A few months ago I was part of an online program run by someone else and I was asked to participate as a facilitator in the program. What the program was about specifically isn't that important for this story, but the important thing was that I was invited specifically to provide my views and offerings.
(By the way, the word for story and history is the same in French. Also, "more" and "most" is also the same in French. I have difficulty with that. I just wanted to quickly share that)
There was a post written by an African-American person about their anger towards racism and specifically racism propagated by white Americans. Now, do I really have any expert knowledge in this very specific domain of African-American racism in America? Definitely not. But I am deeply passionate about discussing anger because anger is such a prominent cause of suffering.
I provided my feedback and I was asked to apologize for creating an unsafe place for the participant. Since I had already made my point and it was up to them to take my feedback or not, I apologized for the unintentional propagation / coercion of racism through my feedback. The thing is, since this space wasn't really mine and therefore the audience wasn't necessarily familiar with how I approach the topic of anger and suffering in general, I wanted to refrain from elaborating further.
Now that some time had passed and I am writing to you, a person who subscribed for my writings, I wanted to elaborate further on what it means to let go of anger from a past wound.
Before I get to that, something important to discuss is the matter of safety. I run a discord server, and lately it's been attracting some spammers. Having lots of spammers on my server is undesirable for me because it can promote ideas and actions I don't want to promote on my space. But it doesn't mean that what the spammers are spamming are illegitimate. They have their voice, they have their right to free speech, and they can say whatever they want. It's just that the space is somewhere I manage and I have standards for what is OK or not OK in my space.
But what if you're following all of my guidelines and you find someone who makes you feel threatened or unsafe in my space? And while they're making you feel unsafe, what if they're technically following all of my guidelines? How do you proceed in this case?
The standards I use for all of my practices are simple as they follow the code of the Buddha. 1, don't physically harm another. 2, don't verbally harass another. 3, don't take from another what wasn't given to you. 4, don't sexually harass another. 5, don't engage in getting under the influence.
Verbal harassment seems like it's in a gray area because I have no idea what can be triggering to you, even if I say it with the best intentions. Or I can jokingly curse with another person and they might not take offense in it at all. What matters here is the intent. If I know something is triggering to another person and I intentionally raise it up for the purpose of triggering them, then I am harassing another with words.
With all of this said, here is what I really want to say about feeling anger towards a group of people who historically harm your people. While this discussion was initially motivated by black-white racism in America, there are so many applications of this particular anger. For me there is the Korea-Japan anger because Japan colonized Korea. Same applies for female-male relationships, Senegal-France, inter-caste relationships, Jewish-antisemitism, and the list goes on and on.
Oneness, Difference
Something we have to understand is we exist in a layered relationship with the world and its participants. I specifically want to call out two layers: oneness and difference. When we look at another, there is something we can find in common between us and them. At the same time, with the same person we can find different. Unfortunately the problem is that the human mind loves to generalize and only consider one layer at a time.
For example, when Korea is colonized by Japan it seems that all Japanese people are absolutely horrible and all Korean people are victims. But prior to the Japanese rule all the criminals and worst people in Korean history were all Koreans. But at the same time there are Japanese people who fought tooth and nail for Korean liberation, like Fuse Tatsuji and Kaneko Fumiko.
When we get angry at another person it's often times tied to our insistence upon one layer and not the other. For example when I'm angry at a pro-Japanese Korean, I'm forgetting that as Koreans we are allowed to have different opinions about something. My wife and I are both Koreans and we like different parts of kimchi, and we don't fight over it; so I don't need to necessarily be at another Korean for having a different opinion. But I'm too consumed by my unity view to see that difference.
On the other hand if I'm angry at a Japanese person I've met for the first time simply because they're Japanese, I'm making the opposite error of generalizing into a difference. I'm too consumed by the fact that we have different nationalities, I'm not giving them a chance to see that we can be united on a topic of shared interest.
Cycle of Karma
Going back into historical conflicts between groups of people, when we continue the legacy of our divide and conflict the best we can do is teeter totter between the power dynamic. Japan as a nation colonized Korea, but as a result of that Koreans generally have a great victim mentality against Japan. So what happens when Japanese immigrants come to Korea? They get systemically and socially abused, as Koreans rationalize this as rightful justice. And this leads the Japanese immigrants and their descendants to form the opposite reaction, thus continues the cycle of hatred.
The common reaction to this is, "does this mean we have to forget about everything? How is that fair?". But that is a black-or-white idea that doesn't recognize the possibility of accounting for the past while looking forward to the future. When we look at the EU, its beginning is a community between France and Germany after WW2. But just because France and Germany made up didn't mean that the reparation causes from the Yalta Conference were void. We can keep fair justice hand in hand with cooperative progress.
Why Moving On Is Hard
The tricky thing with this is, the more time goes by the grayer "fairness" becomes. A great example of this is the Hawaiian Kanaka home ownership program (DHHL / AHO). This program gives native Hawaiians benefits in buying their first home, given that they can prove their Hawaiian heritage. The thing is, this program started in the 20's and the progress of distributing homes have been slow because much of the real estate meant for family homes kept on being used as commercial space, particularly for airports. Now more and more time passes and with time the genetic pool of native Hawaiians dilutes, especially given Hawaii's large proportion of immigrants from Asia. So the natives find themselves in a situation where their grandparents were eligible but they passed before they could get the benefits, but they themselves can't get the benefits because they are not directly Hawaiian.
This doesn't mean we need to drop all historical contexts and force ourselves to shake hands. What we have to realize is, what makes future union so complicated and difficult is our insistence on the past. To compound this the human psychology has this feature called defense mechanism, so if I've been victimized before once I'm especially sensitive to future instances of the same victimization. This makes me hyper-sensitive to any potential threat that resembles the damage I've received in the past.
Defense mechanism turns into victim mentality and victim mentality is extremely difficult to overcome, especially when it's imprinted at the unconscious level through a group mentality. Trying to overcome a historic victim mentality feels like betraying your grandparents in their face, something like me telling my grandma that I actually love Japan when she grew up facing numerous hardships as a Korean under Japanese rule.
The point I'm trying to make is, we have all the reasons to continue thinking the way we do against other groups of people. I'm speaking primarily about Korea-Japan because it's the one I'm most qualified to talk about. But continuing doesn't advance us into the future because of another particular quirk of the human mind: the oppressor doesn't actually think that they oppressed another.
Koreans generally think they are victims of racism in America and there are good reasons to believe so. But what they're mostly blind to is how racist they are against other people of color. Why? Because Koreans grew up with a homogenous identity founded upon centuries of foreign oppression, and the most readily available coping mechanism was believing in the Korean power to overcome their struggles. So when they meet people from countries poorer than Korea they repeat the same pattern they learned from their oppressors; they look down on them and extract from them.
In another context, when a male gets a job that pays higher than a female for the same work, the male typically thinks that they got a job without thinking about their gender. But when a female points this out, the male feels called out and threatened because in their mind they did nothing wrong to any female. This is unfortunately how oppression works in general: as a side effect.
When we continue to hold on to the past and try to make it as fair as possible, the oppressor will likely never agree to the extent of the fairness offered by the victim because they don't feel like they did something that wrong while the victim will likely never be satisfied with what the oppressor offers because the victim wants "interest" for the suffering accrued over time.
Again, this doesn't mean we shouldn't try. But we need to understand that insistence on the past will likely lead to no fruitful result. Then what's on the other side, if we move on from the past? What happens when we radically move forward?
How To Move On
It is possible to move forward in a cutting way, as in we don't ever interact with the oppressor after reparations are done. You go your way, and I go my way. While this is certainly an option, this is limiting to the grand truth of life and reality in general: we are all inter-connected beings who constantly affect each other.
For example, there was a big controversy in east Asia when Japan said they would discharge radioactive water from the earthquakes into the Pacific Ocean. If we are truly disconnected from each other, Japan is free to do whatever they want; but what Japan does to the Pacific Ocean inevitably affects surrounding nations and eventually the world.
How do we work with the reality of inter-connectedness in facing the future? We have to realize that in the end when we collaborate and work together we can achieve so much more than what we would achieve separately. There is a great amount of good and benefit to be had from cooperation, if we can be in it together.
We see proof of this all the time in the real world, especially in the scholarly researches across universities of the world. In general countries that are open to the world tend to have universities with the most influential research. We don't even have to look that far; the vaccine for Covid was developed through great inter-disciplinary, international collaboration.
When we just see the limitations of our insistence on the past and the benefits of our collaboration in the future, we can see that there's a pretty clear path forward. But again, our human tendencies make this clear path extremely difficult to take.
Your Role
At the same time, it's not your responsibility to take care of the world. You just have to live a happy life for yourself. And that's ultimately where all of this world-affecting changes start: from one individual. When you insist upon the anger you have, and I must reiterate: the rightful, just anger you have, you can see that you have a clear, 100%, absolutely valid reason for it.
However, can you see the limitations of what that anger can ultimately provide you with? The anger I used to hold against individual Japanese people were misplaced, because they were not the ones who colonized Korea. And there was no way I could get the entire nation of Japan to apologize in the way that I wanted. My happiness became dependent on other people, namely the Japanese people.
I don't want to suffer. I want to be happy by myself, without any contingency on others. When I open my eyes to my insistence and let myself be touched by Japanese people, will there be times I affirm my previous belief? Yes, of course there will be because the world doesn't owe me a fairy tale ending for any reason. I can open my heart to a Japanese person and they can end up doing something horrible to me, for sure. But at that cost I open myself up to the infinite possibility of what else can happen.
And in that what else there is a particular thing I want to highlight. Through my coaching practice something I've observed in general is, what the wounded child wants the most from the abusive parent is their unconditional love. Ironically, what the abusive parent also wants the most is unconditional love. We all tend to project our lack onto others.
There is a great miracle (for the lack of a better word) in loving your "enemy". In fact, doesn't the bible advocate for this over and over? Korea has a group of "comfort women" who were enslaved by the Japanese army for sexual purposes, and while they still demand apologies and repentance from the Japanese people they still donated and supported Japan when they experienced the 2011 earthquakes.
Even recently the antisemitic terrorist Bondi beach shooting was deterred by Ahmed al-Ahmed, an unarmed Muslim. These extreme acts of love that reach across the polarity has a great healing quality that causes a big shift in how we think about another. In that vein, there is a great learning for white people when black people love white people even with all of American history and vice versa.
I could write the above sentence as, "when black people forgive white people". But forgiveness still implies the act was bad, which leaves hints of future instances of defense mechanisms and victim mentalities. I'm a bit extreme like that; I don't want conditional happiness that is contingent upon something. I don't want to forgive other people because that means I experienced something bad. I want to be the person who has had nothing bad happen to them. At the same time I want to be the person who apologies to others because nobody is forced to share my belief system.
Again, just because we think like this doesn't mean we instantly forget what happened so that we can repeat history. What I am saying is, we can learn from our past together even if we leave our feelings out of it.
That's it. This is everything I really wanted to say at that time. Of course, I am not imploring upon you to do anything or change your mind in a certain way. But when you're not angry, who benefits from it the most? Is it me, or is it you? It is YOU who benefits because YOU are the one who relieves yourself from anger. And more than anything, I want you to be happy because I love you.
Billy Seol
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July Life Coach
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