Susan Raffo is a dear friend and a comrade in liberation struggle. When we first met, she frequently led anti-racism trainings for white people that called on them to recognize the oppressor patterns they’d been taught as white people, recognize that oppressor/perpetrator patterns do visit trauma on white bodies, and then undo their own white supremacy, cell by cell. It’s easy to name the terrorism in Charlottesville as white supremacy, but it’s much more difficult to acknowledge the nearly invisible day-to-day ways that people socialized as white enact white supremacy.
Last week, I shared Susan’s essay about why progressive-minded white people sometimes feel deep discomfort at having whiteness named as a social and political construct, and one that white people actively participate in. This week, she offers a love letter to white people earnestly grappling with their implicit white supremacy. The words from here on out are hers.
And now for the love letter...
For a brief stint, I was the executive director for an LGBT community foundation. One day I sat down with a donor, a gay white guy who I really liked. I was trying to figure out how to get this man and his friends to switch their giving so that it more directly benefited LGBT folks of color, paying particular attention to trans and gender nonconforming folks. This seemed easy to me. Basic democracy. Some folks had a lot extra and others didn’t have enough. We were all part of the same community.
He listened to me and then, at one point, he interrupted. “Susan,” he said, “I hear you. I really do. Everything you say makes rational sense but that isn’t what it feels like. I am listening to you say that I have more cash than some members of this community and my brain knows you are right but inside, all I feel like is the little boy who was bullied and beat up during school. I want to scream at you, I’ve only been resting for five minutes and now you’re telling me that I have too much and I have to share! Fuck you, just fuck you. Let me have mine for a minute and enjoy it!!”
To this day, I am so grateful for his words. As I listened to him, something in me clicked. Right, I thought. Generosity doesn’t happen when we don’t feel safe, when some part of us feels we have to hold on to our extra in case we run out. And generosity is a different thing when who we share our cash with doesn’t feel directly connected to our own survival and okay-ness in the world. This man, this white man with a big old paycheck and a nice house and a stable relationship, still doesn’t feel safe. Not really. It doesn’t matter that he actually is safe. His perception, his held history, tells him that he isn’t. And so, until he feels safe, until he settles and his need to hold on tight TIGHT is able to soften, he won’t be giving up his extra even though people close by don’t have enough.
In the last essay I wrote, I talked about how whiteness hijacks the body’s survival responses. I talked about how this hijacking means that people who are socialized to be white have to have a kind of functional freeze, a tight hold inside their bodies that protects them from feeling what this socialization has done to their basic humanity. And I talked about how this tight hold means that these whitened bodies end up causing harm both directly and indirectly by not stopping (and directly affirming and contributing to) systems like white supremacy and racism that use subtle and direct violence to control the lives of indigenous people and people of color.
Survival strategies, when triggered, cannot be rationalized with. Survival strategies only care about making sure that the body feels better. Which means they can do all kinds of mental gymnastics and values contradictions and make those things feel justifiable and humane, all in the interest of feeling better.
When I listened to my friend reflect on how he still felt like the kid who was bullied in school, I thought yeah, here’s the contradiction. In order for this friend, this white man with money and social status and legal protection for his right to love, in order for him to be ready to share, he has to heal. And this means focusing on his own life and the ways in which he was hurt so that he can recover from that hurt. Every single one of us should have that. But what does it mean when you have people who have been centered by systems of dominance, often unaware of this centering, and who then, in order to heal, have to center in a whole different way what is happening inside themselves?
Healing is always about finding the original wounds and attending to them. And finding this original wound, it can take time. For Europeans, the original wound that evolved over generations is the same one that was first perpetrated here; the violent disconnection of people from the land (which also means spirit, culture, community, history, medicine, music, food, and overall wonder of life). This wound re-entrenched itself when the idea of private property first showed up, at different times in different European regions, but slowly spreading like a plague. It matters deeply that for 500 years, Europeans fought against those who violently set up fences, taxed land use, and evicted supposed illegal homes. It matters deeply that even though the idea of private land ownership won, there are elements of this fight that never stopped.
This European wound transferred to the United States where it was rebranded as “whiteness.” This is about a cycle of violence. How those who were hurt became the perpetrators, doing unto others as was done to their great grandparents before. None of this could even be imagined without that first original disconnection, this movement toward private land ownership and food as profit, or the ability for some people to have more of a basic need while others around them are starving without enough. As an acquaintance of mine says, remember, everything Europeans did on this land they first did at home and to themselves.
I called this essay a love letter, and it is. Because it’s love that has me thinking about how people, like my friend, are actually going to do the work so that they can come back to a sense of trust in the future and connected giving to other life. Without this, white supremacy cannot end. This is not something that’s about feeling good. White people try to feel good all the time, signing up for healing and meditation and spiritual retreats, going to therapists and bodyworkers and faith counselors and coaches, one after another. This is about learning how to struggle.
Healing is not something an individual body can do only on their own. Healing is about reconnecting with all life, including the lives of those who you have deeply hurt. When connected to the fullness of life, it is not possible to feel good and relaxed when someone near you is still suffering. Being connected to all life is sometimes about feeling good but it’s also sometimes about feeling pain and then, because of that pain, taking action. Reconnection and reparations.
Life is hard. For everyone. We hurt people we love and we are hurt by them. We lose our way, are embarrassed, feel betrayed, witness or experience or perpetrate violence, and watch as people we love die. Living with the truth of this, the pain of this, is where wisdom comes from. We experience and integrate hard things and over the span of our lives, we change. Whiteness is designed to protect white people from feeling hard things, from feeling some kinds of pain; like being surrounded by a cocoon of white noise. And it’s not an equal opportunity protection. It sets up contradiction after contradiction, including the truth of living as poor and working class white folks within the system of white supremacy, struggling for basic economic safety but not struggling past knowing that your own family or kin are going to be safe..
None of this could work if whiteness was not, in a hundred constant small ways, using a system of reward and punishment to keep white folks in their place; as perpetrators within the cycle of violence who still believe they are good and honest people. In this case, the reward promised by whiteness, the carrot at the end of the stick, is to feel and believe that you are exceptional. This is true whether the exceptionalism is about living in the “best country in the world” or about being the best anti-racist white person in your community. Exceptionalism within deep inequality depends on an inbuilt sense that you were born deserving to have your life be supported and loved, even as those around you are not receiving the same thing. This exceptionalism could not exist without the subtle and overt preference for whiteness that exists within every single U.S. institution. Rewards like the benefit of the doubt when being stopped by the police. Rewards like having your history, your beauty needs, your everything defined as the invisible normal.
Exceptionalism is always a lie. It’s the loud dance that covers up the fact that too many of us don’t live in communities where people truly know us, know where we come from, and believe what we say because there is no reason to not tell the truth. Exceptionalism is the cry of the lonely who say, it’s not my fault. I am not abandoned. I am just better than you.
This is a love letter because, with deep love in my heart, I turn to my kin, to those whose families fled deep injustice in their ancestral homelands to come here. This is a love letter because I know that not one of those families came here determined to cause harm in their new home. This is a love letter because I know that, upon arrival, survival depended on figuring out how to be safe in a country where the rules were all different. Not every European who came here settled for whiteness, but most did. Not consciously, but as an act of incremental change, the outcome of a thousand small decisions that chose safety for themselves and their families over struggling with those whose lives most resembled theirs back home.
This is a love letter because this isn’t just about ending white supremacy so that violence against indigenous people and people of color ends, although that is deeply important. This is a love letter because ending white supremacy is about choosing human-ness over whiteness, about dealing with the literal trauma of disconnection that allowed whiteness to emerge in the first place. And this is a love letter because within the cycle of violence, even the perpetrator has to heal.