White Work

“If you bring forth what is in you, it will save your life. If you do not, it will destroy your life.” - The Gospel of Thomas as quoted to me by Gina Breedlove, May 26, 2020. 

Hot pink and yellow sticky notes litter my desk and line the bottom of my computer screen. On some, I’ve written provocations for new essays, “contradictions of white work,” or questions I’m considering, “is resistance the opposite of complicity?” A pink note holds a to-do list, and others reflect commitments I have made to myself and others. One is a warning, “the Grimke sisters: proof that you can be a white abolitionist and not wish to abolish racial hierarchy.” The most prominently placed reads “part of our work is articulating a future people want to move towards,” a daily inspiration by writer, emergent strategist, and pleasure activist adrienne maree brown. 

I am the descendant of both enslavers and justice-seekers, and I carry these lineages with me as I long for a future where whiteness is no longer defined by domination and violence. My maternal line can be traced back for centuries in North Carolina and many of those ancestors displaced Waccamau and other Native peoples, enslaved African peoples and their descendants, and/or participated and were complicit in other forms of racism.  Some of my ancestors were justice-seekers, and it is their work– supporting Black leaders to open and expand educational and vocational opportunities for Pender County’s Black community, marching for civil rights, and fighting to end segregation– that I wish to build on.  Which is to say, I long to work alongside others who wish to remake the world anew, by healing and repairing the harm of our white ancestors and living kin. 

I’ve come to think of this work as “white work”: that is, the work white people must do to heal and repair the harms of slavery and the displacement and genocide of Native American peoples, the legacy of which continues to be among the most defining features of our society. This includes an inward focus to understand and disarm the oppressive and harmful forces within us, as well as how these forces manifest externally through our actions and complicit inaction. White work when taken up in earnest with a commitment to trying again when we get it wrong, is essential to building a world of safety, belonging, joy, and thriving that so many of us are longing for.

“[The arrival of the Pilgrims] meant death for the Indians, enslavement for the blacks, and spiritual disaster for those homeless Europeans who now call themselves Americans and who have never been able to resolve their relationship either to the continent they fled or to the continent conquered.” - James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

A few years ago, I was in tremendous pain. I was once again, a few years into a nonprofit job full of despair and disappointment, struggling to imagine how I would do my job and serve my purpose, and really confused about why those things felt in conflict and why I found my career so unsatisfying. 

For most of my thirties, I believed that working as a nonprofit leader was the best way to make my contribution to society. I built organizations, raised tens-of-millions of dollars, wrote many strategic plans and theories of change, and created scores of partnerships. And I felt like none of it really mattered. Which is not to say there aren’t great nonprofits doing really important work, but you know something is wrong when the “good work” you’re doing leaves you feeling empty; my spirit could only take so much incongruence.

This was made ever more clear to me in May of 2020. You see, I am one of those well intentioned white folks who believed in racial justice, who was a deeply moved college student reading James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Gloria Anzaldua, and Gwendolyn Brooks, who started DEI initiatives where there were none, who read White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist. And yet, when I cried for Ahmaud Arbury, who was lynched by vigilantes while running in his Georgia neighborhood, or numbed out at Derrick Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, I did so from a distance, unable to fully see that my humanity was implicated by these brutal acts of violence. My ability to compartmentalize anti-Black violence is both taught by and directly tied to my complicity in white supremacy. 

It was during a phone call the day after George Floyd was murdered that a friend held a mirror up for me. When I asked my friend Angel how he was doing in the face of another case of police brutality, he encouraged me to ask that question of myself: How am I doing and why do I (and so many other white people) respond to anti-Black violence by compartmentalizing it and acting as if it only affects Black people? Up until that moment, I didn’t realize that as a white progressive, my conditioning was to see the work of racial justice as for other people with no regard for my own stake in the matter. I know I’m not alone – there are a lot of white progressives who see things this way and it’s critical that we shift our perspective because we have to hold power differently. Acts of charity depend upon the very culture of domination that justice requires we upend. 

The dissonance I experienced between my life and my longing [see note below] was causing the pain. For all of the racial justice work I was doing, my body held the wisdom that I was harmed by the same systems of oppression that uphold anti-Black violence, and that I’d better work to dismantle those systems, otherwise I would never be able to escape the anguish of my inherited spiritual disaster. 

A week later, I quit my job.

Our conditioning will have us white people resist wrestling with our whiteness. On the face of it, many well-intentioned white people may not even recognize the need to do so because we are steeped in a culture that is engineered to obscure the facts of white identity: whiteness didn’t exist until it was codified in the US Naturalization Act of 1790; most of our ancestors perpetrated violence against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people either explicitly or were complicit in their silence; we white people have materially benefited from violent, extractive, and unjust economic, political, and social systems for centuries; and on and on. 

Whiteness is not the default or norm; it is one of many different racial identities, experiences, and cultures. Seeing the truth of this helps to expose just how insidious and pervasive white supremacy culture is. Exploring the implications of this truth with other white people is a beginning to healing ourselves and white culture, a precondition of our collective healing from American racism. 

Whiteness is an inheritance of violence and ill-begotten privileges. It is uncomfortable to tell that truth. Doing so often brings out feelings of defensiveness, shame, and pain, but in order to disarm our conditioning, we need to understand and address together the ways in which white supremacy culture lives within us. 

Try an exercise with me.

Re-read the first sentence of the last paragraph again. To be white is to embody a history of abject violence and greed. 

What happens in your body? Did your heart race? Is your breathing shallow?

Are you feeling angry, sad, or nothing? What happens when you notice your reaction? 

Can you believe that this statement is true and trust that there is a freedom in telling it?  

I don’t think I am alone in my experience of pain, shame, and alienation. The power of these feelings is greatly diminished when shared with others, and when we are able to move beyond them, we are truly able to do the slow work of healing and repair in a more whole and healthy way. We become less of a liability, less weaponized, and more trustworthy. I emphasize the power of community because dominant systems rarify belonging. The supposed precarity of our belonging– especially for white people– has us hold on tighter to our place on the ladder of racial hierarchy. When I understood that I could belong to myself and to a community of people who didn't buy into this tenuous relationship, I was closer to freedom than I had ever been. 

I long for a world where whiteness is not defined by domination and violence, and where my ancestors’ disavowal of our cultural heritage, for the false affordances of a white identity, is reckoned with. I believe that if enough of us take up the work of healing ourselves and our relationship with our lineages, that the falsehoods obscuring our shame, fear, and alienation will no longer serve us, because the truth about where we come from and what has been done in our name and by our people, is finally being told and the harm may be repaired.  As Bryan Stevenson reminds us, first we must tell the truth and then we can work towards reconciliation. 

I have resisted writing publicly about this white work for a variety of reasons, predictable as they may be– the judgment of others and the fear that my words will be inadequate or misconstrued. But white supremacy culture manufactures these and other perceived risks to maintain white dominance. I – and other white people– can’t afford to be concerned with possible embarrassment, or getting it wrong, while the lives of Black and Brown Americans are at real risk every day.  We also can’t afford to ignore the cost of living in a culture of domination any longer; the stakes are too high, the suffering too great. 

I wish to serve as an invitation to other white people to take up this work with me and thousands of others who are working to deepen commitments to racial justice through our daily lives. I write publicly about my experience as a way of finding others who share my longings, so that we may work together to articulate and build a future people wish to move towards. 

Do you see some of yourself in my story? What was a moment in your life where you gained more consciousness about your own whiteness? Do you want support to figure out how to move from your good intentions into action? Are you exploring white work in your family or organization and wanting to be in community with others doing the same? I’d love to hear from you.

Notes:

“Closing the distance between my life and my longing” is language from Tanaïs’ extraordinary memoir, In Sensorium: Notes for My People. This memoir, published in 2021, has stayed with me for so many reasons. The author packs a personal and political history into language that is as incisive as it is beautiful. When they describe witnessing a lover’s pain as the result of a dissonance between his life and his longing, they gave me language to understand myself and my own experience better, a gift I only hope to provide to any one of my readers some day. Thank you for your beautiful art, Tanaïs.