Build a circle

Build a circle

Restorative justice happens in a circle.

Build a circle outdoors. Use whatever material is handy. Build it around a tree, or around a firepit. Make it tiny and intimate, or make it large. A circle is a technology. It is an ancestral technology, at every level a teaching. Our work at the Restorative Practices Alliance happens in a circle. All of our classrooms are circular outdoor classrooms. The circle is the oldest classroom: it harks back to our descent from the trees, our migration onto the savannah, our harnessing of fire.

The fire is the center of the village. Once we harnessed fire, we did not allow it to go out. To create the fire with only sticks, in the Old Way, is an effort and an undertaking. To generate the spark requires much work of the hands. And so, once the fire is started, we do not let it die. When it is time to move the village, we wrap up an ember in wet leaves and we carry it with us. Where we plant it, and light the next fire, is the center of the new village. Around the center we constitute the first classroom, the first council. The tribe in a circle: telling stories, making decisions, holding ceremonies, singing, dancing, making music. To sit around the fire together, in multi-cultural community, is, itself, a restorative practice. To sit like this de-centers whiteness. Whiteness, as a sociological construct, requires hierarchy. A circle demonstrates equity. There is no location in a circle above or below. Every point on the perimeter of the circle is equidistant from its center. The center of the circle is the fire: the light.

In Aramaic, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus says what is generally translated as,

Our Father, which art in Heaven,

Hallowed be thy name

Hallowed means holy. Holy be thy name. The word from whence this comes is transliterated qadash. In Aramaic, Hallowed be thy name is Neth’qadash schmach. Neil Douglas-Klotz, PhD, explains: qadash is from the two Semitic roots, KD, the point or pivot upon which everything turns, and Ash, the image of a circle unfolding from a point with power and heat.

The circle—the pivot at its center, and the radius unfolding—is sacred. In mindfulness we refine our concentration. Con-centr-action. With centering action (the Latin). We come to the circle to become more centered. A circle is defined by a radius that is invariant, in all directions the same on a plane. The plane represents earth. We come to the circle to find our true centers, to cross the chasm from the head to the heart, and make our center there. In Aramaic, again, leba (the heart) means the center of intelligence, the pith, the best part of anything.

Recall, people, that on the savannah, we are living with lions. Predators larger and faster than us, able to hunt in the dark. Our safety is by the fire, in a circle. Each perspective—what can be seen from each seat around the perimeter of the circle—is different, related to the others, and yet with a horizon that is not completely visible from any other location. And in this primal setting, our safety is ensured by the one sitting opposite us, because they can see what is behind us, which we can’t see. I want you to feel this teaching in your bones, because it is a teaching about diversity. In every eco-system, health is a function of diversity. It is so in human eco-systems (i.e., culture) as well. The person who is sitting across from me in the circle—the person farthest away—is the one who can most clearly see what is behind me. What is behind me is what I can’t see: what is invisible to me, what I do not know about myself. Sitting around the fire at night, if there are enough of us (if there is enough diversity), we can see in every direction, out into the darkness.

In Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao te Ching, he says, of the master

She considers those who point out her faults

as her most benevolent teachers.

She thinks of her enemy

as the shadow that she herself casts.

The one sitting across from me sees those most clearly, because they are outside of my frame of reference and therefore dispassionate and not illusioned about my impacts. To see clearly what whiteness is, you must stand outside of it. To see clearly what maleness is, you must stand outside of it. And so on.

In the Restorative Practices model, we have, therefore, a minimum diventity threshold in every cohort. Diventity is a term that was coined by our friend, quantum enthusiast and architect Ayssar Arida, to refer to the density of diversity. In an eco-system, the higher the diventity, the more resilient the system. In our model, we require a certain threshold of diventity, because if there isn’t enough, and everyone is sitting on the same side of the fire, no one will be able to see what is behind them. This is why we don’t want to have a group made of all white people, or all men, or of any monolithic social location. Because it won’t be able to see what it can’t see.

Consider, through this lens, a 2018 sociological study in the United States that reveals that ninety-one percent of white people do not have a single person of color in their intimate social networks. In essence, it means that, as white people, we don’t know who we are. We don’t know what whiteness is. Because no one in our circle is sitting across the fire from us, reflecting that.

This reflection may be, at times, necessarily painful. My friend D’Andre was one of the people who broke through part of my blindness in this regard. Because I kept perpetrating against him, through my own unconsciousness of my whiteness. I wasn’t doing it on purpose, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we were part of a community where I got held accountable, and he did me and himself the honor of calling me on my shit. Only in this way could I learn. That was a kind of grace he gave me, to be honest with me. Most of us white people don’t have the kinds of communities where people of color can be honest with us, because we are so systematically dangerous and fragile. We might want to look at that. Not merely to help people of color, not merely because it’s the moral thing to do, but because not looking at it is KILLING US. We are ill from our own lack of awareness of what our whiteness is, and how it operates, because what we call whiteness is actually a form of systematized disconnection. It has, at one level, little to do with the color of our skin. It has to do with the way we occupy space.

What the circle means, also, is that we can’t leave. We have to face ourselves, and one another. Conflict is always a dangerous opportunity: a chance to get real. At the origin of consciousness is a crime scene. We perpetrate and then we are held accountable. This is how we learn. The circle holds us here, calls us back in, with love and firmness. It helps us wake each other up. This is restorative justice: work that re-connects. Our work is very simple: connection, and the repair of what gets in the way.