Dear Readers,
Today I share with you Part 2 of my essay, Dear White Siblings.
I write this introduction immediately following the funeral of a beloved family friend, Rev. Dr. Wendell Luke, Jr. — “a freight-train fierce” man of love, light, humor, curiosity, and courage. A person who has had a profound impact on my life both directly and indirectly, as he mentored, supported, and loved my amazing father over the last forty years.
As my father said at today’s funeral, “Wendell taught me how to hug.” That may sound like a small thing, but the power of a warm, loving embrace is of such great importance as we think about the ways in which we can be part of change in our world.
Knowing light. Knowing love. Knowing deep connection. Knowing warmth. Knowing laughter with (not laughter at). These are critical elements to the spiritual and somatic work of anti-racism, of anti-oppression, of changemaking, and of being in community.
Wendell, our beloved friend and mentor — he was a cerebral man, for sure, but he was also a visceral, spiritual, and physical man. He lived fully in all planes of his life, and in so doing, created space for others to do the same.
As a beacon of self-unity, Wendell became an exemplar for others to courageously follow suit. And from that whole and empowered place, invited us to engage in the work of breaking down within ourselves the learning of racism and white supremacy, as well as the many other inculcated values that perpetuate oppression, subjugation, and prejudice.
From this place of wholeness, Wendell’s light shone brightly on all he encountered. Leading by example, Wendell’s humility, grace, and openness in facing prejudice and racism within himself, along with his fierce, courageous advocacy for and with others, provides a kind of compass for those of us following in his footsteps. A true-North, if you will.
For these reasons, I dedicate this edition, as well as Part 1 of this series, to the incomparable, beloved, and beautiful Wendell Luke. You are missed, Wendell, but your fierceness, light, and love lives on in all you touched. I am profoundly grateful that I knew you and knew your love.
Here’s the essay. (If you haven’t yet, please check out Part 1 of this essay).
So, what do we do and how can we be different, white siblings?
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? Because it is ours to interrogate and our responsibility to become allies and accomplices in their abolition. This is an iterative, reflective process, not a linear one, but here are some thoughts on where to begin, in no particular order.
As Dr. Allissa Richardson recently wrote in Vox:
It is time to simply start believing communities of color. We have enough proof. We have enough pain. What we don’t have is reform. And we owe that to so many people, especially to those who have called out for their mothers from the pavement, and to those who expired even before they had that chance.
This is essential to the process of understanding our inheritance and being a part of change. White people, we must understand that the blinders and barricades we inherited and choose to maintain have kept us from truly bearing witness or from comprehending what it is we are seeing, not at the interpersonal level, but at the systemic and structural level. Indeed, our entire country and history was founded and continues to revolve around white supremacy, racism, and settler colonialism as central organizing premises for all of its agencies, systems, and structures. Whether we “see” it or not, this is truth and it exists.
Next, we can’t say, “I don't know where to start,” with any sincerity, nor could we ever, really. The amount of resources that exist in the world are almost overwhelming, but they are there waiting for us to engage in an open, authentic, and vulnerable way (more on that in the below segment). As Brené Brown so insightfully wrote:
We are a meaning-making species. In the absence of data, we make up stories because having complete information is a self-protective survival skill. But these stories often magnify our fears and anxieties. When we learn how to get curious and reality check the stories we make up, we can increase our resilience and reset faster after failures, setbacks, and disappointments.
The stories likely sitting between the lines of the plaintive questions, “But what can I do? Where do I start?” is that you're scared and uncomfortable, thinking that you have to be perfect from the get-go, that you can’t mess up or make a mistake, that you feel shame about not knowing this stuff already, and/or that the first step includes taking charge of everything and leading us all to liberation.
I am here to invite us to consider that this story not only magnifies fears and anxieties, but it also causes us to enable these systems to persist. We must befriend the unknown and start with ourselves. Ask ourselves why we do not interrogate these issues unless or until faced with the spectacle of a viral video of a police officer killing a Black man? Why do we let ourselves fall asleep between the viral videos and then act surprised and shocked when a new one comes out?
We cannot keep making a spectacle of other people’s pain and suffering to remind ourselves of our own humanity, so let’s seek to understand our inheritance and reconnect with our own humanity.
Finding and rediscovering our humanity and breaking the cycle of the loss of the soul to maintain, perpetuate, and possess whiteness in this society is our work to do.
A revolutionary act of a white person is to undo, unlearn, and de-program our inheritance and the ways in which we were enculturated as white people in the U.S. To then (re)learn, remember and (re)connect with how to be robustly vulnerable, humble, and human(e). To fumble. To stumble. To feel. To connect. To not know. To listen deeply, not as a curated spectacle to create catharsis, but to connect as authentic beings. To soften. To open our eyes and hold the truth of our pain and the pain of others, as well as our joy and the joy of others—at the same time.
Until we return to ourselves, we, as white people, will engage with people of color, and with issues of racism and white supremacy from a transactional perspective: to check boxes, extract knowledge, get an “A.” This, in and of itself, is a white supremacist framework. Aiko D. Bethea says, “Anti-racist work is not transactional. It’s relational.”
Engaging with our own humanity, with Black humanity, with all of humanity from a relational space is essential, and it can only happen when we are wholehearted, humble, and vulnerable. Only then can we be effective allies and accomplices in the push toward liberation and the thriving of all people. When we remain cut off from ourselves as human beings, from a liberationist paradigm where all can thrive, instead choosing to manage, control, possess, and hoard wealth, power, land, and privilege, we cannot be part of the change.
What does this work look like?
Abolition means completely dismantling this system of family policing — not reforming it or replacing the current system with a new and improved system. It means ending its philosophy, design, practices and policies and building a different way of caring for families.
Ending the system doesn’t mean leaving people to fend for themselves in a society that is structured unequally. We are talking about transforming society, including making structural changes at a societal level and changes in our communities. Ending structural racism is a tall order, but we need to work toward that. We need to care for families by providing housing and food, as well as universal, equal and free health care and education. At a community level, we need to care for each other without relying on violent systems like police, prisons, and child removal. It involves mutual aid and figuring out how to deal with families’ problems and needs and the conflict and violence that occurs in families, in ways that are not punitive, inhumane, violent and terroristic.
We cannot be accomplices in this work when we are willfully blind the ways in which these systems and structures function, when we choose not to develop a vocabulary and a physical body
ready to engage in true allyship and accomplice-ship, and when we operate under the impression that in order to be allies, we must take charge and lead.As poet and thought leader John O’Donohue wrote in his blessing “For One Who Holds Power”:
May your power never become a shell
Wherein your heart would silently atrophy
May you welcome your own vulnerability
As the ground where healing and truth join.
And, white people, we hold an immense amount of power in this country, as was intended from its inception.
Now, and now, and now again, we, my white siblings, have choices to make.
Will we make this the inheritance of our children and their children, and the many generations going forward, even if it means sacrificing our and their humanity?
Will we choose, as white people, to continue the enculturation of ourselves and our children in the violent possessiveness of whiteness, knowing it is killing us and others?
Will we choose to deny our own souls and humanity to continue to uphold and perpetuate these systems of violence, oppression, suppression, and inequity, knowing that it makes all of us sicker in every facet of our health?
Will we choose our immediate sense of safety and comfort in our privilege and denial of our complicity over the hard work of self-examination, vulnerability, and discomfort?
Will we choose to require spectacles of the pain and suffering of Black and brown people in order to engage with this essential work?
Now again, there are choices to be made. What will we choose?
The Practicalities of Self Work and Work in Community
Within each of us, there are layers and intersections, meaning that we each have our own interior lives and perceptions, our families (both chosen and blood), our workplaces, our communities, and so forth and so on. As such, the answer to — what can I do? — contains layers and intersections both within and outside of ourselves.
Though what I provide below is incomplete, I have tried to parse through those various layers to provide things you can do for and with yourself, with your loved ones, with your colleagues, and beyond. From the micro to the macro.
Self Work
Before I begin writing about the self-work, I first need to say that I am writing this as someone actively engaged in this self-work and as a fellow learner, not as any kind of expert.
Next, I believe it is essential, in order to be an effective ally and accomplice in change, that I acknowledge that I am writing as a white, middle-class, formally educated, heterosexual, cis-gendered woman.
Those descriptors name the specific Amy intersection at which I sit and the intersection that deeply influences not just what I see and think and what I don’t see and think, but also how and why I do what I do and how and why I am what I am.
I am also aware that I have a diverse readership, sitting at many different intersections, growing in different ways, and experiencing different and various journeys with issues of identity, race, ethnicity, justice, equity, ethics, and history.
Knowing this, the materials I include below will not be relevant to or helpful for each and every reader. However, I hope the below provides something useful and/or interesting for every reader, as well as resources you can share with others whose journeys may require a compass of some kind.
Why am I writing such a preface? For two reasons.
First, the criminal legal system and its penumbra of interconnected systems, as discussed in this newsletter, are inherently connected to politics, identities, history, slavery, genocide, race, gender, wealth, and power (to name only a few) in this country. Change in these systems is not possible without also addressing the legacy and ethos of racism and settler colonialism in this nation.
Second, over the years, I have watched many a person, specifically white people, roll their eyes at discussions of identity and intersectionality, yet in my lived and professional experience, it is this very unwillingness, inability, fear, or whatever else that precludes the person from being effective, from making relational connections, from building trust, from making change, from building community.
We cannot be part of change without self-awareness about who we are, why we are, how we are, and the way we are—each of which is deeply interconnected and intertwined with how we identify ourselves, but also what our physical bodies symbolize to those around us. It impacts how we live in our own bodies, and how our bodies react to discomfort, challenge, conflict, and growth.
We cannot be part of change without awareness of the history, context, and legacy our skin color, ethnic identities, class, education, geographic location, and more, regardless of whether we chose them, want them, need them, or wish them.
When we walk into spaces, we are marked with the symbolism our visible intersectional identities carry and that symbolism creates a dynamic long before we exude our own unique energies, build rapport with others, etc.
I write all of this to convey the import of a self-work practice when we individually seek to answer the question — what can I do?
Because what we do must be done intentionally, with care and awareness. It must be done in a way that does not disrespect, disregard, or displace those who have been working in the changemaking, transformative justice, and anti-racism space(s) for generations.
What does a practice of self-work look like?
I believe that there are layers in this, too. (Again, I write from the standpoint of a white, cis-gendered woman and I know that means I will miss and be blind to a great deal).
First, it is helpful to understand our own identities and intersections.
What is intersectionality? As legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw explained to Time Magazine:
[Intersectionality is] basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts . . . Intersectionality is simply about how certain aspects of who you are will increase your access to the good things or your exposure to the bad things in life.
Here are two resources that delve more deeply into intersectionality:
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s TedTalk: “The Urgency of Intersectionality”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TedTalk: “The Danger of a Single Story”
Why is this necessary? Crenshaw goes on to state:
Self-interrogation is a good place to start. If you see inequality as a “them” problem or “unfortunate other” problem, that is a problem. Being able to attend to not just unfair exclusion but also, frankly, unearned inclusion is part of the equality gambit. We’ve got to be open to looking at all of the ways our systems reproduce these inequalities, and that includes the privileges as well as the harms.
How do we engage in this work?
Participate in (as opposed to being a passive consumer of) workshops and reading groups that go beyond the superficial and really begin to interrogate identity and history.
A wonderful example of a workshop that digs into history, race, identity, accountability, and so much more is the Undoing Racism workshop led by The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. See if you can find a workshop in your area, or fundraise to bring one to your community or organization.
Something you can do at home is engage with the materials on the Project Implicit website: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html. There are a TON of resources available there for people from all backgrounds and intersectional identities.
Take some time to read and sit with yourself with books (or podcasts) that help you probe your own various identities—books that may help you find a vocabulary to talk about and express yourself in deeper, newer, and/or more nuanced ways.
A few examples are (based on my own reading and the reading of friends of mine):
Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla Saad
Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World by Serene Jones
All of James Baldwin
This Bridge Called My Back edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua
“‘Love, loss and longing’: the best books on migration, chosen by writers,” The Guardian, including recommendations by Julia Carrie Wong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Luis Alberto Urrea, Angie Cruz, Mohsin Hamid, Matt de la Peña, Dina Nayeri and Aida Salazar
Please add your recommendations in the comments!
*Order them from an independent bookseller near you. Find them here: https://diversebooks.org/diverse-owned-bookstores-you-can-support-right-now/
Or here: https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/books/a33497812/black-owned-bookstores/
Then, get with others who are on this path of seeing, understanding, learning, and growing to work in community, slowly growing who you are in community with.
Second, how did we get here? Everything that is happening today emanated from somewhere. Understanding our history helps us understand the legacies with which and in which we are living every day. If we want to do better, do different, do more—we must understand, to the best of our abilities, how we got here in the first place.
This is partly important to understand patterns, foundations, and inertia in society more generally, but it is also really important for each of us to understand because we can better wrap our minds, hearts, and bodies around how our unique presences are steeped in legacies, symbols, and histories that are both a part of and separate from our sense of self.
Understanding who we are and where we came from informs our ability to sit and become in tune with when to take up space, when to speak, when to stay silent and listen/let others speak, when we step up or in, and when we step back, along with what our very presence might symbolize to others when we enter a room regardless of who we think we are.
Here are but a few examples of places to begin that journey into history:
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, in concert with Slavery By Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
The Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Scene on Radio podcast series:
Nice White Parents podcast
Third, when it comes to the question — what can I do? — there are other important interrelated questions, such as — who is already working on this? What is their standpoint? What are they doing?
In other words, you are not the first person to ask this question and you will not be the last. Becoming engaged in changemaking involves the moment-to-moment practice of humility and patient urgency.
If this feeling of needing to get involved is a newfound urgency based on what you have learned in the last two or so years, please remember that others have had to grapple with these issues every day since birth, and in every generation prior to theirs.
That does not mean you shouldn’t take action or get involved, it simply means, when you get involved, do so with self-awareness. You do not need to lead the charge; instead, amplify, uplift, support, take direction from, and participate in the community-based groups already hard at work.
We are standing on the shoulders of giants. For generations, people have been fighting for liberation and justice for all. And, there are brilliant, dogged leaders out there right now in your community, hard at work creating a better place for us all, and doing so with urgency because lives depend on it.
Get out there and listen, be consistent, be willing to do what needs to be done, know when to speak and when to stay quiet, know when to lead and when to follow.
Seeking a place to start in your community? Look for community-based organizations and movements in your communities:
If you have any other suggestions, please place them in the comments so others can see them, too! And take a gander at one of my previous editions here.
Thank you for reading!
Respectfully submitted,
Amy
“We have enough proof,” Vox, available at: https://www.vox.com/first-person/22391964/george-floyd-derek-chauvin-adam-toledo-police-violence
“Rising Strong and the Stories We Make Up,” located at: https://brenebrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Integration-Ideas_Rising-Strong_092221-1.pdf
Again, I urge you to take a look at the work of Resmaa Menakem, as well as Layla F. Saad. If you come from a Christian background, Reverend Doctor Serene Jones has done some excellent writing on this general topic.
Additionally, the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism workshop is excellent.
“‘Abolition Is the Only Answer’: A Conversation with Dorothy Roberts,” Rise, available at: https://www.risemagazine.org/2020/10/conversation-with-dorothy-roberts/
“Racism shows up as internalized superiority for white-bodied people and internalized oppression for people of color . . . Both are rooted in feelings of anger, resentment, guilt, shame, and fear that live in our bodies often as anxiety and stress. And this anxiety and stress if left unresolved, is then unconsciously embodied within our interracial interactions.”
Gabrie’l Atchison, EMBODIED ANTI-RACISM: HOW MINDFULNESS PRACTICES COMBAT RACISM
PowerShift.org has a helpful diagram talking about how white people can engage in allyship in affirmative, positive ways: https://www.powershift.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/opportunities-for-white-people.pdf