Dear White Siblings, Pt. 1

A reckoning with ourselves and this nation's systems and structures

Dear Readers,

Here is Part 1 of the long-form essay I wrote in the spring of 2021 formatted as a letter, and the essay I mentioned in “Originalism, the Criminal Legal System, and the Overturning of Roe v. Wade.” Even though this edition and the upcoming edition are, in my mind, one long essay, I felt it was too long of a piece to send out at once.

As a head’s up, I pull no punches in this essay. It is the composition of years of observation, study, experience, thought, action, mistakes, and learning. I wrote it in one sitting almost exactly one year after the murder of George Floyd, and soon after making the agonizing decision to leave my job as a public defender.

I wrote this essay as a prayer. A howl. A lament.

I wrote this essay as an invitation. A hope.

¹

A call.

I hope it speaks to you, engages you in a self-dialogue, as well as a dialogue with others.

I hope we can collectively take a deep breath and work our way through, noticing our resistance, our tightening, our closing, our hardening, our shame, our guilt.

Or, perhaps (and I hope!) our loosening, our opening to a necessary truth, a reckoning and (re)cognizing of the past that sets us free to join the collective imagining of and movement toward a new and different future that has been underway for many years.

I hope.

Here’s the essay.

---

Dear White Siblings,

I realize that even that opening line may cause you to bristle, tighten, or close, but I ask you to breathe through the discomfort and keep reading because many lives depend on it, including yours.

²

As Malcolm X, Ibram X. Kendi, Angela Davis, Vine Deloria, Jr., Gloria Anzaldua, Isabel Wilkerson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah Jones, Michelle Alexander, James Baldwin, bell hooks, audre lorde, Maya Angelou, Resmaa Menakem, Ronald Takaki, and many others

³

have explicated before, whiteness, white supremacy, and the Western Enlightenment paradigm have been the organizing socio-political, legal, and economic structures in the United States since before its inception. These are, in fact, the central organizing paradigms underlying the colonization of the lands now called by many the United States. In the effort to hoard wealth, power, and land, our white ancestors constructed legal, political, social, and economic systems built upon the foundations of the subjugation and enslavement of African and Black people and the genocide and culturicide of Indigenous people. As our country metastasized, so too did our cancers of white supremacy and racism to include, albeit in different ways, all people who were not Anglo-Saxon, including Irish, Scots, Jews, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and many others. 

To maintain dominance in our fledgling nation, those in power recognized the need to divide and conquer by providing a mechanism for those with white skin to receive a handful of crumbs from the Anglo-Saxon master’s table—small bits of land to work and the privilege of protection in the form of skin color—the original affirmative action. In order to gain status and access to that land and the spectre of wealth in the United States, those who had white skin could choose to scrub away their ethnic and cultural identities to assimilate to whiteness.

⁴

To drink from the fountain of power and privilege, the cost was a dislocation from our ethnic and cultural identities and a promise to engage in the active oppression, subjugation, and terrorizing of all those who are not “white.” 

The cost has been our own souls, our own humanity, our own sense of belonging. To possess, perpetuate, protect, and hoard our privilege and power as white people in the United States, we chose to stop being whole, stop being robustly vulnerable, stop examining our own consciences. If we did not do so, we would be unable to pursue the path required by the “possessive investment in whiteness” (to borrow George Lipsitz’s phrase)—one of systemic and structural violence, cruelty, and/or willful disregard and ignorance.

The legacy of manifest destiny is to constantly plow onward into lands that are not ours, take the lives of other human beings (in)discriminately, stride arrogantly across boundaries that are not ours to cross, lock away or kill any and all people who mirror back to us our own cruelty, violence, ignorance, or failure. We have created a structure of white supremacy that is a stealer of Black, brown, and Indigenous lives, a violator of women’s bodies, a kleptocracy of Earth’s resources, a hoarder of wealth and land, and a killer of our souls. 

This violent dislocation of humanity and loss of soul in white people is not new. It was the sacrifice consciously made by our ancestors when they decided to become colonizers, conquerors, imperialists, and enslavers—a true Faustian bargain. As they stole and murdered, our ancestors cut out their hearts and souls, leaving behind their own sense of humanity and interconnectedness with all others on the Earth, and, indeed with the Earth herself. This is the legacy we live with, and it is the one we co-create, support, benefit from, perpetuate, and are complicit in every single moment of every single day. As poet David Whyte noted, “all past is here as inheritance in the present.” 

White people in the U.S., this is very much our inheritance, and it is our present. For those of us who feel we cannot relate to what our ancestors did, it is, in part, because we stopped being whole and exist in the world with blinders on our eyes, barricades in our minds, and blockers in our hearts. This profound disconnect in our collective minds between the physical and cultural violence of settler colonialism and racist violence of the past, and the maintenance of current U.S. systems and structures of social control, racism, and colonialism, such as policing and mass criminalization, reservations, education funding formulae, chronic disinvestment and economic disparities,  environmental injustice, so-called child welfare etc. is delusional.

The violence of our ancestors is pervasive today, only we are now the generators, perpetrators, and bystanders through the systems and structures created long before our births; and, the results are the same—people are dying. Including us.

⁵

As our inheritance and our present, it is very much our own responsibility to continuously, consistently, persistently, and tenaciously interrogate it, comprehend it, and then be part of the collective deconstructing and dismantling of it. This is our work to do!

As videos of police beating or murdering Black and brown people have become prevalent, so too has what EbonyJanice

⁶

calls “the White Urgency Response System,” where “white people show up [to Black and brown people] and plead: Tell me what to do.” My understanding of her naming is that when white people are confronted with yet another exemplar of white violence against a Black or brown person, we all of a sudden feel an urgency to do something and place that urgency to act outward onto people of color to solve, fix, absolve and/or appease. Experiencing the momentary, urgent, and visceral revelation that there is blood on our hands, despite the stain being hundreds of years old, and quite arrogantly fooling ourselves into believing that we do not know what to do. 

In the between spaces, however, those rare moments when videos of lynchings and police killings are not viral events, white people conveniently placate ourselves through willful ignorance and denial that white supremacist legal, medical, policing, education, legislative, and related structures are killing Black and brown people all day, every day, and doing so in our names. We speak to ourselves as Lady Macbeth did, in pretending that acting normal would make it all go away: “Wash your hands. Put on your nightgown. Look not so pale.—I tell you yet again, [they are] buried; [they] cannot come out on ’s grave.”

⁷

Then, we have the gall to act surprised when violence against a Black or brown person is perpetrated again, like it doesn't happen every day. Again, we fool ourselves that these incidents are some kind of outlier and not the norm. Yet again, we place the onus on people of color to explain to us our role as oppressor, perpetrator, and silent bystander, like a sick version of Groundhog Day over and over again.

EbonyJanice’s response to white inquiries as to what they can/should do was powerful:

Why you don’t know how to not hate?

Not devour?

Not harm?

Not meddle?

Not take?

Not break?

Not silence? Huh?

Why you don’t know how to teach your children that the earth is not their foot stool?

Chastise your sons?

Teach your daughters that a tantrum won’t work on everyone; should not be used to get her way when it harms folks?

Steals lives?

Takes breath?

Why you need somebody to teach you that?

A mug to remind you that?

A book to reconcile that?

And why don’t you be consistent?

Why the metrics spike like you somehow forgot [Black and brown people] is dying every day, B?

The cycle is such a distraction from being God.

In this response, EbonyJanice brings to the fore the many facets of white supremacy. She challenges the performative nature of white people urgently inquiring about what they can do, knowing that without a hashtag, t-shirt, mug, or viral video, those same people will choose to forget, opting out, turning our eyes away from the pain until another viral video appears, offending our sensibilities and penetrating our fallacies.

A few days after EbonyJanice’s post, Dr. Allissa Richardson, while talking with Dahlia Lithwick on Amicus podcast, described the same phenomenon in different words:

I started to talk to some of my friends who happen to be white and I said, how do you feel when you see these [videos]? And they said, well, I don’t identify with [George Floyd] personally because I’m not black. So I don’t see myself the way you see yourself in these videos or see a relative of yours saying, you know, that could be my dad or whatnot. And I certainly don’t see myself as the aggressor. I would never do that to anyone. I would never put my knee on somebody’s neck. And so I guess I’m kind of horrified at what I’m seeing. But I can pop in and pop out. You know, for me, it is an opt in, opt out kind of thing. And they realized during the course of our conversation that that’s a privilege to be able to remove oneself emotionally from what you’re seeing. And that’s why I observed so many of my colleagues [] eating cereal and watching this or, you know, just talking about it and having it loop in the background without it bothering them.

⁸

 

Dr. Richardson again highlights the ways in which white people seem unable to imagine ourselves having any role, or relating to any person in the video of George Floyd’s murder—that it was possible to watch the life being cruelly pressed out of Mr. Floyd’s body and be horrified, but only in a distanced way, a voyeuristic way, a way that can be “opted” into or out of at any time. 

In my experience, the revelation, recognition, or remembrance of white supremacy as a violent, cruel, and pervasive structure and organizing system in which white people are all complicit, myself included, is much like a person being pulled from the water after nearly drowning. The person may require compressions or smacks on the back, such as being confronted with the horrifying video of George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin—knee on neck, hands in pocket, face blank. The white person then begins convulsing and spewing the putrid water up and out of their lungs, gasping for air—sometimes in the form of fierce denial, seeking to find a rational explanation for what they are witnessing, sometimes despairing and paralyzed, and sometimes screaming a flailing, urgent inquiry for a person of color to explain to us what we are seeing and experiencing.

It is a visceral response that triggers survival mode and deep shame because it challenges our worldview, our sense of identity, and our lived experience in the world. For many, it is something that requires deep, rational analysis and further evidence to believe because we have become so blind and hardened to what is right in front of us.

Given these observations of distance, denial, and needing more evidence, it seems obvious that white people, and our society at large, would turn to the legal system for some kind of accountability because it is a similarly distanced, soul-less process many white people use to litigate our own reactions to the watching of state-sanctioned lynchings in the 21st Century. It is a cerebral process of logic, evidence, and standards of review, not an experience of humanity, humility, and horror of the kind that is felt at the core of oneself—again, our inheritance showing itself. We demand things like body cameras for police and bystander laws to allow people to film acts of violence by state actors so that we can litigate the lynchings, asking questions about the person harmed or killed—their value, character, conduct—to assess whether we are comfortable with the state-sanctioned summary execution done in our names. 

White people and white supremacist structures continuously re-traumatize and marginalize people of color by demanding that they collect and present more data, evidence, and proof that the systems and structures of white supremacy, racism, colonialism, and genocide are real. What we are doing is asking people of color to litigate the case of white supremacy for us—the perpetrators. To be both the prosecutor and the defense, while we sit high behind our judge’s bench deciding whether there is enough evidence to determine our own culpability. This is all done with the incredibly disturbing distancing, or “opting” out, that Dr. Richardson describes, callously disregarding that which is right in front of us, and has been for over 400 years. It is a very convenient mechanism for denial, complacency, complicity, and persistence of the “possessive investment in whiteness”. Our systems and structures, and their agents remain intact and able to kill another day.

Another deeply harmful way we perform this cruel litigation is by getting mired in the interpersonal aspects of white supremacy, racism, and colonialism instead of the systems and structures that perpetuate them.

One way we do this is by organizing panels of people of color to explain their pain to us in response to our collective, systematized terroristic acts. We are curating the pain of peoples of color to view and engage with on our terms, in a way that makes us feel safe and comfortable, and then choose to walk away when it gets too uncomfortable. We then feel absolved of action because we bravely listened for an hour, or watched the entire 9 minutes and 29 seconds of the video, perhaps while eating a bowl of cereal.

We have the courage to show up and listen, and that’s the bold action. We don't have to engage with it again, think about it, share about it, converse about it, keep learning about it, or interrogate our complicity in it. We don’t have to do the hard, constant work to become allies and accomplices in the abolition of these systems and structures. Instead, we can and often do choose to disengage and go back to the state of perpetrating harm and/or willful ignorance that deep privilege enables because we were brave enough to be uncomfortable for an hour. A brief performance of “cathartic empathy,” consciously situated on the curated spectacle of pain or humiliation of people of color. 

Dr. Richardson frames it this way:

Instead, we should have been asking ourselves why we ever demanded that marginalized communities produce this kind of visual “proof” in the first place. Why were Black and brown people forced to pre-litigate their own murder trials in this way? Why was it necessary to form a counternarrative to the old stereotype of Black and brown folks’ criminality? Why did we ever need to produce a parallel storyline to an official police report?

⁹

Her conclusion is that such a process of “pre-litigation” reinforces and reinscribes white supremacy. White people find ways to justify the killing of an unarmed Black man through racist tropes that connect the individual to broader stereotypes and group identity, and as Danielle Kilgo wrote, “a tendency to go with the ‘police said’ narrative without outwardly questioning if it is right.”

¹⁰

Until we litigate the character of the Black or brown person and determine that the white killer had good enough reason to pull the trigger, we appear to be comfortable with summary execution. The value of the human life taken is conditioned on the verdict of our litigation. 

However, when a white man is the killer, whether a police officer, a mass shooter, or otherwise, he is a “bad apple,” “lone wolf,” or crying for help. When a white person puts on their uniform, or enters a supermarket, spa, FedEx center, elementary or high school, country music concert, or place of worship with a weapon, he is insulated by his whiteness, and more often than not, he walks away alive. When he is killed, it is often because he took his own life.

The cancer that is white supremacy and racism means that a white man with a large gun who has just killed multiple people is a damaged person, innocent until proven guilty, and worthy of having his day in court where justice will be served. In fact, he may have law enforcement officers and other white people raise millions of dollars to help him afford bail, provide him with the best legal representation money can buy, and more. There is no question that this person has inherent worth, his white skin has inoculated him against our disinterested, biased, or hate-filled gaze, and we no longer choose to opt-out.

---

So, what do we do and how can we be different, white siblings?

In the next edition, I grapple with the question: How do we resolve to do the work of understanding our inheritance of white supremacist structures and violence to interrogate our complicity in their perpetuation?

Until then, thank you for reading!

Respectfully submitted,

Amy

1. For a wonderful read about critical hope, check out Jeff Duncan Andrade’s: “Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete”

2. For more on the somatic elements of racism and antiracism, check out the work of Resmaa Menakem

3. A potential reading list

4. For example, The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter; How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev; The Wages of Whiteness by David R. Roediger

5. For example: Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl and The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee

6. For more about Ebony Janice, check out: https://hiphopeducation.com/women-in-hip-hop/ebony-janice-is-fresh-bold-and-so-def/. You can also find her work on Instagram at @ebonyjanice.

7. Shakespeare’s Macbeth

8. Amicus, “The Verdict, the Video, and the Unreasonable Burden of Proof,” April 24, 2021

9. Allissa Richardson, We have enough proof: What’s the purpose of sharing violent police videos anymore, other than to traumatize Black communities?”, Vox

10. The Conversation, April 18, 2021, “Being skeptical of sources is a journalist’s job – but it doesn’t always happen when those sources are the police”, located at: https://theconversation.com/being-skeptical-of-sources-is-a-journalists-job-but-it-doesnt-always-happen-when-those-sources-are-the-police-159173)