“It is time to heal.”

“May we begin the healing process.”

“Prayers for healing.”

The white refrain for healing has begun. I have heard many times before.

I despise racism. I also want our society to heal from its persistent violence.

Racism is painful and appalling. There is no comfort or serenity in a cycle of violence that does not seem to be going away any time soon. Racial violence is just as it was in the 60’s and well before the Civil Rights Movement just as terrorism existed well before 9/11. These things have not gone away, they have only been pushed around. Ferguson in Missouri and ISIS in Iraq are two acute events in a chronic and persistent set of problems that will repeat.

They will repeat because we will work on only the symptoms long enough for the problem to “go away.” That’s what “healing” really means in the end. We want to have the illusion that racism, injustice, torture, inequality, abuse, and so on can be healed with the wave of a magic wand (or prayer). Saying “Prayers ascending” on a Facebook post, liking someone’s passive aggressive link to an article, retweeting someone else’s thoughts on an issue, and the white conscience is once again free to do as it would without hindrance.

The prayer for healing is too often the white cry of the annoyed and bothered.

This wound is too bloody and too gaping for healing yet. This body is way too riddled with bullets to be sewn up. Let’s continue to examine the dead body of Michael Brown and to pull the bullets out before we pray for healing. We need to be disturbed by it. This is grotesque stuff that messes up all boundaries and we need to be uncomfortable. I need to be uncomfortable.

This is still trauma and we haven’t the right to push Michael Brown’s body in the recovery room where we think someone else will deal with it. In recovery is the only place where we can start talking about healing. Who among us believes that we are there just yet?