Reclaiming What Has Been Lost: What “Kumbaya” Still Has to Teach

By Susan M. Glisson

“If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles, then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.”

From Martín Espada’s Imagine the Angels of Bread, 1996

In a recent meeting with a group searching for a way to confront racism in their community, my co-facilitators and I suggested a healing process as one potential methodology to support that work.

With great skepticism, one of the participants asked for a concrete example of how healing work had actually made a difference anywhere.

“Just one,” he said. “Just give me one example.”

I shared the story of my work in Philadelphia, MS, with a multiracial group of citizens to bring a too-long delayed measure of justice in the infamous 1964 civil rights murders there. We began in dialogue through storytelling and active listening. Being heard nurtured healing. That process prompted a trial and conviction of lead Klansman in the case and also in transformative change in community relations and political representation, and in spending public monies more equitably. Healing shifted the group’s attitudes and mindsets, which then altered their actions together.

In the next meeting, we asked the participants about their vision for their work. The same person who wanted a tangible example of success replied.

“I am the pessimist of the group,” he began. “I don’t think anything is going to come of this. You folks are all touchy-feely, New Age, kumbaya, with candles and everything. None of that works. Nothing is going to change.”

He continued, “That example from Philadelphia didn’t prove anything. Those people didn’t change to do what they did. They only did that work to make the town look better for money.”

“Talk is cheap,” I hear often. The doubt is understandable. Far too often, our public discourse is full of sound-bites and vitriol in an endless loop that accomplishes nothing. We listen to convince instead of to understand.

Healing dialogue is the exact opposite. To secure it, we first create spaces of psychological safety that enable participants to be vulnerable and connect as human beings, perhaps for the first time. But this kind of process is often dismissed as a “kumbaya moment.”

Maligned by the Right and the Left, “kumbaya” has become a proxy for labeling the display of emotions or seeking unity as frail and feeble. The stereotyping of the word is relatively new. Its origins lie in the fear that conservatives have of the power of organized, grassroots movements grounded in love, in relationship, and in truth, especially movements for social change in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Before it was a joke, however, “kumbaya” was a plaintive cry for justice.

Historian Vincent Harding once spoke about the white student volunteers who had gathered in Oxford, Ohio, in 1964 for training as civil rights workers in an upcoming project in Mississippi called, “Freedom Summer.” They’d just learned that three men who’d gone to Neshoba County to investigate the burning of a Black church were now missing and presumed dead. The organizers encouraged the volunteers to take some time and think through whether this sobering news altered their commitment to working in the state.

Harding soon joined them. As he walked among each small group of young people, he heard the same utterance from each group.

“They were all singing ‘Kumbaya,’” he marveled.

Black activists had taught them the song, created in post-Civil War and Jim Crow-proscribed Black culture. Born of great despair, the song still had hope that a just God might “come by here,” to liberate a persecuted people.

Every single volunteer chose to go to Mississippi.

In 1964, “kumbaya” meant commitment in spite of violence. It signaled transformative power rooted in a deep-seated belief in truth and justice and to working on behalf of others. It was courage walking. That is power that cannot be destroyed because it resides in an idea enlivened by empathy and love, centered on and driven by the humanity of the oppressed.

Unable to kill it, conservatives searched for another way to blunt what they viewed as encroaching Black and Brown political power. They began belittling “kumbaya.” In their hands, instead of being a reflection of mental health and strength, emotion and human connection became examples of weakness.

This recharacterization is dangerous. It renders a key mechanism of social change a laughingstock. Moreover, the derision of emotion and valorization of toughness and stoicism have been the route to what we now understand is “toxic masculinity.”

The derision of emotion is likely even older. In order to brutalize others in slavery, those socialized as “white” had to decouple themselves from their feelings — they had to create a psychological chasm between head and heart to stomach the atrocities they were committing. They had to destroy empathy. That psychological breach animates the capitalistic, individualistic and white supremacist systems and ideologies from which we now suffer.

Some liberals joined in on the mockery because they, too, don’t want power dynamics to change. They’d just like them dressed up nicely.

Still others dismiss what they believe “kumbaya” represents because there is a disconnect between our understanding of how social change actually happens and how we think it happens.

After generations of collective trauma, we are a broken nation. We are emotionally malnourished from centuries dominated by white internalized supremacy, a mindset that shapes every policy and practice, especially those connected to public safety and criminal justice.

But our methods for addressing these issues haven’t worked.

We ought to have learned by now that laws cannot legislate changed hearts or attitudes. Neither does Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, the corporatized, non-threatening pablum that promises tip sheets and tools on how not to offend anyone, without fundamentally transforming attitudes or inequitable power dynamics. Indeed, new studies suggest that approach makes the problem worse.

To transform mindsets, we must excavate attitudes informed by a belief in a human hierarchy of worth. Convictions only change when a person’s emotions are activated, when empathy is cultivated, which requires being able to individuate, to see another person as a human being. Emotions aren’t roused by lectures and tip sheets or laws or policies, but by stories, told compellingly and truthfully by a credible speaker in the right kind of emotional environment that connects one human heart to another.

Now proven by neuroscience, what some dismiss as “kumbaya” practices are actually the pathways to transformation. In the midst of authentic human connection, we can begin to imagine a new future together. Only cheap talk is cheap.

By debasing the concept of “kumbaya,” we have allowed the Right to undermine the power of love — the kind of love that means laying one’s life down for one’s friends. A kind of love that demands justice for all. The kind of love wedded to solidarity with the oppressed.

The values inherent in the original meaning of “kumbaya” constitute a roadmap to equity: truth-telling; acknowledgement of suffering and injustice; recognition of our common humanity; demands for dignity and equality; beloved community.

How do we build a future grounded in those values? We create the conditions that promote authentic human connection. We slow down instead of bowing to the false urgency of white supremacy that keeps us so exhausted we don’t question systems. We gather in circles to disrupt hierarchy. We listen to each other’s truths in stories, interrupting false narratives of each other. We learn to turn to wonder about another’s journey, instead of shutting down and retreating to corners. We take turns which reminds us every voice must be heard. When we practice these elements of equity, we shift our way of being with each other. We embody these characteristics. We start to realize, as activist/artist Ricardo Levins Morales suggests, that no one should get seconds until everyone gets firsts.

When we shift our way of being, we alter our actions. As activist/organizer Taj James asserts, “shifting our way of being IS equity.”

These ways of being both characterize and cultivate equity in a virtuous cycle. They alert us to the presence of equity and they nurture equity by creating the conditions for it.

We have to practice being this way in order to imagine and create the future in which we wish to live. As educator Stephanie Pace Marshall argues, “We cannot create what we haven’t become.”

Words matter. How we speak with each other matters. To conjugate a language that constructs a new future, we will have to create oases within our brokenness that allow us to practice a new way of being in order to glimpse what is possible. The poet Ocean Vuong argues for the “linguistic existence of a fire escape . . . a way to be vulnerable without shame” so that we can tell each other the truth. He asserts, “We often tell our students, ‘The future’s in your hands.’ But I think the future is actually in your mouth.” It will not be easy to undo decades of conditioning. But it can be done with intention, care, and courage. You can start in your community right now. As more commit to and practice this work, those collective actions create new norms. Those norms cultivate an environment for justice. These processes spark imagination. They enable us to visualize a future where justice is the norm; we have to believe that is possible in order to create it. And we have to experience moments of its foreshadowings to cultivate our belief. Healing is the way.

Together, all of us can begin the work social critic Ivan Illich described as the most revolutionary way to change a society: “to tell an alternative story, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into our future so that we can take the next step.”

In the end, one question above all stays with me. To build an equitable, inclusive, and welcoming society for all, it is incumbent upon all of us and especially those with power over others to ask themselves in every situation in which they have the authority to determine someone else’s fate: what would I do if this person was someone I loved? And then, do that.