what if tender was more radical than harsh?

It was never explicitly stated, but I feel like the early years of my politicization taught me that, for white folks, to do the real antiracist work was to be swift and harsh towards each other’s mistakes. As if in order to prove our seriousness about liberation and our understanding of how high the stakes were, we had to bring maximum intensity to each moment of responding to harm. 

We knew that the violence and dehumanization of white supremacy merits the full fire of our righteous rage, and a full, unequivocal, embodied “NO!” The first step to healing or repair, has to be stopping the violence and stopping the violence was long, long overdue. 

But, I've come to feel that those moments of harshness with each other are less often fueled by that righteous rage of our humanity rising up, than by our own collective shame and, sometimes, our need to prove that we’re “one of the good ones.” And eventually I had to ask - if the goal is less harm and more thriving for all the web of life, what actually transforms the harm at its root, or at least plants seeds of change? What would it look like to respond in a way that’s less about my need to be prove something, and more about making something new possible?

It’s these questions that led me to study somatic and collective trauma healing  - trying to understand what actually supports “stuck” embodied patterns to be ready to shift, soften, let go.

And as it turns out, in my experience, engaging each other with the same harshness, domination, or force that our systems operate with just does not seem to have that outcome.

I want to clarify that I am not speaking to how a person who is on the receiving end of racist harm’s dehumanization should respond to that moment. That’s not my conversation to have and when I’m on the receiving end of charged feedback about my own racist impacts, it’s important to me that I receive that feedback without policing the way it’s delivered. What I’m sharing is a line of inquiry about how someone like me who is equally capable of participating in unintentional racist harm myself, might move to address the way another white person’s racist conditioning is showing. 

I’m grateful for the challenge posed by adrienne maree brown and so many other transformative justice practitioners, to consider the ways our attempts at reparative action so easily reproduce the conditions that created the harm in the first place.

If I am embodying a belief that you are disposable (just as our profit-over-people systems say you are), I worry about what I am putting into the soil. How do we cultivate soil in which new patterns, beliefs, and choices can grow?

And if we are unwilling or unable (read: un-practiced enough) to move towards and invite fellow white folks into a more life-giving path and culture than the one we’ve inherited, who do we imagine should do it?

Sometimes, I’ve witnessed an understandable fear in myself and other white folks on the left, that if we’re not careful, we’ll fall into the pattern of coddling and protecting each other’s comfort. That is an equally common and maybe even a more significant pitfall and barrier to change among us. It was that fear which, for years, left me afraid to move towards or show tenderness, curiosity or openness-to-connection in these disruption-of-harm moments.

But I don't think coddling or harshness are our only two options here. I think a third way is more than possible. Building culture around this is life-long work and I don’t claim to know the way, but I’m grateful we can make the road by walking and we don't do it alone. 

Learn more about this cohort-based work, building embodied antiracist culture & community.