Day 9: The Presence of Shame
Greetings friends,
There’s a difference between guilt and shame.
Guilt has to do with having done something wrong. Shame has to do with being wrong. (Like—innate unworthiness.)
White guilt and racial shame will both play a large role in the white experience as long as white supremacy and racism are pervasive. They’re consequences of having some awareness or a desire to be just, be in relationships of integrity with people of color, and otherwise live on the right side of history. All this while simultaneously understanding whiteness means unjust privileges, and access and insulation from racist violence and harm that affects other people.
Guilt and shame can leave us very stuck in our antiracism growth.
However—in my (very) unprofessional assessment—guilt is a developmentally normal response to being white and recognizing the reality of racism. While shame is evidence of having been developmentally harmed. This difference matters.
Guilt is easier. The way we metabolize guilt (get unstuck!) is through action. We learn to engage in accountability, redress, and repair for harm we have caused individually. We learn to take action, with others, to challenge and interrupt the harm caused in and by racist systems and structures.
Shame is tougher. Thandeka, who wrote a book many years ago called Learning to be White, described the process of being racialized as white as a developmental process rooted in the shame/shaming of white children and youth. She recorded numerous first-person accounts of white racialization among adults who grew up in the 60s and 70s—stories where children and youth were punished for “crossing racial lines” and made to understand their communities would expel them if they didn’t get back in line. The specific ways racialization happens is very different in more white families today than it was in the 60s and 70s. But, the larger processes remains similar.
Being shushed for noticing difference, told not to challenge grandma when she’s racist, watching parents say we “value equality” but stay uninvolved when racism roars into public life. At developmentally vulnerable ages—a time when you literally depend on adults for survival—many white children learn their belonging is contingent and love is conditional as part of their racialization.
Shame (you are unworthy! unloveable! innately bad!) becomes woven into the experience of the racial self as subtle, but powerful, messages about belonging are entangled with expectations that one goes along with whiteness in one’s family. (My video gave a not-so-subtle example of this).
No wonder shame comes roaring up when we encounter the demands of racial justice and the urgency of antiracism. Our whiteness, necessarily made visible and seen because of its relationship to racism, is still tangled up in shame and it makes itself known when we step into this journey.
So, what do we do about shame?
I actually don’t know.
But I do know this. Shame is a huge barrier to white antiracist growth. Shame makes it too easy to shut down to the work of justice (at best) or respond with resistance, disdain and anger (at worse). And I know that shame (of any sort) can only lose its grip when we find ways to acknowledge it’s there, talk about it, and name it. So, I know that’s where we need to start.
Friends, here’s your action for today. Sit down for 5 minutes, take a deep breath, and imagine (maybe write about!) a time you experienced shame related to race. Then go to look White Awake: Waking Ourselves for the Benefit of All. White Awake offers a unique path into understanding how white racial formation has affected us (historically, communally, psychology) and connects us with others to help us build community (the kind Chris Crass talked about on day one!) and move holistically into the work of collective liberation for all. Mark a time you can take one of their courses! They make them time flexible, they’re so so so good, and everything they do is on a sliding scale.
You are loved and you are necessary in this collective work. Thanks for risking being vulnerable with me today.
Jen
Day 1: Make a list of at least three specific ways you want to grow your lived commitment to antiracism.
Day 2: Talk with two people about what you need to do to interrupt, intervene or challenge a racist dynamic or situation and get their support in envisioning how to do it.
Day 3: Explore through the work of these projects (read about them, watch the videos) Acts of Reparation and the Community Remembrance Project as a way to contemplate generational legacies, learn about current efforts for remembrance and repair, nourish your own moral imagination for where you may be called to plug in.
Day 4: Find one question or one family story and decide to ask it or ask about it, to create “productive instability.”
Day 5: Try one of Chanté Griffin’s “tips” as a way of practice interracial relationship-building.
Day 6: Do an audit of where you spend your time and where you spend your money. Identify specific choices you could make to shift where spend your time and your resources from mostly white spaces into Black- and Brown-owned, run or majority spaces.
Day 7: “Spark a conversation with your child or students that inspires and liberates them to be more curious about how they can help dismantle racism” (thank you, Dr. Berry!). If you don’t have a child or students, connect with a friend or loved one who does—share what Dr. Berry got you thinking about and ask them about what they do.
Day 8: Identify at least one racial dynamic that exists in your familial relationship where you haven’t fully “gone home with your antiracist values on your sleeve.” Make a plan for how you’re going to lean in with some kind of interruption (a question? a curiosity? a response that disrupts but strives to stay in connection).
P.S. Save the date: Join me and others who took part in this experience for a live conversation on Tuesday, July 9th at 5:00 PST/6:00 MST/7:00 CST/8:00 EST as a way to wrap up and reflect on our 12 Days of Action. We’ll follow up with the link shortly.
P.P.S. It’s not too late to sign up for 12 Days of Antiracist Action! Share this sign up link with your friends and we’ll help them get caught up: https://mailchi.mp/10b7b14d2037/murwtz2krf
