A Paradoxical Palm Sunday Truce in Fighting Against Hate
Dean Jacqueline Mattis of Rutgers Univeristy and formerly a Dean at Michigan on Love, Forgiveness, and Altruism.
Palm Sunday commemorates the day the Gospel says Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and was hailed by the people, only to be crucified five days later.
Dean Jacqueline Mattis on love, forgiveness, and altruism
The background to my call for an Easter truce on Palm Sunday
A proposal to defund the Eisenberg Family Depression Center should be on the table because of the unacknowledged hate and racism that thrived at the University of Michigan Clinical Psychology. But for the Christian Holy Holidays, let’s give peace based on justice a chance.
Context
I have been writing a series of Substack articles about the forgotten history of my Michigan Depression Project and Michigan Heart Project in making modest but strategic inroads into the racial hatred that thrived at the University of Michigan, wherever the psychoanalytic faculty had influence.
My narrative revives suppressed but vitally important information, some over 30 years old. Why not let bygones be bygones? Why won’t I just let go? People, both friends and foes, who are unfamiliar with key details of the situation offer that advice as a way of getting out of harassment. In 2024, I am still trying to turn it off.
Things got unbearably uncomfortable for minority and LGBQT grad students more than for me.
That changed when a UofM psychiatrist, Elizabeth Young, collaborated with the anti-psychiatrist David Healy in 2002 to produce bundles of demonizing material that would be in active use after Elizabeth Young had passed. David Healy had given up his medical license under duress and fled Wales to live with a girlfriend in Canada, only to disappear again. So, he was supposedly out of the scene, but not really. His influence lives on in blog posts that denounce vaccination and attack the foundation in Argentina that retains the INHN archives of Holocaust survivors who were so important in my life.—such as Barney “Barney” Caroll, who had also saved the UofM Department of Psychiatry from mediocrity before I ever arrived.
The trash talk between Elizabeth Young and David Healy is currently being used by haters Peter Kinderman and Eiko Fried to discredit me, harm my most intimate personal relationships, and deny me any possibility of earning a livelihood from marketing my expertise. The haters operate through a distributive network that allows grants the privilege to be hateful to me to anyone for any reason who wants to harm me. No questions are asked, and the hater does not even have to know where the information comes from or be able to defend its veracity and relevance. A prime example.
Why call for an Easter truce on Palm Sunday?
For thousands of years, spiritual and religious leaders have selectively called for breaks from the carnage on holidays. Sometimes, the combatants take it upon themselves to temporarily stop the fighting.
The Christmas truce (German: Weihnachtsfrieden; French: Trêve de Noël; Dutch: Kerstbestand) was a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front of the First World War around Christmas 1914.
Pope Francis, the current religious leader of the Catholic Church, had established a tradition of calling for Easter truces on Palm Sunday in public masses or sermons. He skipped 2024 because of a serious illness.
Why do I call on Dean Jacqueline Mattis for the honor of delivering a sermon on Palm Sunday?
Dean Jacqueline Mattis has just testified in my Substack article about the racial harassment and humiliation of students associated with the preservation of the control of grad school and a captive internship by psychoanalytic faculty. Dean Mattis spoke in her capacity as the Black Student Representative to the Faculty of the Michigan Program in Clinical Psychology.
Brace yourself. I chose Dean Mattis because, after being considered such a nuisance and threat to the social order, UoM showered her with honors. Shortly after that, she was appointed to the faculty and then given a position as Dean.
The U of M then began giving Dean Mattis sterling recommendations for giving talks, even after she quickly departed to become an administrator elsewhere. She currently has the tough job of being Dean of Rutgers’ Newark campus.
UofM official PR states
She is the recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award at NYU, and of the Positive Psychology Young Scholars Award from the Templeton Foundation. She serves on the Editorial boards of Spirituality and Psychology and of the Psychology of Women Quarterly.
And specifically for today’s topic:
Her work explores the meanings, manifestations, and functions of religiosity and spirituality among African American and Afri-Caribbean youth and adults—particularly urban-residing youth and adults. Of particular concern is the link between religiosity, spirituality and positive psychological as well as prosocial outcomes among African American and Afri-Caribbean youth and adults. In this line of work she investigates how people conceive of God, how they express religious and spiritual commitment, and how they use their faith to guide decisions and behaviors. She examines the extent to which, and ways in which, various domains of religiosity and spirituality (e.g., people’s self-definition as religious and or spiritual, involvement in formal and public aspects of religious life) inform such positive outcomes as forgiveness, empathy, compassion, altruism, volunteerism, and community involvement among those who live with the challenges associated with urban life.
Dean Jacqueline Mattis on love, forgiveness, and altruism
Transcript
My research focuses on African-American and Afro-Caribbean people in the United States and particularly on the role of religion and spirituality in the lives of African-Americans.
One of the things that I'm particularly interested in is the role that religion and spirituality play in the lives of urban-residing people, particularly those living in low-income or under-resourced communities.
A lot of the work my students and I have done have looked at why do why does someone who can barely afford a meal choose to make a meal available to someone hungrier than they are or they perceive us hungrier than they are.
I have a nine-year-old boy. Why do people choose to give who I had interviewed who spends much of his life giving to his mom and his little sisters?
His entire life is organized around that and if you talk to him his real sense is that God has given so much to him. This is a kid who comes from a really poor family and he really does believe that he has so much richness because he has a mom who laughs he has a sister who adores him who's seven years old.
For him that's that's what gift looks like and so and that's what Grace looks like so for him. He's a spiritual person and his sense of optimism is really profound and the same thing goes for adults.
What goes wrong in communities I've interviewed? A lot of the work that exists in psychology right now focuses on what goes wrong in communities. The consistent focus on what goes wrong leads structures of power ultimately to think about communities of color and particularly African-American urban communities as communities that are communities in despair, communities that are threatening communities that need to be contained and controlled in a variety of ways.
Part of that vision is rooted in racism and and classism and gendered sexism but one of the things that we have a responsibility to own as social scientists is that we're partly responsible for that vision so because we consistently choose to focus on negative aspects of human development in urban centers.
We reinforce this vision that people in urban centers, particularly Black and Brown people, are threatening, problematic, and in need of containment.
So my work focuses on shifting the discourse on trying to understand how the people I know or the people I grew up with how they became as beautiful as they are.
The beauty that I see in the people that I know is the beauty that I see in people in urban spaces generally.
So, my work focuses on again religion and spirituality but on the ways in which people's belief in something bigger than themselves-whether it's God or a system of Gods or something that they they just see as sacred that ultimately shapes their willingness to be loving and forgiving and compassionate and empathic in the lives of others. We are all the Beneficiaries of Grace, beneficiaries of somebody's Grace.
We all have said something all have done something that others could have walked away from us for and if we if they had walked away from us ,we would all be patently alone.
So being able to do that perspective taking but also to be able to do the if we're going to live as a human community we I got to do first for somebody what was done for me even if I don't really remember the moment when the person did the forgiveness thing or the compassion thing?
Why do people forgive? Why do people forgive? We see a lot of police violence. We see a lot of community violence. People who are living with that violence have to make a decision about how to respond and so I'm curious about why people choose in the moments of trauma to forgive those who have hurt them and what it means when you have been forgiven?
How that ultimately shapes your willingness to forgive others so and again in terms of compassion. I’m interested in why people choose to care as deeply as they do and what happens when people are the recipients of profound love, especially unexpected love from strangers, from loved ones, from anyone.
How does the experience of being loved deeply or unexpectedly change how you operate in the world?
To take that different vision of who we are as human beings humanizes and also unflattens the vision of who we are.
My hope is that ultimately if we take this approach to humanity--which is the normal approach that human beings are that loving. right If we take that approach to human beings we ultimately have an opportunity to transform the way that urban centers function.
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