White people under construction
Since anti-racist protests swept the globe, I have been doing a lot of my own soul-searching and action-taking, but also leading quite a few group conversations with white people about this moment of racial reckoning. To be clear, I don’t have any particular training in this kind of thing (which, one might argue, should preclude me from doing it), but I’ve been attracted to learning about anti-racism and taking action for awhile now, and started doing group work with other white people after the Charleston church shooting in 2015.
Engaging with a wide variety of white folks across the country, with all different sorts of professional affiliations, here’s a bit of the pattern keeping I’ve been doing:
White people are excavating the past harm they’ve done and aren’t sure what to do with it. Is it good to contact a friend or colleague and let them know they’ve been thinking about something they said or did that you now realize is racist, or is that putting extra labor on that person? There is no one answer. Alongside the bigger structural questions about reparations, many of us are navigating a lot of confusion about what repair looks like in a wide variety of interpersonal situations. It’s too bad that more of us haven’t been exposed to, trained in, or experienced transformative or restorative justice practices that would help us think about some of this more clearly. Now is the time to start.
White people’s relationship with one another are seriously strained. Some of us are trying to figure out how to be unconditionally loving with friends who have been called out for racist abuse, but also not let them off the hook. In another era, we might have said, “We know your heart,” but we now feel a responsibility to add, “We know your heart, and it sounds like you might have harmed someone.” It’s hard not to just absolve people we know and love, but complicity no longer feels loving. We’re also having conversations with family and friends that we never did before; it finally feels urgent (it always was, of course). It’s messy as hell. Some of us who consider ourselves further along are exasperated by white people just starting to wake up to racial trauma; we need to get over that. It’s our job to be welcoming.
Relatedly, white people are frustrated with how they were raised by parents and teachers. On one hand, our parents were surely doing the best they could. On the other, why didn’t they do better? Especially in the case of former hippies who took action during the late 60s--why wasn’t structural understanding passed down or did they not actually have a very sophisticated structural analysis? (I actually had an exchange with my own badass mom on this front, and she said that she and my dad didn’t have a structural analysis to speak of.) Same with educators--why did it take until college for our professors to push us to think systemically, not just interpersonally, about race?
White people are discovering that they have bodies (!!!) and that racialized trauma lives in our bodies, too. We are realizing that if we are going to fight racism, we have to reconnect with our own bodies, histories, and trauma. Resmaa Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands, goes a long way towards catapulting a reader into this journey, probably one reason it’s zoomed up the bestseller list in recent weeks. A lot of white people feel deeply disembodied, and a lot of white people have a story about themselves that they are “bad” at feeling things in their bodies.
White people are relieved to be taking action and appropriately suspicious of the sense of relief. It feels empowering to order the books, sign up for the webinars, donate the money, and take anti-racist action. We are actually doing something about racism! Yet it’s easy to slip into a box-checking mentality, which has a white supremacist quality to it. We need to learn how to follow and recognize how much we don’t or shouldn’t have control. We need to feel out a wandering, winding, messy, and relational path that should take us a lifetime to travel. As Austin Channing Brown says, “This is about being better humans.”
I’m so curious, what are you hearing?
(And does anyone have a better term than “affinity group” for these kinds of conversations; I’m not a fan, even as I understand its function.)
Love, love, love what you pulled out here, Courtney. This is such a crucial contribution and one that we need so much more of-- noticing and naming and honoring what's happening in this moment not just on an individual level but a group level. Thanks for doing it so artfully and lovingly.
Here's one more thing I'm seeing: So many white people I love and respect right now feel like they woke up suddenly in a dark room and have to navigate their way to the door. We are desperate to find a light switch that will illuminate everything all at once, a desk or wall that we can use as a guardrail. And so we cling to right answers and get ourselves in a tizzy "Wait.. so is reading White Fragility bad or good? Should I be talking to other white people or should I be shutting up and listening to BIPOC voices? Wait, what's police abolition? Do I have to believe in that?" It is so scary to realize "oh, there's actually no guard rail... and the room is much bigger than I expected.. and it's not actually clear where the exit is... but I can still put one foot in front of the other... and to grab ahold of an unfamiliar hand as I do so." Thank you for making it a bit easier to walk forward in the darkness together.
This encapsulates so much of what has been on my mind, Courtney, thank you for writing as clearly as you do. For many white folks waking up to racialized trauma, I'm the friend who is afraid of being "too much" and overloading my friends and family who are new to the conversation (I work in immigrant rights, and as we know, things are only getting worse by the minute). How do we help our friends/partners/family/colleagues build the muscle for racial literacy & self-examination without exhausting them & ourselves? At what point can I pause reading 6 articles about police brutality a day, and how do I find accountability partners/groups (alternate term for affinity space) who are in the same headspace as us?
In reflection on this article, linked below, here's some of what I wrote this week: I’ve been moving, feeling, and observing how I am breathing differently this summer. With more anxiety comes shorter breaths, more reactivity and jitters, less presence. With more attentiveness to noting pain and feelings comes more capacity to listen to others, to feel pain without being overwhelmed by it, to examine my body’s patterns. A fundamental shift in awareness is making visceral how whiteness and racial performance and the memory that courses and pulses and agitates my cellular veins and skeletal muscles. Whiteness has contorted my body to play small, to enact violence toward myself. The performance act is subtle and violent and memorialized; it’s new and anxious and ever present. Racialized trauma demands my attention to be exposed and transformed. It’s work of healing the multiple generations and voices that live inside me, who have all feared and coveted and exploited and killed Black joy, Black dignity, Black children and mothers and families. Performing whiteness is performing death. Unlearning whiteness is the work of life. I believe that we can unlearn this cult of death and move ourselves toward the “cultural wellsprings that are affirming, nourishing, and empowering.” This is brave work, and it is not optional. It is necessary to stop killing Black people with each breath I take.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/06/08/the-performance-of-white-bodies/?fbclid=IwAR1ghJd7dSSaRMvqC-v-jp1ajnobYcgAb6TVEmJIaj2CLEfOPKw50XoZN6U