Week 5:
Absorbing the Emotional Impact
Dealing with the realization that we are complicit in a system that has beaten, robbed, enslaved, and killed so many BIPOC (and continues to do so) can be traumatizing. So traumatizing, in fact, that we compare the process of dealing with this realization to the five stages of grief. This week we’ll provide the space and the tools to grapple with the many emotional responses that we white folks have to learning about our complicity in white supremacy. And hopefully you’ll come out the other side feeling empowered and ready to accept the challenge of becoming fearlessly anti-racist.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
Give yourself permission to feel ‘bad’ about your complicity in white supremacy.
Identify your own, specific emotional responses to your complicity in white supremacy.
Retrain your thoughts around race and racism.
Create and/or maintain an emotional support system.
Resolve any lingering emotional roadblocks to becoming fearlessly anti-racist.
Glossary
White Fragility: The tendency of white folks to shut down, avoid, or deflect away discussions of racism (especially their own racist behaviors), or lash out against folks who initiate them, in order to minimize the negative feelings these discussions bring up for them.
Cognitive Distortions: Thought fallacies which mislead us into a state of emotional distress.
Decolonize: To disrupt the narrative that white European forms of thought, knowledge, teaching, learning, etc. are the only legitimate forms.
White Guilt: A paralyzing emotional state, stemming from the realization that white folks bear a collective responsibility for the historical and contemporary harm perpetrated against people of color.
Your Grief is Real
Living as a BIPOC in a white supremacist society is traumatic.
Living as a white person in a white supremacist society is traumatic.
Both of these statements are true. The truth of the first statement in no way diminishes the truth of the second statement. Your feelings, grief, and trauma connected to your white privilege and complicity in white supremacy are real and important. You need to allow yourself permission to feel your feelings, and to do so without self-recrimination. Yes, many BIPOC certainly have it worse than you, and it is good that you recognize that their struggle is very different than yours. But their struggle does not invalidate your feelings. As we will see later, you do BIPOC no favors by playing the martyr and refusing to acknowledge or deal with your own emotional ‘baggage’ before joining the fight to dismantle white supremacy.
Just as it is a logical fallacy to say, “Well, there are people starving to death in Asia, so I should not feel any emotions about my problems here in the U.S.” so too is it nonsensical to say, “Well, BIPOC suffer more from white supremacy than I ever will, so I should just ‘suck it up’ and set my feelings aside.”
The scope of other people’s suffering in no way affects the validity of the personal troubles you face. And you must do the emotional work of grappling with your feelings about your own complicity in white supremacy, before you can become fearlessly anti-racist.
Reflection: Have you ever minimized or denied your own feelings? What was the result of minimizing our denying your feelings? Was it helpful or harmful?
The Five Stages of Grief and Loss
In connecting with our white racial identity, white privilege and complicity in white supremacy, we may feel a sense of loss — like a part of us is changing or even disappearing. This loss can be heavy and difficult to process.
In the film The Matrix, the protagonist Neo makes the choice to ‘wake up’ and finds that his existence has been a lie — a computer simulation running in his brain. In the film, the real world is a pretty horrific place, where human beings are used as batteries to power their evil robot overlords. While Neo does gain something from his choice — he awakens to the real world, horrible as it may be — he also loses something. He loses the blissful ignorance of living a life free of the knowledge that the real world is a horrific place.
Similarly, coming to terms with our white identity, privilege, and complicity in white supremacy helps us to see the world — and our place in it — more clearly and accurately. But it also means a loss of the blissful ignorance of living a life of white privilege, unaware of that privilege. And of living a life supported by the moving walkway of white supremacy, without understanding our complicity in that system.
One tool that may be helpful to you in processing your grief over the loss of this blissful ignorance is the Five Stages of Grief and Loss. While this tool was developed to help those suffering from the loss of a loved one, we have found that the stages provide a helpful road map to the process of grappling with the loss of our former, blissfully ignorant selves.
Chelsie explains how the five stages of grief can help us understand our emotional reactions to learning that we are complicit in white supremacy.
Reflection: Have you seen yourself working through the five stages of grief in grieving the loss of your ‘blissful ignorance’ of your complicity in white supremacy? Which stage has been the most difficult for you to move through?
A Cognitive Behavioral Approach to Addressing Our White Fragility
The term white fragility has gained a lot of traction in recent years. This is because, in part, it succinctly encapsulates white folks’ many emotional responses to being challenged on (or even having to talk about) issues of race and racism. We might feel defensive, embarrassed, guilty, ashamed, angry, depressed, persecuted, or helpless. And when we are confronted with our own privilege and complicity in white supremacy, those emotions may be significantly magnified. In the podcast episode below, three white anti-racist educators discuss the problem of white fragility, not only as it relates to discussions about race and racism, but as it relates to white folks’ general lack of resiliency, compared with BIPOC.
Podcast Episode: Speak Out with Time Wise Episode 26: Robin DiAngelo/Debby Irving - White Fragility, Obliviousness & White Allyship
As with acknowledging our privilege and complicity in white supremacy, acknowledging our own white fragility is an important step toward becoming fearlessly anti-racist. And as with privilege and complicity, the work doesn’t end with simply acknowledging our white fragility. We need to acknowledge it in order to overcome it. Importantly, as with implicit bias, acknowledging your white fragility is not a reflection on your personal character, but rather an admission that you have been shaped by the socializing forces of living in a white supremacist society. Understanding that we, as white folks, are prone to certain emotional reactions when confronted with conversations about race — much less our own racist actions — can be helpful in identifying the specific emotions we experience, which is the first step in the cognitive behavioral approach to emotional management. While we are not clinical psychologists or counselors, we’ll still walk you through the basic process, with the intent that doing so may help you to identify and process your own emotions about your complicity in white supremacy.
The first step in processing your emotions is to identify them. Dr. Robert Plutchik’s emotion wheel (illustrated below with, appropriately, mostly white folks) is a great tool for helping you name exactly which emotion(s) you are feeling, including the degree to which you feel them.
There is a method behind how Plutchik set up his wheel (e.g., stronger emotions on the inside, weaker on the outside; opposite emotions across from one another on the wheel) and there are other wheels you can check out as well, but for this lesson we just want you to focus on naming your emotions, using whatever tool works best for you.
Reflection: When you think about your identity as a white person, what emotions arise in you? What about when you reflect on your white privilege? When you contemplate your complicity in the system of white supremacy? Try to be specific as you can as you name each emotion.
Once you’ve identified your emotions, then you can connect those emotions with the thoughts that lead to those emotions. For example, if, when you reflect on your white privilege, you think “Well I had it bad too!” that thought may lead to the emotion of resentment or defensiveness. And if you’re feeling those emotions, there are low odds that you’ll take action. We need to change our thoughts in order to change our feelings so that we can take action. It’s healthy and appropriate to feel guilty (for example) about our complicity in white supremacy — it speaks to our humanity. But how we react to that feeling is what’s important.
So how do we change our problematic thoughts? One way is to recognize our cognitive distortions* or thought fallacies when we think them. If you find yourself thinking, “It’s not fair that I’m responsible for dismantling an unjust system just because I was born with a certain skin color,” and feeling frustrated in response to that thought, it might be helpful for you to recognize that your mind is engaging in the Fallacy of Fairness. From there, the next step is to come up with a mental statement that is closer to the truth (i.e., not a cognitive distortion). For example, “Life isn’t fair, but I’m still committed to being a good person who does the right thing, no matter what.” That thought, repeated often enough (and in lieu of the cognitive distortion it is replacing) will likely lead to a much different emotional response — perhaps hopefulness or eagerness — which will set you up to take anti-racist action.
*You can Google “list of cognitive distortions” to find a format that works best for you, or you can check out the Wikipedia article on the topic, which does a nice job of succinctly summarizing each of the fallacies.
Reflection: What cognitive distortions do you find yourself repeating, when it comes to your privilege and complicity? What mental statements might you adopt to replace these thought fallacies?
Healing from Embodied Trauma
Part of disrupting white supremacy is disrupting the narrative that white European knowledge is the only valid form of knowledge. In providing this final tool for processing the trauma of living in a white body in a white supremacist society, we are attempting to decolonize our white European beliefs about trauma and healing.
Somatic healing is a practice championed by therapist and healer Resmaa Menakem. It involves healing the trauma that is stored in our bodies, and that has been inherited from our ancestors (literally passed down through DNA). Resmaa argues that both white and black (and other nonwhite) bodies have suffered trauma under the dominion of white-bodied supremacy. Black bodies directly, and white bodies vicariously, either through seeing brutality inflicted upon black bodies, or actually inflicting that brutality themselves. We all need to heal from this trauma.
White-bodied supremacy rests upon the (false) cultural ideology that black bodies are invulnerable and dangerous, while white bodies are fragile, and vulnerable to black bodies. This lie has been coded into our “lizard brains” (the most primal part of our brain that overrides our thinking brain in times of stress, and issues only three commands — fight, flee, or freeze). This, argues Resmaa, is the basis of our white fragility. Our fear of black bodies is stored deep in our bodies, and only through healing our bodies can we be free of that fear.
Resmaa suggests that one practice that will help with this is to notice what your body does when you encounter an unfamiliar black body. Do you experience tension or constriction? Where in your body do you experience these sensations? In order to settle your body enough to engage in this body practice, Resmaa offers five anchors that help ground you in your body, when your lizard brain begins to take over. We have briefly summarized each below, along with a sampling of Resmaa’s suggested practices for implementing each anchor.
Soothe yourself to quiet your mind, calm your heart, and settle your body.
Practice: Shut up, don’t say anything, just breathe. Sit down, and put your hands in your lap. Mentally tell yourself to stay calm, keep it together, or calm down. Think of a person, place or pet you find soothing, and let yourself experience it for a few moments. Tell the other person that you need to go to the bathroom to get a couple minutes to clear your head. Or take some time in a different way like slowly taking off your sweater or taking a long, slow drink from your water bottle.Notice the sensations, vibrations and emotions in your body, instead of reacting to them.
Practice: Pay attention to your body’s experience of being in your clothes. Where does your skin touch your clothes? Your underwear? Notice any coldness, restriction, looseness, weakness, trembling. Experience and name each sensation in your body. As thoughts and emotions and possible reactions arise, don’t let them take over — bring yourself back to your body.Accept the discomfort and notice when it changes, instead of trying to flee from it.
Practice: When you feel an urge to push away the discomfort, don’t. Keep your attention focused on it. Instead of analyzing the discomfort, focus on the sensation of discomfort itself, and notice when it changes. Don’t focus on what to do next, but instead on your discomfort in the present. Remind yourself that any discomfort you feel is a protective response, not a defective one.Stay present and in your body as you move through the unfolding experience with all its ambiguity and uncertainty, and respond from the best parts of yourself.
Practice: Slowly move into the heat, peril and possibility of the conflict. Use the first three anchors to bring yourself back to the here and now when you begin contemplating the future or past, or the other person’s response. If you don’t know what to say, say so. Don’t try to get a specific response from anyone else. Act only from your own deepest integrity. If you struggle, go back to Anchor 1 and start again.Safely discharge any energy that remains.
Practice: Use this anchor only after you’ve worked through or disengaged from the conflict. After you’ve been in a conflict, your body naturally stores up energy that needs to be discharged, just like any animal after a stressful situation. Some ways to discharge that energy include exercising, dancing, and physical labor. Let your body do whatever it wants to do (unless it is harmful). Be sure to move your entire body for at least 20 minutes.
The next time you feel your white fragility begin to take over, try to use the five anchors to center yourself in your body, and notice how your body is reacting. Try to stay grounded in your body instead of your thoughts or emotions, and really take inventory of what your body is experiencing in that moment.
White fragility is an absurd myth, and it harms whites and BIPOC alike. We have to overcome it if we are to mend our collective, racialized trauma and move forward. It is worth restating that white fragility can be overcome — it is a trauma response to the culture of white bodied supremacy, not a true description of the character of white bodied people. White folks are actually quite strong, resilient, and capable of dealing with uncomfortable situations, when they need to be, both as a “race” and as individuals.
Reflection: [These questions are paraphrased from My Grandmother’s Hands] What evidence do you have that the belief that black bodies are dangerous is actually true? Why do you believe you are feeble and helpless in the presence of black bodies? What sensations arise in your body when you contemplate this question? How does this belief serve you? How does it affect other people?
To help you recognize your own resilience and overcome the myth of your white fragility, we have provided a guided body practice below, based on one of the practices suggested by Resmaa in his book My Grandmother’s Hands (which we highly recommend reading). Find a quiet space where you can be alone for 10-15 minutes and then listen to the audio track below.
Reflection: What sensations arose in your body during this practice? How might you recall those sensations, in your body, when next you begin to feel the effects of white fragility?
The Importance of Ongoing Support
Absorbing the emotional impact of our complicity in white supremacy is not a one-time event. We, Chelsie and Galen, still grapple with the emotional weight of engaging in anti-racist practice, perhaps now more than ever, since launching From Within. But we process daily with one another, and regularly with other white accomplices. And we get to meet with all of you each week.
Dealing with your own emotional struggles — related to your complicity in white supremacy — will require constant support, in order for you to remain fearlessly anti-racist. White affinity spaces like this one, or the Fearlessly Anti-Racist Alumni group on Facebook (which you will all receive an invite to join, upon completion of this program) are a great way to stay connected and find support with other like-minded white folks. You can also reach out and form your own network of white accomplices, with whom you meet regularly for dialogue. If you have the means, hiring a licensed therapist is also an excellent way of getting consistent emotional support. In the spirit of decolonizing the healing process, we’ll also note that practices such as wailing circles or group body movement (like dancing) can be a great way to relieve stress.
Whatever you choose, be sure that you have ongoing support. Being fearlessly anti-racist is not something you are, it’s something you practice, every day. And you will require others to challenge and support you in that practice.
HOMEWORK CHALLENGE
Now that you have a few tools at your disposal, let’s put them into practice. This week, find and watch a film about the overt harm of white supremacy (e.g., 12 Years a Slave, American History X, Do the Right Thing). As you watch, take inventory of how your body and mind respond to the words and images on the screen. What specific emotions arise, during which specific scenes? What images, words or phrases land in your body? Where in your body do you feel them? Keep a notebook nearby while you watch the film, and pause frequently to take notes. Be as specific as possible.
Reflection: How easy or difficult was this challenge for you? Why do you think that is? What patterns did you notice, in terms of your emotional or embodied responses to specific types of events depicted onscreen? How might you use this exercise to help you manage your emotions while you are in dialogue with other people?
Moving Forward, Fearlessly
Processing the emotional impact of absorbing your white identity, privilege and complicity in white supremacy is an enormous task. Hopefully this week’s lesson has given you some tools to help you work through those feelings (and some validation that they are real and important). The time and place to address those feelings, however, is here and now. One of the many benefits of white affinity spaces is that they create opportunities for white folks to do this vital emotional work, without saddling BIPOC with the burden of watching them — or being expected to help them — process their emotions. So take advantage of being here, in this space, surrounded by supportive white folks who are ready to help you do the hard work. And do this emotional work now, while you have the time and space to really grapple with it, because — and please pardon our brutal honesty here — your white guilt will be a liability when you are in the moment, being challenged to engage in anti-racism.
Ajah Hales illustrates this concept in her example of stopping to help a stranger:
“Imagine you’re walking through a park in your neighborhood and you come upon a stranger who has been beaten nearly to death. You’re a Good Samaritan, so of course you want to help. But as you go to call 911, you realize you left your cell at home. You don’t know CPR, and no one else is around. What is your next step?”
Reflection: Before we go on, take a moment to consider — what would you do in this position? More specifically, what are the first three things you would do, in order of importance? Write them down before reading further.
Take a moment to look at your list. It’s likely that you have not listed “Worry about not knowing CPR” or “Berate myself for leaving my phone at home.” In the same way, Hales points out, we white folks should not be spending any amount of time worrying about our own privilege or complicity in white supremacy, when BIPOC are literally dying from white supremacy. Instead, we need to immediately take action. But you don’t have to take our (or even Hales’) word for it. Aba and Preach will be happy to set you straight. (Note: The video below is an edited version of the full video, which you can find here).
Aba and Preach discuss white guilt (and why it’s not helpful to BIPOC).
Reflection: How did you respond to the video above? Did you find yourself getting defensive at all? Tone policing? What did you think about their argument?
Guilt is a powerful motivator, but it needs to be a motivator. Feeling guilty alone is not useful to anyone and, in fact, is actively counterproductive if it prevents you from taking real action. No black or brown person wants you to feel bad about your complicity in white supremacy. They want you to take action. Feel your white guilt and other emotions, but process them privately — by yourself or with other white folks (like we are doing here) — and do so with the intention of working through those emotions, so that you can re-commit to the critical work of taking fearlessly anti-racist action.