Morally Injured, as Charged.
There is a reason why so many whites react with anger and denial toward Black Lives Matter: it is because of “moral injury.” Moral injury refers an individual’s moral conscience when an act he or she has done or witnessed transgresses his or her deepest values. Military Veterans often suffer from moral injury, but, in truth, it is common to all of us.
For every trauma committed there is a moral injury that lingers, too. Just as trauma is carried over from one generation to the next, so is moral injury. Over time, trauma will engender a collective sense of victimhood, and likewise, moral injury will engender a collective sense of guilt. Will? – it has!
Guilt and victimhood are labels that no one wants. No black person likes to think that he (or she) cannot pull himself up with his own bootstraps – even when he has no boots! And no white person likes the guilty feeling that he or she is responsible for collective black trauma – especially when they have never personally harmed a black person.
Privilege is a fellow traveler with moral injury. One soldier goes home from the war having murdered a defenseless family – in a single moment of anger and frustration he has bought himself a rueful life with his own moral injury. But there was another soldier there beside him; his loaded gun gave him the privilege of doing nothing, with no consequences, but he too suffers from the same lingering, tormenting sense of moral transgression. Privilege endures through generations, even when the moral injury of its origins have been obscured by time.
The response to moral injury is the same as the response to trauma – all too often we develop unhealthy behaviors, such as addiction, anger, and denial, which help us to avoid the pain. Avoidant behaviors, even in subsequent, “innocent” generations, prevent us from doing what is right. Instead, anger and denial enable us to substitute cold words for compassionate values. Yet our consciences will always remind us that we have hardened our hearts.
If we can truly listen to our self-talk, to the negative things we tell ourselves because of all the trauma and moral injury we have experienced, then we can honestly move forward to practice the values we cherish – to mend our great nation. We need to participate in some difficult conversations, to bravely share our stories, and to validate the stories of others. I hear black people, who have legitimate anger, speaking of love and forgiveness. I hear white people, who sense the illegitimacy of their privilege, asking for love and forgiveness. The healing has begun.
The racial problem must be solved quickly because there is a much larger problem to be addressed. Our need to escape the pain of moral injury and trauma has turned us all into addicts, and the human landscape is built to feed our addictions, our denial, and our anger. Like all addicts, super-consumers selfishly destroy all that is good around us: our families, our friends, our communities… But the much larger problem is not to be found in the human landscape. The much larger problem is the speed with which we are destroying our planet. Ecosystems cannot respond quickly enough, and all the innocent plants and creatures are dying because of us.
Talk about moral injury…