Dialogue Description:

“As long as you think you’re white, you’re irrelevant
…And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white.” —James Baldwin

Whiteness was forged in the fires of white supremacy, the two have never been separate. Yet a generation of white and light-skinned anti-racists are faced with the challenge of both identifying as white in order to rightfully own white privilege, while simultaneously unmooring from the whitewashed ‘white’ identity of past and present. In this dialogue we want to take up the beginnings of that challenge. If the road backwards to reclaim our own ancestors has been washed out by generations of colonization, what would it look like, what would it feel like, to seed a new aspirational identity for people who identify as white or light skinned? If ‘white’ people are to heed the call in finally reckoning with the crisis of confronting and then defining themselves/ourselves, how do they/we usher in that new era in a way that reckons with history and with current reality, in all that is hopeful and dire, in order to become people with a soul, intact?

Here are some articles to frame this conversation:

• Excerpts from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (specifically the section about the ‘Dream’)
• James Baldwin- On Being White and Other Lies 
• Helm’s White Racial Identity Development Model

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

• Going back into own ethnic histories has not felt liberating, no way to find pre-colonial identities
• Necessity of community in having longevity in this work – and Baldwin quote about no white community
• Curious if and when white will not be only oppressive
• How white has been framed around protection
• What’s my culture? A sense of longing and seeing – tidbits excavated from history, or vestiges of other cultural lineages, feels empty and disjointed – relationship of culture and land, knitting cultures of significance (Scottish, Irish)
• White racial identity development model  – different experiences of it resonating more or less
• Is white anti-racist a double negative, defined in relation to what?
• As half white and half Japanese, this question of identity has been with me since I was a child, different identifications, internalized racism and anti-semitism
• Racial identities are so entrenched, what are other ways of interacting engaging full humanity
• Curious about the non-linear jumbling of white racial ID model
• I find the culture piece difficult because I do have a culture but don’t always like it
• It can feel empty, fake or appropriative to take symbols from my own alienated ancestry – and they gave up culture to become white
• I want to reckon more with colonization and these vacuums of culture, and not feel this emptiness which keeps taking
• Reclaiming witchcraft
• Something new to move forward
• Read a NY Times article about emancipation of white identity that frustrated me
• Ability to imagine something different, what does not yet exist – inspired by Grace Lee Boggs
• There is some peace or relief in hearing thoughts that are not completely formed for me
• In one of the articles, the history of defining black people related to white self-definition
• Raised Mormon, grew up feeling intact culture deeply instilled, when I let go of religion the culture went with that, full of inheritances related to oppression of others
• How do we recognize white supremacy unraveling?
• What is it to be white and not hate that?
• In workplace, whiteness in my face with hiring practices
• Overwhelming of everywhere I turn in my life, hyper-aware of my whiteness, not wanting to be in a place of self-loathing, how to move forward
• As a Buddhist practitioner, exploration of white privilege comes from love and caring, love makes me want to deconstruct, see blindness, interrupting the repetition of how it plays out
• How to include in this the role of the state and imperialism, how does this individual and community work serve to challenge the state that perpetuates structures of white dominance
• What does it mean to be part of a culture that was formed in relation to denying others’ cultures?
• What are adjectives of “white culture”: individualism, power, presumed innocence, compartmentalization and disconnection, binary worldviews, sense of good self, disembodied, dissonance, wrapped up in ideas and not visceral reality, enchantment with a certain idea, entitlement to resources, safety and protection, wired into defending what have, conditioning of belief in being the best and right way, perfectionism, “objectivity”
• What is it breaking apart these monoliths?
• What is culture, values, practices, habits
• Wide diversity of experiences?
• White supremacy culture (Tema Okun)
• All stereotypes of whiteness are classed
• WASPiness
• The Dream of white middle/upper class aspiration
• What behaviors our economic system rewards, what identity structures
• Powerful to learn histories of IWW and how attempts to forge labor solidarity across racial difference were violently suppressed
• Part of the white identity is state protection
• Fear of what it means to fully be in resistance, to what point can we create an actual shift that confronts power?
• How much is fear consistently running our sense of how we move in the world?
• What are the aspects of a counterculture that are present already?  That are real and here already?
• Gendered experience – as women, have to conform to dominant culture even more strongly in order to “prove ourselves” and our worth
• When we challenge the culture wherever we are there are always repercussions
• It takes a lot to intervene, definitely repercussions
• Acknowledge white activitsts who have struggled against white culture, important part of our legacy.
• Whiteness as encompassing so many different passions, trump, black lives matter, SURJ. WNC encourages us to dialogue with people who are different, ‘difficult conversations’.
• White supremacists now are anti-establishment, we need to figure out how to have conversations across whiteness.
• What do we agree on? Neither of us trust the government. And only cause we agreed on that could I ask, well what about the racism?
• Noticed on line there are not a lot of white people talking about whiteness, especially for
• Seems like a big silence, maybe that’s a good thing since we have had so much floor space.
• Would never have this conversation with any white person, can be very problematic to talk about ‘going beyond whiteness’ with any white person, and so in a group where people have a strong understanding that our identities and culture can never move beyond resisting white supremacy, we should ask the tough questions about defining our identity. Feels like we are in a new era, in the bay, radical community where we are trying to strength and further live into an ‘white anti-racist’ identity
• Anne Braden, talking about AA mentor of hers who said, there is another America and you could be part of the other America.
• Chris Crass called a book called the other America, an America that doesn’t lynch. At a time of not only domestic oppression, but imperialism and militarism and so much complicity in that.
• In terms of creating new culture, some Black friends talking about looking back into the era of slavery for the resilience and the ancestry there, the power.
• For myself, wanting to look back at my ancestors without appropriating
• By controlling and defining others, we relinquished our ability to define ourselves. Attempting to define ourselves, having such a hard time, tied to class and that feels horrible too.
• Coates, those that believe themselves to be white, just calling it the vacuum that it is. people who have co-opted whiteness to be something.
• Counter culture that I want to choose, relinquish the right to define our culture as a whole. Hearing the message of just staying in the vacuum, just be in the not having.
• Whiteness is not a vacuum because it has actions, beliefs attached to it. Whiteness just lacks love and compassion and justice. And there is that culture in us and how can we support each other in becoming conscious.
• Ritual and healing are missing, and need to reconcile what it means to not have that, feel like Im in a vacuum in that sense.
• As an older person, there was a women’s conscious movement and queer consciousness movement, and is it possible that some of what you are saying is generational.
• Thinking of my parents giving up language and culture, and to them as immigrants learning some of the ‘white’ rituals had meaning.
• Im the first generation that never had a relationship with the generation that came over, that assimilation happened, the language had been lost.
• Civil rights movement, and then movements in the 70s, and then the 80’s and there was a void. Trying to reclaim an intergenerational relationship to resistance. Many of our elders were incarcerated or beaten out of the movement.
• Historical process of creating the fiction of the white race, the exchange of being seen as white, connection so fascinating, feeling emptiness when the whole culture is set up to say you belong, its yours. and the old message of ‘de-ethnicize’ and this is all yours
• fetishtization of the culture of origin, stop taking, instead go back to your old ways. But there can be this weird re-inscribing of European whiteness, and European is a fiction.
• Movement away from families in terms of whether people feel like they have a culture.
• Our generation has a tendency to move away from our families more then previous generations. Felt like I had a lot of culture growing up in my family, and then I left and am trying to create a culture just surrounding me.
• Ritual handed down through white middle class protestant, and a new age cult, we just buried my grandma, and it was the first ritual that I had done with my dad and stepmom for so many years. They grew up in white middle class culture, and they rejected that and so we didn’t x-mas, etc. but then there was a gap in the connection.
• Culture of complicating things, what does it mean to re-connect to land and were settlers etc. how to hold both.
• We are uniquely postion, an identity that is marginalized and oppression, we are well positioned to hold that everything is really complex, that is something that I am joyful to claim, even if the somatic experience is painful.
• Coming back to my body, fissure in my family around healing practices, and so having a disability has helped me figure out how to care for my body, so I don’t want to appropriate, so when I find something that helps me heal, I don’t feel like Im taking it, but really fully using it and honoring it.
• Something about the line fo inquiry about following my body, not up in my head weighing the pros and cons of is this mine or not.
• Embodied in who we are, I inherited a way of being that is completely dis-embodied, and so ways that bring me back to my body through breath and meditation are substantive for me.
• Trying to carefully walk through a journey with my parents is redemptive, to try to define something better then what we came from.
• In grad school we did a lot of storytelling, often in community, a powerful way to bring their identity into
• Activism coming out of the movement against police brutality, bringing us to the streets that feels almost like a ritual, and hope it continues. new in the past few years
• Guided story telling- Book on Grief and Praise. Collective grief ceremony, beautiful diverse group of people. Important for myself as a white person, is to explore my grief of my family, important to not make hierarchies of my grief isn’t as important as others.
• Might be a lot of trauma in a lot of peoples lives, on the foundation of white supremacy, even if people don’t explicitly relate it, and it is important to heal in that. It has been hard for me to be ok with healing from my trauma.
• Dancing and mourning. Grew up as a small person very haunted, without a culture to hold that. And now as an adult, im exploring the way whiteness is haunted. In terms of cultural practices that are absent, I think mourning, haunting, grief is very alive.
• White people like scaring themselves. As a colonizer and oppressor, what are ways that we can really deal with the real roots of fear and perpetuation of terror on others, also related to death. One reason why there is such a voracious flocking to Dia de los muertos, beyond asthetic, is because we don’t have culture around death
• What would it look like to create larger rituals of death
• Bodhisattva- don’t reach enlightment until everyone does. As a white person, not fully healing until all white people are healed. not my own personal liberation, until all people achieve it.
• What we have to do to learn and play out our role is traumatic, and the process of that has been greased with blame and shame. That to liberate ourselves is to learn to love ourselves in the ways we have experienced that trauma. Not possible to heal ourselves without intervening in racism. It is the bodhisattva role, our healing has to include that intervention, when we see racism and white privilege acted out.
• Coming back to ritual and supporters, how amazing it would be to heal from the impact of intervening and the trauma of doing that or not. Or story telling. To bring in energies toward that.
• Culture of complexity
• vulnerable, body, story, ritual
• gratitude
• beginning
• value of living in discomfort for a while
• thank you
• rooted-ness
• having an aspirational identity is tied to aspirational communities
• things to think about
• challenged, and open, bodies.
• power of presence, people being together
• all of the trees
• shared experiences
• appreciation as well
• looking for ritual and culture that is already happening.
• whiteness as eucalyptus, state of jones
• what is culture, how we create it?