Confront Whiteness: Looking At Our Collective Shadow in 2020
Four years ago after the election, the first thing I did was make a sign that read “Confront Whiteness” to carry into the streets the next day. I had tried to convince myself that the polls and reporting were right, that Trump would lose, but I couldn’t shake the nagging suspicion that racism, xenophobia and hatred and derision for the ‘other’ would prevail. Our society had yet to really confront the unifying factor in all those things: the insidious construct of “whiteness” and the right to domination it bestowed upon people whose physical traits fit the social prescription.
Soon after, I began volunteering my time on an organizing effort that would become the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. As the former Head of Communications, I can confirm the core organizers were very careful about the messaging every time the media asked if this was an “anti-Trump march”; we were extremely clear that it was a march FOR the values that Trump had so clearly campaigned against: human dignity, equity, inclusion, pluralism, etc. The talking points we developed described Trump as a symptom, not the cause, of a much deeper problem.
“Symptoms” can kill a person though. Women and femmes who had been experiencing and witnessing violence, discrimination and disenfranchisement under previous Presidents, both Democratic and Republican, already knew that deadly truth.
We adopted an unapologetically racial justice framing in our messaging, which the New York Times derisively reported was destroying the Women’s March on Washington before it could happen by ‘driving away’ white women. I personally incurred the wrath of a number of white women who were brand new to activism, by tightly controlling the spokespeople for the march to brilliant and experienced organizers who were women of color from marginalized backgrounds. Those outraged white women weren’t just hungry to speak to the media, they felt entitled to be spokespeople over Black, Latina and Muslim women who’d collectively been organized for 60+ years, and inherited legacies of organizing that went back generations.
I bring this back up today as liberal white America again grapples with the existential crisis of what’s looking a lot like another Trump victory. The past four years have taught me a lot about the ways that white supremacy perniciously perpetuates itself in the most liberal of spaces, and how few white people are actually willing to do anything to stop it.
Writer, political strategist and my compadre in the movement, Stanley Fritz, recently shared a poignant and painful story about his attempt to facilitate a racial justice workshop within an extremely progressive political organization in New York. The resulting emotional outbursts from white men in the room were so disruptive that the workshop abruptly ended. Stanley writes, “At first, it was hard to understand: how could they be in this space with people who claim to support progressive politics but be so hot and bothered over a political worldview that included a clear racial analysis? And then it hit me. They, and honestly, most white people, can agree that racism is bad, but they don’t think that they are personally racist. Additionally, they feel like they’re just innocent bystanders in ‘a thing that happened hundreds of years ago’” (emphasis mine).
This is exactly why so many liberal white people spent the last four years believing that they could simply “hate Trump away,” because it’s much easier to abhor the racism in the ‘other’ than to observe it operating within your own world and behavior. This is why, immediately after the stunning success of the 2017 march (suck it, NYT), the very people who’d never believed Trump could possibly win became experts on defeating him with “the resistance”. In 2020, virtually every email and text message I opened from the Women’s March organization referenced Trump.
This is really about dealing with our collective shadow, the psychological concept that what you refuse to acknowledge persists. The hierarchical systems of domination and exploitation that privilege wealthy white men above all others have existed for over 400 years on this land, and they are not going away until we reckon with them. This is why the defenders of white supremacy fight so hard against racial justice and ethnic studies in our educational systems, in our history books and in our collective understanding; because hatred and fear can only thrive in the darkness of ignorance.
Dealing with our shadow means looking within ourselves, rather than finding blame in the outside world. It means interrogating how all the systems we live in, interact with and passively support are contributing to a social mythology that white people deserve more, deserve better, deserve to be the leaders — and the founders and the people speaking to the media. It means stepping aside and leveraging our privilege to uplift Black women, trans women, women from vulnerable communities. It means listening to and believing these women, and doing what they ask us to do. Including talk to our Trump-loving communities, which are never as far away as we’d like to believe.
Really and truly, confronting “whiteness” was the work we needed to begin four years ago in order to curb the harm. The coming years are now going to require much more of us. We may fancy ourselves heroes just for easily seeing the humanity of others, but soon now we will be called upon to make real sacrifices to defend that humanity. We have the chance to answer the fool’s question, “what would I have done during the time of slavery and the Underground Railroad? … What would I have done under Nazi occupation? …What would I have done in the Civil Rights era?” White ethno-nationalism was never defeated and now is the time to become real accomplices to people bearing the brunt of the violence and terror.
Or else we will remain complicit in the abuse, because truly no bystanders are “innocent”.
