go get your cousins
I don’t remember the specifics of when or where, but I can vividly remember what happened in my body, the first couple of times I heard the call from friends and peers of color to “go get my (white) cousins.”
(In case you’re not familiar, “go get your cousins” has been a common call-in from BIPOC community, asking white folks to lean in and take responsibility for the racist harm our white kin are causing, rather than leaving it to BIPOC community to address which has long been the default)
At this point, I was very familiar with what my (white) “cousins” or kin and I were up to out here, and could easily access my own grief and shame at the perpetuation of racist harm and relationship betrayal that I knew we were committing day in and day out, mostly unintentional but also not intentionally-avoided or intentionally-made-right either.
But when asked to go “get” them - to move towards fellow white folks in situations of racist harm - most everything in my body recoiled away, froze up, even stilling my breath and restricting access to mobility in my limbs. Maybe some of you can relate.
All parts of the ask felt impossible in those moments - the “go” part (my body felt frozen), the “getting” part (which I had very few compelling models for, except for the white-people-verbally-tearing-apart-and-canceling-each-other version of “getting”) and the “my cousins” part, which implied relationship that I had rarely built with the people in question or practiced with other white folks.
These are some of the experiences that started to lay bare for me just how difficult it would be for me to really live out my liberatory values (commitment to moving and speaking in reparative ways that reduce harm and cultivate right-relationship) while ignoring the role my nervous system was playing, and without being deeply in community and practice with other white folks around the transformation of our embodied patterns into something new. And how would we build the multiracial solidarity and movements needed to build a better world, if us white folks had such limited capacity (read: practice) for navigating the charge and impacts of race among us?
I started noticing just how much my attempts at growing antiracist capacity thus far had been seeped in the very whiteness + white patterns I sought to undo or move away from:
They were focused on cultivating better thoughts, language and ideas, totally ignoring the messier truth of my embodied experience, and the inherited patterns that remained there in my body, unchanged by my “knowing better”.
They were competitive and individual endeavors, aimed at making me a “good” white person, ideally the “best” white person in the room, hopefully able to evade the shame of association with whiteness - with very little concern for the growth or capacity of the white people around me.
They were check-box oriented, and I sometimes had the feeling that if I could just master one more “good” white person behavior, perhaps through one more book or workshop, I might arrive at some permanent good-white-person status and be protected from shame.
They were all about my performance and not about collective capacity. As though the deeply rooted, structurally embedded, pervasive and persistent system of white supremacy just needed me to be a “good” white person and that would turn the tides.
The list goes on.
Finding a different path, together with others, is the journey I’ve been on ever since. As Audre Lorde wrote, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. So, how do we (white people) cultivate community and relationships in which to practice ways of relating to our own inherited patterns of harm, and to each other’s, that can replace the ones we learned? Like the conversation about transformative justice, how do we cultivate responses to harm and violence that aim to transform the harm rather than just replicating it?
How do we grow embodied capacity to metabolize the bound energy that had me feeling like a deer in headlights when called to act, so my aliveness can move, and so that energy doesn’t come out sideways? How do we practice engaging each other in moments of harm in ways that are not spring-loaded with our own shame and desperation to flee whiteness and its weight? How do we cultivate tenderness towards our own inevitable mistakes that can support us in showing that same tenderness to other white folks, for sometimes perpetuating this system that none of us consented to being born into?
Each fall and spring, I co-lead a deep-dive, cohort experience around these questions, for white leaders longing to be in community around the messiness of trying to embody our values. If you’re interested or know other white folks who might be seeking this kind of embodied practice and community, here are the details about the general cohort, and here are the details about the cohort for white clergy.
Our next cohorts begin in January and the registration deadline is Dec. 19th!
