Do Better
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When we are unable to face our shadow self or tolerate the full spectrum of our humxn emotions or the emotions of others, then we are ill-equipped to authentically engage in anti-racism. In fact, we are likely causing more, rather than less, harm if we seek to do so without first facing our own selves. It leads to emotional violence like spiritual bypassing*, gaslighting*, white wildness, and so much more (all of which we will discuss!). When BI&WoC are too afraid to face our shadows, we cannot withstand the pain that arises from really realizing the harm we’ve endured, and when white women+ turn away from this work, they center themselves and inflict more harm on BI&WoC. Additionally, when white women+ do not face their shadow, they are unable to quell their fear—their fear of BI&WoC, especially Black women+, and our resilience, connection, and power. And most important, white women+ fear what all white folx fear, be it consciously or unconsciously: that Black and Indigenous folx will treat them the same way they have treated us (a truly terrifying thought!). As we’ll explore, to face our shadow we must acknowledge that our shadow self exists. We must tend to our wounded inner child and continuously partake in the inner work, like challenging our inner white supremacist worldview.
#6—Getting Stuck in Our Feelings
The last major obstacle I frequently witness in this work is getting stuck in our feelings, most often grief. As an empath and highly sensitive person, I’m all in my feelings a lot of the time. But I’m aware that it ain’t doing nobody no favors, and I’m doing major inner work to make modifications. When you get stuck in your feelings, you are getting stuck in your own self, and being stuck in your mind is not advancing anti-racism, it’s settling into self-indulgence. Racial justice brings up big feelings. It is some of the deepest and hardest work you will ever do no matter your race or ethnicity*. You will feel the full range of emotions, from anger to guilt to grief, shame, and sadness. But feeling our feelings ain’t the same as getting stuck in them. Way too often I witness (predominantly cis white) women+ get overwhelmed with emotions about how this work makes them feel, and that’s where they stay. Stuck in a grief-ridden guilt trip. And that’s not helping me, them, or anyone who has been harmed by them specifically or white supremacy on the whole. When you get stuck in your feelings you will inherently make anti-oppression work about you and not about those whom you have harmed, which is missing the point entirely. For BI&WoC, this most often shows up as a tendency to stagnate in grief, shame, or trauma. We often struggle to feel the fulsomeness of our feelings and tolerate the many mixed emotions that arise for us and the white folx we witness while doing this work. So I encourage everyone to feel all your feels, please! Let your feels flag fly. But let yourself truly feel those uncomfortable experiences, especially your personal and collective grief, to move up and out. To process to completion so you can transmute those feelings into supportive action. Fear not! I’ll be helping you here. You ain’t alone.
WORKING WITH WISE COMPASSION
The common thread in all the foregoing obstacles is that they can be combated with compassion, for ourselves and for others. “Compassion” means “to suffer together.” It is the act of truly witnessing another person and their suffering and being motivated to help relieve it in some way. It is similar to empathy, but they ain’t the same. Empathy is the ability to feel for another, but it misses the motivating factor to act on that feeling. In fact, neuroscientists have found that compassion is more beneficial than empathy, as it activates the areas of our brain affiliated with problem-solving, whereas empathy stimulates the areas of our brain affiliated with pain. In short, compassion feels good and leads to action. Empathy feels uncomfortable and leads to overwhelm. Compassion is the way to go, but many of us, especially women and femmes, were taught that compassion means supporting others even if it means ignoring our own needs. In Buddhist theory there is a concept of wise compassion, which is the notion that compassion must include us, not solely the subject we seek to support. It’s the compassionate form of putting your oxygen mask on first, the reverse of which is unwise compassion. Caring for ourselves supports us in caring for others; after all, hurt people often hurt people.
When I started practicing wise compassion it shifted everything. Much of my identity had been wrapped up in serving others, from parents and partners to bosses and best friends. I didn’t realize how undermining my own needs was creating less connection with people in my life, not more. I wasn’t sharing the fullness of myself, nor was I focusing on myself and the work I needed to do in order to acknowledge where I needed to grow and take the necessary actions to water the seeds of change. I learned that caring for myself was not in fact selfish. It was necessary. I learned that racial justice and anti-oppression are revolutionary acts of collective healing, and that healing had to begin within me. There are many other institutional and systemic powers at play, but our personal power plays an important part. Practicing wise compassion and tending to our own heart spaces create connection with ourselves, our emotions, and the wounds that are a part of what prevents us from creating desperately needed personal and collective shifts. If we aren’t able to face our shit, then we can’t show up for ourselves to do this work and we definitely cannot contribute to healing the collective. We will fail at overcoming one of our first big obstacles to achieving anti-racism: ourselves. This requires us to slow down. To rest. To get off the capitalist patriarchal hamster wheel of constantly DOing rather than BEing. And feel so we can heal. In the words of Audre Lorde, “Within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehum[x]nization, our feelings were not meant to survive.”7 Under white supremacy, there is so much of ourselves that was never meant to survive—especially for queer and trans Black and Indigenous women+. Acknowledging where we get stuck in the quest for racial justice and showering ourselves in wise compassion in order to overcome those obstacles is how we ensure survival. Our own and each other’s.
Spiritual Soulcare Offering
Heart Check-In
To lean into our wise compassion, you can use acts of soulcare to assist you in cultivating more connection with yourself and ultimately with others.
After my mother died, I needed to tangibly check in with myself so I could connect with my feelings and properly care for my heart. I created a daily phone alert that asks “How is your heart doing?” and six years later it still serves as a reminder to take a moment, pause, and actually check in with my heart. I’ve found it super helpful and maybe you will too. I suggest setting the alert for a time of day when you can pause to be with yourself rather than simply ignoring it. Maybe first thing in the morning, just before bed, or over lunch.
WHETHER YOU TRY THE PHONE ALERT OR NOT, SET AN INTENTION TO CHECK IN WITH YOUR HEART EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT THREE TO FOUR DAYS, THEN REFLECT ON THE FOLLOWING:
How has my heart been feeling?
Does my heart feel different from how I thought it might when I first checked in?
What am I most afraid to feel? Why? How is this obstructing my anti-racist efforts?
How can I better move toward that which I am not wanting to feel?
Call to Action
Getting Past “Good”
When you find yourself feeling defensive or fearful regarding racial justice or anti-oppression, try the following:
1) Check in to see if your need to be good and right is running the show.
2) Pause, reflect, take a breath. Then ask yourself: Am I trying to feel or be perceived as “good” in this moment? Why? What am I afraid of?
Am I trying to be “right” about this situation? Why? What do I believe I will gain from “being right”? Is that true?
What might I lose from my need to “be right”? Whom might it harm? Why?
How might my need to be (or be perceived as) good and right interfere with my need for connection? For understanding? For support?
3) For BI&PoC: Am I tempering myself (through silence, action, inaction, or otherwise) in order to be believed or accepted by whiteness?
THREE
White Supremacy Starts Within
Your willingness to look at your darkness is what empowers you to change.
—IYANLA VANZANT
In 1851, Sojourner Truth gave what is known as the “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, a rallying decree calling on the white community to consider her doubly oppressed experience living at the intersection of being both Black and woman. Over 160 years later, BI&WoC around the world are still forced to ask this same. Damn. Question. We are still fighting for the right to be recognized, respected, and supported because white supremacy continues to censor us, to abuse us, and to attempt our complete eradication. Racial justice activists and anti-racism education have erupted in popular culture, particularly following the violent murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and so many more Black folx, be it by police or vigilantes, as revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, we are enduring deepening racial inequities from a global health crisis, an influx of performative allyship from individuals and corporations alike, and the attempted white-washing* of the Black Lives Matter movement. We are mired in personal and collective race-based grief. Yet there is still an inability to create lasting, meaningful change despite “good intentions.” So how do we acknowledge and address the white supremacist status quo? Where can we learn steps for creating lasting solutions? What tools are required for our collective healing? White supremacy creates grief and loss for all people, albeit in different ways. To address and process the oppression that we observe and experience out in the world, we need to first take a long, sobering exploration inside our own universe.
White supremacy is undoubtedly a systemic issue, but it starts in the hearts and minds of men+, women+, and children. Usually white ones. Often when we think of white supremacy and racism, we think of external, overt acts of harm. We picture Nazis in Germany, or the word “nigger” leaving someone’s lips in disdain. We imagine tangible and egregious actions that we can point to and say, “That is racist.” But as we’ll learn, that ain’t the way white supremacy usually works. White supremacy starts within because the broader social systems that create institutions of oppression started within. In the hearts and minds of white folx who disseminated this ideology across all races and gender identities. White supremacy is taught, learned, and absorbed from birth if not before. There are numerous doll test studies where both white and Black children as young as three years old affiliate white skin as prettier, cleaner, and/or better than dark skin. Both Black and white toddlers alike exhibit a strong internalized preference for whiteness, and this bias* remains in adulthood.1
Since white supremacy is part and parcel of the global status quo, it infiltrates every aspect of who we are and how we view the world and our place within it. Consciously and unconsciously. Racism, internalized oppression, and white supremacy are a part of our collective genetic makeup and the thread composing the layered fabric of our global tapestry. They are insidious by design. So much so that we are often incapable of recognizing, let alone naming, them. Even, and often especially, when they exist within ourselves. And make no mistake here, beloveds, racism is housed within every white person on the planet. Internalized oppression afflicts all BI&PoC, and all white folx and non-Black PoC uphold anti-Blackness. All humxns are prone to perpetuating white supremacy because white supremacy is the status quo.
* * *
There is a time and place for logic and academic analysis, but when it comes to healing the chasm that is the racial divide and creating understanding across ethnic, cultural, and racial lines, we must do so from our heart as well as our mind. Education alone is not enough. If it were, I wouldn’t still need to repeat the same shit as Harriet Tubman, Marsha P. Johnson, or Malcolm X. We must learn to tolerate the challenging and conflicting emotions that arise when we address racism and white supremacy. Emotions like grief, guilt, anger, shame, hope, anxiety, relief, fear, and sadness, to name but a few. We must acclimate our body to withstand our own discomfort and shower ourselves in compassion so we have a shot at bestowing that same compassion on others—particularly queer and trans Black and Indigenous women+ who are most marginalized by race and gender identity oppression. Withstanding our discomfort also requires understanding that discomfort is a necessary and constant part of the work. Our goal is not to feel comfortable, because we won’t. It is to better tolerate the discomfort that inherently arises. No matter your race, unless and until the violent and uncomfortable truths of white supremacy have resonated through your every cell, you will be unmotivated and ill-equipped to take the lifelong, daily, and demanding actions required to dismantle all systems of oppression as they exist within and outside of us, and create a world where all humxns can finally breathe easy.
White supremacy is one of the greatest forms of collective social trauma in the world. Failing to address the race-based grief faced by all humxns is a failure to heal our personal and collective pain. And our healing will be the revolution. Racism is an inside job. Because we cannot heal what we refuse to reveal.
WHERE WHITE WOMEN+ GET RACISM WRONG
Time and time again I encounter well-intentioned white women+ who want to commit to racial justice but have fooled themselves into believing that racism only exists outside of themselves and their direct and immediate control. Well, I’m here to call bullshit! The truth is that white supremacy starts within and therefore all anti-racism efforts must as well. At least any efforts that have a hope in hell of creating substantive change. It can be easy to think you are “doing the work” solely by addressing things outside of the four corners of your physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental being. But it’s a lie. A ruse you have been sold by a capitalist system that wants you to stay busy and bothered so you do not and cannot recognize the larger system for what it is—racist, oppressive, and stacked against anyone who doesn’t belong to the dominant groups.
First, it is vital that we address what “doing the work” in a racial justice context even means. To use a garden as a metaphor—and forgive me here, because I am nobody’s gardener—is it pulling up your sleeves and getting your elbows dirty pulling out the weeds? Is it nourishing the seedlings you’ve planted so they have what they need to thrive? Or is it being with yourself so you better understand the ins and outs of how the garden actually functions, and how your personal experiences and ideologies are influencing every garden-related action and thus the well-being of the garden itself? I believe it’s all of the above. But we can’t effectively weed away the hate or nourish those who have been subjected to it without first understanding the intricacies of the ecosystem you’re working in and how you contribute to its existence. Ya dig?
When I ask white women+ what they are doing to address racial injustice, be it in my workshops or on the interwebs, I routinely receive answers that allude to a racist world and ideology that exists entirely separate from them, their actions (or inactions), and their worldview. It’s a tempting and intentional mirage created to other themselves from the white supremacist issue and the ills it causes the BI&PoC whom it was constructed to oppress. How convenient. But, in the words of Randy Jackson, it’s a no from me, dawg. I don’t have time for this self-aggrandizing line of fake reasoning. Too many Black folx are dying. When I receive common white answers in response to the “what are you doing?” query, like posting about anti-racism educators on Instagram, attending a rally, or donating to mutual aid, it can be hard to keep my cool. These are all important and appreciated acts, but they miss the most critical mark: addressing the ways in which you as an individual perpetuate white supremacy day in and day out. When you head out into the world in the hopes of taking tangible action to mitigate discrimination but have failed to first address the ways in which you have and continue to participate in the very oppression you are seeking to eradicate, you perpetuate more of the same. You operate f
rom the oppressive systems socially encoded into your DNA and ignore your power, privilege, and the violence that ensues when you are ill prepared to illuminate and remedy your shadows. In sum, you cause harm. In no small measure. I am a queer Black woman and I face many oppressions as a result of that intersecting identity. And I also hold many privileges as a cisgender, light-skinned, multiracial, Canadian, English-speaking, highly educated, neurotypical, non-disabled, financially secure, thin, young(ish) person in a heterosexual-passing marriage. It is my work to unearth and address my own privileges so I can cause less harm to those whom I oppress. To acknowledge my status as an oppressed oppressor. White women+ need to do the same, but y’all are struggling.
White women+ and non-Black PoC are also prone to telling me how much they support me and my work while failing to engage in daily, personal racial justice or Black liberation education or efforts themselves. This itself is an act of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Let me be real clear: it is utterly impossible to support me or any of the work I do when you aren’t actively participating in racial justice and addressing anti-Blackness yourself. Full stop. How precisely are you supporting me or advancing racial justice when you can’t even acknowledge that you are implicated in the oppressive systems of whiteness to which you belong and perpetuate simply by being white or benefitting from whiteness as a non-Black PoC? How can you help heal the collective divide when you refuse to heal your own race-based hurts as a means to hold compassionate space for the harms you and white supremacy have and continue to inflict on Black and Indigenous women+? The answer is simple: you can’t. Any belief or intention to exclude your own actions or inactions is performative at best and deeply destructive at worst.