White Supremacy Rehab
May 25, 2020, one day after declaring my engagement to building a Regenerative Eco-Village, George Floyd, an unarmed black man was brutally murdered by police in Minneapolis. The world erupted. We, white people, were being called (again) into the reality that if we weren’t actively dismantling systems of white supremacy, we were complicit in upholding them. Oof, gut check. I had dedicated my privileged life and work to dismantling the illusion of separation at the root of all suffering on the spiritual level (with mostly white people) and meanwhile BIPOC people were fighting for their right to exist. Where was I in all this? If white supremacy, as Resmaa Menakem writes, is in the “air we breathe”, how was it circulating through me and into the world?
Instead of sit with the discomfort of that question, I joined a march, “passed the mic”, donated to Shaun King, and wept often. I could feel the proverbial eaves of my privileged 4400 Sq. ft. perch on Mt. Tam, shared with other white friends, start to crumble. I had always longed for more diverse community, but didn’t prioritize it. I knew my dream to co-create a diverse, regenerative community and avoid unwittingly perpetuating biased systems was dependent on getting intimate with how the code of white supremacy ran inside my operating system and get trained in how to navigate it.
Definitions:
Racist: “One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.”
Anti-Racist: “ One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.” — Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Anti-Racist
Facing White Supremacy
“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin, New York Times, 1961.
Hand painted and Amazon ordered Black Lives Matter signs started popping up in the town where I lived, a stunningly beautiful place where the median annual income is $137,000 and the population 89.1% white. I watched the viral video by Kimberly Jones about how the game of capitalism is rigged in favor of white people and had the humiliating feeling that “winning” at this game is sad and pathetic. I’m not one of them, I would think to myself, I rent!
I have just learned how to game the game and live like I have intergenerational wealth. I use my privilege for good! The trouble with white supremacy being in the air we breathe is how it shapeshifts every thought and motivation, often without detection. Whether I liked it or not, I was in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Omelas, where utopia comes at a collectively agreed upon cost. Someone else’s misery.
Like any addiction, I can be conscious of it, and still want it. The grooves in my brain that long for the power, influence, and luxury of privilege are old and deep. This game design is a matrix of manipulation, conditioning the majority of us to believe our worth is earned by playing and ending up, never enough. But to give it up? My head start in this insane game? Is that even possible? Can I exploit it for good? If it is in the air I breathe, is there any way to design a new game? Can I help create a community without unconsciously rigging it in white favor?
Dismantling White Supremacy
I started with a weekend course “Seeing the Racial Water” with Robin D’Angelo, author of White Fragility, and Somatic Therapist Carlin Quinn. (I know D’Angelo’s work is controversial and learning from, and paying, BIPOC teachers is essential to this work, and this is where I started.) Listening to white White Fragility, driving around Mill Valley, I cringed at my need to nod too enthusiastically, spiritually bypass, dissect, blame, defend, and fix. I witnessed myself wanting “answers” of what to do and say so I didn’t do harm to BIPOC people and mostly to be perceived as a good white person. Wanting to be good and pursuit of “goodness” is ancient and biblical and for me, the underlying issue. My inner do-gooder is an old friend at this point and just making sure she doesn’t mount her soapbox of righteousness, or flagellate me, is my charge.
Systemic Racism: one group’s racial prejudice backed by legal authority and institutional control which then becomes internalized
Over the weekend I was on an inner rollercoaster through curious and emotional adult, rigorous analyst, skeptic, white savior, and white devil. None of this is my fault to it’s all my fault. It is no surprise, I was centering ME. I noticed how each emotionally charged response was a strategy to avoid feeling. I didn’t want to feel the pain and heartbreak of horrific and persistent brutality suffered by people of color for hundreds of years. I didn’t want to feel the acute loss and sadness at how limited my life has been by having so few diverse humans in it. I didn’t want to admit I was in a white body at all. The whole weekend was about waking up inside our white bodies, admitting we have a racism problem, feeling the pain this causes, and owning the fact that white people are the ones who can, and must, dismantle it.
Graduating from Shame
“We don’t have to feel guilty about our racial socialization, just responsible for changing it.” — Robin D’Angelo
I was on day 60 of waking up at 6:30am every morning to co-host Virtual Sanctuary, an online space for two hours of morning spiritual practice. My housemate Kathryn Robinson and I would do an hour of silent meditation, sing and chant for 30 min, and speak to the shift from extractive to regenerative ways of being for another 30 min. It was the most disciplined I have ever been in my morning practice and it held me as I was thrust through the spin cycle of 2020 and ‘called in’ to sit with the shame of not actively dismantling my own white supremacy sooner.
“Fighting to end white supremacy is not an act of charity but is rather a last grasp at being human for white people, at rescuing our own souls from continuing to perpetrate heinous violence against other humans beings, the only just or moral choice in the face of such a system, and our responsibility in order to be fully human.” (Thompson, 2001, p. 20)
Shame is my first step in white supremacy rehab. I could feel it stumble onto the stage, wasted with loathing and pick up the mic, glaring at me. “What a fucking fraud,” it said. “You don’t really want this to change, you love feeling supreme. You will choose safety over and over again.” Waiting in the wings is my white savior in her habit frothing at the mouth to be chosen for duty. But, I have been training for this. I let them be and witnessed them, knowing shame and all her minions was just a way station. I knew this was just another layer of awakening, each layer, a death of supremacy. I knew that if I felt the pain underneath all that shame I would no longer have any “supreme” identity to hold onto. Resistance would be my next step in rehab. Then an even deeper dive with Brig Feltus. More on that soon.
Findings thus far: White, and human, supremacy is a strategy of ego to define its worth and hold onto power and safety in hierarchy and manufactured meaning. Inside ALL of us who breathe this air is a weasel of a tiny, white wizard hiding behind a curtain writing narratives and catchy tunes to keep us in pursuit of his definition of success, Oz and Omelas. Once he is revealed, however, the work is getting this earworm narrative out of our heads and bodies, one conscious moment at a time.
Next: Why Regenerative?
White Supremacy Rehab Resources:
Read: My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem, How to Be Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi, Me and White Supremacy, Layla F. Saad
Act: Ways to Pay Reparations, Business Insider
Watch: I am Not Your Negro Documentary, James Baldwin
Attend:
- Free Racialized Trauma Course, Resmaa Menakem
- Heal Thyself Course, Reverend Brig Feltus
- Whiteness at Work Course, Desiree Adaway
- Somatic Healing Session, Yael Weissberg
I work with executives, entrepreneurs and storytellers to connect to their confidence, passion, and purpose, in private 1:1 leadership coaching sessions. Want to discover what makes you come alive, and and how to lean into it? Sign up for coaching sessions, designed to meet you where you are in your journey. Online or in-person intensives in the Azores, Portugal.
