Why Interrogating Whiteness Matters
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This week, I was invited by PUGS to write a blog post about the course I’ll be teaching, Interrogating Whiteness. In proposing this blog, PUGS suggested I could talk about "why this course matters so much to (me)—because it‘s clear that it does."
That is a huge question, and it feels like there are about a million different ways I could go about answering it, but I will just say, for the purposes of this blog post: this course (and how I see it fitting into larger local, national, and international conversations and forms of activism) has everything to do with questions of reconciliation and healing. How do we heal ourselves? How do we make space for and support others in their healing? How do we—individually, collectively—heal from the traumatic, ongoing legacies and effects of white supremacy (which go hand in hand with the legacies of colonization; genocide; theft & displacement; slavery; mass incarceration; social, economic, and geographical neglect and abandonment; consolidations of real estate, resources, and capital; the outsourcing of toxic matter and waste; the mass policing, surveillance, detention, and deportation of non-white immigrants, and all forms of capitalist exploitation), in the service of actual racial justice and reconciliation?
“On the other side of dismantling white identity ... is a whole other, richer, more open, more meaningful, more generous, more caring way of being in the world”
In a recent conversation with a white family member, I was asked: "Well, what do you want white people to do (about racism)?" I thought about this question in the hours after our conversation, and I came to the following conclusion:
I want a large number of white people to be so deeply, viscerally horrified by the (historical and present) reality of white supremacy—the reality of what it does to others; the reality of what it does to one’s communities and families and relationships and the places one calls "home"; the reality of what it does to one's own psyche and capacity to be a full, present, alive, connected human being (and I would say that existing within and benefiting from a system founded on exploitation and murder threatens to destroy all of these things)—that they feel they cannot bear to exist another day without doing everything they can possibly imagine to dismantle white supremacy.
I don't have the answer to how to destroy white supremacy, and I don’t think it’s something a single person or small group of people can do on their own. White supremacy is institutional and systemic, absolutely, but it also lives in and is maintained through bodies and minds, especially the bodies and minds of white people. While I’m not asking white people to destroy their bodies (which, incidentally, would do nothing to destroy white supremacy), I am asking them to look very closely and uncomfortably at their own lives, at the ways in which they’ve been (largely subconsciously) conditioned into racism, at how this conditioning has shaped their identities, their senses of self, their senses of danger and fear and comfort and safety, their senses of the value of their lives and the relative value of the lives of others (depending on whether those others are white or black or indigenous or Latinx; American-born citizens or immigrants; rich or poor; housed or houseless; "criminals" or "law-abiding" members of society; etc.). In other words, I am asking them to look at the ways in which their views of themselves and the world are bound up with ideologies of white supremacy: ideologies in which, to put it very simply, certain lives matter more than other lives. And I am asking them to work to dismantle, in themselves and in others, these views and the actions and behaviors and countless forms of direct and indirect violence they serve to engender, obscure, disguise, and justify—which will likely involve dismantling certain aspects of their own identities (a very scary and challenging thing to do).
However, the important thing to remember is: one’s (built, conditioned) identity is not the whole of who someone is. And on the other side of dismantling white identity—on the other side of dismantling whiteness—is a whole other, richer, more open, more meaningful, more generous, more caring way of being in the world: a way of being that does not depend on the constant exclusion and erasure and exploitation of others; a way of being that leaves room for real love and connection and all the messiness and difficulty and beauty of real, honest relationships; a way of being that does not depend on all kinds of anxious, paranoid posturing and acts of violence and defensiveness required to kill or ward off all perceived "threats," threats which are often simply products of white people's imaginations
Part of teaching this class is also very personal for me, in the sense that I do not want to live in this way. I refuse to. I have seen people I love live in this way; some of them may end up dying in this way (which doesn’t necessarily mean that I love them any less, although it does complicate that love). And I think, as a white person, "not living in this way" also requires acknowledging and talking about the pain and horror of white supremacy—both as it affects people of color and as it affects white people—with other people who also want or feel compelled to acknowledge and talk about it. These are hard conversations to have: they are uncomfortable, they are psychically and emotionally demanding, they require stepping into extremely murky and complex territory, where mistakes and missteps feel almost inevitable. But I would rather make a million mistakes in my attempts to figure out how to contest and undo my own white racial conditioning, and how to destroy white supremacy—attempts which I hope to undertake alongside and in the company of many others—than live my whole life terrified, trapped, and completely alone in the house/prison of whiteness.
So that is what this class is about. And it is about building connections with others who are on their own, unique versions of this same path. I don’t know who all of these people are, yet, but I look forward to meeting more of them as my work continues. I think meeting and connecting with people is what this work is about, and I feel really lucky to be in a place where I’m able to do that.
Sarah DeYoreo’s course Interrogating Whiteness: An American Unstory starts again July 6.