In other words, a note to my younger self. Let me begin by saying that in order to speak about a thing, it’s helpful to first name it. To effectively engage with race, you have to acknowledge and identify your ties to whiteness and your part in the problem of racial inequity.
As a new therapist, you were excited and hopeful. Through your training, you learned valuable skills and gained self-awareness. The program you joined is excellent, producing resourceful and responsible clinicians, and you’re proud to be a part of it. You felt prepared to support individuals, couples, and families on their healing journeys.
However, you soon realized that you overlooked something important — whiteness. In the initial months of your first therapist job, you faced the limitations of your understanding and ability to discuss whiteness. While you can handle difficult and uncomfortable topics, whiteness makes you squirm.
You struggle with being identified as white and grouped with other white people. The defensiveness and unease you have around whiteness tells you that there’s something profoundly personal about being white that requires you to delve deeper. But how?
At times, you’re aware of whiteness and you recognize that race has an impact on the work that you do. As part of your training, you were taught to invite individuals of color to explore their experience of meeting with a white therapist. You learned to be aware of how race and racial inequity can affect the lives and well-being of people of color. Unfortunately, these lessons didn’t help you address your relationship with whiteness. They reinforced an unrealized racial mode of operation that you live by — race only matters when people of color are involved.
You haven’t considered asking white individuals how meeting with a white therapist could influence their therapy. Or how whiteness affects our sense of self and mental health. You haven’t explored how our presence as white people can complicate relationships and spaces. Though you’re influenced by the idea that the thing you don’t talk about is the thing you need to, you haven’t noticed that white people generally don’t discuss whiteness. Eventually, you realize that you haven’t addressed race with white people in therapy because you don’t see it as significant in your own life.
Encounters in therapy and everyday life will make you question what you’ve learned about whiteness. Recalling the coursework and the process of intense personal reflection that was part of your training program, you realize that you never truly examined how you make sense of being white in America. You lack insight into the ways whiteness shapes you and how you move through the world.
In your training, clinical experience, and continuing education, you study race from a scholarly and clinical perspective. The focus is on developing multicultural competencies and becoming culturally skilled counselors. You learn about racial identity development, but you don’t apply white identity development theories or explore their relevance in your own life. Whiteness has remained mostly invisible to you.
You’ve been avoiding and ignoring your own race, not only in your professional training and practice, but in all aspects of your life. You are genuinely troubled by instances of racism that you hear about from clients, friends, loved ones of color, as well as from news stories and research data. However, it’s difficult for you to recognize the role of whiteness in these situations, as well as in American culture, history, and your chosen profession.
You haven’t fully come to terms with it yet, but your reluctance to discuss and acknowledge whiteness stems from your desire to avoid association with it. Whiteness was created to establish a hierarchy that goes against your personal and professional ethics, and you want no part in it. Gradually, you begin to understand that you cannot escape it — you are tied to whiteness.
Your struggle to reconcile the stark contrast between your values and what whiteness demands is the reason why you have trouble responding to matters of race and racism effectively and consistently. You’re beginning to understand the importance of identifying your role in perpetuating racial inequality in America. You’re also getting in touch with the emotional and psychological toll that maintaining whiteness takes on you.
Then there’s the issue of the prevailing narratives concerning race and whiteness that are interwoven throughout American culture. Unwittingly, you internalized the myth of white superiority. You absorbed and acted upon a corresponding narrative that portrays black and brown people as dangerous. Sadly, you’re accustomed to blaming people of color for the racism they face, all while convincing yourself that you’re a good white person.
So, you find yourself as a therapist who is unsure about how to navigate whiteness. The good news is that you don’t stay here. You will learn how to confront the conflicting realities that race is not biologically based, yet it still provides you with undeniable advantages.
It will become clear that we are part of a dysfunctional and destructive racialized order, and we all need healing. You will see how race reduces people to ideas or social narratives, which is harmful in our culture and fails to honor personhood. You will also notice that this is what you were taught and expected to do to maintain your place in whiteness.
To reckon with race, you must continuously reject whiteness, let go of defensiveness, and approach race with curiosity and humility. By confronting and undoing the ways you’ve navigated life without considering race, you will gain a greater understanding and ability to address racial inequity.
Curiosity will help you explore the stories and beliefs you’ve held about your whiteness and reveal much to learn about the history of white people in your country. The truth about whiteness and how it operates is often overlooked in America, and you missed it. Knowing this history will help you make sense of your personal struggle with race and the collective challenges we face.
Examining how you and white people have perpetuated racial terror and harm throughout history is necessary to disrupt and unlearn destructive thoughts and patterns. It will be painful and evoke guilt and shame for how your understanding of whiteness has distorted your perception of normalcy, Americanness, and health. However, attending to these painful things will ultimately heal you.
You need to move away from the familiar racial space that limits your understanding of America’s racial problem and your role in it. By retracing your geographic journey from the Northeast to the Midwest and the South, you will gain a new perspective on how race and white identity are perceived differently in different locations. Whiteness has different characteristics in various places, but its fundamental purpose remains the same — to establish and protect the belief that having less melanin makes one superior and more deserving.
For much of your life, you embraced the safety and comfort of being included in whiteness, and turning away from it isn’t easy. But, you will realize that belonging to whiteness is conditional, fueled by fear, and you would rather divest of whiteness than live in fear. You start to trust that when white people acknowledge and take responsibility for the maintenance of white superiority, and when we deconstruct the skin color-based ranking system we’ve designed, it promotes collective flourishing. This will guide you as you work to dismantle the legal, political, and economic systems that privilege white people and deny others equal benefits. Rejecting whiteness is the only way you can truly uphold your belief in equity and abundance for all.
As you examine whiteness, you will feel lonely, but remember that you are not alone. You have a beloved community of people who share your commitment to challenging and undoing whiteness. By learning from and growing alongside these individuals, and utilizing the skills you have acquired as a therapist to apply this knowledge in your own life, you gain the hope that those of us counted as white can break free of whiteness and become something other than what we have known.
Finally, there will be discomfort and distance with white people whom you know and love. At times, you fear that the growing sense of disconnection between you and the white people in your life will only continue to expand, with little promise of closeness. But, you keep on. Because one thing is certain — this is the path to wholeness and freedom.
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