These are my notes and quotes from Part III of Healing Resistance by Kazu Haga. I wrote my key takeaways from the book for the subscribers of my Future of Conflict series.

Part III

From Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail

The Six Steps of Nonviolence

Information Gathering

Education

Personal Commitment

Negotiation

Direct Action

Reconciliation

The six steps are not necessarily in order, but more like “six streams” that flow together. Of the 6, Direct Action is the only one that is unnecessary. Reconciliation is the mandatory end of the process.

Information Gathering

The role that privileged and marginalized groups play in information gathering in conflict:

Years before I committed myself to the practice of nonviolence, I got into an altercation with a neighbor. I got home after a long day, exhausted and a little tense. While I was in the shower, this neighbor knocked on the back door to our apartment, upset that I had taken his parking spot, even though our building did not have assigned parking spots. When I came out of the bathroom, my roommates told me that he had come down and asked, “Where is that Asian guy?”

I flipped. I stormed upstairs, started banging on his door, and immediately got in his face. “What does it have to do with me being Asian,” I yelled as I shoved him against his counter. I used to think about that incident a lot and ask myself why I got so upset. After all, I am an Asian guy…. So why did that piss me off so much?

I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I’ve been “that Asian guy” ever since I moved to the United States. A lifetime of being exoticized, tokenized, other-ized, teased for the shape of my eyes, my funny name, and the weird bento boxes that my mom would pack for my lunch made me sensitive to being seen not as Kazu, but as “that Asian guy.”

There can be a level of privilege in being able to see things—particularly incidents tinged with some form of oppression—objectively. For those whose communities have historically been marginalized, we are swimming in injustice, violence, and oppression. It is easy to become sensitive and harder to view things objectively. When I say “sensitive,” I don’t mean that in a judgmental way.³ The Oxford dictionary defines sensitive as, “quick to detect or respond to slight changes, signals, or influences.”

Oppression is traumatic, and hypervigilance and hyper-attentiveness are common manifestations of trauma. When we are used to fighting off threats and attacks on a daily basis, we are constantly looking for the next attack, and being sensitive is an effective and important survival mechanism. At the same time, constantly looking for the next sign of danger only perpetuates trauma and does not help us heal.

When your identity is not part of US society’s dominant group (white, heterosexual, cisgender, male-bodied, middle-class Protestant-Christian), and someone from the default/dominant group calls you out by your marginalized identity, it can feel like you are being put in a box, specifically a lesser-than box. You cease to be an individual and feel reduced to the sum of all of the negative stereotypes of your marginalized group. Over time, that can make you sensitive.

Looking back on that incident, I am sure my neighbor did not mean any ill will. For him, “Asian” was probably nothing more than just a physical descriptor (he did not know my name). With the benefit of hindsight, I am able to see now that he was not intentionally being racist.

The mind is a funny thing. If you’re constantly looking for something, you may begin to see things that aren’t there. If our expectation is that the next harm or potential for harm is around every corner, we become more and more hyper-vigilant, which only serves to reinforce trauma. It does not help us heal.

A lot of today’s social justice circles seem to have established a culture where we earn points for calling out injustice. If we see an instance of injustice and call it out, we earn credit because of how “woke” we are. And in our deeply embedded capitalist mentality, we can get addicted to that currency and begin to look for it everywhere. Calling out injustice is important, but seeing it in places where it is not or exaggerating it is harmful. Oppression and violence are so prevalent in our society that it’s easy to see them everywhere, but reality is hard enough without us adding extra injustice to it.

SUBJECTIVE REALITY

Of course, the burden of this work can’t fall entirely on marginalized communities. Oppression and marginalization are traumatic; trauma causes hypervigilance; and hypervigilance may lead to seeing things that aren’t there. Even when a marginalized person is experiencing injustice where there is none, there is also a role for those in privileged positions to understand and empathize with that person’s subjective experience. Accusing marginalized people of being “too sensitive” can be incredibly harmful.

As important as it is for us to learn to see things objectively, we can’t negate people’s subjective experience as “not real.” It is a real, lived experience that needs to be honored. Our attempts to understand conflict needs to happen with a dialectic lens, meaning we try to see the objective truth as well as honor subjective experiences.⁴

During that argument with my neighbor, he accused me of playing “the race card.” He accused me of being too sensitive and seeing racism where it wasn’t. And you know what? He was probably right. In retrospect, I can see that I was being too sensitive. But that was the reality of my experience. In that moment, I may have seen something that was not there, but twenty years of mounting traumas around racism were adding up, and that day it was just too much. That was my reality, and it is an important part of the story.

As people of color in the United States, we have never had the option of “playing” this “game” called “race.” It has been shoved down our throats from day one. So every once in a while, we may cough up a card and it may land on a white person’s face, but it’s only because we were trying not to choke on white supremacy. We don’t mean for the card to land on your face. We’re just trying to breathe.

How many times have we heard a man accuse women of “being too sensitive” or “acting crazy” when they call out sexism? How many times have I done that? Too many to count. Maybe some of those times I was right, but that’s not the point. If all I can see is, “That person is just overreacting,” then I’m not honoring their experience, and therefore I am not seeing the entire conflict.

Being a cisgender male means that I am less sensitive to sexism and patriarchy, which means I may miss a nuanced experience and not see injustice that is there. I may get defensive and stop gathering information too quickly. In doing so, I am failing again to see the complete picture.

As members of marginalized communities, our work is to heal from our traumas so we’re not seeing violence where it doesn’t exist and perpetuating our traumas in unnecessary ways. As members of privileged communities, our work is to understand that our position may not allow us to see the full picture, have compassion for why people may be too sensitive, and allow space for that pain and anger. This is part of the information we all need to gather about any conflict.

Similar to many of the books on negotiation we’ve covered, empathy is a key aspect of information gathering:

Empathy is not just about being nice; it’s also about being strategic. It’s about understanding the perspectives of each party in the conflict, the history of the conflict, and gathering as much information as we need to understand the full picture.

Information-gathering might take a lot of time.

Ivan Marovic, one of the cofounders of Otpor, the nonviolent student-led revolution that brought down the dictator Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia … told me that the leaders of Otpor planned, researched, strategized, and trained for a full year before launching. A full year!

There are similar stories throughout history.

If you’ve seen images of children being attacked with fire hoses in the American South, that was during the Birmingham campaign, one of the Civil Rights movement’s most successful campaigns. The leaders of that campaign planned for a full six months before jumping in with full force.

The seventy-eight leaders of Gandhi’s army lived in an ashram together to do the work of strategizing and spiritual preparation for 15 years before embarking on the salt march.

Rev. Lawson once said that, “The difficulty with nonviolent people and efforts is that they don’t recognize the necessity for fierce discipline and training and strategizing and planning and recruiting and doing the kinds of things you do to have a movement. That can’t happen spontaneously. It has to be done systematically.”

Information is often be the limiting factor:

Our responses to conflict—personal or global—will only be as effective as the quality of our information and the care we take in developing the right strategies. What kind of transformation could we bring about if invested in this step as much as the military invests in preparing for war?

The measure of success is always reconciliation. You might “win” your cause without reconciliation, but then it ceases to be nonviolence:

In nonviolence, all strategies and tactics should be evaluated on whether or not we are getting closer or further away from [reconciliation].

Educating

In building a nonviolent movement, the larger community (including your “opponents”) must be educated. The best-practice for this education is the same in sales, mediation, and nonviolence struggle: to understand what is important to people and base your messaging around that.

Education is about connecting with people on their terms, empowering them with new information, and building a base. We cannot win people over without considering what matters to them. In order to put information into the right formation, we need to understand both the raw data about the issue as well as the people we’re trying to educate.

There are three kinds of knowledge. We want people involved in nonviolence to have the third kind — the felt-sense of the knowledge. This is because we will be asking them to do difficult things, and the other kinds of knowledge may evaporate in those moments.

In Buddhism, the Pali word panna refers to wisdom. Early Buddhist texts refer to three different types of panna: suta-maya panna, cinta-maya panna, and bhavana-maya panna.

Suta-maya panna refers to knowledge gained from an external source—understanding something new by listening to someone explaining a new concept or reading about something in a book. I first learned about prison abolition this way. I read articles about it and watched lectures by people like Angela Davis.

Cinta-maya panna refers to knowledge gained through one’s own thinking. It’s about using your own intellect and logic to analyze and make sense of things. After hearing about the concept of prison abolition, I thought about it for myself and became critical of our current criminal justice system. I came to understand why, logically, our current system is inhumane and ineffective.

Bhavana-maya panna is wisdom gained through lived experience. In Buddhist practice, this refers to an embodied understanding on the true nature of reality, an insight gained through meditation practice. But you can gain such insights outside the monastery, in the experience of everyday life. It was by sitting in restorative justice circles in prison that I lived into what prison abolition could actually be.

(This is also what Jamal Rahman calls “Knowledge of the Heart” as opposed to “Knowledge of the Tongue”)

Unlike arguments and debates where the goal is to “win over”, education is not about judgment, shame, or winning.

In a nonviolent conflict, we remind ourselves that people are never the enemy. We are never trying to defeat others by shaming them into submission. Our efforts to educate aren’t about proving anyone wrong but about helping each other get closer to fulfilling our potential as compassionate human beings.

Personal Commitment

Personal commitment is a translation of Gandhi’s idea of self-purification. The idea is to have your mind and heart focused on the ultimate goal (agape and reconciliation) so all the micro- ways of interacting are aligned with nonviolence as opposed to judgment, spite, or separation.

One way I think about it is we can only share the healing that we have experienced with our conflict partners. We are limited by our own understanding.

Kazu talks about the role of singing in the Southern Freedom Struggle to bolster this sense of commitment and purification:

Take freedom songs. During the Civil Rights movement, people did not sing freedom songs to kill time. It was not a hobby. It was not karaoke night. Singing was a core part of the strategy to keep people unified and their spirits uplifted to help them maintain their commitment to the cause.

During the hardest moments of the movement, people would sing. They sang in churches, they sang while facing fire hoses, and they sang in jail. They used songs as training before the march, as weapons during the demonstrations, and as medicine when they were locked up.

Freedom songs kept people committed. I have heard many elders tell stories about how they would not have made it through the movement if not for those songs. Singing kept them alive.

And inspiring example from the Montgomery Bus Boycott:

The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. For over a year, the Black community of Montgomery walked, carpooled, went way out of their way, and made sacrifices to protest segregation on the city buses. What was meant to be a one-day boycott turned into a commitment and a lifestyle that lasted more than a year.

A famous story emerged from that campaign about Mother Pollard, a seventy-two-year-old community leader and advisor to Dr. King. Despite her age, Mother Pollard joined the boycotts from the beginning. She refused to ride the bus and walked wherever she needed to go.

When members of her community offered her rides, she replied, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” Mother Pollard’s commitment went beyond a campaign or a protest. She was committed to her own dignity and to the liberation of her people. Nonviolence had become a way of life.

This is the type of personal commitment required to create transformative change.

Negotiation

The point of the struggle is to change the policies and structures in a relationship. Negotiation is a critical part and must find (or create) “win-win” solutions that meet everybody’s interests.

In the Nashville sit-ins, the white business owners didn’t have a vested interest in solving the conflict (it wasn’t their problem!) until the Freedom Struggle made it their problem through direct action.

This allowed everyone they had something at stake, and created something to negotiate about.

This is a little different than typical “finding a win-win” negotiation.

Here’s another example of understanding interests and finding a “win-win” from the Nashville action:

After months of hard-fought demonstrations during the Nashville Sit-ins, white business owners agreed to desegregate the lunch counters in Nashville. In response, Dr. LaFayette and the other movement leaders made a decision that surprised everyone.

They decided not to make a public announcement. No parade, no press conference, no major public celebrations. They simply and quietly stopped the sit-ins and the boycotts.

Why, you ask? The movement leaders decided that any sort of public celebration could have been a further embarrassment for the white business leaders. While the movement won the immediate victory of integrating lunch counters, the leaders were committed to a longer-term vision of reconciliation and Beloved Community.

Winning the campaign but rubbing the victory in the faces of their opponents would perpetuate the us vs. them worldview and further the divide, taking one step forward and two steps back.

The Kingian Nonviolence attitude to negotiation requires a power balance. The role of direct action is to create that power balance if it doesn’t exist:

The third key aspect of a nonviolent negotiation is that we believe only equals can negotiate.

If one side of the table has more power, then we can have a conversation with them—if they allow it. We can share all of our concerns and hopes for a particular outcome, but they can simply say, “We’ve heard you and we’re just going to do things our way.” That’s not a genuine negotiation.

Inequitable power dynamics are one of the biggest factors that prevent real change. What motivation does a corporate executive have to listen to the concerns of low-income workers or share power with them at the negotiating table when they have millions of dollars in profits at stake?

Just because one side is ready to have a genuine dialogue does not mean the other side will come to the table in good faith.

Sometimes, willingness to enter a dialogue is not enough.

Sometimes, we need to create the power equity necessary for a genuine negotiation on equal terms.

Sometimes, talking is not enough.

Sometimes, we need action.

Direct Action

It’s the only step that you can skip:

One of the most important lessons I eventually learned about direct action is that it is never a goal in and of itself.

It is a tool that you use to get a goal accomplished.

During the Occupy Wall Street movement, I was invited to Occupy Seattle to offer a workshop as well as to facilitate a dialogue between advocates of nonviolence and advocates of “diversity of tactics.”

The dialogue was getting pretty heated at one point, with each side making their argument about what they thought would be more effective for their movement. It was at that point that someone yelled out, “We’re all right. But what are we trying to do?”

The debate between nonviolence and violence (or diversity of tactics in this case) is ancient.

But oftentimes, that debate is held outside of the context of a stated goal.

Without clarity and agreement on what the goal is that you are seeking, having debates about what tactics or strategies will be most effective is putting the cart in front of the horse.

Without understanding the goal, it’s impossible to figure out what strategies will be best in getting you there.

Kazu on Dr. King’s two reasons for using direct action:

The first is to “dramatize” an issue, to educate the public about an injustice that may not be widely known. As long as the public remains ignorant of an injustice, it is impossible to have a conversation about it.

The second reason to use direct action is to give ourselves leverage in the negotiation. In the previous chapter, we discussed how in a nonviolent negotiation, only equals can negotiate. As long as there are unequal power dynamics at the table, we can never have a real, genuine negotiation. Direct action can be used to create leverage—to balance the power dynamics so we can negotiate on equal terms. If a government official or corporate leader refuses to engage in negotiations in good faith, then one thousand people sitting outside of their office may change their mind.

When Dr. King was criticized by the clergymen in Birmingham for using direct action, he responded, “You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”

Kazu’s critique of communities which use nonviolence internally but not for larger social issues:

Some communities consider themselves to be nonviolent because they love and forgive people, practice nonviolent communication, choose not to eat meat, practice yoga, and meditate every day. Those are all important aspects of a peaceful lifestyle, but privilege often allows certain communities to stick with interpersonal practices of nonviolence and avoid the risky and scary aspects of nonviolent direct action. Some people have never had to resist anything.

Some communities, on the other hand, have never had the privilege not to resist. As Chris often reminds workshop participants, when empire isn’t knocking down your door every day, it’s easy to stay within the realms of personal transformation and nonconfrontational forms of community building and not risk engaging in acts of political resistance.

We need to acknowledge that the conflicts in our society are at such a heightened, overt level that our nonviolent responses have to match their intensity. We must stop the immediate harm so that we can create space to work on reconciliation. This requires resistance.

Dr. King on the utility of nonviolence:

I’m concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice. I’m concerned about brotherhood. I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.

Dr. King on the necessity of power and love:

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

It’s easy to forget that direct action is about togetherness and reconciliation. So that aspect has to be constantly highlighted.

In 2017 I had the privilege to travel to Standing Rock as part of a delegation from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship to stand in solidarity with the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people who were fighting for their sovereignty and protesting the planned construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through their lands.

The elders there taught us something that I will never forget.

As groups headed out of the camp to go to a direct action, they would remind us that we were not simply going to a protest but to a ceremony. They encouraged us to conduct ourselves as if we were going to a sacred ritual.

The purpose of direct action is often to disturb and disrupt complacency and negative peace, which can be done in ways that are constructive, that honor relationships and the dignity of all people.

Direct actions may surface conflict, they may be uncomfortable, and they may temporarily hurt relationships, but we can still resist in a way that ultimately brings us closer to healing.

Reconciliation

The Kingian Nonviolence training manual states that reconciliation is the “mandatory closing step” in a campaign or conflict. Key word: Mandatory. It is largely a commitment to this step that separates a principled approach to nonviolence from violent approaches to conflict or from a purely tactical and strategic commitment to “non- violence.” In Kingian Nonviolence, a conflict is not over until there has been reconciliation.

Forgiveness and accountability don’t need the other party to be present. It’s work we can do alone. The same is not true on a societal level.

Whether we’re the one harmed or the one who caused harm, our own healing is never dependent on anyone else. That said, the healing of our society does depend on our ability to reconcile conflicts together. We heal society not only through individual resilience, but by healing our relationships to each other. Because we are harmed in relationship, we need to heal in relationship.

An example of true reconciliation with Kazu’s friend Chris:

Chris is another one of our incarcerated trainers. Almost twenty years ago, his best friend was murdered days after Chris’s birthday. Chris is currently serving time for a retaliation murder he committed.

In 2013, he was transferred to a new prison where he found out that the man who actually stabbed and killed his best friend was serving time at the same prison, on the same yard. We’ll call that man “Tony.”

“For the first several weeks, I was completely stressed out,” Chris shared. “I wanted to take revenge and felt that if I didn’t do something my peers would look down on me. At the same time, if I did take revenge, I knew it would affect my family because I would probably never go home.”

For the next few years, Chris avoided Tony at all costs. He was filled with anger and hatred, but he knew that if he ever wanted a chance to go home, he had to keep his distance. It was his attempt at keeping the peace. When he started to learn about Kingian Nonviolence, he realized how his anger was affecting him and how avoiding Tony was only creating negative peace. He says that nonviolence “helped me accept my friend’s death and move toward forgiving the person who took his life. I learned about the importance of reconciliation.”

So, what did he do? Something only the courage of nonviolence could drive him to do. He reached out to Tony.

“Now, I’m able to sit and talk to him about our purpose in life—about the type of men we want to be when we go home.” Chris told me this story after a workshop one day. He wanted to tell me because Tony was in the workshop that day. Chris had invited him.

It’s said that you know that true reconciliation has happened when the two sides of a conflict are closer to each other than they were before the conflict started. True reconciliation is about even more than repairing relationships back to its original state. It’s about growth, strengthening relationships, and moving forward stronger than we were before. It’s about moving us all toward Beloved Community.

Afterward

Training and time.

In the same way that violence has been institutionalized, we can institutionalize its antidote—nonviolence. We can build institutions, structures, and policies that are constantly reinforcing a new way of relating to each other. When practices are constantly reinforcing justice, healing, accountability, forgiveness, love, and understanding, we can start changing who we are.

Taking inspiration from Meghalaya:

I once saw a documentary about the people of Meghalaya, a state in northeastern India. One of the rainiest places on earth, the rivers in the forests flood each monsoon season. Hundreds of years ago, the people who live in these forests created an ingenious way to cross these rivers year-round. They wove together the roots of rubber trees when they were still saplings, young enough to be malleable. They would weave them together into living bridges that span from one side of the river to the other. The challenge was that they had to wait for growth to happen. They had to wait for the roots to grow from one side of the riverbank to the other and become strong enough to support the weight of the people crossing them. This could take years, even generations.

In one scene, an old man was teaching his young niece how to tend to these bridges. He explained to her that he may never walk on this bridge, but her children and her children’s children will walk on this bridge, just as he has walked on the bridges built by his ancestors.

This has become a powerful analogy for how I look at the work of social change and the work of building Beloved Community. It is the work of generations, not election cycles, grant periods, or five-year strategic plans.

We don’t need to be weighed down with the expectation of single-handedly changing everything, because we are not alone. We have the wisdom of our ancestors and the lives yet to be lived by our descendants.

Our work is simply to learn from our elders, tend to our portion of the bridge, and pass on the knowledge to the next generation. Our work is to bridge our ancestors with our descendants, meet intergenerational trauma with intergenerational wisdom, and heal the trauma and transform it into the resiliency that we will pass onto our children so that they can cross wider and wider divides.

Maybe we’ll never get there. Maybe we’ll never fully evolve away from violence. But it’s still the direction I want to walk in. And who knows, with the wisdom of our ancestors and the lives yet to be lived by our descendants, maybe someday our children’s children will reach the other side of that river.