Statement on Racism from Board Member, Renata Reich Moise, on behalf of the Wilihelm Reich Infant Trust.

When my mother Eva was a tiny child, one of her first memories was of her father Wilhelm Reich taking her with him, on his shoulders, to a large protest (which perhaps became a riot) in Vienna. The price of food had soared due to hyperinflation, and desperate people were in the streets. She remembers a man in the crowd reached up, pinched her cheek, and said “you aren’t hungry.”

Wilhelm Reich protested, although he himself was not starving, because he saw injustice and could not look away.

In the years which followed, Wilhelm Reich would write The Mass Psychology of Facism. One quote (of several) written 87 years ago, stood out to me this week:

“Hence, it would be hopeless to try to prove to a fascist that black people and Italians are not racially ‘inferior’ to the Teutons. He feels himself to be ‘superior’ and that’s the end of it. The race theory can be refuted only by exposing its irrational functions, of which there are essentially two: that of giving expression to certain unconscious and emotional currents prevalent in the nationalistically disposed man, and of concealing certain psychic tendencies.”

Seventy-eight years ago, Wilhelm Reich, having fled fascism to the United States, wrote:

“Unarmored life…will find a home in the expanses of Maine. A hundred and sixty acres of land on a soft incline facing south and east, six hundred meters above sea level, covered with a young pine forest, a lake in front and mountains on the horizon. Here truth shall be sought and protected from the plague. Here sickness and misery shall be understood and ways discovered for conquering them.”
(from Wilhelm Reich’s diary, 4 September 1942)

This vision takes place on what was once Abenaki Native American land.

For more than 400 years the United States has lived out the story of racial fascism, as have many other places on the planet we call Earth. The horror of real events, generation upon generation, cannot be grasped. History books have written away the truth–do we now have the strength to face what has been (and continues to be) perpetrated upon people of darker skin, or the strength to witness George Floyd’s murder? Rayshard Brooks’? Eric Garner’s? Elijah McClain’s? Breonna Taylor’s? I am trying to face these things, yet I have not been able to watch these videos, listen to audio, read the details. The still photographs burn into my heart, the words won’t leave me; so many saying “I can’t breathe,” and Elijah’s words “I am a vegetarian.”

On Juneteenth, in a Downeast Maine town, not far from where I live, a noose appeared, hanging from a telephone wire.

This is a time of listening, grieving, and acknowledgement, a necessary time of upheaval with many questions of what comes next. I believe my grandfather, were he still alive, would be speaking out for justice. He would be reminding us of the importance of preserving the loving and alive nature of the unarmored child, which is the clearest path to a better world. Despite what he lived through, he had hope and still felt moved to protest injustice when he saw it.

Here at The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, we support and join efforts to expose, protest, and dismantle racism, and we recognize that our mission to engage people in orgonomic science must be intentionally and explicitly inclusive.