On white people Building Belonging together Inside movementS for liberAtion
When I started writing this, I didn't quite expect it to become what it did. But I trust that it's what needed to come through, so I am sharing it openly — and always welcome feedback.
One of my teachers, Susan Raffo — has written about conditional belonging as a central feature of whiteness, and embodiment educator Prentis Hemphill, has written about letting go of innocence as being vital to the work of collective liberation. Their words have been kicking around inside of me for some time, poking at something that wanted to be named about how us white folks often relate to each other in movement spaces.
We live in a culture of conditional belonging. The impacts of conditional belonging permeate all of our lives. Conditional belonging tells us: “There is a right way to be, and a wrong way to be. If you’re wrong, you’re out.” This is a form of cultural and developmental trauma we are born into, not knowing if our connection - therefor our survival, is secure. We are witnessing the collapse of systems that can only become possible at this level through a profound denial and suppression of interconnection. Separation is a requirement for domination.
Whiteness teaches us that the conditions of our belonging depend on proving our innocence and goodness, that we fall within a binary of good or bad, and that if we fail at these things, we risk losing all connection.
We need only look to the cultures in Europe from which we’ve descended to begin to get a sense of where value was placed, who was safe and who was not, and what the consequences were for falling out of line.
Within white supremacy culture, belonging is conditional and contingent on being good, pure, and right. Making mistakes risks shame and excommunication, so we necessarily develop strategies to cope and survive. We learn ways to preserve some form of belonging because relationship is a fundamental need for our survival as social animals.
Making a mistake, being in conflict, causing harm — these things can feel like a threat to our very lives. These reactions are communications from our histories telling us just how high the stakes have been. But for most of us, in the present there is a much wider margin of error than our bodies yet know.
Just pause and notice how your body is responding as you read this, is there tension, heat, emotion? Are you feeling pulled closer or wanting to push away? Pay close attention if you can to your responses. Pause and look around you, are you safe in this moment? Is anything coming to attack you? If your mind establishes that you’re relatively safe for now, can you find a neutral sensation to rest your awareness on for a few breaths? Can you notice a beautiful colour or image in your environment?
How are we supposed to be truly accountable if our survival responses continually hijack us towards actions that preserve our sense of “goodness” “innocence” and our need to “know” the answers?
Lately I’ve been reflecting on some of ways that I’ve learned to distance myself from other white people - judging, rolling my eyes, mocking and critiquing. We are so practiced at this behaviour as white folks. We have built culture around it in leftist communities, and are often rewarded for it. How many of us have carried out actions at some point with the purpose of signalling: “I’m not like one of *those* white people”?
Of course we want to protect and distance ourselves from what we know is violent and toxic. It feels shameful because it *is* shameful. But the thing about shame is it feeds on itself, and we are so afraid to look at it so it just keeps growing.
Shame keeps us stuck in beliefs, actions, and behaviours - direct and indirect - that perpetuate white supremacy. Efforts to avoid shame also drive rage, individualism, humiliation, perfection, and a whole host of other responses that we see the manifestation of all around us. When I say shame fuels supremacy I mean that in really tangible ways - when we don’t deal with it or process it - it keeps things in place as they are.
Naming shame as a driving force of whiteness does not mean that we put all the other work aside and sit in our feelings. It *does* mean that we spend time in our feelings about whiteness as part of the work we do. How can we make that feel more tolerable? How can we build unconditional belonging with each other so we can stay in the mess long enough to transform it?
Whiteness needs our shame in order to persist, it lives on it, and like any system, it will adapt to try and survive. We must get this part, there is no skipping it. No bypassing it.
For those of us who are white, part of our task is to learn to be curious about these reactions in ourselves, and appreciate how they have a protective logic to them, while also recognizing how they no longer serve us and are impediments to accountability and liberation. Like any survival response, they can compromise our integrity, values and dignity — keeping us stuck in cycles of isolation, urgency, and control.
We can’t get out of this mess by refusing to build relationships with each other, by distancing and judging, by sharing critique without love or relationships that can help facilitate repair. It isn’t the job of people of colour to hold us through this unlearning. They shouldn’t have to, and they can’t, because it isn’t their work to do. It is only work we can do together, because it lives in our bodies. We can do it transparently, openly, and in relationship with people of colour, but it is fundamentally our process to go through with each other.
We have a responsibility as white people to build belonging with each other for this very reason.
What would it mean for us to turn towards each other rather than away when we falter, mess up, and cause harm? Without secure connection, we default to preserving our goodness at the expense of taking effective action towards divesting from white supremacy.
Building this kind of belonging is no small task. Many of us have learned to distance ourselves from whiteness as a way to preserve our "goodness", and we lack a sense of trust and connection with other white people (possibly an intergenerational trauma response that speaks to the brutality our own peoples inflicted on each other for generations.)
But we need to learn. We need to find something we can reach for in ourselves that is older and deeper than whiteness. We need a sense of connection and culture, a remembrance and a vision for the future that weaves the remaining threads of our ancestral wisdom into a tapestry that gives us clues for where we go from here. A spell and a prayer that connects past and future. Something strong enough that it holds us, so that we can hold each other, as we extract ourselves from domination. We are already inside of our harm as white people, it is already happening and our learning and capacity to tolerate that will not happen quickly enough to stop all the harm in its tracks.
Learning to slow our bodies down, to tolerate discomfort, to each do our part to metabolize this harm from our systems, to shift our survival physiology, to find more space and choice - this is a necessary part of movement strategy.
Lately, I’ve been having more conversations about all this with other white people. About who our people are, what we know and don’t know, about how we got to be this way, and how we’re grappling with it. Something often happens in these conversations that at first was a surprise, but now I’m beginning to understand. When we sit across from each other and we acknowledge together, both what whiteness has taken from us, and what has been done in our name, the grief becomes visceral. It becomes real. I can feel in those moments how our separation was by design, and how when we turn towards each other to remember, to acknowledge, something ancient begins to stir.
This is now our work, to sit together and develop the capacity to slow down enough to tolerate the harm we are implicated in so that we can transform it. We don’t know how to do it yet because we haven’t ever done it on this scale before, but we could. We could learn. And we could leave something different than we inherited, for those who come next.