Why I Engage In Racial Equity Work As a White Woman
I am humbled by and grateful for all I have learned from my Black, Indigenous, and racialized colleagues in racial equity work. It has been so important in my own development to hear stories of their experiences in their own voices. Often, my mind was blown at how different their experiences could be from my own: “What? Your family talked about racism at the dinner table! Families do that?”
Other times their unfiltered truths left me reeling. I once asked three Black male colleagues, “What if you just let White women cry instead of comforting them when they get upset in your equity workshops?” My feminist position was that catering to tearful outbursts is infantilizing to White women and enables our fragility. All three spontaneously put their hands up in a “don’t shoot” gesture, and one explained, “I’m not sure I could do that and not get lynched - maybe not literally but for sure professionally.” It was a powerful, catalyzing moment, and caused me to consider the impact of my White feminist beliefs. I knew I had to live into the trust of our working relationships by leaning into their truth. I was lucky to have those relationships. And I was lucky to have already developed the embodied awareness skills to process my disequilibrium - most White people I know have neither. As a result, many White folks don’t respond well to the unfiltered truth.
Over time I’ve come to realize that the racial justice landscape is an ecosystem in which we all have a role; and that we need people of all races to fulfill its functions. As a White facilitator I can get other White people ready to hear that unfiltered perspective, both by saying the difficult thing, and by unpacking mental, emotional and gut reactions to it. Below are my top seven reasons that White teachers, facilitators and coaches, too, are important.
1. Other White People Modeling Racial Consciousness Helped Me
In my own racial consciousness development, it has been formative to see other White people ahead of me in this work. I remember noticing how Heather Hackman held a room of mostly white colleagues accountable, watching how Christine Saxman co-facilitated with Black colleagues, and sensing how Tim Wise’s audience received his presentation. It was as if they opened a door to a different way of being that I caught a glimpse of, enough to know that I could get there someday too. None of my schooling showed me White people actively fighting for racial equity. None of my family could have an unanxious presence around racial issues or even conversations. But here were people showing me the possibility of what the Q’ran calls the “hidden joy that awaits for acting justly.”
“What do I do when I mess up? . . . How can I build my capacity to stick with this work for the long haul?”
2. It’s Not the Job of Racialized People to Teach White People
It has been equally formative for me as a member of the social dominant to hear marginalized folks describe their experiences, unfiltered, from their own, first-hand perspectives. This is all the more important as I consider the patterns that serve as clues to how systems operate. However, it’s not the job of Black, Indigenous or racialized people to help White people make sense of our internal struggles. That’s our work. For example, I once heard a talk by Africana Studies Professor Christopher Tinson called The Fact of Captivity: Twelve Years A Slave and the Afterlife of Slavery. In it, Tinson connected the brutal history of slavery to current attitudes and events, always with a systems-level view. In the Q&A, a young White woman took the mic to ask this Black professor’s advice on how to handle her racist uncle at the holiday table. While that’s an important question, unless he has white relatives, how would he know how to handle this? And how is it his business? We need to make space for White people to ask each other these kinds of family-structural questions along with our internal questions such as, Why didn’t I see all this before? How can I make sense of everything I’m sensing and feeling now? What do I do when I mess up? Who am I in this racial landscape and what is my work? How can I build my capacity to stick with this work for the long haul?
3. People Hear New Ideas More Easily When They Come from Inside a Community
Exasperatingly, people tend to hear difficult information best from those in their own group. This has been vexing to me as a woman, when a man hears my idea from another man and suddenly gets it, and I know it’s vexing to Black, Indigenous and racialized folks when White speakers and authors do it. In fact, I’ve heard Robin DiAngelo start her talks with an apology along the lines of, “I know you’ve been saying what I’m about to say for years, but research shows that White people will be able to hear it from me.” This is not surprising, It’s how our nervous systems are wired, particularly until we learn to steward them better. When I work in multiracial facilitation teams, we think proactively about who needs to hear which message from what messenger. This is part of cultural competence - knowing which tool to use, and who should employ it. The truth is that when we meet people where they are, we better prepare them for the next step.
4. We Need Low-Stakes Practice to Handle the Hard Conversations
Along the same lines, that racist White uncle at the holiday table is more willing to listen to family than to non-white outsiders. Still, family events can be freighted with all sorts of expectations and emotions, and most White families haven’t been in the habit of leaning into these conversations. We need to develop our ability by practicing communication skills with other White people on the journey. And luckily, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Skills such as Loan Tran’s “Calling-In” and Sonya Renee Taylor’s “Calling-On”, Glenn Singleton’s “Courageous Conversation”, Lee Mun Wah’s “Mindful Inquiry”, and Otto Scharmer’s “Deep Listening” are readily available. But having a White affinity/accountability group facilitator or coach can take these techniques out of the stumbling realm of self-help and catapult them to the expert user sphere.
“As White people we need to develop our critical lens.”
5. Anti-Racist Work Benefits from Collaboration
As my friend and colleague Tony Hudson of Racially Conscious Collaboration says, we need all hands on deck because there’s more than enough anti-racist work for all of us to do. When we think about facilitation and coaching for racial equity through a lens of competition, we’re just reifying the White cultural norms that value competition above collaboration, and independence above community. When we come from a collaborative mindset, we can plan that proactive messaging, refer clients to one another for the best fit, and come together to model a more synergistic way of being.
6. White People Need a Critical Lens, Not a Pundit to Follow
Also on the re-culturing front, White culture normalizes the valuing of expert opinions, then defines “experts” as those with titles, degrees, and positional authority rather than those with lived experience. We’re culturally programmed to listen better to the “experts.” And, conveniently, that relieves us of having to develop our own critical lens to justify our opinions - we can simply quote an expert. But, citing someone without considering their thinking is similar to re-posting an article without having read it. In this unthinking agreement, we also give away our agency.
There's a phase of White identity development where people begin to understand the need to value lived experiences, particularly the lived racial experiences of those who have been marginalized by White culture. Yet, early on, we often simply substitute in the Black, brown, Asian or Indigenous person while still clinging to the notion of “expert.” The problem is that we then continue to give away our agency. This can lead to reflexively and uncritically accepting any opinion of a Black, Indigenous or racialized person as true or best - a phenomenon called “Bending Over Blackwards” in the popular “Detour Spotting for White Anti-Racists” article by jona olssen. But what happens when two Black thought leaders don’t share an opinion? What if two Asian people have differing experiences? As White people we need to develop our own critical lens, and this is something White coaches and facilitators can help us refine.
7. We’re Better off When We Carry Out our Emotional Labor Together
While we are practicing our communication skills, we also need to practice our body awareness in order to start stewarding our nervous systems so we can stay present in the conversation. It’s normal to feel anxious during a conversation about race and racism. And when human beings feel anxious we are closer to the edge of a fight or flight or freeze or fawn reaction that effectively shuts down the conversation. By practicing awareness of our own body cues, we can learn to anticipate the trip-wires that send us over the edge - because some of our racist uncles are really good at finding them! If White people try to do this somatic awareness work in mixed-race groups or pairs, we add to the emotional labor that anyone who’s not white has to take on. In other words, not only will they need to help you process what’s going on for you, they will need to process what your reaction brings up in them. We are essentially asking them to nurse us through our bad feelings of oppressing them. But if we can do this with White coaching or facilitation, we don’t have that issue. We also don’t have to feel embarrassed about our responses. And, invariably we can learn a lot from one another’s insights.
Again, the contribution of Black, Indigenous and racialized people to the field of racial equity is unquestionable - in fact it’s the bulk of the work. But, as Black human rights activist Loretta Ross often says, “A group of different people headed in the same direction, with different thoughts and beliefs, is a movement. A group of people headed in the same direction with the same thoughts and beliefs is a cult. I’m not interested in joining a cult, I’m interested in starting a movement.” As White people, we need to join the movement. We need to develop our own critical lens, moral compass, sensitivity and agency. We need to find our action confidence, and that’s where I come in as a White racial equity facilitator and coach.
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