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Brokenness and Leadership

Jenifer Wolf-Williams, Ed.D., LPC-S

Yes, this is Genocide

I climbed the levee, walked through a gate flanked by razor wire, and looked around.  A few yards higher, a woman sat alone on a castoff lawn chair, her expression empty as she watched me approach.  I climbed toward her and glanced briefly at the chair beside her.  It had no seat, so she stood and grabbed another from nearby.  They were the only three chairs I had seen in the camp, and her act felt precious.  “Me llamo Jeni,” I told her. 

“Soy Violeta,” she responded. 

Below us, the bright orange arches of the International Bridge pierced the morning sky, palpable through coils of military wire.  Small camping tents, including Violeta’s, covered the levee, while more lined the streets below.  We could just see the tops of the portable toilets, ten of them for this community of about 2,000.  The smoke from Violeta’s campfire blew across our faces, but she didn’t flinch, so neither did I.  It wasn’t long before she said, too matter-of-factly, “I sent my daughter across yesterday.” 

Her daughter is nine years old.  Violeta had stood near the bridge and watched her child leave.  She waited until an officer took custody, and then Violeta walked back to her tent.  Alone.

“I couldn’t let her suffer anymore,” Violeta explained.  “She was raped here.  We were both raped.” 

“Here in the camps?” I asked, and Violeta nodded. 

“Sometimes people disappear from here too.  Adults and children.  I couldn’t let her stay any longer.”  Violeta looked away and tightened her arms across her chest.  “I’m going back to Honduras now,” she added.  “The gangs murdered my parents when I was three, and my grandparents raised me.  Now the same gangs are targeting me.  But I’m going back.  There is nothing else for me to do.”

 

This makeshift “camp” did not exist when I last entered Matamoros this past spring.  It formed by default when the U.S. government implemented the Migrant “Protection” Protocol, better known as “Remain in Mexico.”  Under this policy, even migrants who demonstrate credible fear of death in their home countries are forced to wait months outside our borders to complete our now-impossible asylum process.  They have no access to U.S. attorneys, clean water, adequate food, health care, or toilets.

And, like all asylum seekers, they will never be heard by a member of the U.S. judiciary branch.  U.S. immigration “courts” do not operate within the judicial system, but are governed directly by the U.S. president and his attorney general.  The administration’s Zero Tolerance policies mean zero chance for life. 

Tragically, Violeta is one of countless mothers who make impossible choices between death and death.  Some have sent children as young as three across that bridge, knowing the separation may very well be permanent. 

Early this fall, I visited a different border city with a group of volunteer attorneys.  Two mothers approached our team requesting birth control for their daughters, ages eleven and twelve.  Rape was inevitable, they said, and they wanted to protect their girls as best they could.  The cartels know easy targets when they see them.  And like Violeta, these mothers acknowledged disappearances in the border camps but still found them preferable to the killings back home. 

 

Volunteers can only bring band-aids.  I managed to get a few personal water filters through customs and encourage two young families to accept flu vaccines from an extremely limited supply (twenty vaccines for 2,000 people).  Because I'm a mental health professional, I distributed fliers on stress reduction, read to children, and sat to talk with hurting people.  Local volunteers do a thousand times more, working every day to provide hot meals, more tents, legal information, fresh survival ideas.  But the only real solution for the camps is to end the Migrant “Protection” Protocol (MPP) that brought them into existence. 

Those of us who vote need to understand that MPP is genocide.  The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide lists five deadly acts, any one of which can earn the title "genocide."  They are:

  1. Killing members of the group;
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Migrant “Protection” Protocol carries out genocide in at least three of these forms, and Violeta and her daughter suffered all three.  MPP is a form of genocide, and we as U.S. citizens are the only ones who can stop it.  

 

Of Harm and Hope - A Response to Zero Tolerance

By request, I'm sharing the transcript of a speech I made in front of Dallas City Hall last summer, when the United States government began to openly steal children from their parents.  Many of those families remain apart, and private accounts speak of continued separations.  I find it important to share these words again.  Please note the links to research.  The harm is real.  And so is the hope.  

Jenifer Wolf Williams, Ed.D., LPC-S

 

I’m a trauma therapist with a focus on immigration trauma, and most of the time I work with adults.  But not that day. 

That day, a little girl sat in my counseling office in a chair that was far too big for her, and mostly, she was silent.  Slowly, she answered my questions in whispered monosyllables, and what I remember most are her eyes. 

At first, I couldn’t see them at all.  She kept them glued to the floor.  But once I earned enough trust, she looked up at me with brilliant, dark eyes—pooled with more tears than I had ever seen eyes hold. 

At last, she let them spill, and with them her grief.  She didn’t know where her father was.  Just somewhere in ICE detention.  Somewhere she could not find or reach.

There. Is. No. Question. 

Separating families causes longterm psychological and physical harm.  Decades of research link separations to Adverse Childhood Events (ACE’s), and Adverse Childhood Events have been linked to impaired neurodevelopment in children.  Impaired neurodevelopment that causes longterm cognitive, emotional, and social impairment.

And this type of adverse childhood event is so stressful it is called Toxic Stress.  Toxic Stress has been linked by decades of research to lifelong risk of depression, lifelong risk of PTSD, and lifelong risk of physical impairments like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. 

A trauma study among refugee families found that of the twenty-six trauma types they reported two made the strongest negative impact on wellbeing.  The two traumas that tied for most harmful were physical torture and family separation. 

 

The poet Warsan Shire tells us that no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. 

And the little girl in my office that day fled home because gang members tormented her father, pressed him for money he didn’t have, and when he couldn’t provide what they wanted, they entered her school and held her sibling at gunpoint. 

Her parents did what any parent would do – they fled.  But when they reached the U.S. border, what we gave them in response was trauma upon trauma. 

 

Family separation harms adults too.  I have seen this harm many times, but one woman stands out in my memory.  She was almost as quiet as that little girl.  She crumpled to a fetal position, and when she spoke, she spoke of suicide. 

Suicide is not just a risk, it’s already real.  You may have heard of the Honduran father who committed suicide in ICE detention just this week when his son was ripped from him.  We are no longer at risk.  We are in the throes of damage. 

 

So this brings another question.  Just a few days ago, a friend of mine of mine asked, “How could they?”  And this is a good question because it’s not that our leaders don’t know they’re causing harm.  In fact, if you look at the CDC website, a U.S. government website, it tells us that adverse childhood events are preventable and we all need to work to prevent them.  This information is certainly available to the Department of Justice. 

The only way someone could commit this kind of harmful act on another human being is through another process that social psychologists have studied for a long time.  It is a process of dehumanization that is accomplished through moral shift

Moral shift happens when we begin to redefine who deserves our moral treatment.  All faiths share the mandate to treat the vulnerable with kindness and protection.  All of us share the values of love, kindness, compassion, honesty, and courage.  But in moral shift, we begin to think there are contexts in which it’s okay not to follow our moral values.  This is called moral disengagement.  We disengage from our own shared values. 

The second level of moral shift is victim exclusion.  Victim exclusion says, “That group doesn’t deserve to be treated the same way as the rest of us.”  Historically disenfranchised groups are the most vulnerable targets of exclusion.  If our forefathers devalued a people group, we are at high risk for doing the same. 

The third and worst level of moral shift is moral reversal.  Moral reversal says, “It is a virtue to harm that group because they are a threat to me.”  What we see today as our leaders perpetrate cruelty on families and children at the border is moral reversal.  It is a cruelty based on the idea that hurting asylum seekers is virtuous. 

 

But the good news is, there is one more level.  And that level is moral recovery.  Moral recovery is a long and complicated process.  It takes courage, patience, and hard work.  I won’t list all the steps right now, but I’m going to mention two.

The first is deep connection.  Deep connection begins with coming together as people from different groups, different backgrounds, to find we who are as a whole.  We commit the time and find the courage to begin.  We learn from each other, and through time and hard work, we identify our shared goals.  We connect ourselves and our resources to reach those goals in ways that none of us could do alone.    

A second step toward moral recovery is active bystandership.  We see what is wrong, and we refuse to pretend we didn’t see it.  The typical human reaction is to turn away.  To speak—to acknowledge injustice—takes courage.  It takes will.  But our acts of courage and will carry us toward healing.  They carry us toward connection.  And they carry us toward peace.

 

The Word We Dare Not Say

The Word We Dare Not Say

Raising our family in a small Midwestern town was mostly lovely.  The girls could walk to dance class, visit neighbors, ride bikes to church.  Our favorite tea room was a block away, and a fun used bookstore not much farther.  But life was complicated too.

My stomach tightened the first time I heard a teenage friend speak against immigrants.  I pushed back but didn’t realize the power of  the regional sentiment behind his words. 

Later, as a legislative staffer for our Republican U.S Senator, I was stunned by the colder, harsher words of adult constituents.  I pushed back there too.  Hard enough for senior staff to remove me from the immigration assignment.  Hard enough to earn a lecture. 

“Try to put yourself in the place of an older woman who has lived in the same neighborhood all her life,” our advisor explained.  He described the woman’s grief at her changing neighborhood.  Its altered businesses.  Its bilingual signs. 

He didn’t say it, but he didn’t need to.  This hypothetical constituent was White, and her neighborhood was becoming Brown. 

Immigration was code for the word we dared not say. 

I read this constituent in a thousand emails, heard her voice in angry calls.  Saw her face in the actual woman who flew to D.C. to complain.  Her ire became our mandate for silence.

 

Recently, social scientists from three universities set out to explore the forces behind lawmakers' interactions with immigrant constituents.  They used an experimental design to study state legislators’ responses (or non-responses) to “constituents” who self-identified as U.S born, foreign born, a voter, or ineligible to vote. 

Oh, and the researchers looked at one more variable.  Race.  

They sent randomized emails to a sample of 5,087 legislators from 42 states.  The messages were typical:  “How can I track the progress of a bill?”  “Who can I contact if I have a problem with a state agency?” “How can I get a copy of the state budget?” 

Each email also contained a randomly selected closing that cued the experimental or control conditions:

I hope to hear from you soon.

I vote and hope to hear from you soon.

Even though I don’t vote, I hope to hear from you soon.

Even though I wasn’t born in the US, I hope to hear from you soon.

I was born in the US. I hope to hear from you soon.

Even though I wasn’t born in the US, I vote and I hope to hear from you soon.

I wasn’t born in the US. Even though I don’t vote, I hope to hear from you soon.

I was born in the US. I vote and I hope to hear from you soon.

I was born in the US. Even though I don’t vote, I hope to hear from you soon.

Finally, to create a racial identity for each “constituent,” the researchers followed an established scientific design using common names.  Josh Wilson represented a White constituent, Jamal Wilkerson a Black constituent, Juan Gonzales an Hispanic constituent, and Jian Wu an Asian constituent. 

Surprisingly, the likelihood of legislators’ responses did not correlate with voting eligibility or birthplace in the ways researchers expected.   

Legislators were only slightly more likely to respond to emails that mentioned voting, and this difference was similar whether the “constituent” identified as a voter or non-voter. 

Legislators were slightly less likely to respond to constituents who noted birthplace, whether this was the United States or elsewhere. 

The only experimental variable that strongly predicted whether a legislator would respond was race.  

Requests from apparently White constituents received the best response rate at 41.8 percent.  Black constituents received a slightly lower percentage of responses at 39.4 percent.  (Similar studies comparing these two groups have found larger differences.) 

But the strongest discrepancies in response rates were for requests that appeared to come from Hispanic and Asian constituents.  “Juan Gonzales” received responses only 34.7 percent of the time.  For “Jian Wu”, the response rate was 32.6 percent.

It may be worth noting that the low response rate for Jian Wu was spread evenly among Republican and Democrat legislators.  Juan Gonzales stood a much greater chance to hear back when he wrote to Democrats. 

The researchers summarized their findings this way: 

By experimentally manipulating the traits of a hypothetical constituent, we sought to determine whether state legislators were motivated by self-interest or bias in responding to requests for constituent services. The results appear to strongly favor the second of these two mechanisms (pp. 527-528).

In other words, race mattered.  It mattered more than voting.  It mattered more than immigration status.  It mattered more than anything. 

And before we point fingers at our legislators, we need to look at their driving force -- ourselves. 

Racially based immigration practices are our social heritage.  As I detailed in an earlier essay, the United States didn’t even try to hide this until the Civil Rights Era.  We openly espoused laws that declared citizenship was reserved for Whites only.  We operated Ellis Island for White European newcomers and Angel Island prison camp for those arriving from Asian countries. 

Growing up White, Midwestern, and Protestant, I understood these bits of history as relics from an unenlightened past.  I didn’t ask why most of my neighbors looked like me. But I’m asking now.  And still learning.  Slowly. 

I can only do my best to walk a different road.  To see my blind spots.  To touch oppression.  To recognize that much of what I once saw as normal, was intentionally “normalized” so I wouldn’t see my racism.  So I would be okay with walls and family separations and border militia and travesties of justice.

But love does not exclude.  Love does not fear.  And love does not hide from its own painful truths. 

Brokenness, Danger, and Reconnection

Tonight, I feel unsafe.  My doors are locked, and my neighborhood is quiet.  But my heart races as I pull up the news.  More bombs.  Another mass shooting.  More dehumanization.  More threats against this group.  More threats against that group. 

My chest tightens.  I know this drill – from social psych studies of troubled lands. 

Social psychologists know a lot about how communities—and nations—slide toward extreme violence.  And the United States is on that path.

Societies at risk for mass violence have histories of devaluing targeted groups.  They live with persistent conflict between groups.  They ignore historical social traumas.  They perceive oppressed groups to be “dangerous.”  And they lock themselves in to the voice of authority. 

Until about two years ago, when I gave societal risk factor lectures, I would breathe a sigh of relief on that last one.  It would never happen here.  Not in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Not in a nation built on protest, dissent, and freedom of speech.

But that changed. 

Now I hear it far too often: full deference to a leader, no matter what.  No matter that he disparages – repeatedly – anyone different from himself.  No matter that he rips babies from their mothers’ arms.  No matter that he publicly sides with dictators against his own nation.  No matter that he militarizes our border against a helpless community of refugees. 

None of it matters, or none of it matters enough.  His followers still follow.  Most do not share his values, yet they follow.  They cite his position, the political tradeoffs, their acquired fear of “others.”  And however far he goes, they do not turn back.     

So I am frightened.  Not of a hungry group of refugees.  Not of people who worship on Saturdays or Fridays.  I am frightened of people who look like me.  I am frightened of the powerful, the dominant, who will not step back from a man who leads hatred. 

But I take a deep breath.  Fear is no place to stop. 

And the research does not stop there either.  Societies torn by mass violence can and do find healing.  They learn.  They do the hard work.  They discover shared goals and create shared beauty.  They acknowledge pain and find a path forward.  They choose kind leaders.  They speak thoughtfully.  They listen, think, and listen again.  They craft a shared vision, protect the oppressed.  And when it all feels too hard, they take hands and try again.  Together. 

 

Posttrauma Leadership - Why We Need Survivor-Leaders

Eric shook himself, once again, from the terror of sleep, the smells of blood and cypress.  He opened his eyes and looked toward morning.  He was a leader now, a changer of lives.  A leader set in motion by grief—and by purpose.   

Eric was only sixteen the day the mobs came, but his grandfather had prepared him.  They rushed together toward the forest, as did Eric’s grandmother, widowed mother, siblings, and cousins.  As they ran, the shouts grew closer.  “Don’t let anyone escape! Capture all the cockroaches!” 

In the cover of branches, Eric clutched familiar hands, silent, vigilant, until the cruel time came to part for separate cover. Then alone on his perch, he trembled at the sounds of his heartbeat, while his soul screamed silently at other sounds he heard.  He survived the multi-day massacre, but most of his family did not. 

Eric’s journey from those branches was the start of a grueling walk toward prosocial leadership.  Like recent school violence survivors or threatened immigrants, Eric did not want his wounds to become his identity.  But also like them, his history was too large to hide.  He would forever be a survivor, yet he ached to be more.  And what he craved most was for his pain to matter—for it to heal the rest of us.

Almost two decades later, I discovered Eric’s story in a long, gray survival of my own.  No, I do not know how genocide feels, or mass violence, but parenting through medical trauma drew me towards connection.   

ICU was cold in the Minnesota winter, and our eighth-floor room was as stark as the sky in the small corner window.  I watched the Mayo Clinic copters rise into blinding snow for another rescue mission, and I waited, powerless, for the next sign of change. 

Behind me, my daughter slept lightly while her monitors beeped and flashed under the watch of her nurse.  This was not the senior year I had envisioned for my middle child, perfectly healthy until a few weeks ago.  Nor had I imagined our new best friends, next door in the Ronald McDonald House, battling cancer or waiting for transplants, when they should have been focused on homework and sports. 

This was where I started.  This crazy unreality of broken plans and sharp edges.  And afterward, the cold gray slog of reconstructing life while my daughter recovered -- and her new best friend did not. The crush pushed me down, but I was startled to find it also pushed me forward.

I’m a trauma therapist, so my distress was no surprise.  Isolation, depression, anger, insomnia.  Yet with them—as for Eric—an overwhelming urge to make it matter. 

I began to hear us everywhere: a teen cancer patient who wanted to help the homeless, a bereaved mother who longed to prevent other suicides.  Sometimes the goals matched the trauma, sometimes not.  Either way, our wounds fueled our desires. Our helplessness fueled our need to help. 

We knew the script: We were supposed to be the downtrodden, the “victims” of disease or of injustice.  Our role was to receive, but the role did not suit us. That brand of survivorship eroded our dignity. 

Theresa M. McGovern saw this plight for what it is – a human rights issue.  When she lost her mother in 911, she felt the injustice of cameras that focused on her tears but ignored her substantive responses.  She heard it in the treatment of the female HIV patients she defended in court.  And she found it across the globe when those most affected by atrocity became the strongest voices for change—but were relegated to grief soundbites. 

The path to leadership—to meaning and purpose—isn’t always clear.  Yes, news accounts and documentaries abound with protagonists who rise from dark times to become change agents.  But in my gray period, it seemed to me those stories were newsworthy for their uniqueness.  Those survivors were “heroes,” and those heroes were not us.  Most of us had no clue how to change the world.  Most of us felt stuck. 

I was stuck -- definitely.  I was too shy, too small town, too unconnected.  Too inadequate. For solace, I retreated to the quiet comfort of research journals.  

Studies on PTSD were everywhere, and posttraumatic growth was nothing new.  But I found nothing to explain survivor-leadership.  Nothing told me how to coax it into existence – for myself or anyone else.  I would have to untangle this the hard way. 

Over the next few years, I completed a doctorate in leadership and wrote a dissertation from my heart. To decipher what works, I analyzed the journeys of eight trauma survivors who led effective social change.  Eric was one of them. 

For a long time, Eric felt stuck too.  He carried nightmares and grief, anger and fear.  But he also carried hope—secretly at first—that he would matter. He was alone, homeless, uneducated, traumatized.  Yet his quest for purpose was as primal as his quest for life had been.

And across a long journey, Eric met his challenge—first with a simple support group for nearby genocide orphans and eventually a national youth organization and international peace education program.  Ultimately, Eric hopes the healing of young Rwandans will inspire hope and purpose across the globe.

Eric’s story is not a simple one.  Even in his leadership, the night terrors stayed.  The anger persisted.  The tears continued.  But somehow—inside the brokenness—he found purpose. 

I’ve seen such purpose intimately as a trauma therapist for other Rwandan genocide survivors.  It shocked me to discover that the trickle of our refugee system means some are still just arriving from the 1992 massacres.  It did not shock me to hear their longings to contribute.

They are not alone.  Trauma-inspired leadership develops across cultures, across trauma types, and across areas of leadership.  The leaders whose journeys I studied were survivors of genocide, trafficking, medical trauma, gang violence, and child slavery. They were men and women from five continents.  And their gifts to the world include child-slavery abolition, ethnic reconciliation, gang violence prevention, and medical research funding, to name a few.  Posttraumatic leadership is real.  

Today, my middle daughter is a thriving, internationally based professor, and the medical trauma she endured at seventeen feels increasingly remote.  It does not define her.  But I hope she will forgive me if I say that, in some ways, those experiences still define me.  Because in the excruciating days of “after,” I began to craft a new path for myself.  My work addresses a different set of traumas—migration—but grows from what I learned about the passion and wisdom inspired by pain. 

The leadership lens I encountered shifted my view of the oppressed.  Yes, survivors need us to open doors and build bridges.  But mostly, we need them.  We need their undying purpose, their unique understanding, their expansive love.  Whatever they have weathered—war, violence, displacement, disease--we need them.  The hope of the hurting holds power.

 

 

Facing the Underbelly -- Racism and Immigration

Soldiers in camouflage, each with a machine gun, surrounded our two-door Plymouth, but I was more tired than afraid.  In her carseat behind us, our baby began to stir, and I hoped the soldiers wouldn’t order us to unpack the car as their counterparts had at the last checkpoint.  That order was no small task, since my husband Peter and I had filled every inch with food and dishes, clothes and bedding.  It was hard to make it fit again. 

But this time, mercifully, the soldiers merely looked us up and down, inspected our documents, studied our goods through the glass, and directed us to the next checkpoint.  Decades would pass before we understood that we had entered—and safely exited—Guatemala’s indigenous genocide. 

We were naïve twenty-somethings, en route from Texas to Honduras, barely aware of our danger or our privilege.  A family of three White faces carrying three blue U.S. passports, we were not typical Pan American Highway travelers.  We had crossed two borders already, would cross another soon, and at any point could have turned and crossed back the other way.  But for too many people around us, the soldiers with machine guns were a deadly presence, and escape across a border was impossible.

Guatemala was in a “Silent Holocaust” Peter and I knew nothing about, despite our efforts to discern the potential safety of our trip.  The slaughter of Central American indigenous had somehow escaped our attention in Texas—an invisibility that would seem impossible had the targets been White. 

Only decades later, through my dissertation research, did I understand what we had seen.  And only then did I recognize we might have owed our lives to White privilege.  In those dangerous years, the United States denied asylum to 98% of Guatemalans who requested it. 

 

More recently, a friend explained her thoughts about racism by noting that all of us are minorities sometime.  “You’ve been a minority,” she pointed out. 

“It’s not the same,” I objected.  “When I’m the only White person around, people assume I have more money, more education, or more connections.  And they’re usually right.  People assume the opposite about someone with browner skin.”

It’s also true—and this is important—that the U.S. citizenship that helped my family cross those borders would not have happened had my ancestors been browner. 

Before the Civil Rights era, President Trump’s openly racist utterances might have been less shocking.  Immigration and Naturalization laws were overtly racist for most of our history, and Adolf Hitler himself pointed to U.S. immigration policies as a model he liked.  He wrote in Mein Kampf:

It is not, however, in our model German Republic, but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of common sense…(B)y excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People’s State (p. 342).

I did not have Hitler on my mind when we made our wartime border crossings.  In fact, I don’t remember thinking about migration or racial justice at all.  I didn’t have to.  I just assumed we had the right to cross, and it was years before I understood the privilege in that assumption.

It’s easy to miss, as I did, the White supremacy in U.S. immigration law because we’ve lived it from the start.  The Three Fifths Compromise of 1787 and the U.S. Naturalization Law of 1790 reserved citizenship for Whites only.  These were our foundations.  Whiteness was a determining factor for inclusion as “American.” 

In high school history, I dismissed these laws as products of my unenlightened ancestors, not as the roots of my own entitlement.  I saw them as ugly artifacts of their times, but didn’t wonder why my neighbors mostly looked like me.

Today, our fears center on Middle Eastern, Latino, and African newcomers, but our ancestors were more worried about Asia.  Every few years, Congress added another set of prohibitions against Asian entry, and they weren’t afraid to declare their purpose “to preserve…the racial status quo.”

Angel Island was another response to the fear of non-White arrivals.  Our European ancestors had a decent chance of entry through Ellis, but West Coast (mostly Asian) arrivals to Angel Island were greeted with detention and inhumanity.  I understand why we don’t talk about it much. 

But maybe our silence is the reason so little has changed.  The response to a 1921 rise in refugee numbers was an emergency bill “to immediately slow immigration to allow time to develop a more carefully considered immigration law.”  Or in today’s language, “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” 

 

From the Civil Rights era until President Trump, leaders proclaimed—at least on the surface—a need for immigration laws that aligned with egalitarian values. When President Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removing national origin quotas he described quotas as “un-American in the highest sense.”

Unfortunately, like other Civil Rights changes, the new system wore a cloak of egalitarianism without fixing the problem.  In fact, many “diversity” visas went to White European countries, while the changes had a devastating effect on our nearest (non-White) neighbors. 

Before 1965, the people whose homeland my family and I traversed in our Plymouth Champ might have stood a chance in securing a U.S. visa.  Today, the odds are miniscule.  Civil Rights Era changes made entry harder for Latinos by quietly imposing a new hemispheric ceiling.  Visa availability for neighbor countries plummeted, and most legal immigration options reached an end.   

The truth is, we offer zero legal means of entry to most Latin Americans.  Our neighbors cross our southern border without documents because there is no “legal” option—even when the reasons are life or death.

A friend in Honduras messaged me in fear because de facto community leaders entered her family’s home, attacked her brother, and threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave the country.  But everyone he turned to assured him the United States would never grant asylum.  Having seen too many turned away, I could not disagree.  I had nothing to offer. 

Such atrocities happen every day.  I cannot forget the small, frightened girl who cried in my office and could not meet my eyes.  Her mother explained that attackers had entered her daughter’s classroom and threatened to kill the children.  They held the girl’s brother at gunpoint.  So the parents did what anyone would.  They fled.  But that day in my office, the child before me had a new trauma.  Her father was gone—in ICE custody somewhere—and the family did not know where.

The U.S. response is worse now.  Now Customs and Border Patrol turns away families like theirs on arrival, denying their right to petition for legal asylum.  Such impossible restrictions—even in life or death moments—force unthinkable choices.  It isn’t safe to enter at checkpoints, so families who flee join other migrants in death-defying walks through the deserts.  

No one has an official count of border deaths, but Humane Borders documented 3,087 body recovery sites in Arizona alone.  The borderland deserts are our Mediterranean Sea, the coyotes our rubber raft traffickers.  Here too, people die crossing because they have no other choice.  

 

Now that President Trump has again revealed the racism of our immigration policies, we can regain clarity.  We can see the truth, and we can change the unjust system we inherited. We can focus on preventing death in transit, abuse in detention, and exploitation on arrival.  And if we do, our children will look back on us with pride. 

As individuals, we’ve already gained the courage to confront ourselves.  I’m not the younger me who accepted my border-crossing privilege as “natural.”  And I’m not the only older, White American ready to work. 

A few weeks ago, I participated in a rally for a Muslim immigrant who lost a promised job because of her hijab.  We stood outside a mall to share our message, and an older White gentleman left his Christmas shopping, walked over, and asked what was going on.  Like me, he had probably never faced bigotry in his life.  But he responded, “Any kind of discrimination is wrong.”  And within two minutes, he was holding a sign.  He gives me hope. 

Moral Shift and the American Newcomer

The plan began with two truck bombs, one on either side of the apartment complex.  Once the bombs had exploded, but before the dust had settled, the men would run from home to home with their cache of weapons to kill survivors.  Somali Muslim refugees are dangerous, the plotters reasoned, even the babies, so none could be left alive.

The refugees’ rescue came in the form of undercover agents, two rogue members of the plotters’ Kansas militia, who fed their plans to the FBI.

When I read these events in my newsfeed, two pieces of my heart pulled open.  The terror plot was slated for Kansas, my home state, by people who were middle-aged, White Midwesterners--like me.  Their targets were forced migrants, survivors of global terror like the people I connect with—and love—in my work as a leadership educator and trauma therapist.  The rupture between these two groups, these two parts of myself, was palpable. 

“Talk to someone at church,” my husband suggested, so the next morning I stopped Pastor Scot in the hall.  

“Scot, aren’t you from Kansas?” I asked with no explanation.

“Six blocks away,” Scot replied.  “My childhood home is still there.  Six blocks from the apartments.”

I begged Scot to help me respond somehow, act against such atrocity, and he asked the one sensible question.  “What can we do?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted.  “But I’m a researcher.  I’ll find out.”

What I took back to Scot a few weeks later was a summary of decades of research on intergroup violence: red flags that warn communities at risk, interventions that calm (or don’t calm) group conflict.  The data is rich and complex, but to me, it made the most sense through the lens of Dr. Ervin Staub

A child survivor of the Holocaust, and later of Marxism, Dr. Staub eventually became a leading research professor at Amherst.  And his early experiences led him to question the powerful influences behind inhumanity and love. 

Dr. Staub noticed that across time and place, societies who suffer mass violence blame everyday problems on a devalued group.  Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s loss of World War I and the subsequent hyperinflation.  Rwandan Hutus blamed Tutsis for a long list of political and economic woes.  You could name more examples.  They are easy to identify in hindsight, but the key is to see the devaluation before it pulls us under. 

To do this, Dr. Staub explained, we have to catch the early steps.  The blame process is part of a larger moral shift, a transformation of what it means to be good and loving.  During difficult changes (economic decline, political and cultural shifts), people naturally feel threatened.  So if a leader suggests the changes are caused by a target “other,” we feel inclined to band together in self-protection. 

This “other” is usually a group with a history of devaluation, so the community (or nation) is already uncomfortable with them.  Scapegoating isn’t a huge stretch.  We’re not prejudiced, but there are reasons to keep our distance.  It’s responsible to be cautious.  Yes, we are kind and compassionate, but “they” are a threat, so circumstances warrant distinctions between basic rights and “their” rights.

This is how we reach the first level of moral shift, moral disengagement.  The context warrants a different response than what our values normally require.  We have to consider the circumstances. 

From here, the second level, victim exclusion, begins to feel less shocking. 

Victim exclusion places the “other” outside the moral realm.  In other words, we can’t afford to treat them as human because they don’t meet the definition of humanness. 

Most of the time, this level shocks us.  We can’t fathom how Nazi leaders convinced the masses that Jews were “rats.”  And we’re stunned to hear that Rwandan Hutu leaders—and the Kansas militia plotters—openly described their target groups as “cockroaches.”  But moral disengagement makes us vulnerable to beliefs we would normally reject. 

Seeing the “other” as exceptional prepares us to see them as not quite human.  This is the only way I can explain the meme my Facebook friend posted—comparing refugees to rattlesnakes.   

I need to say unequivocally that my friend is a brilliant, respectable, and loving adult.  Someone I’ve known and admired for years, someone who cares about family, faith, and country in ways I will never match.  That was what made his meme so stunning. 

A quick search led me to Sid Miller, Texas agriculture commissioner, who apparently started the refugee-rattlesnake comparison in 2015.  Perhaps Mr. Miller was not the first.  He certainly was not the last.  When leaders dehumanize a group, the rest of us tend to look the other way.  Give them the benefit of the doubt.  Wonder what they know.

Once the “other” is sufficiently dehumanized, the moral shift is complete.  Morality now tells us it is virtuous to inflict pain on the “other.”  We are doing so for the greater social good.  We are doing so to protect our children. 

This is the process behind refugee bans, “extreme vetting,” asylum rejection, and the dismantling of DACA.  It is the process behind VOICE, President Trump’s Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement that urges Americans to call and report “crimes committed by removable criminal aliens.” 

These actions dehumanize new or would-be Americans by telling the rest of us we are vulnerable to threat and harm from them.  It assumes my White Protestant Midwestern self needs to be protected from my Black/Latina/Middle Eastern/Coptic/Jewish/Muslim neighbor.  It encourages me to suspect my neighbor might not be “legal.” 

And our fears ignore the truth—that researchers have repeatedly found either no link between immigration status and crime rate or that immigrants are less likely (PDF) to commit crimes than non-immigrants. Undocumented immigrants hold the lowest crime rates of all. We are not vulnerable.  They are.

The good news is that moral reversal has a remedy.  Moral recovery is possible when we allow ourselves to 1) see what is happening, 2) acknowledge the harm, and 3) connect with the targeted group as fellow humans.   

America’s moments of soul-searching give me hope.  We are strong enough to face ourselves.  Strong enough to face our history.  Strong enough to talk.  And we are strong enough to encounter the humanness of people we fear.

In Garden City, a growing group of physicians are a prime example.  Surprised to find a doorway to the world in the rural Midwest, the doctors saw the town’s newcomers as exactly the people they wanted to know and work for.  So they opened a medical clinic in the same community the militia had targeted.  Ifrah Ahmed, a young community member, observed, "There is still good out there. There are still people who believe in us.” 

Unexpectedly, the presence of refugees helps Garden City and similar Kansas towns reduce the physician shortage that plagues other rural areas.  The doctors who serve the newcomers staff the local hospitals too.  "In the past we had to wait a long amount of time to be seen," one county commissioner explained. "We had to travel to be seen, to get health care that now we can get easily."  When communities—and nations—see the vulnerable as human, everyone wins.    

 

Brokenness and Leadership -- Blog by Jenifer Wolf Williams, Ed.D.

Yes, this is Genocide

I climbed the levee, walked through a gate flanked by razor wire, and looked around.  A few yards higher, a woman sat alone on a castoff lawn chair, her expression empty as she watched me approach.  I climbed toward her and glanced briefly at the chair beside her.  It had no seat, so she stood and grabbed another from nearby.  They were the only three chairs I had seen in the camp, and her act felt precious.  “Me llamo Jeni,” I told her. 

“Soy Violeta,” she responded. 

Below us, the bright orange arches of the International Bridge pierced the morning sky, palpable through coils of military wire.  Small camping tents, including Violeta’s, covered the levee, while more lined the streets below.  We could just see the tops of the portable toilets, ten of them for this community of about 2,000.  The smoke from Violeta’s campfire blew across our faces, but she didn’t flinch, so neither did I.  It wasn’t long before she said, too matter-of-factly, “I sent my daughter across yesterday.” 

Her daughter is nine years old.  Violeta had stood near the bridge and watched her child leave.  She waited until an officer took custody, and then Violeta walked back to her tent.  Alone.

“I couldn’t let her suffer anymore,” Violeta explained.  “She was raped here.  We were both raped.” 

“Here in the camps?” I asked, and Violeta nodded. 

“Sometimes people disappear from here too.  Adults and children.  I couldn’t let her stay any longer.”  Violeta looked away and tightened her arms across her chest.  “I’m going back to Honduras now,” she added.  “The gangs murdered my parents when I was three, and my grandparents raised me.  Now the same gangs are targeting me.  But I’m going back.  There is nothing else for me to do.”

 

This makeshift “camp” did not exist when I last entered Matamoros this past spring.  It formed by default when the U.S. government implemented the Migrant “Protection” Protocol, better known as “Remain in Mexico.”  Under this policy, even migrants who demonstrate credible fear of death in their home countries are forced to wait months outside our borders to complete our now-impossible asylum process.  They have no access to U.S. attorneys, clean water, adequate food, health care, or toilets.

And, like all asylum seekers, they will never be heard by a member of the U.S. judiciary branch.  U.S. immigration “courts” do not operate within the judicial system, but are governed directly by the U.S. president and his attorney general.  The administration’s Zero Tolerance policies mean zero chance for life. 

Tragically, Violeta is one of countless mothers who make impossible choices between death and death.  Some have sent children as young as three across that bridge, knowing the separation may very well be permanent. 

Early this fall, I visited a different border city with a group of volunteer attorneys.  Two mothers approached our team requesting birth control for their daughters, ages eleven and twelve.  Rape was inevitable, they said, and they wanted to protect their girls as best they could.  The cartels know easy targets when they see them.  And like Violeta, these mothers acknowledged disappearances in the border camps but still found them preferable to the killings back home. 

 

Volunteers can only bring band-aids.  I managed to get a few personal water filters through customs and encourage two young families to accept flu vaccines from an extremely limited supply (twenty vaccines for 2,000 people).  Because I'm a mental health professional, I distributed fliers on stress reduction, read to children, and sat to talk with hurting people.  Local volunteers do a thousand times more, working every day to provide hot meals, more tents, legal information, fresh survival ideas.  But the only real solution for the camps is to end the Migrant “Protection” Protocol (MPP) that brought them into existence. 

Those of us who vote need to understand that MPP is genocide.  The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide lists five deadly acts, any one of which can earn the title "genocide."  They are:

  1. Killing members of the group;
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Migrant “Protection” Protocol carries out genocide in at least three of these forms, and Violeta and her daughter suffered all three.  MPP is a form of genocide, and we as U.S. citizens are the only ones who can stop it.  

 

Of Harm and Hope - A Response to Zero Tolerance

By request, I'm sharing the transcript of a speech I made in front of Dallas City Hall last summer, when the United States government began to openly steal children from their parents.  Many of those families remain apart, and private accounts speak of continued separations.  I find it important to share these words again.  Please note the links to research.  The harm is real.  And so is the hope.  

Jenifer Wolf Williams, Ed.D., LPC-S

 

I’m a trauma therapist with a focus on immigration trauma, and most of the time I work with adults.  But not that day. 

That day, a little girl sat in my counseling office in a chair that was far too big for her, and mostly, she was silent.  Slowly, she answered my questions in whispered monosyllables, and what I remember most are her eyes. 

At first, I couldn’t see them at all.  She kept them glued to the floor.  But once I earned enough trust, she looked up at me with brilliant, dark eyes—pooled with more tears than I had ever seen eyes hold. 

At last, she let them spill, and with them her grief.  She didn’t know where her father was.  Just somewhere in ICE detention.  Somewhere she could not find or reach.

There. Is. No. Question. 

Separating families causes longterm psychological and physical harm.  Decades of research link separations to Adverse Childhood Events (ACE’s), and Adverse Childhood Events have been linked to impaired neurodevelopment in children.  Impaired neurodevelopment that causes longterm cognitive, emotional, and social impairment.

And this type of adverse childhood event is so stressful it is called Toxic Stress.  Toxic Stress has been linked by decades of research to lifelong risk of depression, lifelong risk of PTSD, and lifelong risk of physical impairments like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. 

A trauma study among refugee families found that of the twenty-six trauma types they reported two made the strongest negative impact on wellbeing.  The two traumas that tied for most harmful were physical torture and family separation. 

 

The poet Warsan Shire tells us that no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. 

And the little girl in my office that day fled home because gang members tormented her father, pressed him for money he didn’t have, and when he couldn’t provide what they wanted, they entered her school and held her sibling at gunpoint. 

Her parents did what any parent would do – they fled.  But when they reached the U.S. border, what we gave them in response was trauma upon trauma. 

 

Family separation harms adults too.  I have seen this harm many times, but one woman stands out in my memory.  She was almost as quiet as that little girl.  She crumpled to a fetal position, and when she spoke, she spoke of suicide. 

Suicide is not just a risk, it’s already real.  You may have heard of the Honduran father who committed suicide in ICE detention just this week when his son was ripped from him.  We are no longer at risk.  We are in the throes of damage. 

 

So this brings another question.  Just a few days ago, a friend of mine of mine asked, “How could they?”  And this is a good question because it’s not that our leaders don’t know they’re causing harm.  In fact, if you look at the CDC website, a U.S. government website, it tells us that adverse childhood events are preventable and we all need to work to prevent them.  This information is certainly available to the Department of Justice. 

The only way someone could commit this kind of harmful act on another human being is through another process that social psychologists have studied for a long time.  It is a process of dehumanization that is accomplished through moral shift

Moral shift happens when we begin to redefine who deserves our moral treatment.  All faiths share the mandate to treat the vulnerable with kindness and protection.  All of us share the values of love, kindness, compassion, honesty, and courage.  But in moral shift, we begin to think there are contexts in which it’s okay not to follow our moral values.  This is called moral disengagement.  We disengage from our own shared values. 

The second level of moral shift is victim exclusion.  Victim exclusion says, “That group doesn’t deserve to be treated the same way as the rest of us.”  Historically disenfranchised groups are the most vulnerable targets of exclusion.  If our forefathers devalued a people group, we are at high risk for doing the same. 

The third and worst level of moral shift is moral reversal.  Moral reversal says, “It is a virtue to harm that group because they are a threat to me.”  What we see today as our leaders perpetrate cruelty on families and children at the border is moral reversal.  It is a cruelty based on the idea that hurting asylum seekers is virtuous. 

 

But the good news is, there is one more level.  And that level is moral recovery.  Moral recovery is a long and complicated process.  It takes courage, patience, and hard work.  I won’t list all the steps right now, but I’m going to mention two.

The first is deep connection.  Deep connection begins with coming together as people from different groups, different backgrounds, to find we who are as a whole.  We commit the time and find the courage to begin.  We learn from each other, and through time and hard work, we identify our shared goals.  We connect ourselves and our resources to reach those goals in ways that none of us could do alone.    

A second step toward moral recovery is active bystandership.  We see what is wrong, and we refuse to pretend we didn’t see it.  The typical human reaction is to turn away.  To speak—to acknowledge injustice—takes courage.  It takes will.  But our acts of courage and will carry us toward healing.  They carry us toward connection.  And they carry us toward peace.

 

The Word We Dare Not Say

The Word We Dare Not Say

Raising our family in a small Midwestern town was mostly lovely.  The girls could walk to dance class, visit neighbors, ride bikes to church.  Our favorite tea room was a block away, and a fun used bookstore not much farther.  But life was complicated too.

My stomach tightened the first time I heard a teenage friend speak against immigrants.  I pushed back but didn’t realize the power of  the regional sentiment behind his words. 

Later, as a legislative staffer for our Republican U.S Senator, I was stunned by the colder, harsher words of adult constituents.  I pushed back there too.  Hard enough for senior staff to remove me from the immigration assignment.  Hard enough to earn a lecture. 

“Try to put yourself in the place of an older woman who has lived in the same neighborhood all her life,” our advisor explained.  He described the woman’s grief at her changing neighborhood.  Its altered businesses.  Its bilingual signs. 

He didn’t say it, but he didn’t need to.  This hypothetical constituent was White, and her neighborhood was becoming Brown. 

Immigration was code for the word we dared not say. 

I read this constituent in a thousand emails, heard her voice in angry calls.  Saw her face in the actual woman who flew to D.C. to complain.  Her ire became our mandate for silence.

 

Recently, social scientists from three universities set out to explore the forces behind lawmakers' interactions with immigrant constituents.  They used an experimental design to study state legislators’ responses (or non-responses) to “constituents” who self-identified as U.S born, foreign born, a voter, or ineligible to vote. 

Oh, and the researchers looked at one more variable.  Race.  

They sent randomized emails to a sample of 5,087 legislators from 42 states.  The messages were typical:  “How can I track the progress of a bill?”  “Who can I contact if I have a problem with a state agency?” “How can I get a copy of the state budget?” 

Each email also contained a randomly selected closing that cued the experimental or control conditions:

I hope to hear from you soon.

I vote and hope to hear from you soon.

Even though I don’t vote, I hope to hear from you soon.

Even though I wasn’t born in the US, I hope to hear from you soon.

I was born in the US. I hope to hear from you soon.

Even though I wasn’t born in the US, I vote and I hope to hear from you soon.

I wasn’t born in the US. Even though I don’t vote, I hope to hear from you soon.

I was born in the US. I vote and I hope to hear from you soon.

I was born in the US. Even though I don’t vote, I hope to hear from you soon.

Finally, to create a racial identity for each “constituent,” the researchers followed an established scientific design using common names.  Josh Wilson represented a White constituent, Jamal Wilkerson a Black constituent, Juan Gonzales an Hispanic constituent, and Jian Wu an Asian constituent. 

Surprisingly, the likelihood of legislators’ responses did not correlate with voting eligibility or birthplace in the ways researchers expected.   

Legislators were only slightly more likely to respond to emails that mentioned voting, and this difference was similar whether the “constituent” identified as a voter or non-voter. 

Legislators were slightly less likely to respond to constituents who noted birthplace, whether this was the United States or elsewhere. 

The only experimental variable that strongly predicted whether a legislator would respond was race.  

Requests from apparently White constituents received the best response rate at 41.8 percent.  Black constituents received a slightly lower percentage of responses at 39.4 percent.  (Similar studies comparing these two groups have found larger differences.) 

But the strongest discrepancies in response rates were for requests that appeared to come from Hispanic and Asian constituents.  “Juan Gonzales” received responses only 34.7 percent of the time.  For “Jian Wu”, the response rate was 32.6 percent.

It may be worth noting that the low response rate for Jian Wu was spread evenly among Republican and Democrat legislators.  Juan Gonzales stood a much greater chance to hear back when he wrote to Democrats. 

The researchers summarized their findings this way: 

By experimentally manipulating the traits of a hypothetical constituent, we sought to determine whether state legislators were motivated by self-interest or bias in responding to requests for constituent services. The results appear to strongly favor the second of these two mechanisms (pp. 527-528).

In other words, race mattered.  It mattered more than voting.  It mattered more than immigration status.  It mattered more than anything. 

And before we point fingers at our legislators, we need to look at their driving force -- ourselves. 

Racially based immigration practices are our social heritage.  As I detailed in an earlier essay, the United States didn’t even try to hide this until the Civil Rights Era.  We openly espoused laws that declared citizenship was reserved for Whites only.  We operated Ellis Island for White European newcomers and Angel Island prison camp for those arriving from Asian countries. 

Growing up White, Midwestern, and Protestant, I understood these bits of history as relics from an unenlightened past.  I didn’t ask why most of my neighbors looked like me. But I’m asking now.  And still learning.  Slowly. 

I can only do my best to walk a different road.  To see my blind spots.  To touch oppression.  To recognize that much of what I once saw as normal, was intentionally “normalized” so I wouldn’t see my racism.  So I would be okay with walls and family separations and border militia and travesties of justice.

But love does not exclude.  Love does not fear.  And love does not hide from its own painful truths. 

Brokenness, Danger, and Reconnection

Tonight, I feel unsafe.  My doors are locked, and my neighborhood is quiet.  But my heart races as I pull up the news.  More bombs.  Another mass shooting.  More dehumanization.  More threats against this group.  More threats against that group. 

My chest tightens.  I know this drill – from social psych studies of troubled lands. 

Social psychologists know a lot about how communities—and nations—slide toward extreme violence.  And the United States is on that path.

Societies at risk for mass violence have histories of devaluing targeted groups.  They live with persistent conflict between groups.  They ignore historical social traumas.  They perceive oppressed groups to be “dangerous.”  And they lock themselves in to the voice of authority. 

Until about two years ago, when I gave societal risk factor lectures, I would breathe a sigh of relief on that last one.  It would never happen here.  Not in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Not in a nation built on protest, dissent, and freedom of speech.

But that changed. 

Now I hear it far too often: full deference to a leader, no matter what.  No matter that he disparages – repeatedly – anyone different from himself.  No matter that he rips babies from their mothers’ arms.  No matter that he publicly sides with dictators against his own nation.  No matter that he militarizes our border against a helpless community of refugees. 

None of it matters, or none of it matters enough.  His followers still follow.  Most do not share his values, yet they follow.  They cite his position, the political tradeoffs, their acquired fear of “others.”  And however far he goes, they do not turn back.     

So I am frightened.  Not of a hungry group of refugees.  Not of people who worship on Saturdays or Fridays.  I am frightened of people who look like me.  I am frightened of the powerful, the dominant, who will not step back from a man who leads hatred. 

But I take a deep breath.  Fear is no place to stop. 

And the research does not stop there either.  Societies torn by mass violence can and do find healing.  They learn.  They do the hard work.  They discover shared goals and create shared beauty.  They acknowledge pain and find a path forward.  They choose kind leaders.  They speak thoughtfully.  They listen, think, and listen again.  They craft a shared vision, protect the oppressed.  And when it all feels too hard, they take hands and try again.  Together. 

 

Posttrauma Leadership - Why We Need Survivor-Leaders

Eric shook himself, once again, from the terror of sleep, the smells of blood and cypress.  He opened his eyes and looked toward morning.  He was a leader now, a changer of lives.  A leader set in motion by grief—and by purpose.   

Eric was only sixteen the day the mobs came, but his grandfather had prepared him.  They rushed together toward the forest, as did Eric’s grandmother, widowed mother, siblings, and cousins.  As they ran, the shouts grew closer.  “Don’t let anyone escape! Capture all the cockroaches!” 

In the cover of branches, Eric clutched familiar hands, silent, vigilant, until the cruel time came to part for separate cover. Then alone on his perch, he trembled at the sounds of his heartbeat, while his soul screamed silently at other sounds he heard.  He survived the multi-day massacre, but most of his family did not. 

Eric’s journey from those branches was the start of a grueling walk toward prosocial leadership.  Like recent school violence survivors or threatened immigrants, Eric did not want his wounds to become his identity.  But also like them, his history was too large to hide.  He would forever be a survivor, yet he ached to be more.  And what he craved most was for his pain to matter—for it to heal the rest of us.

Almost two decades later, I discovered Eric’s story in a long, gray survival of my own.  No, I do not know how genocide feels, or mass violence, but parenting through medical trauma drew me towards connection.   

ICU was cold in the Minnesota winter, and our eighth-floor room was as stark as the sky in the small corner window.  I watched the Mayo Clinic copters rise into blinding snow for another rescue mission, and I waited, powerless, for the next sign of change. 

Behind me, my daughter slept lightly while her monitors beeped and flashed under the watch of her nurse.  This was not the senior year I had envisioned for my middle child, perfectly healthy until a few weeks ago.  Nor had I imagined our new best friends, next door in the Ronald McDonald House, battling cancer or waiting for transplants, when they should have been focused on homework and sports. 

This was where I started.  This crazy unreality of broken plans and sharp edges.  And afterward, the cold gray slog of reconstructing life while my daughter recovered -- and her new best friend did not. The crush pushed me down, but I was startled to find it also pushed me forward.

I’m a trauma therapist, so my distress was no surprise.  Isolation, depression, anger, insomnia.  Yet with them—as for Eric—an overwhelming urge to make it matter. 

I began to hear us everywhere: a teen cancer patient who wanted to help the homeless, a bereaved mother who longed to prevent other suicides.  Sometimes the goals matched the trauma, sometimes not.  Either way, our wounds fueled our desires. Our helplessness fueled our need to help. 

We knew the script: We were supposed to be the downtrodden, the “victims” of disease or of injustice.  Our role was to receive, but the role did not suit us. That brand of survivorship eroded our dignity. 

Theresa M. McGovern saw this plight for what it is – a human rights issue.  When she lost her mother in 911, she felt the injustice of cameras that focused on her tears but ignored her substantive responses.  She heard it in the treatment of the female HIV patients she defended in court.  And she found it across the globe when those most affected by atrocity became the strongest voices for change—but were relegated to grief soundbites. 

The path to leadership—to meaning and purpose—isn’t always clear.  Yes, news accounts and documentaries abound with protagonists who rise from dark times to become change agents.  But in my gray period, it seemed to me those stories were newsworthy for their uniqueness.  Those survivors were “heroes,” and those heroes were not us.  Most of us had no clue how to change the world.  Most of us felt stuck. 

I was stuck -- definitely.  I was too shy, too small town, too unconnected.  Too inadequate. For solace, I retreated to the quiet comfort of research journals.  

Studies on PTSD were everywhere, and posttraumatic growth was nothing new.  But I found nothing to explain survivor-leadership.  Nothing told me how to coax it into existence – for myself or anyone else.  I would have to untangle this the hard way. 

Over the next few years, I completed a doctorate in leadership and wrote a dissertation from my heart. To decipher what works, I analyzed the journeys of eight trauma survivors who led effective social change.  Eric was one of them. 

For a long time, Eric felt stuck too.  He carried nightmares and grief, anger and fear.  But he also carried hope—secretly at first—that he would matter. He was alone, homeless, uneducated, traumatized.  Yet his quest for purpose was as primal as his quest for life had been.

And across a long journey, Eric met his challenge—first with a simple support group for nearby genocide orphans and eventually a national youth organization and international peace education program.  Ultimately, Eric hopes the healing of young Rwandans will inspire hope and purpose across the globe.

Eric’s story is not a simple one.  Even in his leadership, the night terrors stayed.  The anger persisted.  The tears continued.  But somehow—inside the brokenness—he found purpose. 

I’ve seen such purpose intimately as a trauma therapist for other Rwandan genocide survivors.  It shocked me to discover that the trickle of our refugee system means some are still just arriving from the 1992 massacres.  It did not shock me to hear their longings to contribute.

They are not alone.  Trauma-inspired leadership develops across cultures, across trauma types, and across areas of leadership.  The leaders whose journeys I studied were survivors of genocide, trafficking, medical trauma, gang violence, and child slavery. They were men and women from five continents.  And their gifts to the world include child-slavery abolition, ethnic reconciliation, gang violence prevention, and medical research funding, to name a few.  Posttraumatic leadership is real.  

Today, my middle daughter is a thriving, internationally based professor, and the medical trauma she endured at seventeen feels increasingly remote.  It does not define her.  But I hope she will forgive me if I say that, in some ways, those experiences still define me.  Because in the excruciating days of “after,” I began to craft a new path for myself.  My work addresses a different set of traumas—migration—but grows from what I learned about the passion and wisdom inspired by pain. 

The leadership lens I encountered shifted my view of the oppressed.  Yes, survivors need us to open doors and build bridges.  But mostly, we need them.  We need their undying purpose, their unique understanding, their expansive love.  Whatever they have weathered—war, violence, displacement, disease--we need them.  The hope of the hurting holds power.

 

 

Facing the Underbelly -- Racism and Immigration

Soldiers in camouflage, each with a machine gun, surrounded our two-door Plymouth, but I was more tired than afraid.  In her carseat behind us, our baby began to stir, and I hoped the soldiers wouldn’t order us to unpack the car as their counterparts had at the last checkpoint.  That order was no small task, since my husband Peter and I had filled every inch with food and dishes, clothes and bedding.  It was hard to make it fit again. 

But this time, mercifully, the soldiers merely looked us up and down, inspected our documents, studied our goods through the glass, and directed us to the next checkpoint.  Decades would pass before we understood that we had entered—and safely exited—Guatemala’s indigenous genocide. 

We were naïve twenty-somethings, en route from Texas to Honduras, barely aware of our danger or our privilege.  A family of three White faces carrying three blue U.S. passports, we were not typical Pan American Highway travelers.  We had crossed two borders already, would cross another soon, and at any point could have turned and crossed back the other way.  But for too many people around us, the soldiers with machine guns were a deadly presence, and escape across a border was impossible.

Guatemala was in a “Silent Holocaust” Peter and I knew nothing about, despite our efforts to discern the potential safety of our trip.  The slaughter of Central American indigenous had somehow escaped our attention in Texas—an invisibility that would seem impossible had the targets been White. 

Only decades later, through my dissertation research, did I understand what we had seen.  And only then did I recognize we might have owed our lives to White privilege.  In those dangerous years, the United States denied asylum to 98% of Guatemalans who requested it. 

 

More recently, a friend explained her thoughts about racism by noting that all of us are minorities sometime.  “You’ve been a minority,” she pointed out. 

“It’s not the same,” I objected.  “When I’m the only White person around, people assume I have more money, more education, or more connections.  And they’re usually right.  People assume the opposite about someone with browner skin.”

It’s also true—and this is important—that the U.S. citizenship that helped my family cross those borders would not have happened had my ancestors been browner. 

Before the Civil Rights era, President Trump’s openly racist utterances might have been less shocking.  Immigration and Naturalization laws were overtly racist for most of our history, and Adolf Hitler himself pointed to U.S. immigration policies as a model he liked.  He wrote in Mein Kampf:

It is not, however, in our model German Republic, but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of common sense…(B)y excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People’s State (p. 342).

I did not have Hitler on my mind when we made our wartime border crossings.  In fact, I don’t remember thinking about migration or racial justice at all.  I didn’t have to.  I just assumed we had the right to cross, and it was years before I understood the privilege in that assumption.

It’s easy to miss, as I did, the White supremacy in U.S. immigration law because we’ve lived it from the start.  The Three Fifths Compromise of 1787 and the U.S. Naturalization Law of 1790 reserved citizenship for Whites only.  These were our foundations.  Whiteness was a determining factor for inclusion as “American.” 

In high school history, I dismissed these laws as products of my unenlightened ancestors, not as the roots of my own entitlement.  I saw them as ugly artifacts of their times, but didn’t wonder why my neighbors mostly looked like me.

Today, our fears center on Middle Eastern, Latino, and African newcomers, but our ancestors were more worried about Asia.  Every few years, Congress added another set of prohibitions against Asian entry, and they weren’t afraid to declare their purpose “to preserve…the racial status quo.”

Angel Island was another response to the fear of non-White arrivals.  Our European ancestors had a decent chance of entry through Ellis, but West Coast (mostly Asian) arrivals to Angel Island were greeted with detention and inhumanity.  I understand why we don’t talk about it much. 

But maybe our silence is the reason so little has changed.  The response to a 1921 rise in refugee numbers was an emergency bill “to immediately slow immigration to allow time to develop a more carefully considered immigration law.”  Or in today’s language, “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” 

 

From the Civil Rights era until President Trump, leaders proclaimed—at least on the surface—a need for immigration laws that aligned with egalitarian values. When President Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removing national origin quotas he described quotas as “un-American in the highest sense.”

Unfortunately, like other Civil Rights changes, the new system wore a cloak of egalitarianism without fixing the problem.  In fact, many “diversity” visas went to White European countries, while the changes had a devastating effect on our nearest (non-White) neighbors. 

Before 1965, the people whose homeland my family and I traversed in our Plymouth Champ might have stood a chance in securing a U.S. visa.  Today, the odds are miniscule.  Civil Rights Era changes made entry harder for Latinos by quietly imposing a new hemispheric ceiling.  Visa availability for neighbor countries plummeted, and most legal immigration options reached an end.   

The truth is, we offer zero legal means of entry to most Latin Americans.  Our neighbors cross our southern border without documents because there is no “legal” option—even when the reasons are life or death.

A friend in Honduras messaged me in fear because de facto community leaders entered her family’s home, attacked her brother, and threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave the country.  But everyone he turned to assured him the United States would never grant asylum.  Having seen too many turned away, I could not disagree.  I had nothing to offer. 

Such atrocities happen every day.  I cannot forget the small, frightened girl who cried in my office and could not meet my eyes.  Her mother explained that attackers had entered her daughter’s classroom and threatened to kill the children.  They held the girl’s brother at gunpoint.  So the parents did what anyone would.  They fled.  But that day in my office, the child before me had a new trauma.  Her father was gone—in ICE custody somewhere—and the family did not know where.

The U.S. response is worse now.  Now Customs and Border Patrol turns away families like theirs on arrival, denying their right to petition for legal asylum.  Such impossible restrictions—even in life or death moments—force unthinkable choices.  It isn’t safe to enter at checkpoints, so families who flee join other migrants in death-defying walks through the deserts.  

No one has an official count of border deaths, but Humane Borders documented 3,087 body recovery sites in Arizona alone.  The borderland deserts are our Mediterranean Sea, the coyotes our rubber raft traffickers.  Here too, people die crossing because they have no other choice.  

 

Now that President Trump has again revealed the racism of our immigration policies, we can regain clarity.  We can see the truth, and we can change the unjust system we inherited. We can focus on preventing death in transit, abuse in detention, and exploitation on arrival.  And if we do, our children will look back on us with pride. 

As individuals, we’ve already gained the courage to confront ourselves.  I’m not the younger me who accepted my border-crossing privilege as “natural.”  And I’m not the only older, White American ready to work. 

A few weeks ago, I participated in a rally for a Muslim immigrant who lost a promised job because of her hijab.  We stood outside a mall to share our message, and an older White gentleman left his Christmas shopping, walked over, and asked what was going on.  Like me, he had probably never faced bigotry in his life.  But he responded, “Any kind of discrimination is wrong.”  And within two minutes, he was holding a sign.  He gives me hope. 

Moral Shift and the American Newcomer

The plan began with two truck bombs, one on either side of the apartment complex.  Once the bombs had exploded, but before the dust had settled, the men would run from home to home with their cache of weapons to kill survivors.  Somali Muslim refugees are dangerous, the plotters reasoned, even the babies, so none could be left alive.

The refugees’ rescue came in the form of undercover agents, two rogue members of the plotters’ Kansas militia, who fed their plans to the FBI.

When I read these events in my newsfeed, two pieces of my heart pulled open.  The terror plot was slated for Kansas, my home state, by people who were middle-aged, White Midwesterners--like me.  Their targets were forced migrants, survivors of global terror like the people I connect with—and love—in my work as a leadership educator and trauma therapist.  The rupture between these two groups, these two parts of myself, was palpable. 

“Talk to someone at church,” my husband suggested, so the next morning I stopped Pastor Scot in the hall.  

“Scot, aren’t you from Kansas?” I asked with no explanation.

“Six blocks away,” Scot replied.  “My childhood home is still there.  Six blocks from the apartments.”

I begged Scot to help me respond somehow, act against such atrocity, and he asked the one sensible question.  “What can we do?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted.  “But I’m a researcher.  I’ll find out.”

What I took back to Scot a few weeks later was a summary of decades of research on intergroup violence: red flags that warn communities at risk, interventions that calm (or don’t calm) group conflict.  The data is rich and complex, but to me, it made the most sense through the lens of Dr. Ervin Staub

A child survivor of the Holocaust, and later of Marxism, Dr. Staub eventually became a leading research professor at Amherst.  And his early experiences led him to question the powerful influences behind inhumanity and love. 

Dr. Staub noticed that across time and place, societies who suffer mass violence blame everyday problems on a devalued group.  Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s loss of World War I and the subsequent hyperinflation.  Rwandan Hutus blamed Tutsis for a long list of political and economic woes.  You could name more examples.  They are easy to identify in hindsight, but the key is to see the devaluation before it pulls us under. 

To do this, Dr. Staub explained, we have to catch the early steps.  The blame process is part of a larger moral shift, a transformation of what it means to be good and loving.  During difficult changes (economic decline, political and cultural shifts), people naturally feel threatened.  So if a leader suggests the changes are caused by a target “other,” we feel inclined to band together in self-protection. 

This “other” is usually a group with a history of devaluation, so the community (or nation) is already uncomfortable with them.  Scapegoating isn’t a huge stretch.  We’re not prejudiced, but there are reasons to keep our distance.  It’s responsible to be cautious.  Yes, we are kind and compassionate, but “they” are a threat, so circumstances warrant distinctions between basic rights and “their” rights.

This is how we reach the first level of moral shift, moral disengagement.  The context warrants a different response than what our values normally require.  We have to consider the circumstances. 

From here, the second level, victim exclusion, begins to feel less shocking. 

Victim exclusion places the “other” outside the moral realm.  In other words, we can’t afford to treat them as human because they don’t meet the definition of humanness. 

Most of the time, this level shocks us.  We can’t fathom how Nazi leaders convinced the masses that Jews were “rats.”  And we’re stunned to hear that Rwandan Hutu leaders—and the Kansas militia plotters—openly described their target groups as “cockroaches.”  But moral disengagement makes us vulnerable to beliefs we would normally reject. 

Seeing the “other” as exceptional prepares us to see them as not quite human.  This is the only way I can explain the meme my Facebook friend posted—comparing refugees to rattlesnakes.   

I need to say unequivocally that my friend is a brilliant, respectable, and loving adult.  Someone I’ve known and admired for years, someone who cares about family, faith, and country in ways I will never match.  That was what made his meme so stunning. 

A quick search led me to Sid Miller, Texas agriculture commissioner, who apparently started the refugee-rattlesnake comparison in 2015.  Perhaps Mr. Miller was not the first.  He certainly was not the last.  When leaders dehumanize a group, the rest of us tend to look the other way.  Give them the benefit of the doubt.  Wonder what they know.

Once the “other” is sufficiently dehumanized, the moral shift is complete.  Morality now tells us it is virtuous to inflict pain on the “other.”  We are doing so for the greater social good.  We are doing so to protect our children. 

This is the process behind refugee bans, “extreme vetting,” asylum rejection, and the dismantling of DACA.  It is the process behind VOICE, President Trump’s Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement that urges Americans to call and report “crimes committed by removable criminal aliens.” 

These actions dehumanize new or would-be Americans by telling the rest of us we are vulnerable to threat and harm from them.  It assumes my White Protestant Midwestern self needs to be protected from my Black/Latina/Middle Eastern/Coptic/Jewish/Muslim neighbor.  It encourages me to suspect my neighbor might not be “legal.” 

And our fears ignore the truth—that researchers have repeatedly found either no link between immigration status and crime rate or that immigrants are less likely (PDF) to commit crimes than non-immigrants. Undocumented immigrants hold the lowest crime rates of all. We are not vulnerable.  They are.

The good news is that moral reversal has a remedy.  Moral recovery is possible when we allow ourselves to 1) see what is happening, 2) acknowledge the harm, and 3) connect with the targeted group as fellow humans.   

America’s moments of soul-searching give me hope.  We are strong enough to face ourselves.  Strong enough to face our history.  Strong enough to talk.  And we are strong enough to encounter the humanness of people we fear.

In Garden City, a growing group of physicians are a prime example.  Surprised to find a doorway to the world in the rural Midwest, the doctors saw the town’s newcomers as exactly the people they wanted to know and work for.  So they opened a medical clinic in the same community the militia had targeted.  Ifrah Ahmed, a young community member, observed, "There is still good out there. There are still people who believe in us.” 

Unexpectedly, the presence of refugees helps Garden City and similar Kansas towns reduce the physician shortage that plagues other rural areas.  The doctors who serve the newcomers staff the local hospitals too.  "In the past we had to wait a long amount of time to be seen," one county commissioner explained. "We had to travel to be seen, to get health care that now we can get easily."  When communities—and nations—see the vulnerable as human, everyone wins.