Walking with Whiteness Module Two: Whiteness as an Episteme of Violence What do we mean by white supremacy culture? What exactly is whiteness? What is the current cultural landscape for engaging with these concepts?
Module Two engages with our current cultural moment and unpacks the term “whiteness” by understanding it as a cultural logic and system that is used to keep people in false separation through historical amnesia. In other words, “whiteness” is a cultural program and story told to people of European ancestry that keeps us in illusion by creating an “us” and “them” based on processes of racialization.
Vocabulary: BIPOC/BIWOC Colorblindness Microaggressions Structural and Institutional Racism Unconscious Bias Whiteness White Privilege White Supremacy Culture
Somatic Practices: Understanding Racial Fear Responses
Journaling on Module Two Material: • Kelsey Blackwell and Resmaa Menakem discuss why racial healing needs to incorporate a meaningful, engaged relationship with the body. Both of these articles frame the body as a historical site that is laden with meaning, and full of intergenerational coding and embodied experiences that impact how we understand ourselves and how we fit into racialized histories. Consider how you’ve previously engaged with anti-racism work, if it all: o Has there been a meaningful engagement with the body? o What happens in your body when racial conflict presents itself? o How do Blackwell and Menakem impact your understanding of what racism is and how it impacts our lived experiences? o What is your understanding of Somatic Abolitionism (Menakem)? • The Aurora Levins Morales readings serve as testimonios, or personal stories where she draws upon her life experiences to create embodied social knowledge. In these readings she suggests that racialized systems create social categories that cut off people from their inherited ancestries and lineages and clump us into pan-ethnic, ahistorical, flattened boxes. Especially for white-bodied people, this leads to a lack of understanding of where we come. Amnesia becomes the price of the ticket to benefit from white privilege, which grants us access to institutional power. Considering Morales’s writings: o What do you know about your family history? How much do you know of your ancestry? o How was race talked about in your house growing up, if it was talked about at all? How do you think this impacts your relationship with whiteness? o Try using an intersectional lens to write your own social history and how this impacts your racial consciousness and your received ancestral lineage. Use the “One Up/One Down
Identities” worksheet and the Intersectionality video to gain a deeper understanding of your social location. • The Heart.Change.Consciousness. and 10 Percent Happier podcasts take on whiteness and some of the shame and discomfort that can come up for white-bodied people around race. In reflecting on these podcasts consider: o What does whiteness mean to you, personally? o Is there anything that scares you about examining your whiteness? Is there anything that confuses you? o Do you feel any shame around your whiteness? o How might curiosity become a useful tool in unlearning ingrained fear responses to race? • Spend some time reflecting on your Fear Responses to Racial Conflict. To recap:
Fight (fire/projection response): Devil’s Advocate, Defensiveness (physical, argumentativeness), challenge of worldview met with panic and fire
Flight (air/avoidant): Minimizing reality of a situation, Colorblind approach, avoiding discomfort at all costs
Freeze (air/earth; overwhelm/shut down): Bystander effect, white silence
Fawn (earth/appeasement): “We’re all really one”; “Can’t we all just get along” Listen to the Racial Fear Response practice a few times, processing different situations from different moments of your life: o What patterns do you notice? What do you learn about yourself? What questions do you have? o Is your go to Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn? A combination? Have your responses changed over time?
o In what situations do you experience fear around racial conflict and difference? o What mind stories and judgements do you have about these fear responses? o How can you hold compassionate space for yourself around these areas and get curious about where these responses originate from? o How can you use this information to identify your working growth edge?