Description/Guiding Questions:
“If America is to grow out of white-body supremacy, the transformation must largely be led by white Americans. This transformation cannot rely primarily on new laws, policies, procedures, standards, and strategies. We’ve already seen how these are no match for culture. For genuine transformation to take place, white Americans must acknowledge their racialized trauma, move through clean pain, and grow up.” ~Resmaa Menakem, “Whiteness without White Supremacy” from My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, p. 262
“White people in this country have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.” ~James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
After ten years of learning, growth, and exploration of embodied, intersectional white anti-racist political education, facilitation, and community building, we at White Noise Collective are reflecting on what we have learned individually and collectively, where we have come as movements, and what still impedes our work for racial justice for collective liberation. In many ways, we are responding directly to this call from Resmaa Menakem (and James Baldwin before him, and so many others before them) to envision how to love ourselves as white people; how to build a white anti-racist culture that is both welcoming and accountable, strategic but not transactional, and that does not reify aspects of white supremacy culture.
We have been in inquiry this year exploring these themes, and invite you all to continue on in dialogue, where we can sit collectively with some big questions we are holding at our growing edges in white anti-racist culture building. Some of these questions, but of course not all of them, are:
– Recognizing the ways in which white nationalist and white supremacist groups are harnessing white people’s fears, shames, and economic insecurities to recruit them into hate, division, and extremism (as well as offering easy bypass to the difficult emotions that come with recognizing one’s privilege), what would it mean to be building an anti-racist white culture that more deeply meets peoples needs for belonging? How do we build an inviting and identity affirming culture without losing accountability or shirking responsibility for the histories of harm that are ours to account for?
– What is important to identify and articulate about the patterns of white supremacy that occur specifically within White Anti-Racist Culture?
– What critical lessons have you (and your organizations) learned in your explorations of white anti-racist organizing, and what do you see as your growing edges as our political landscapes shift within late stage capitalism and climate change?
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.
Opening Go Round (what’s one thing on your mind / that draws you to this dialogue)
- Excited by Menakem’s call.
- Connect with communities, esp white communities around social justice. Appreciation for WNC!
- How to nurture and sustain loving and supportive space for white folks.
- How do you organize as white people and not be white centered?
- In organizations around white anti-racism, recognizing how important community is to sustaining in this work.
- Culture of belonging in white anti-racist work: how to work with the tendency to push folks away who mirror/embody parts of whiteness that I can’t tolerate in myself. How that trickles into our organizing. How we bring out full selves to the work – not be white centered.
- How do we bring our full selves to the work?
- How do we have a white anti-racist culture that doesn’t breed self-hatred but doesn’t allow people to escape accountability? Experiences I had on my journey, how I wanted to quit.
- Living in larger cancel culture, feeling shame and fear, there never seems to be a right way to show up which is hard when you’ve been conditioned to want something that feels right.
- Cancel culture: bred by social media, if you do one thing wrong you get cast out from the in group; made irredeemable; i think of cancel culture also as focusing not on how what something someone did was wrong, but that they ARE wrong.
- No separation between whiteness and white supremacy, whiteness was created for the purpose of exploitation. Even as I work to take apart white supremacy in myself and whatever ways around me, and yet there is a need for those of us who are in white bodies, what are we replacing white supremacy with? Taking apart and rebuilding. How are we building community and culture that doesn’t shy away; balancing of taking apart and rebuilding at the same time
- A sadness, a heaviness, a discouragement of feeling that i’ve been doing this type of white identity based organizing for ten years and don’t feel super inspired by it presently, a loss of political agency, Desire to be a political agent but don’t feel moved by this work right now
- Prompts feel so large – so much to take in, how to know where to start; when I think about it on a person to person level and the people I love and care about, it is more human; are the people I love safe? Do I feel safe? How can we feel safe together? Do I feel safe with other white people? Am I making it safe for people of color and other white people to be in the world? How to ground into day to day. If I’m not in organizing spaces, what does that mean, and how do I make sure I am participating in the day to day in ways that feel right for my life.
- Tend to want to move back from theory and politics and just move back to the personal experience; have stepped out of a lot of spaces, nice to step back in and see what’s happening and how things are shaping
- Rightness around being white in anti-racist spaces
- Was remembering that over a decade plus i’ve tried to engage with so many white anti-racist organizing groups and nothing stuck, so this question of belonging interests me. What has made me feel I didn’t belong in other spaces? How much of not feeling belonging is mine, I need to just keep showing up, and how much of it is me feeling like I don’t fit in; how much is that this work is just uncomfortable?
- This is the challenge – anti-racism work isn’t about do-do-do, it’s about building relationships rather than “doing”. Even though I’ve been doing this work for a long time I don’t necessarily feel like I have relationships with those people.
- We don’t necessarily have to be reaching out to those who are on the far right, can start by building relationship with people who are already in our circles
- Still new to this area –
- Realize I’ve been living outside of belonging for many months now; have been grateful here
- Lineage of white anti-racist ancestors, there is so much re-rooting in this lineage that feels medicinal
- Been feeling deeply unsettled by what it feels like I’m becoming, and what a lot of white anti-racist cultures are becoming; we think we are practicing liberation, but we are practicing forms of domination, alienation, shame, othering; think we are practicing methods of accountability, but all kinds of other things are happening
- What are the ways we are inviting white folks to feel shame in the face of history, as a way of waking up, and with forms of attack it feels vulnerable to question “how are things not going well in white anti-racist cultures?” instead of defending everything
- Almost embarrassed that I feel discouraged about this work
- What’s the hesitation around organizing? Keep showing up in movement spaces, but identify as “other people organize me”
- Caste, reckoning with history – the book Caste drops me down into a question of “who’s willing to give it up?”; truthfully I have found reckoning with history to be so energizing, I want to talk about it with other white people
- Realize that when something needs to be said, it takes practice! Specifically around handling discomfort; across power imbalances as well
- Exploration of ways that my own experiences of trauma that are not related to whiteness get hooked into and pulled up by white fragility responses that I have; when my white racial stress is activated I have automatic habits that were put there in other ways in me and get pulled up to the surface
- Part of my journey into anti-racism journey was being exiled early on as a queer and trans person; the preacirty of belonging that feels sometimes so brittle and acute in primarily white anti-racist spaces really tugs at that fear of exile, getting kicked out, being wrong, being wrong in ways that feel clearly not singularly about being white
- Hypervigilance of other people is something I’ve really worked to not do over the years, this was something that was obviously trained into me and is not something I want to continue
- Heaviness, sadness, grief; started out about a year ago being very gung-ho, getting my friends to sign up for workshops, divesting, paying land tax, etc; wasn’t successful with a single person – where did this kind of idea that i have to perform and be a good white person and recruit my friends and have something to show for my anti-racist work on paper?
- Started out as a climate activist; see the intersections between social justice and environmental justice work through climate movement; became suspicious of non profit industrial complex because i was pulled into this idea that “i’m going to save the world”, and now I’m volunteering with a mutual aid organization in West Oakland that is primarily BIPOC led, we are a multicultural group with no direct leadership; we have to get over the social spaces we are from in order to get our work done
Open Discussion
- Identity development is a splitting (wanting to distance myself from this person who is embodying toxic white supremacy – is that just self hatred, or does this remind me what I don’t like about my whiteness or about myself and I want to put that on someone else because I’m uncomfortable about what that is for me), par for the course in terms of development
- Coming into awareness of self we move through a stage of doing that; then we come into greater nuance; then we come to a greater integration of all of our own parts and another person’s parts; can hold a little bit more conflicting pieces that make up a whole human
- Even thinking about a training I’ve offered in the past where a participant wanted to distance from the workshop itself because it didn’t feel like it was meeting the urgent need of racist violence in that moment
- What is a generative way to hold this experience that might invite some deeper inquiry for everyone in that scenario?
- Get really scared of triggering white shame in all white spaces; find myself caught in a freeze response; no direction feels viable because shame is going to come up
- For me, and for some other white folks I know, when you first start taking in history through a different lens than you’ve heard before; it is maybe normal depending on your personality structure to “just want to get it right”, it is so uncomfortable and stirring
- In those early stages, no one was explicit with me that “It’s going to be normal that you are going to want to be a good white person”, you want to move through this as quickly as possible to not get stuck there
- Normal to feel shame, but important to metabolize through that; hold more grey space
- If I’m feeling shame, what will happen to me? What will happen to my body? My well being? Something really bad is going to happen…; such a holding, protection, wariness to connect; guardedness, even in white racial justice spaces
- Robin D’Angelo, most white people don’t have skills in tolerating discomfort
- Resmaa Menakem: white perpetrator trauma – immediately this comes up and it’s sickening, frankly, shame comes from that, and what i’m learning from that is to be with it; there really isn’t anything more to do with that
- Immediately i think i have to fix it, solve it, correct it – i understand that as part of my whiteness; really i have to get comfortable with discomfort
- I know that i need to be with white people to do this work, not by myself
- Patterns of shame in white anti-racist culture, important to call out, important to call in in a more loving way, here we are all together growing, regardless of how it is delivered, even if someone is calling me in feels like a call out – triggers the oh no don’t want to trigger the shame bug, the direct route to feeling like i am bad
- Relationships with comrades so important, knowing each other’s fuller lives and not so two dimensional, performative of brilliant rad shit
- Involved in abolition, punishing culture is our default, generations of harm that we are physically reverberating from, and currently must pretend you did not do something wrong so you can belong
- Questions of disposability and punishment: how do we confront that and how it shapes anti-racist spaces?
- Internalized punishment: everywhere i turn i’m doing something wrong, my response is wrong, my response to the response is wrong – if i can be good then i am deserving of community, this is something that lives in me. A feeling that fragility responses are not just harmful but wrong, but those are responses that i have been taught, deeply implanted and embedded in me
- Is this “splitting” a natural process, what it would be like to develop curriculum that draws form parts work: oh this part of you feels like this, is acting out like this, not as totally identified with these parts
- Anti-racism training can be harsh, i’m not sure that white shame or white perpetrator trauma is inherent. When i learn about history, i feel tremendous grief, not shame as identification with it. Ways it is taught is often: this is you, face it, deal with it
- There’s this idea of Jungian shadow, on personal level, on organizational level, what is shadow of whtie anti-racist culture? Could there be a conflicted relationship to power? As a woman i struggle with voice, and as a white person feel like so much i say is problematic. Each of us is going to bring all our pain places in our identity, where we feel separate, less than. What is a wholeness that can be aimed for?
- Relationship between personal processing, relational, and organizing work – organizing work i don’t want to continue in are where white supremacy culture shows up, like the one right way, the rushing that overrides needs. I want to talk about how i am learning and growing and changing. Is it ok to make mistakes. The place where i feel ok to make mistakes is with UNtraining, checks my need to assess others. The discomfort – how do we do it? If i slow down, if we check in with our bodies, any of the practices from Menakem, doing them in real time, not just when i get home – weaving them in
- One of my biggest aha moments coming out of being oblivious and numb – it is horrifying to begin to feel what white supremacy has done, the myths, the silences, it was fucking intense to begin to feel it and say it out loud. I go into the tough stuff. It is key to reclaiming my humanity, collective grief, that we do yucky things together – don’t send me away to do this by myself
- How to allow for space for people to have their trauma responses, when mistakes happen, safety and accountability
- Taking in all this reflection, how we were raised, how we heal on the macro level – time and trust and relationship and how little of that there is on a larger scale of movement organizing. How do we show up with the benefit of the doubt, and what are antidotes to entitlement? I learned to doubt everything i said, because that was the antidote to entitlement. I am trying to make room in my body, our collective body, and it all has to happen right now and it’s so slow
- Have learned from involvement with CRC (https://www.crc4sd.org/), one of their meeting agreements is: “Mistakes are inevitable. Growth is always possible.” We have accountability partners – how can you rectify the mistake, addresses need for community, who will hold us accountable.
- How to subvert individualism. The white anti-racist culture i don’t want to be building is feeling isolated in myself. Practice partners, and community, build my capacity to be more whole
- What are examples of living into this collectivity? Community muscle.
- Joined a trans clinician consultation group and immediately had judgement that i am more of an expert, already othering myself from the group. I remember someone saying for themselves that they want to not be an expert and learn and grow, brought up for me how my superiority was showing up. It is a way i isolate and distance myself. I deny myself care, belonging, holding. How do i show up in a way of both having something to offer and to receive? Also looking at ways i feel inferior, or don’t have something to contribute.
- How do I show up genuinely and believe that I have something to offer and something to receive. – Really appreciate this reflection
- Generative inquiry looking at ways i have made myself both inferior and superior, what i want to bring to anti-racism spaces
- My value in antiracist work is no longer determined by how many people I recruit to donate, join a call, join an organization, etc. – I hit a wall with that; that in itself is so characteristic of performance, numbers, white supremacy, etc., that seems to me to be a toxic expression of white supremacy in our antiracist groups
- Did have to step away from the majority of my white friendships because I was really pushing so hard on them and feeling so alienated; in forming new community I’m starting to have my needs met, which allows me to be in a better place to hold my friends who are less able to touch this work with compassion
- Think of POC friends who hold it all, and are able to say “whenever you are ready to walk through this door, there’s a seat for you!”
- BIPOC folks have always been living through apocalyptic times – I think there is a lesson there for me in contrast to anti-racist work; a lot of poeple have been living this way for a very long time and dealing with it
- Two years ago I spent a period really immersed in shame about my whiteness that I thought I would never get out of – my family is very shamed based, which is a part of it, but also we hook into this collective shame that never gets experienced, and needs to be experienced – really pressing into the shame and not running away from it, and you can’t do it alone, you need to hold hands with it and be with people who tell you “you will get through it, we love you” – this descent and reemergence was for me a very spiritual thing, really bottoming out and coming up the other side more resilient
- I love that idea. That we are taking turns processing through a collective residue of white shame.
- What keeps people here? What is it about the people who stay in anti-racist work? I don’t know, but I’m really asking that question
- When I think this anti-racist work I think about the longevity of it; the pressure that I put on myself in certain aspects of my life, this is a long game, so how am I going to stay in it in a way that doesn’t also cause harm to me in the process
- For me, there has to be something I’m doing physically; I’m a gardener, I think about all the times I use garden tasks to do mental processing, or ease transitions between using different parts of my brain, I work with other people and conflict arises, and how often just doing a thing helps me work through it; i hope that white anti-racist culture can include all of us thinking and being more in touch with what way would be most generative for us to engage, and for there to be a lot of options in that regard
CLOSE OUT WONDERINGS, QUESTIONS, REFLECTIONS
- Thinking about organizational shadows
- Movement shadow, feel something in my chest
- Parts work
- This work brings up so much for folks, maybe few more therapy style tools may be a good idea
- Collective shame and channeling that, working through that
- Urgent, but been this urgent for centuries and millenia – the slow & urgent work continues
- Appreciation for being welcomed in this space, the tone and commitment
- Chewing on idea of what are the unhelpful antidotes to white supremacy culture, how can we offer other antidotes
- Grateful for the open heartedness tonight, gives me hope that so many people are doing whatever you are doing, take away more of an experience of org shadow
- Hard time processing tonight, and grateful to be in stream of it – a lot to take in what each person is saying and want to thanks folks for being so open and vulnerable in the sharing
- Inspired and struck by delicacy and boldness, complexity of this work – how much it takes. Struck by sense of beautiful islands that feel lightyears ahead of everyday reality i interact with, how to bring those worlds together
- Spacious, enjoying listening, the difference of being in white anti-racism spaces and being in a new city with white students for the first time as a history teacher, really feeling the contrast between this convo and the ones i having with folks in my new home
- Excitement, feel something growing that i have been trying to nurture for a long time. This space felt like embodying values that we are wanting to, noticing so much less judgment, distancing and hypervigilance in myself tonight, feels important to name – the process as valuable as the more heady talking
- Feeling tender and grounded
- Awake to how supremacy shows up in my life
- Reminding myself of something i know – the feeling of aliveness is a guide, where i want to go, who i want to be with, has been hard to find the last couple years
- Feeling a big exhale, i have been hypervigilant for so long that i forgot how it is to not feel like that
- Perpetrator trauma is a new concept for me, stirring a lot about the white collective body
- A lot coming for me around accountability and transformative justice – hold true the harm i have done, my ancestors, what does this feel like. The experience of that is a spiritual journey. Anti-racist 12 step.
- Echoing shimmery feelings of gratitude; one of main words with a lot of feelings attached to it is metabolism – identifying shadows, stuckness, patterns, antidotes that were once liberatory becoming stuck is holding back healthy metabolism of how much toxicity we are trying to process; wanting to put the movement back in social movement
- Aware that I’ll be thinking about this for quite some time; haven’t arrived at a specific thing to share, appreciate folks sharing what shame feels like to them both bodily and journeys through it; started training in a martial art and the belt colors all mean things, was just thinking about the journey for all learning and at different stages there is some shared experience and feeling around that
- Flip side of entitlement being doubt! That’s just one thing!
- Ambiguity; building bigger capacity for ambiguous relationships; attraction not promotion, when I do my own healing work and keep in my lane for a while, it allows me to keep more space for ambiguity in my white relationships; creates more safety for others to be who they are and to expand our relationship so they can trust and be more open to hearing what my experience and views are; being open to things evolving in ways that are outside the prescribed norm
- maybe humility is a good middle ground between entitlement and doubt