Deconstructing Whiteness: sitting with the bones

It’s Fall 2018.  I’m a thirty-eight year old woman, a working mother of four children, and I’m in my first class, Ethnicity, Race, Gender, and Sexuality with the head of the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at Colorado State University, Dr. Caridad Souza.  This is what I write in the back of my textbook:

I don’t know enough yet

I can’t speak eloquently enough yet

I’m afraid of who I might offend

I’m afraid I won't do the subject justice

I’m afraid of my whiteness, my cisgender heterosexuality

I’m afraid of setting myself up as a spokesperson

And yet, if I am telling the truth

What I really feel compelled to talk about

Is religious oppression and religious privilege

And oppression and privilege in all the ways I’m

Beginning to see their intersection in my life

I want to talk about how difficult it’s been to 

Be spiritual but not religious, the constant need

I’ve felt to prove myself

It’s more than my spiritual evolution

It’s about becoming free

As soon as I write it, I think, “Am I centering myself? Am I wasting breath obsessing over my whiteness?  Or if I wasn’t when I wrote it, am I doing it now by fine-tooth combing my motives?”

The answers to these questions are yes, and no.  Yes, I'm centering myself, and no, this is not a waste of breath: for where else can I begin but with myself?  

When I began, I swung wildly on a pendulum. 

As I woke to my White Supremacy, my shame and grief swung me into White Fragility.  Not knowing how to sit with these emotions, I got busy with helping and swung into White Saviorism.  Once I realized my need to help was still more about me and my guilt than anything else, I swung into White Fatigue and Paralysis, even more ashamed of myself.  My "I suck" mantra turned out to be White Martyrdom which I tried to alleviate by using my White Privilege to opt out of the tensions and the uncomfortability.  Once I realized I was doing that, I swung back into White Fragility. 

It wasn’t pretty, but it was true.

I don’t think there is any other way to find a new center than to swing wildly back and forth until the old center finally destabilizes and lets go.  

My job was to STAY WITH IT.

Stay with the process.  Don’t try to alleviate the pain, numb it out, explain it away, or make it anybody else’s job to make it better (especially the BIPOC community).  

My job was to ASK FOR HELP (again, not from the BIPOC community- this is called emotional labor) so I could build stamina and resilience because this work is an inside job AND an outside job, often at the same time, and you can’t do liberation without community (Audre Lorde).  I don’t think I could have done it without my somatic therapist, my women’s circle, my professor, and the guidance of all the writers and activists already in the trenches.  

This is long-haul work, lifetime work, deconstructing systems of oppression from the inside out kind of work. 

There are no shortcuts through the revolution.

As a white-bodied person, I cannot work to dismantle racism in the world around me until I’ve examined the roots of racism inside of me.  

I have to begin with myself or I run the risk of adopting the form of anti-racism without the substance, “performing allyship” to help my ego feel better about itself, like the biblical Pharisees who prayed loudly in the streets so everyone could see the proof of their devotion.  They were the ones who did the most damage to the cause of freedom.  Jesus called them “white-washed tombs.” 

We all hold bones. 

The work starts in the tomb and in the temple of your spirit.  Because we are all both tomb and temple; we are all oppressed and the oppressor.  And no one is free until we are all free. 

It’s time to sit with the bones.

Audre Lorde says it this way: “ I urge each one of us to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there.  See whose face it wears.”

 To deconstruct whiteness, I have to begin with self-awareness; I have to name myself. 

Naming situates me within my context. 

Once I locate myself, I have the power to choose if I actually want to be where I am.

I have the power to change and the power to bring about change.

To quote the Chicana writer and feminist activist, Cherrie Moraga: The Revolution Begins At Home.