How to Confront and Undo Your White Conditioning
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We at PUGS strive to bring you topical, relevant, deep learning opportunities that are accessible and affordable. So why, now that all eyes are and should be on the Black Lives Matter movement, is PUGS running a course about whiteness? We asked Interrogating Whiteness instructor Sarah DeYoreo to unpack why it’s so important for white Portlanders to recognize, confront, and begin to process their white conditioning. These are her words:
The course Interrogating Whiteness is meant to help participants—particularly, but not exclusively, white participants—begin or continue to process and unpack their own racial conditioning: the process of being conditioned into a culture founded on the myth and associated practices, institutions, ideologies, and behaviors of white supremacy. I believe that this is crucial, scary, challenging, but ultimately deeply rewarding and transformative work for people, especially white people, to undertake if they want to work to dismantle white supremacy: both as it manifests in the larger culture and at institutional levels, but also as it manifests in their own bodies, psyches, and learned behaviors (which often take the form of defensiveness, denial, repression, projection, and evasion, among other things).
“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor that is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.”
Two people who are foundational to my own thinking around these questions and my ability to conceive of and plan this course are the writers Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, both of whom were committed in their lifetimes to understanding how racism and white supremacy function not only culturally and institutionally, but also how we are all differently conditioned into these systems, from birth onward, and how these systems and our conditioning into them have real effects on our psyches, bodies, relationships, and, for lack of a better phrase, our capacity to be human.
There is a quote from Audre Lorde, who identified as a Black, feminist, lesbian poet, that I feel pretty well sums up my entire motivation for teaching this class: she says, "The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor that is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships."
In order for white people, and those who perhaps are not white but who have been coerced, nonetheless, to assimilate into the system of white supremacy—and assimilation into white supremacy, or assimilation into "whiteness," is always the price Indigenous people, immigrants, and people of color have paid in order to receive even the most basic services and most tenuous sense of "belonging" in the United States. Assimilation always comes at the expense of Black bodies. In order to truly work to dismantle white supremacy and the systems with which white supremacy is deeply, inextricably entangled (capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ecological destruction, etc.), they must work to see, examine, and unpack or work through the ways in which they, themselves, have been conditioned into these systems and the pain that conditioning has caused and is causing them. In short: they must learn how to see themselves.
I realize that sounds counterintuitive, and like one of the very last things white people need to do (don’t we already see ourselves everywhere, all the time, front and center?), but I think really seeing oneself requires also seeing one’s own pain and the relationship between one’s own pain and the violence one is inflicting on others—and I think, in a very real and terrifying and consequential way, the history and present of whiteness in this country is a history of white people projecting their own pain onto the people around them—especially when those people are people of color—and thereby avoiding actually looking at themselves. I think white people learning how to do this would be a groundbreaking, revolutionary act. It would bring the system of white supremacy crashing to the ground, and it would enable other possibilities for how we might live together in the world to flourish and grow, in ways that are probably unimaginable to us now.
One final thing I will say: I am white. I grew up in a white, "liberal," highly educated, upper-middle-class family in the California Bay Area, and I think I was about 19 years old before I ever thought seriously about race, and about 25 years old before I ever thought seriously about my own race. The fact that I could grow up in this kind of family, attend the schools that I attended, and not think about race for the first 20 years of my life says a lot about the way whiteness (even liberal, "enlightened" whiteness) works. I am now 32, so clearly this is a journey I am still very much in the midst of. I expect I will be more or less in the midst of it for the remainder of my life. I feel really good about that. I do not have all, or even most, of the answers, but I have a lot of questions, and I have found that these questions are helpful in guiding, challenging, and encouraging others in this work. The longer I teach this class, the more I feel that what is at stake in these questions is nothing less than:
What is it to be alive? What are our lives worth? What gives them meaning and substance?
It turns out that when one's life depends on the domination and exploitation of others, one's own life is worth very little, and that is a painful and traumatic way to live, regardless of whether or not one is willing to acknowledge that pain. So this course is intended to help people begin to acknowledge their own pain—the pain of racial conditioning, of what these racial hierarchies do to all of us—and to recognize that we all have nothing to lose and everything to gain in figuring out how to dismantle white supremacy and how to imagine our way to a different reality, one that I know is possible and right there, waiting for us.
Join Sarah’s course Interrogating Whiteness - An American Unstory from Monday, July 6 online.
Main image by QUOI Media, Creative Commons.