Just kidding. I don’t believe this — though I’m sure some people might and for good reason. You can read Du Bois’s essay about The Souls of White Folk and let me know what you think.
See? Us, white folk, can have a sense of humor when it comes to whiteness… Maybe not. Who knows. (Side note, if you’d like to know what I mean by whiteness, here’s my best explanation of it — I’m still figuring it out).
Now that we’re here though, can we talk about our souls, white friends? What’s going on in us — beneath our white surface? What can we do with race that nourishes our being? Because, as I see it, no one in America can escape race.
Here’s the simplified and imperfect way I’m currently making sense of race in the US, we live in a social environment of systematized racial inequity. Throughout American culture, the racial system yields the results it’s designed to. If we want different results, we need to change the system. In order to change the system, we need to figure out the personal — the ways our lives daily intersect with it and the parts we play in sustaining it. Whiteness is the way I’ve named my, and white people’s, part. I’m working to untangle myself from whiteness, while also engaging in the big shared work of taking apart this system and quashing racial inequity.
Let me put this out here too, white friends, whiteness — the way we white folk learn to be in our racial system — isn’t good for us. It’s not good for us collectively, as in humankind. But also it’s not good for us, as in the people racialized as white.
I’m not talking about the good that’s outwardly visible and measurable, like white privilege — the social and economic benefits that come with having white skin in the US. The perks of whiteness — the ones we see and don’t see, they’re not free (in my opinion, whiteness is overpriced). Whiteness was made to separate, literally to define what is white and what is not. To be part of whiteness, is to be disconnected — from ourselves and from one another.
What whiteness demands of us, it isn’t for our greater well-being and interconnectedness. The skin-deep benefits of whiteness are easily given, as long as we’re deemed white and keep with whiteness. But they’re easily snatched too (you can read here about a time my sense of white safety was ripped away). The favor that follows white skin, is no match for the deep rooted, spirit crushing ills whiteness also brings.
Whiteness doesn’t support the core of our being or welcome the whole of who we are. Whiteness isn’t for human compassion, community care, or togetherness. It doesn’t encourage who we might want to be unless, of course, we want to be and do whiteness. It steals our hope of attaining equity, diversity, and deep belonging. It stifles our ability to dream of something better and stunts unknown possibility. Whiteness takes us away from our humanness, pulls us into numbness, and depletes the human spirit.
Intuition tells me that, to some degree, many of us know this. I don’t know white people for whom being white — or being called white — is not complicated. Some white people seem to take it as a personal insult to be lumped together in whiteness. I don’t find many white people who talk about whiteness, most of the white people in my life don’t look for opportunities to consider or divulge what being white means to them. This is telling to me.
My white friends, undoing whiteness is good for our souls because human beings were made to flourish, and whiteness doesn’t allow this. In community and relationship with one another, and across race, I’ve seen whiteness get in our way. The narrative whiteness would have us live into, has us missing out on the opportunity to perceive ourselves and other people expansively. There’s more to us than the boxes we’re put in and the social categories we’re assigned to. Our souls, our humanness, do not belong to whiteness. These are ours to own.
Taking apart racial inequity, and the ways we learn to perpetuate it, is soul care. It is caring for ourselves, caring for others, and caring for the whole of humanity. Ultimately, whiteness offers us cheap gifts. These perks divert our attention. They convince us that whiteness isn’t a tool and made up scheme designed to keep us from knowing the depths of human affinity and they circumvent our being fully human. Unless we pay attention to it, and actively resist it, whiteness will work against us.
Looking at whiteness and our ties to racial inequity, can be about becoming more human. It can be about freeing ourselves and others from the constraints that keep our souls from soaring. Our journey can be letting go and unlearning the ways we’ve been socialized to disparage, oppress, and separate. We’re not simply doing something different, together, we’re becoming something different, and, in doing so, we’re championing the collective social change we all need.
We can relate to race in a more life affirming and soul sustaining way. We can attend to parts of our malnourished souls and become more effective participants in the undoing of racial inequity. We can look out for and oppose the ways whiteness harms us and others, in everyday life.
My white friends, I’m hoping we aid one another to see how whiteness brings destruction. I’m trusting we’ll help each other understand that, just because a lie seems to outwardly benefit us, it does not mean that lie nourishes our soul or helps us be whole.
Comments