What a Time to Be Alive
Right now, we are in a fast river together—every day there are changes that seemed unimaginable until they occurred.
If you are a white person (or a man) this is a time of intentionally relinquishing power, or having it pulled out from under you. I know it seems fast and everywhere, but it’s not rapids, not a waterfall, not a tsunami. Most people who aren’t white have, in our lineages or lived experiences, the whiplash of much more drastic changes that have been placed upon us by your ancestors. Imagine being snatched from home and shipped into slavery, weighed and measured, worked to death, lynched daily, reminded that our lives are expendable at any moment (and yes this is true even right now, hence #blacklivesmatter and #defundthepolice).
Or being displaced from the land we were given instructions to love and care for, then raped, killed, or reprogrammed.
Or being burned up by new weapons your ancestors created to speed colonization or domination. Being cast as the savages or terrorists in their worldview, in a way that stuck to us even outside the stage of their minds, your minds, such that it’s nearly impossible for you to even see that lie without cultural ice buckets poured on the delusion.
Your ancestors did not fight fair, and they didn’t teach you to be in right relationship with anyone. They didn’t give our ancestors time to wonder, ask for help, course-correct, negotiate. This is why some say you should be grateful we seek justice, equality, and our humanity, versus revenge. Right now, after years of physical, intellectual, and cultural warfare on peoples who were different from white, different from you, you have an opportunity to leap forward, dive into this river of change, rather than be deluged and drowned in it.
The time for denial is over. You were not raised in a secret mountaintop retreat disconnected from the world, you haven’t existed with no contact for more than four hundred years, so we know you see and know what is going on. And you’re scared, saddened, defensive, guilty, and unsure of who to be if you aren’t the superior by default, so you make choices toward or away from or against your own highest self.
When you ask, “But don’t all lives matter?” we hear, “I refuse to acknowledge the harm I have caused you by benefiting from false constructs of supremacy. I cannot prioritize your pain over my privilege.”
When you say, “Ok ok so teach me,” we hear, “My time and needs continue to be more important than yours. I refuse to research and read; I demand your labor.”
When you say, “But what do I do?” it sounds like procrastination, because we have told you a million things.
Here.
Here are ways I recommend diving into this river:
Learn to say, and mean, “I am sorry for the impact of my white supremacy.” Don’t just post it on the internet. Say it from your heart and gut directly to people you’ve impacted, especially in situations when you are or have been in positions of leadership and authority. And then—and this is important—shift your behavior so you never need to give that apology again. Riffing off fellow nerd Albert Einstein, practicing white supremacy and expecting an outcome other than race war is one definition of collective insanity. We don’t want an apology without the shifts in behavior, policy, and access to power, without the end of the monsoon of constant harm.
Commit to doing your own work without seeking accolades. Yes, some people of color will be welcoming, will even celebrate what you do. I am sometimes moved to tears when I hear how acts-of-white-people-being-kind-to-Black-people touch my Black southern father, who just never thought he would see that. Many people of color won’t clap because the point of this moment is decentering whiteness in the story of humanity, and that means not centering white course correction with the attention we give a baby’s first steps. We won’t patronize you for rejoining a collective path . . . and that should be good news.
Don’t revert to supremacy under pressure. It breaks trust. If you are told you are practicing white supremacy, consider that we see and feel things you do not because they’re weaponized against us, weighted against us, scarring us, limiting us. We aren’t generalizing or reducing you, we are protecting our vulnerable lives.
Redistribute resources. Not as charity, which is just another way to assuage the conscience of privilege. Redistribute money, leadership positions, decision-making power, land, time in meetings, visionary space, relationships with philanthropy, speaking opportunities, press attention, health care benefits. If you can measure it, you can redistribute the resource.
I am taking the time to write to you because I am a mixed-race Black woman. I am connected to the same lineages of harm as you, even as I am harmed by them. I benefit from how the artifacts of whiteness in my skin, cadence, and cultural shaping make me more visible and comprehensible to you, more human to you. I am in intimate familial relationship with white people, and I want those relationships to be honest and accountable.
It’s a devastating weight to carry, to work to be fully myself, humble, and brilliant, messy, and great, against a delusion of white supremacy so pervasive and invasive that it can grow within each of us without invitation. But just because something alive violates us does not mean we asked for it, does not mean we partner with it, believe it, or even let it live.
I, in my wholeness, am working to hold the contradictions of white supremacy responsibly, to weed my own garden even as I demand and build my and our Black power. We all have our work, and none of us can do anyone else’s.
A Variation on Paying Attention to White People
In the spirit of “what you pay attention to grows,” I want to bring more attention to the white people who are in my life, none by accident, none tolerated, each beloved and cultivated. Not everyone has an experience of white people who love, learn with, and follow them. I want to practice, in this moment, attending to them as much as or more than we attend to the swarm of karens and beckys and donalds and other haters.
I do not believe whiteness will just disappear in shame, or that white people committed to racism and other offenses to science and god will self-segregate in a way that leaves the rest of us and the planet safe. So I must believe that something else can emerge, is emerging, even if it is still small and rare. And my belief is met by the presence, felt much more than spoken, of white people who are blessings, peers, beloveds, comrades, self-responsible humans.
I am blessed by my mother. She gave up everything she’d been raised in, family and resources, when she realized she was in love with my father. She began unlearning racism without training, decolonization curricula, language monitors. She began her unlearning in relationship, as a wife and as a mother. She was the one who came storming into classrooms challenging her children’s racist teachers. She has taken our sides and has our backs and asserts our brilliance at every turn. She doesn’t claim to get it right, but she keeps leaning in, and learning with love. She makes me consider that something can shift deep within when you birth a Black child, or three. I am not interested in denying that, ridiculing that, making it smaller than what it is.
I am blessed by those in my southern white family who reach out to let me know they love me and listen hungrily to suggestions for what they can do to be in solidarity, to teach their kids to see beyond the racism they’re all raised to swim in. They help offset the pain of knowing there are white people related to me by blood who watched me be a Black child, and then chose to vote for the Klan’s favorite president.
I am blessed by the antiracist white people in my inner friend circle. Instead of perfection, these friends are committed to practice, to asking questions, and really listening to the answers, to doing their own work and not putting it on me, to releasing rigid control, and seeing that there are many ways to be productive and efficient, to growing ease in taking leadership from Black people, from people of color. And then diving in deep with other white people. And decentering themselves in their fields. And fucking up, and then letting it grow them rather than make them performative or bitter. They do most of their race work elsewhere, and yet it is palpable to me without feeling like guilt, charity, pity, or other power-over emotions.
I have had a white partner in the past, and though I revel and thrive in Black love currently, when I look at movements for change, I see many leaders with white partners, white family, white community. Sometimes they are claimed, sometimes they are quietly kept off screen. We need to bring more attention to why those people get to be in our lives, why any white person gets the privilege of being in intimate space with those who have experienced enough ancestral harm from white people to stay away forever.
There are shifts of labor in these relationships, from the nonwhite labor of internalizing and burying the impact of white supremacy, to the white labor of reducing the material and cultural impacts of white supremacy; from the nonwhite labor of extending trust where it has been systemically broken, to the white labor of moving beyond good intentions to concerted and consistent attention and effort. We need to attend not in a carrot/stick way, not in ways that deny your humanity, or cheerlead what you are already just supposed to do, but simply acknowledge that it is work.
It isn’t a shift at the level of slogan, political correctness, or press release, though those cultural quakes do soften the soil for new organic infrastructures of antiracist life to take root. It is deeply personal work to relinquish white supremacy, and it helps me if I remember that the white people in my life are not exceptional but just a few steps ahead in their work.
Think of those confederate monuments coming down. All my roots are southern, so those statues seemed like they’d always been there and always would be. And then slowly there came a mainstream realization that they were celebrating the worst of humanity, the plantation hitlers, that that’s what white supremacy is about. Now it feels inevitable that we are pulling down the symbols, as inside everyone’s minds, we are pulling down the ideas of racial supremacy.
But then there’s the gap, the statue’s empty base, the place where that idea once seemed right. Now there’s just the wound, the world shaped around the absence of a clear way of being.
I recently purchased the bust of a Black man, head full of amethyst, from Damon Davis; and last year I visited the National Museum for Peace and Justice, which is full of statues to honor those murdered by lynching across the United States south. All of these works are perfect, and I wish they were everywhere. I am tempted to make a case for replacing the statues with Black heroes and martyrs, but I can also see the case for no replacement statues, not in our town squares or in our minds.
We live in a beautiful, interconnected world that needs our attention. Maybe if we drop the performance of celebrating difference, we can make it possible to survive difference.
It must be possible. We must make it possible, or else we will always be in a position of demand, or counterpolicing, or rage. I want us to use this current justified rage to shape demands that take the labor and danger off us. I want to liberate our grandchildren from those taut, hurt, and angry lives.
At the same time, I want us to contend for power, and notice who truly invites that power. That is the common trait of every white person, every person I allow into my life in a meaningful way. There is a mutual invitation: both of us in our power and truest selves are invited into every space.
So for the white people walking this path with me, thank y’all for keeping me faithful when a mass perspective on whiteness still feels pretty hopeless. Thank you for being willing to be visible or not. Thank you for not waiting for praise as you unlearn the supremacy you were programmed to practice, and for not reacting personally to the righteous rage and shifting boundaries required to move through this collective transition. Thank you for offering support, instead of demanding more labor.
Mary Hooks, of Southerners on New Ground, articulated a mandate for Black people in this time: “To avenge the suffering of our ancestors, to earn the respect of future generations, and be willing to be transformed in the service of the work.”13
The white people in my life must align with that mandate—put your lifetime in service of undoing the work of your ancestors, earning the respect of future generations, and being willing to be transformed in the service of the work.
Addendum for the Jewish Community, Especially Those with European Lineage
I know some of my comrades can turn off their empathy for colonizers, oppressors, harmdoers, racists, abusers, and others who use their humanity for domination. Or maybe it is different than turning it off, maybe empathy is just not available while the wounds are still oozing. As a mixed-race person with whiteness as part of my lineage, I feel it is my work in this lifetime not to close my heart to the processes of whiteness, white families, white peoples, even—especially—when they are causing great harm. As a person who grew up in Germany and later learned I had German ancestry, I feel it is in my life’s work to be in right relationship with my Jewish family, especially those of Ashkenazi heritage. Only by allowing myself to stay in touch with their humanity can I find some hope for the species surviving white supremacy.
Wanting Jewish people to be safe from persecution is part of the path toward peace and justice in the world. One piece of this work is to ensure that Jewish people of all backgrounds feel and are safe everywhere on earth, along with the rest of us. Another piece is to know that an apartheid state like Israel, which is presented as the only safe home for Jewish people, is never actually safe, for anyone; it will never be a path toward peace. Zionism aligns directly with white supremacy, but because the people leading Zionist efforts claim to be doing this for Jewish safety, and Jews have faced such devastating and traumatic erasure and genocide throughout their history, including at the hands of white supremacists, some have felt it is complicated to find a clear stance.
As an American, I am obliged to keep learning, trace the contours of this struggle, and to use my standing as a US citizen to show up well and on the side of sovereignty, to decolonize this place that has such a massive impact on Palestine, and the rest of the globe. I am obliged to recognize that Israel and the United States are cut from the same colonial and contradictory cloth. Since 1948, Palestine has been systematically colonized by Israel as a Zionist project cocreated with and backed by Western interests. Israel has become an outpost of the United States, through which the US can protect its interests in the region.
And as a Black American, I believe Jewish people should embrace anti-Zionism in the same ways that some white people in the US have embraced antiracism. After all, in the same way white people in the US have to be socialized into supremacy thinking, the Jewish communities who see Israel as their promised land, and themselves as chosen above others to have the historical right to take that land out from those currently living there, are socialized into these beliefs from birth. They have been colonized, along with those who are not Jewish but buy into the idea that Israel is the path to Jewish safety. The work of this generation is steady, uncompromising decolonization, everywhere it is needed, including in this traumatic, wounded nation-state, and in the US, Israel’s staunchest ally.
For guidance, I look to anti-Zionist Jewish leaders who are aligned with the work of antiracist white people, and who reject the oppressive systems that distort and destroy humanity. I would also point my Jewish readers to Jewish Voice for Peace and Arab Resource and Organizing Center as places to begin decolonization. Narratives that suggest that one people can be free (or safe) only if another people die (or are oppressed) yield more violence and trauma, and are inherently supremacist. They serve those with the power to unilaterally oppress, imprison, and kill.
And sadly, there are currently more genocidal campaigns unfolding in the world than I can count on one hand, as well as other unjust wars, conflicts, and normalized violence. I have been able to read about unfolding genocides in the Congo and Sudan, in Myanmar, and the fully displaced Armenian people. There are also ongoing terrors unfolding in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, and Syria. There are places so cut off from any kind of communication that we do not know the extent of the abuses and crimes unfolding within.
What keeps me grounded is learning about ongoing repression all over the world, constantly, and seeking patterns of resistance. I am learning all the time to “transform myself to transform the world,” as Grace Lee Boggs taught us. What keeps me grounded is accepting that I cannot do everything, but if I let my rage, grief, and inspiration move me, and we each show up where we are most enraged, grieved, and inspired, we might end up having enough solidarity to transform the patterns that flow through all injustice. Some of you may find that one of those other campaigns is the best long-term place for your solidarity work. I am excited about groups like Rising Majority, Grassroots International, and Grassroots Global Justice who work on a regular basis to help us connect these struggles.
What keeps me grounded is seeing how vast the movement for Palestine is in this moment and knowing that anytime people are facing apartheid and genocide they need this level of solidarity, and more. They especially need to see this level of pressure and noise. We need to stop doing business as usual with the people and corporations collaborating with their oppressor.
What keeps me grounded is that I have never come across a politic or historical trauma that justified the genocide of an oppressed people. I know we are right to stand against occupation and genocide wherever we see it. I am a survivor among survivors, and we will end this cycle.
13. “The Mandate: A Call and Response from Black Lives Matter Atlanta,” Southerners on New Ground website, July 14, 2016, https://southernersonnewground.org/themandate.