distancing

One time I was part of a cohort-based learning experience that was about 3/4 folks of color and 1/4 white folks. The thing lasted many months, not just a few. Looking back a few years later, I notice that in all the relationships I built, I did so little connecting with the other white folks in the group. 

This pattern in myself (and fellow lefty white folks) has become familiar now. It's like, in multiracial spaces where the charge of race and the potential for unintentional racist harm is high, we (*white people) can be so focused on distancing from those white patterns of harm which we're worried about replicating, that we actively distance from each other, too.

It almost feels like a fear for contagion, like if I get too close to your whiteness, it might get on me - and then my carefully curated self-concept as a "good white person" might be at risk. Now that that I'm in deep community with fellow white folks around the transformation of our patterns, I've heard so many others relate to this distancing impulse. 

Historically, when white people have moved towards each other around a shared racial identity, it’s almost always been in service of exclusion, protecting our power or comfort, re-enforcing internalized superiority - and it makes sense that our white bodies, committed to liberation, would be wary of echoing those moves.

And yet, where does this leave us? 

We've inherited tremendous unprocessed shame, grief, dissociation, etc about our history of and participation in white supremacy and this inheritance just can't be healed without connection and community to hold what's too big to hold alone. 

In a country built on the relational betrayal of Black and Indigenous people, and the land itself, if we cannot practice transforming white relational patterns (hierarchy, control, conditional belonging, etc) between us, we will surely struggle to show up in right relationship across race as well.

This is one piece of what we explore in the embodying antiracism cohorts that I co-lead each fall and spring. Here are details about the next one.