I appreciate y’all reading this newsletter. Some of this one will be hard for you to hear, I imagine, and also a big, huge, fucking relief to see the world clearly so we can get on the way to healing ourselves, one another, the planet.
The headline of a recent Washington Post article poses the question, Can politics kill you?, as a way to frame the harsh fact that people living in red-as-in-GOP-led states are dying from COVID at faster rates than those who live in blue states. A better way to say this is: people are dying from whiteness.
I’ve been reading about the harm of whiteness and talking to people about how we get on the path to healing from it because it is destroying all of us.
The first set of questions for me is what, precisely, is the nature of the harm in whiteness? This widely-circulated piece talks about “white supremacist culture,” and it’s excellent. Once you understand that white supremacist culture affects us all, it helps explain the fact that you don’t have to be raised white to enact it, as we’ve seen in a couple of horrific recent examples.
But understanding the culture doesn’t get to the somatic experience, which is what I’m interested in here.
What I’m curious about is how whiteness becomes embodied, what does it feel like when it gets under our skin. I first learned about this idea from Dr. Howard Stevenson. He talks about creating change through racial literacy, which begins by taking seriously the bodily effect of racism on all of us.
In a workshop, he took a racially diverse group of us, about 20 people in all, through an exercise. He asked us to close our eyes and think of an encounter in which the subject of race came up. Then, he asked us to reflect on how we felt in our bodies during that encounter. Many of the people in the group were puzzled by the question, this being a group of mostly academic-types and we tend to live in our heads more than in our bodies. So, he prompted us with a series of questions: Is your stomach upset? Is your heart rate going up? How is your breathing - fast and shallow, or slow and deep? Are your shoulders up around your ears? Is your jaw clenched? Are you grinding your teeth? Is your tongue pressed to the roof of your mouth?
Dr. Stevenson is a man with an incredibly calming vibe, more Jedi Master than stuffy academic. One of the key insights he urged us to take away from the exercise was: in a culture where the subject of “race” is so loaded with meaning it triggers these bodily stress responses in all of us, whether one is the target of racist abuse or being called out for enacting that harm on others. It’s not the stuff of false equivalence but rather a way of thinking about race that is a layer deeper than the merely cognitive.
In doing more research on this, I’ve come across Dr. Wendy Allen’s dissertation in which she writes:
“the literature on White privilege and Whiteness often refers to the invisibility of privilege and the need to make it seen. [Instead, I suggest] that it needs to be felt.”
This seems central to what we, who are raised white, need to do to begin this work. We need to learn how to feel what whiteness is doing to our bodies. We who are taught to believe in our own beneficence and superiority engage in a form of magical thinking when we try to pole vault over the pain of looking at the real harm of our whiteness and jump right into healing. But I don’t think it works like that. So, what is the harm in whiteness and how does it come through in our bodies?
One of the best things I’ve read recently that answers my questions about how we embody whiteness is from two experts in this, Veronica Watson and Becky Thompson, who write:
We believe that white people carry with them memories and experiences that tell them that something is desperately wrong, that racism is not natural or inevitable. White racial trauma may occur from witnessing or being responsible for extreme acts of violence such as police brutality, for example, or from mundane, everyday violence of racism such as refusing to interact with people of color or to acknowledge their contributions in professional or educational settings.
I’ll admit that I felt uncomfortable when I first started reading about “white racial trauma.” I mean, come on… isn’t this just more “white tears”?
The thing that changed this for me was reflecting on two lessons I’ve learned in many years of therapy: 1) that people who cause real harm are often in pain themselves; and, 2) finding compassion for them and for myself is the path to healing. Another way to think of this is: the harm we cause is connected to how much pain we’re in, and much of that pain is operating beneath the surface at the level of the unconscious. How does that come out in our bodies?
Back to Watson and Thompson, who identify the following qualities of embodied white racial trauma:
Hypervigilance and a Sense of Persecution: Hypervigilance is a kind of “always on” awareness. One expert describes it as “an attempt to restore safety and prevent any further victimization by anticipating and recognizing everything as a potential threat and acting accordingly.” Watson and Thompson then observe: “What an apt description of whiteness. When considered from the vantage point of racial trauma, whiteness can certainly be understood as having been ‘wholly focused on [the] job of defining, policing and protecting white privilege, space, identity and culture. Collectively it has drawn boundaries, defined an inside and an outside to a presumed sacred space/identity, and aggressively ejected and rejected those bodies that fall outside of the ideological and social pale.” It’s this hypervigilance that then morphs into a false sense of persecution, another warning sign of trauma overexposure. This is where that belief that whiteness is always threatened, victimized and under attack comes from.
Diminished Creativity: Another way that we respond to trauma as humans is that we lose our ability to think and act creatively. Psychologists refer to this as “diminished creativity,” a trauma response in which originality and innovation take a back seat to just getting the job done, whatever that is — a meal, a holiday, a garden. Checking it off the list matters more than enjoying the creation of it. Watson and Thompson connect this insight from psychologists to the way we do whiteness, which relies heavily on creating and staying in white-only spaces, fortresses that we have worked hard to build for ourselves. But this strategy of sameness and exclusion ends up limiting us in all kinds of ways. Again, Watson and Thompson: “The diminished creativity that results from homogenization makes people tired, lethargic, bored by everyday life, and susceptible to reaching for the next quick fix.” That quick fix can be the opioids or alcohol we reach for to anesthetize ourselves or a self-help cult with midnight volleyball.
Dissociation: A third form of trauma response that psychologists have identified is dissociation, a protective response in which ‘we cut ourselves off from our internal experience in order to guard against sensations and emotions that could be overwhelming to our system.’ Put simply, we have a built in psychological mechanism that enables us to leave our bodies if the going gets too rough on the physical plane. This is very common among survivors of sexual or physical abuse and one I’m very familiar with. Part of the reason I’ve always had my head in a book is that it is a very handy way to not be present in my body to escape whatever was happening to it, especially as a kid.
When I said above that we, academics, tend to live in our heads more than in our bodies, I meant me. I do this. I sometimes think of living in my mind this way as one of those loft beds with a ladder in tiny apartments. I stay up in the loft all the time and rarely come down into the ground floor of embodiment. How’s this connected to whiteness? Watson and Thompson, once more: “White traumatic dissociation is one reason why white people are often afraid to confront racism.”
Watson and Thompson go on to observe that “dissociation can occur when trying to undo racism as well as when working to uphold it,” and I was intrigued by this. For example, when a white person calls attention to a racial injustice in a personal or professional setting, “this is met by silence as the audience becomes flat-eyed, disengaging from the naming that is occurring in its midst.” This explained so much for me.
They continue:
“Such a response positions the truth-teller as the problem, as the one who is causing the argument. In that moment, the witness is not only silenced, but also is made a nonperson by the nonengagenent, an actual threat to the white family, organization, or institution. …Being shut down can produce a visceral sense of not being safe or not being seen, and of being erased, which can result in lifting a part of oneself out of the room, out of the trauma, as a means of protection.”
A friend of mine used to say to me: “White people are never going to thank you for pointing out their racism.” Fair enough. To be honest, I don’t want thanks, or a ribbon, or a cookie. I just want us to quit being so predictably shitty, to quit calling the fucking police, and building our walled fortresses to protect a false sense of safety. I’ve tried to point the way with my writing, speaking, and teaching but I’ve often gotten that dead-eyed, silent response from my fellow white raised people.
Until I read Watson and Thompson on this, I didn’t understand that response and wondered if it was me. Maybe if I were a better writer? Maybe if I were…different in some other way, people would listen? Reading Watson and Thompson was really a lightbulb moment for me. Ah-ha! This is about trauma.
I’ve got more to say about how we move toward healing from whiteness, but I’ll save those for the next newsletter. Thanks again for reading here, y’all. I really appreciate it.