getting on well, and having lively discussions about many topics. Everyone on my side of the table was white, and indeed almost everyone in the room. As the main course arrived, the topic of conversation turned to what it’s like living in different areas of Ibiza. The man sitting opposite me, let’s call him R, told us that he loved his area but he didn’t like that there was a nudist beach in front of his building. Now with Ibiza, being Ibiza - the home of free lovin’ hippies who enjoy nothing more than a naked swim - this was met with some jovial resistance at the table. The woman next to him jokily prodded him saying “this is Ibiza! What’s wrong with a naked beach?”. Then he said, “yes but come on, you don’t want your children walking out to see two black men naked”. 

Now to some people, this whole interchange might have passed them by, but there it was, that one tiny extra word “black”. That rolled off his tongue habitually, unconsciously even. For me, though, it held so much power and turned his statement from a stuffy personal view into something much more painful. 

 It’s interesting, because in the moments where someone has said something directly racist in front of me, I always have the same physical experience. It’s like everything goes blurred and I can’t really hear what’s going on around me, I turn my eyes to the ground and I retract totally into myself. I feel humiliated. And alone. And so awkward.  After a few moments I gathered myself and even though I really really didn’t want to, my internal voice said “you have to say something”, and so I mumbled under my breath “I’m not sure what the colour of their skin has to do with it” and the (white) woman next to me turned to me and said “the size!” and laughed. She was referring to the trope that black men have big penises. 

I want to share why all of this was a problem, and why, I think, it had such an effect on me. Not in some patronising attempt to  “educate” you but to give you the opportunity to walk in my shoes, just for a moment. 

The inclusion of the description of the men as black, is something that I think was unique to them being black. I believe that he would never have said “two white men”, had the men been white, he just would have said “two men”. In truth I doubt that he would have included “asian” or any other racial category. But to him, them being black, was pertinent to why he wouldn’t want his children to see them naked. Why? Whilst this is my assumption, it is an assumption founded in countless pieces of research and my own lived experience. The underlying implication that black men are more dangerous, the deeply held collective belief that black men are aggressive, sexually predatory and unsafe. This is the same thread alive in the woman who crosses the road when she sees a black man walking towards her, but wouldn’t if it was a white man. It’s the person who grips their bag a little tighter when a black boy sits down next to them on a bus. It’s the woman who called the police on the black kids selling lemonade on a street corner. And here - it’s these black men with their big penises, scaring our children. 

But I don’t think it was the invocation of this well worn stereotype that hurt me. For me it was something deeper and more imperceptible. It was contempt. This underlying feeling of “how dare you?” be here, doing something that I don’t like, when you are black and I am white. And I know none of this was said, and I have no doubt that this is deeply buried in the unconscious, but I felt it. And the thing is, in that moment, my reaction became not just about that statement but about every racist statement I’ve heard before. I felt the fear I felt when I was 11 walking home from school nd a group of men shouted nigger and threw a can of beer at me. I felt the heartbreak I felt when my first boyfriend told me he’d been to our mutual friend’s house for dinner whereupon he was asked by their parent with distaste “are you still dating the negro?”. I felt the pain of my ancestors, the mammies and the maids in my own lineage, who would have been scorned and scolded for getting above their status. 

And this is what I feel is really important. Even if this is all a misinterpretation and overreaction on my part. Even if there was no contempt, no implication of danger. Even if this was a genuinely irrelevant inclusion and he would have said “two white men” - I felt it. And that matters. 

It matters because it disconnects us. If one person feels something, it exists within the relational field. And if many people feel something, it exists within the collective field. 

That’s why the approach of “they didn’t mean it, just get over it” simply doesn’t cut it. It ignores the very real human emotional experience in these seemingly insignificant moments, which are the tip of the iceberg on top of hundreds of years of history. It’s why I think there was such a volcano of black rage after George Floyd’s murder that actually didn’t have all too much to do with the murder itself.  Each instance like this had been a drop of lava just simmering under the surface waiting for its moment to erupt. 

Back to the dinner. I made my excuses and left. And as I sat in my car, I had this weird feeling that’s hard to explain, but I get it every time I hear a racist comment - it’s like this super alone feeling. I want to cry and it’s confusing because I love my life, I feel so happy and privileged in so many ways. And yet there’s this thing, this aloneness, this fear, this underlying feeling of just not belonging. And it’s weird because even though cognitively I know that people experience these kinds of moments of exclusion and prejudice everyday a million times over, and there is nothing unique about this experience for me, in that moment, sitting in my car, I felt like the only person in the world. By the time I got home, I just felt sad. 

Here’s where it gets relevant. 

The next morning I woke to a message from the organiser saying that R had contacted her for my number, that he’d felt terrible about what had happened and he wanted to contact me. A few hours later, I received a message from him saying that he was so sorry he had offended me and that he deeply regretted that the conversation had gone that way and that what he had said had made me feel I needed to leave. It was a sweet and genuine message. To which I honestly replied that I appreciated the message and to consider us all good. Later that day, I received an even longer and more heartfelt message from the woman who had made the comment about the size of their penises, saying how sad she felt that she’d said that, how she always wants to educate herself and she’d love to have a coffee with me to talk about it further if I was willing. I messaged the organiser and said my piece on why those comments weren’t acceptable to me. And that was that. Done. 

And in truth to part me, it was - done. Someone said something unconsciously offensive. They realised. They felt sad. They apologised. I accepted the apology (genuinely). What more is there to be done? It’s done. 

And why shouldn’t it be done? Because the reality is that this man and woman meant no harm. Whilst that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be good for them to take this experience and learn from it. It’s really not their fault. We are all the consequence of our history. Just as my reaction to the comment is conditioned by hundreds of years of black oppression, so too are theirs conditioned by hundreds of years of white supremacy. In this we are equal. And both faultless. 

But there was another part of me, and this is where the awareness really comes in. 

To this part of me - it was not enough. Sure they apologised but that doesn’t take away that he said it in the first place. It doesn’t take away the reality that the belief is still in there, ready to surface the next time he sees two black men taking up space in a way he doesn’t like. And so, no, it is simply NOT ENOUGH. 

As I sat with this part of myself, observing it without judgement, I asked myself  “ok, Hols, it’s not enough, then what would be?” 

And the truth is what that part of me wanted was revenge. Him to suffer, because I did. Him to be removed from the team. Humiliated. Ostracized. 

It’s fascinating - because even by the time I finished writing that word “revenge” - my conscious mind has kicked in to say “of course I don’t want that!”.  But something underneath, this deep, young, maybe even primal part sings a different song. I can feel the energy of it - it’s wrathful, vengeful - out for blood.

Being able to track this in such painstaking detail (because believe me it is painful for me to see these parts of myself) is such a gift. I get to feel this “out for blood” energy in my own body, I get to become the personal embodiment of the energetic pattern that lies under all the polarisation, the cancel culture that wants to shame and blame the other side to hell. It is not justice., it is vengeance, and it says, ultimately, “I am in pain and I want you to pay for that by sharing my pain”.

It’s so important for me to write this out and share it publicly. To show that even I, someone who teaches and practises love and forgiveness, who is deeply diplomatic, whose whole career has been and continues to be about peaceful justice and harmonious coexistence. When it gets personal, I feel these things.  

Recently my 3 year old has adopted this habit of getting really frustrated when I say no. In fact he’s beyond frustrated. He’s outraged. And sometimes, when he’s really pissed off, he hits me in the face. And the truth is, I don’t mind at all, in fact it makes me want to hold him even closer. Because I know that what’s happening is that he’s feeling something that he doesn’t know how to feel, some sadness, or disconnection or fear. And so he lashes out at me as a way to be with the feelings and regain some control because he doesn’t yet have the skillset or capacity to feel these feelings. Underneath the anger is just his tender little heart. 

As I sat with the experience at the dinner, I allowed myself to feel into it. I journeyed through the fiery layers of wrath and vengeance, to the watery layers of sadness and despair, until eventually all that was left was just my tender, little heart.

If I look at the experience of feeling victim to a racist comment and I strip away all the critical race theory and the historical context and the problematic stereotyping, what it really comes down to is - it hurt my feelings. And it’s not that all the other stuff is irrelevant, it has its part, it’s just not the deepest thing. The deepest thing, the crystalline truth is, they hurt my feelings. I’m not being flippant here - feelings matter. And these are deep feelings, of fear and shame and grief entrenched in our lineages over centuries. But they are feelings. 

And it is so important to me, to acknowledge that. That at the deepest level, this is about feelings. 

Because it allows me to feel much more confident when I say:

Cancel culture - or indeed any of the moralistic and shame based tactics used in public discourse to pressure behaviour change around race (and other identity categories) - is masquerading as a sophisticated and justified response, when it’s actually just the lashing out of our collective inner toddler. It is the consequence of one big culturally co-signed unwillingness to feel our collective grief and process our own feelings. 

And when we consciously journey below our instinctive reaction to find what is truly underneath, we grow up, from the toddler that lashes out to the adult who gets to choose how they respond. 

Back to my own process. It took me two days of bitterly recounting this experience, lamenting about the unfairness, and muttering fuck you under my breath everytime I thought about it, until I arrived at a new plane. 

I reflected on what people have been told to lead him to believe that black men are more dangerous or there to be objects of our sexual fetishisation, I thought about it within the wider context of power and oppression and how we are all somebody’s victims (and somebody’s perpetrator) in the story of our tragic history. And I thought about this man with his kids, taking his dog for a walk, crying, going to the loo, doing the normal - very human - things that people do. I took them out of “villain” into my mind and into “humans”. 

I was able to fully receive the truth that I had understood cognitively but hadn’t truly felt in my body. That we are all the consequence of our history. 

And when I felt that, in my body, I let it go. Mostly. 

I say mostly, because the truth is if I look deep enough there is still a tiny echo of fuck you. There is still a thread of victimhood asking why the world is so unfair. There is still a deep sadness. Maybe I’ll never fully integrate that residue. But what I can say for sure is that I don’t want anyone else to suffer because I feel bad.  

And all of this gives me so much compassion for the collective. 

I see where I’m at with my humanity. How I hold emotional maturity, empathy and deep forgiveness as my guiding lights and when met with something that hurts my feelings my wounds still get activated and thrash about in a sea of the opposite of these ideals until I find equilibrium within myself. 

What if as a collective we were in this too, midway through this process? 

Whereas in my micro example it took me a couple of days to move through this process, perhaps as a collective it will take us a couple of decades. Perhaps that’s exactly the location we are in right now. We now have some level of permission to feel and speak all the things that have been suppressed for centuries as we emerge from under the boot of oppression. But we don’t yet know how to do that.

We’re still growing up. 

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So why does this all matter for civil discourse? 

Ultimately civil discourse, truly generous and restorative dialogue, is about staying in connection through disagreement and repairing where there is rupture. But staying in connection through disagreement and repairing when there is rupture is actually a pretty refined skill. 

And this is the location where many of us find ourselves. We have woken up to the futility of circular conflict, but we haven’t yet fully grown up by building the emotional and relational skills to do something different. And if we don’t have the actual skills for restorative dialogue, we may no longer be toddlers throwing punches, but we become toddlers dressed in our parents' clothes pretending that we are civil and respectful when inside we are not. 

As I moved through this process, I began reflecting on what capacities were at play in this encounter that allowed us to move from disconnection to connection and rupture to repair in this instance. And I identified the following: 

• The ability to feel my feelings. And importantly to let the different parts of myself have their full experience. And enough regulation to be able to move through these emotions without lashing out at others in order to avoid feeling the icky things. 

• Perspective taking and reframing. To be able to come back into connection with the people who I felt had hurt me, I had to be able to see the world through their eyes, and from their vantage point. And ultimately to acknowledge that if I had had their biology, their upbringing, their experiences, I would be the same. And vice versa for them to be moved to apologise to me, they had to be able to see the world through my eyes and reframe an ostensibly harmless statement into something that had the power to hurt. 

• Compassion for myself and others. Compassion for myself to not berate myself for being overly sensitive and bypass the experience; compassion for the part of me that desires vengeance and wants to dress it up as justice; compassion for the people who said something that hurt me. 

• Accountability and action:  The willingness and the practical action needed to repair. On both of their ends the accountability and integrity to say “I’m sorry, please forgive me” and on my end the generosity to say “I forgive you”.  

• Vulnerability and humility to share it forward. This is actually the step I feel least skilled in and is what I am attempting to do with this piece of writing. To say, this is what happens for me in these instances, it’s not pretty but here it is, maybe you can relate and maybe this helps. Let’s grow together. 

There are probably many more. But this feels like a good start. 

And so when I think back to how we even start civil discourse about some of the most disconnecting topics of our time, I wonder - what would happen if we started at the top, with our feelings. 

As I write this, I find myself smiling about all the gymnastics we do in public discourse to locate these situations in fancy critical frameworks of oppression and liberation - and I wonder, if at least some of this is just a big convoluted way of avoiding us simply saying  “this really hurts my feelings”? 

Discourse has always seemed to me a discipline of the mind. But what if we saw it first and foremost as a discipline of the heart? 

What if we just started here.. 

Our histories are tragic. Our feelings are hurt. Can we talk about it? 

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PS: A special thank you to my friend Katie who helped me with the final edits of this essay. I was due to publish it last week but I became really insecure and worried it would land as petty and overly intense. I wrote to her and said “would you please read this for me and give me your reflections? I'm worried it seems petty and random”. To which she replied “it is neither petty nor random” and offered some beautiful refinements.