What Do You Want From Me? — The Question That Pervades

My dear white people, you’ve asked, so let’s talk about it.

Photo by Matt Walsh on Unsplash

Many a time you’ve directly asked this of me. Other times, it goes unspoken, but this question is ever present — it lingers in the background of our talks about race. I see the honest, exasperated, and questioning look on your face. My answer varies — a different wish for a particular juncture, one related to a certain circumstance, or a distinct desire for a specific relationship. But, my white friends and loved ones, here’s my best attempt to answer it broadly, for today.

I want there to be an us. I want you and I to trust that reckoning with race will not tear us apart. That our relationship can survive the demise of white superiority. That the love and care we have for one another and for shared humanity, will withstand the ways that parting with socialized expectations and racial norms can bring broken relationships and separation.

I want us to agree that we don’t have to have everything figured out and to expect growth and change in one another. To know that we’ll make mistakes but to trust that, in our relationships, we do our best to show up with love and care, sometimes we hurt others, and we come back to one another to repair the fractures. That we can do this with each other around race.

I want our new normal to include examining whiteness. I want us to explore the meaning we’ve made of race with one another. I desire for us to co-create space where we open up about how we’ve messed up, help one another figure out where we can be better, and dig into what we, as white people, need to be doing about racial inequity.

I desire a different kind of relating with race and with one another. Where we look for the things we’ve taken for granted as white people and we strive to grow our idea for what racial together-ness can be. You are my people, I don’t want us to feel or be alone — I want us to do the work of acknowledging racial imbalance and our part in it in community. I want us to take apart racism and join in the work of building something new. I want this to be work that we share.

I want us to grow our imagination. I wish we would help one another imagine ourselves and our world outside of the box of whiteness — that we encourage each other to break free of it. That we’d come to understand how the ideas of what it means to have white skin was made up by someone else, that we’re not eternally bound to ideas of whiteness. I want us to open up possibilities for new ways of being, of navigating the world, and of understanding power, relationships, and humanity — ways that free us all from the bounds of race and racialization.

I want us to pay attention with openness. To grow our capacity to sit with uncomfortable truths about race. To agree that whiteness and the racial status quo is not working. Racism in our world and the legacy of racial inequity in the US, isn’t difficult to see. Whiteness may have taught us to ignore it, but we can teach ourselves otherwise. We can help one another to pay attention. (Looking for opportunities to learn? Visit the list of books and resources I have collected and relied upon).

I want us to see that, as a group and as individuals, we’re pretty deficient when it comes to recognizing racial imbalance and being with race. That this is how whiteness socializes us to be. I hope we’ll see that acknowledging our shortfalls is the beginning of the work we can do around race. That we’ll examine and seek out ways we can meet our needs when it comes to growing our awareness of and skill in seeing race — that we’ll look to understand what exactly is the work we need to do.

I want us to know that it’s ok to be disappointed about the history of our people. That it makes sense if we might want to distance ourselves from our racial legacy and it’s ok to struggle with how white people have been in the world. But I want us to not see ourselves as victims to whiteness or need the story of our people to be different than what it is.

I want us to recognize how the way we choose to be in the world affects others. That the things we choose to believe in, the ways we enact our beliefs, and who, and what we choose to stand for, has consequences. I wish we would hear about what the racial consequences are — good and bad — for our well-being, our family, for our relationships, and for our world. To take this into account in our day-to-day living. I want us to consider the impact our ways of being, believing, and doing, with race, has on our lives. Does it help us live and be the way we want to? Does it create the relationships and depth of connection we desire?

I want us to know that change is imminent and that we can help to shape our racial future. I want us to see that we are not being left out or being picked apart, but that we are being called in. I want us to understand that doing nothing is action. To know that when we do nothing and say nothing about racial injustice, that we are choosing to stand with whiteness and we are maintaining white dominance. We are being asked to join in the work of liberating the whole.

It might feel as though I’m asking for a lot and… you asked me what I wanted.