I’ve been thinking a lot about white guilt. As I work with a team of Black MaGes (marginalized genders) to support their restorative and healing work - reparations for centuries of colonialism and white supremacy in material and meaningful ways - it’s obvious that the passion and fervor that took hold of the nation after the murders of Ahmed Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, the resolve to face and dismantle white supremacy, to find new community solutions to safety rather than police and their everyday violence - it’s obvious that all of that has faded.
Part of this is due to rightwing and liberal push-back, of course. Many folks never pretended they were going to face up to the legacy white supremacy, or their only nod to the current events were performative kneeling sessions with no meaningful action.
But many non-Black folks did take to the streets, disrupted business as usual, and showed up to anti-racism work, both online and in their communities. Many companies, non-profits, and educational institutions committed to a more robust Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) work, and some of them followed through, at least for a while. Even as states like Texas have made it illegal for universities to have DEI committees, many staff have remained committed to the work in their own departments.
Yet even so-called liberal nonprofits became frustrated with the feedback after a few short years that they still weren’t seen as welcoming places to BIPOC audiences or employees - instead of digging deeper, they quietly fired their data teams who wouldn’t change the way they collected their numbers. (I actually know at least one of the folks who were fired.)
Those anxious allies that showed up in droves, their numbers started to fall off in late 2020 and 2021. At one point the antiracism education team I work with had 40 volunteers and was welcoming dozens of new members every week, members who wanted to learn. Now we’re lucky to get 5 people at a regular meeting.
Where did the white people go? Some gave so many hours and dollars at the beginning, trying to fix racism all at once, that they ran out of energy and money. Rather than recalibrating toward a more sustainable contribution, they gave up and ghosted.
Some left because the education was uncomfortable - they made mistakes, as we all do when learning. When somebody let them know of the harm they caused, they doubled down or they left the group in a flounce or out of shame. The shadow of their existence became too much.
ID: a photo of a shadow in a window on a black background. Free stock photo by Pexels, used with Creative Commons License.
Some kept at the work for months, even years, but eventually they stopped coming to meetings or responding to messages, busy with other things. Some stopped their education and believed those who told them that voting and being “nice to everyone” were enough. Some were shown to be dangerous, unintentionally or not, to the Black folks they were working with, and had to leave.
In many cases, it seemed like white guilt was the reason that people tried to be “allies” in the first place, and then the discomfort of living with the white guilt was the reason they couldn’t endure the work.
I was only a few years ahead of the influx of white folks into movement spaces - I had gotten involved with anti-oppression movement work in 2016, after the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
By May 2020, I was white-knuckling through fluctuations of white guilt, and had been for years. I was taking on a lot of responsibility in movement spaces while trying (not always successfully) to decenter myself, trying to support several BIPOC folks. I was pushing myself to build bigger teams and do more. I was terrible at boundaries. When I was alone, trying to catch up on the backlog of work I had picked up for myself, I was often resentful and dreading the next meeting. Because of this I wasn’t always doing the good work I thought I was.
Yeah, I really wasn’t always doing the good work I thought I was.
I’m going to leave this piece of writing here, unresolved for now, keeping it short. There’s more to say, more story to tell, more to explore, but I think it can be useful to just practice being with the discomfort of this. I will write more posts later on some further thoughts.
What do you think about when you reflect on the past several years? What have you observed in the collective? How does your own identity inform that? How has your personal journey in anti-racism and anti-oppression evolved? What shadow qualities have you noticed in that journey?