America on a Loop
healing lives outside the loop
The question should never be “What do we do?”
Whiteness in America is not standing still.
It is trapped in a loop.
America’s loop can feel like a tight, anxious orbit of fear, control, and performance that never opens into accountability. The loop disguises itself as care, as concern, as action but it never reaches the streets where extracting harm and victory are co-existing.
It never asks who has been sacrificed to keep comfort intact.
This is not a failure of imagination. It is a learned condition. And breaking it requires leaving the loop entirely.
We have been inside the closed loops of terror before although America’s current horrific loop of domestic hate and terrorism isn’t surprising. Still there can be moments of shock as living inside a regime of extreme evil isn’t normal.
Again and again, the ill-fated powers of faux supremacy raise their nimble, butt-hurt heads. They are able to do this because whiteness has never troubled itself to remedy its own problems.
What we are witnessing in white spaces is the predictable common circling- low frequency energy, riffing in place. It looks like movement, but it isn’t. The loop never turns into a circle. It never opens.
There is no release of energy forward, no spill into the long-haul streets of abolishing empire and remaking of new worlds.
What’s Already in the Streets
As a reminder, here is what has already been thrown into the streets under America’s current administration:
Over 300,000 Black women who have lost their jobs
When Black women lose economic power, they don’t just lose a job
They lose quality of life
Access to affordable and quality healthcare
Long-term retirement security
Childcare
Mental health stability
Their families including extended families suffer.
And they do not regain employment as quickly, nor at the same income level, even though Black women are more educated, more qualified, and have worked harder.
This reality may upset those on the loop especially the liberal loop who wonder why Black women aren’t showing up in ways they want them too-which you don’t get a say.
Black women have been in the streets. Black women are on the ground. Black women have regenerated this earth and reimagined worlds and continue to do so.
Education, Health, and Survival in the Streets
Education has plummeted. Yet gains are still being made and celebrated.
Public education is underfunded. Libraries are banning multicultural and diverse books. Black and brown children are in these streets. Black and brown books are in these streets.
In these streets:
Pregnant Black women who are more likely to die in childbirth
Black and brown elders cut off from food programs, healthcare, assisted living
Grief and loneliness
Homelessness
Housing crises
Renters displaced from neighborhoods they once cared for
Cold streets.
Dark streets.
Lonely streets.
How the Loop Works
The loop demands one-sided thinking. Erasure of creativity subtly emerges.
If one thing is happening, it insists that only that thing matters. The loop removes the mirror and forces attention outward never inward.
The loop replaces reflection with repetition.
To close the loop, to widen the circle, to create an opening,
we must escape all-or-nothing, one-and-done thinking.
Proximity Is Responsibility
Whoever or whatever is in proximity to you becomes a potential responsibility to consider.
Alongside the distant streets are the exterior streets and the ones in front:
Your block
Your building
Your neighbors
Your community
Your values
Who is in your streets right now that requires:
Funding
Attention
Intentional care
“Take it to the streets” is not metaphorical.
Maybe your streets are closer when the gaze turns away from the loop ramp.
We are all our neighbors’ keepers.
Social media is not the Streets (only)
We don’t close the loop by posting and reposting only.
The loop is:
Endless updates
Hot takes
White celebrity allies
Books that never leave the shelf
Performative outrage
People read, repost, donate elsewhere, feel momentarily relieved and return to the loop.
Not the streets in front of them. Not where organizers are pointing towards.
Not the structural streets where racism persists.
Loops are:
Directionless
Repetitive
Disembodied
Excuses
Disorienting
Delusional
Loops are tools of whiteness.
They hurt everyone.
They are psychic conditions.
Mental warfare.
Spiritual captivity.
Looping is not new
We saw this loop after George Floyd.
People:
Wrote books
Gave money for awhile
Lightly protested
Returned to comfort
Ten percent here.
Twenty percent there.
Thirty percent somewhere else.
Fundraisers everywhere while the streets at home went unseen after the performative energy created new loops of self-effort and abandonment. Short-term commitment to a cause is a byproduct of whiteness and a dangerous loop that keeps many stuck.
Same loop.
White supremacy is a condition created by stealing land, harming/murdering people, and culture then wandering the earth pretending to be righteous and ultimately not knowing what to do with the guilt and shame.
A loop of the worst kind.
The answers have always been in the streets on the grounds where the people reside and the corners where culture makes it home in safety and truth.
Healing Lives Outside the Loop
There is no privileged antidote.
No single solution.
Liberation requires multiple, tactile efforts reaching near and far.
This expands capacity.
It builds growth.
It supports neuroplasticity.
The loop survives on idleness masquerading as movement.
Freedom from the Loop
Listening to, witnessing, buying, and studying the work of Black women is important to understanding the need to be free from the loop.
Not because Black women are perfect and superior but because their work is not driven by this deadly, mind-numbing repetition.
Perfection itself is a tool of whiteness.
And perfection is the loop.
Faith, Risk, and Leaving the Loop
Spirituality does not live in the loop.
Faith is bigger than any loop.
The loop is smaller than a mustard seed therefore the soil of hope experiences stunted growth when expected to flourish and reproduce.
Whiteness and the loop thrive on learned helplessness, security obsession, and fear of mistakes.
People off the loop:
Hold multiple truths
Risk discomfort
Act without guarantees/are flexible
Serve with others on the ground and in kinship with others
They are not know-it-alls.
They are not waiting to be right.
They are reaching for people without jobs.
Praying at local shelters and online.
Building where they stand.
Getting off the Loop
Loops are addictive.
Compulsive.
Mental bondage.
Like addiction, they require:
Acknowledgment
Consciousness-raising
Community
Accountability
Intervention from outside the self
Books, art, writing, and thought leadership are resources not the source.
Healing lives outside the loop.
Liberation lives in the streets.
When you can’t visit the ground and participate in direct action take it to your streets while reaching beyond perceived barriers.
The gate is open.
The door is waiting.
The way is in front of you.
The streets in your purview and the people on the ground, the people placed in your path, both need your money, your support, your prayers, your service, your connections, your volunteering, and your intention in what ways you can honestly commit.
Executing requires the ability to activate both/and far and near, local and global, now and later sustainable and sustaining action.
Abide with the people, with your people.
Together we heal. Together we are safe. Together we win.
We must care for one another now and when things settle.
Love is On the Other Side of the Loop
Whiteness fails in fragility and fails inside of empire; shout with the ones that are raising consciousness not at the empire that can’t hear because their listening roots are dead.
Tend to the roots that nourish a new day. Re-learn the rules of how to fight and battle off the loop of distraction and disconnection outside of the white liberal playbook.
Fake outrage is a sickness; walking alongside others who are enrage is the path towards collective well-being; the valley of rage is where we find ways to heal and win.
The loop is not confusion it is captivity. And captivity cannot be reasoned with from the inside. Faith demands movement, not certainty, and responsibility begins at the edge of proximity. Leave the loop and move in love.
The streets will teach you the rest; build with comrades already putting the work down. Follow the fellowship!
There is nothing left to figure out. Step out or keep circling.
Urgency vs Urgent Culture: Mutual aid and community care support short-term and long-term needs for ALL. Urgency culture may treat care as competition and brokenness of a people rather than a malady of systemic fracture and institutional harms.
The Ground has answers see below link with comments from local organizers-
Comment-Please share encouragement for others. What are some practical ways you/we can resist the loops that attempt to keep us away from the path ahead?
RESIST THE LOOP…
Thank you Salaam reading and rereading this. I really appreciate the depth and repetition and completely hear to see and hear this in many ways