I recently led a racial equity training for progressives where it became clear that people of color needed a separate space to freely discuss racial disparities within the organization and create action steps to combat institutional bias. I split up the group so I could work with the POC and my white co-trainer could work with the white people to understand the concerns raised and identify their next steps to foster equity.
We came back together and I asked each group to share their next steps. Each time I said “white” anxiety filled the room. These white progressives struggled with being named as white. When I said “What did the white caucus discuss?” or my co-trainer said “We as white people...”, they were visibly uncomfortable.
In my experience, white people seem unaccustomed to being racialized. Simply naming their race causes many to squirm or get defensive. In fact, I’m amazed at how often I’ve seen white people respond to the word “white” as though it were a slur, and not just a descriptor.
I asked my friend Susan Raffo, a Twin Cities healer and anti-racist activist who was raised white, why so many progressive white people balk at being called white. She shared this with me. The words from here on out are hers.
You think it’s not a big deal. You’re talking pragmatically about something, not even a lot of emotion when you speak. You’re even saying what feels like the most obvious inconsequential thing, “well, you’re white…” and it stops there. Because you can feel it. That rise in the other person’s body temperature, that gathering storm, and then, depending on the gender, class, age, culture and night before sleep of the other person, you either get shock, rage, defensiveness, woundedness, or that deadly super-charged stillness as the blood drains from their very light face.
White people on the left often hate to be called white. Much of the time, progressive or liberal white people experience this naming as a direct attack, something to get away from, fight back against, or something they just can’t handle, all jittery and anxious, trying to DO something and just making it worse. Sometimes they stand there, bodies all braced and waiting for the moment to pass. And sometimes they completely disappear, ghosts in front of your eyes. This discomfort—even hatred—only increases in times like these, where white nationalism is hyper visible.
From the moment that egg and sperm meet, each of us is becoming a specific kind of person based upon where we live, the cultures we are raised in, and our experiences. This is our conditioning. Those raised to be white are conditioned from birth to accept the glaring contradiction between everything they are taught about love and how to treat people, and treating or witnessing people of color be treated as exceptions to these rules. White people are taught, indirectly through experience and directly through words, that this contradiction is normal, justifying their comfort, even as others suffer. This is what I mean by whiteness. I don’t mean culture. Whiteness is not culture. Whiteness is absence.
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