White Supremacy, Healing, and Liberation

***This blog posit is an excerpt taken from the concluding chapter of my thesis. In it, I reflect on liberation, whiteness, and the winding road my own grief journey took during the year that I was writing my thesis. The excerpt begins and ends with a poem.




Someone on TV asks what do you think of when you hear the word free 

I think of gazing into faces of people as they pass considering how good they must be and hoping they’re off to have coffee with a lover or an old friend someone who knows just how to love them or is simply asking to be given the chance to try

I think about how surprised I am at the brightness of my own blood outside my body and how much it looks like her blood in the street long after riot police leave bringing their boots and their gloves home bringing these home to their girlfriends

I think about the day, that balcony
Lula de Silva saying to me and you and anyone asking,

“The powerful can kill one, two, or one hundred roses,
but they will never stop the arrival of spring

And our fight

is in search 

of spring”

I think of spring, of seeds, of all the harvests I won’t live to see
I think of my enemies, who,
 

I’m sorry to say God I do not love
I think of their children
who I just learned that I do

Who will tell Ross Beaty’s youngest daughter
(grad student, UBC)

We stand beside Julio González Arango, but babe,
we are fighting for you too.

––

At the beginning of all this, I shared a story about loss and how good it felt to cry in a bar with my friends, a story that marked the start of a 2.5-year journey exploring what it means to grieve together. I went into this journey knowing how important it was for climate grief to be held in community. But what I also found out over the course of my research was just how much grieving together has to teach us about being in community. I came to see how climate grief is actually just one part of a much deeper and broader kind of heartbrokenness, and how, it is only by journeying into this very same place of heartbreak, that we can be drawn into real community.

I was about half a year into my research when I started sensing that climate grief was actually related to a much deeper and more expansive kind of grief, one I was struggling to put into words. Around the same time, the topics of whiteness and white supremacy began surfacing repeatedly in my personal life and in my research. Although something in me felt drawn to explore them, I couldn’t quite see how they fit with my thesis topic. I knew white supremacy was a major systemic cause of the climate crisis, but I wasn’t sure what it all had to do with grief; so, I decided to ignore them, resolving to return to them once my thesis was done. But, as you well know, healing can be annoyingly persistent and the concepts continued to come up, again and again. Finally, despite tight deadlines, I relented, putting my thesis aside for a few days to try to figure out what the hell white supremacy had to do with climate grief.

This was the clearly what I been needing. After reaching out to my friend Emma for some resources on whiteness and anti-racism, I barely got a few pages into the first article before reading a sentence that made me freeze. “Whites tend to think of racial identity as something that other people have, not something that is salient for them.”[1] I sat back, stunned. Up until that very moment I had never fully thought of my whiteness as a racial identity; I never considered it to be a core part of who I was. Reflecting on this was uncomfortable. I realized that on some level, this was because I didn’t want whiteness to be a core part of me; I didn’t want to be associated with the destructive and terrible things white people, and white supremacy, had done. The longer I sat with this, the more it became clear. I may have accepted white supremacy on a theoretical level, but I had no way accepted it on a personal or emotional one.

Whiteness and Distorted Narratives

At this point, I still only had a vague sense of how coming to terms with my own whiteness was related to climate grief. But I could see that the work was important, and that I had been avoiding it for a long time. One of the first things these articles helped me see was how exactly I had been avoiding it. In order to accept the reality of white supremacy without having to actually identify myself with it, I had created a kind of distorted narrative. I had been telling myself (only somewhat subconsciously) that I was one of the ‘good’ white people. Just look at all the justice work I was doing! Look how progressive my politics were! I wasn’t like those ‘bad’ white people, the reactionaries and conservatives, the ones who came from money, the ones who didn’t organize or get involved in their communities, the ones who didn’t talk about race with the right terminology. By blaming other white people, I could distance myself from whiteness––freeing me from doing the painful work of reckoning with my own racial identity.

Although this narrative was obviously benefitting me, I was also starting to see how much it was harming me. It was preventing me from being in real community because as an organizer, this narrative meant that I didn’t know where I fit in the broader fight for liberation. My unaddressed feelings of shame around my whiteness and privilege made me feel I had no right to claim I was fighting alongside the likes of the people of colour in my poem: Julio González Arango, Lula de Silva, or Mya Thwet Thwet Khine (a young woman murdered at an anti-coup protest in Myanmar two days before she turned 20). And for obvious reasons, I also didn’t want to identify with other white people, especially those who had some of the same privileges to me like Ross Beaty’s youngest daughter (Ross Beaty is the white billionaire founder of a Vancouver-based mining company implicated in the murder of Xinca land defender, Julio González Arango).

The readings I was doing helped me realize that this narrative of being better than other white people, and the feelings of alienation that went with it, weren’t unique to me. Keeping people alienated from each other, and relating to one another in terms of superiority and inferiority, is the very logic of white supremacy. White supremacy is a hierarchy of domination; it functions by convincing us we need to earn our worth by being superior, or dominant, over others. As white people, we may have been taught that the colour of our skin makes us superior to others (either morally, biologically, or socially), but we still exist in the pyramid. There will always be someone else above us, and we will always be at risk of losing our position if our superiority is challenged.

And the latter is exactly what happened as I initially starting learning about white supremacy years ago. Not only was my imagined position threatened, but the whole foundation of the pyramid was threatened. I was realizing that rather than making me morally superior (as I was implicitly taught growing up), my whiteness actually made me complicit in a deeply immoral system of oppression. I wasn’t yet ready to face the truth of this. I couldn’t own up to the harm I was complicit in as a white person because I was afraid owning up to it meant I was an immoral, bad person, a reality that could knock me out of the pyramid altogether. Having nothing yet to replace the pyramid with, I did a patch job instead, propping myself up in my position of superiority with the narrative, “at least I’m better than other white people.”

Of course, like most distorted narratives, this story could only last for so long. It was alienating, lonely, and unstable. Over the past year, it has started to unravel. I can’t say exactly what it was, perhaps my thesis work around climate grief, perhaps it was the work I was doing in therapy, but either way, there was a deep well of grief within me that was connected somehow to my whiteness, one eating away at the foundations of the pyramid and demanding to be seen.

Grief and Community

Reading more of the articles my friend had sent me, I realized that unravelling my distorted narrative and facing the reality of white supremacy would mean going to that deeper realm of grief I had sensed before, the expansive one also connected to my climate grief. I didn’t know what to call it other than a place of deep heartbrokenness. It was a place of sorrow and grief over the brokenness of our world and the unimaginable levels of inequality, injustice, and human suffering that it holds. I had visited this place in the midst of my worst period of climate grief, but this time it was different. Going to this place of heartbrokenness through the wound of white supremacy meant not just grieving the brokenness of the world, but also coming to terms with my own brokenness and shame. It would mean facing (and even harder, being accountable for) the ways me and my ancestors had been benefiting from, and helping to uphold, a brutal system of domination and oppression.

But, thanks to the readings, I also learned facing this heartbrokenness meant facing the painful ways white supremacy had harmed me. Sitting with the pain helped me realize that not only had white supremacy taught me to objectify and dehumanize others, it had taught me to do the same to myself. It taught me that my worth was conditional. It taught me to see my relationships with others in terms of superiority and domination instead of reciprocity and genuine care. It taught me that if I or anybody else messed up, if we admitted to our own weakness, failures, immoralities, we would be catapulted down to the bottom of the pyramid.

When I took the time to really sit with all this, I realized that my grief lay in the knowledge that all this could be otherwise. There was an alternative to this pyramid. We could exist in communities of love and support, ones that––although they may not be perfect––would at least teach us that our worth is not dependent on superiority, power, or perfection; communities that would tell us it’s okay to own up to the ways you’ve failed and harmed others, it’s okay to face pain and shame and loss, it’s okay because no matter what happens, you belong. This is what white supremacy (and the interlocking systems of capitalism, colonialism and the patriarchy) took from us. White supremacy taught me I was unworthy of genuine community, unworthy of unconditional belonging. And it meant that I was too afraid to own up to the harm I was complicit in and too afraid to go to the places of deep grief and shame. But the beautiful thing was, it was precisely by being invited into genuine community, that I was able to finally face that pain.

Collective Liberation

The only reason I was finally able to start facing the reality of my racial identity as a white person was because of community. It was clear from the beginning that I couldn’t do the work of facing my internalized white supremacy alone. I needed my friend Emma to send me those resources and go for long walks with me to talk about them. I needed teachings on collective liberation from people of colour like bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Lama Rod Owens. I needed the examples set by white people doing anti-racist work like Ann Brayden, Chris Crass and Tema Okun. I needed community. And, the more I read, the more I realized that that’s exactly what these authors and organizers were inviting me into––a global community of people fighting for collective liberation, a community that had a clear place for me as a white person.

Although mostly made up of people I had never met, this community acknowledged the deeper humanity in me in a way that was transformative. The movement for collective liberation saw my racial identity with crystal clarity; it acknowledged the full extent of the harm I was complicit in as a white person. And yet, at the very same time, it saw my humanity. It saw the very part of me that I was so worried made me as immoral and therefore worthless. It saw this and didn’t say I was worthless; it said the opposite. It acknowledged my deep worth, my humanity, my ability to change, and the unique work I was being called to do in our shared fight for liberation.

Here’s the thing though. Even as I needed this community support in order to face my grief, it was actually the act of grieving itself which taught me how to be in real community. Going into my own woundedness, I was able to finally see how connected I was to others in the movement. It was as if my own woundedness was a deep well within me, and as I followed it down, examining my own feelings of hurt and shame, I saw this well bottomed out onto the same ground water as everyone else’s, the same vast source of grief and pain. My shame and hurt didn’t have to distance me from others in the movement, it could be the very thing that connected me to them. As I wrote in the poem, it was as if I suddenly realized our blood was the same color red.

This is precisely what it means to be in genuine community. It means identifying deeply with the humanity of the other; it means seeing the ways they are hurt by the very same broken systems I am; it means mourning with them as they mourn, knowing our oppression, and therefore our liberation, is connected. But crucially, it means doing all this without obscuring the real and often unjust differences between our suffering. Our wells of grief may be connected, but they each hold their own water within them. The people in my poem have experiences that I will never fully understand. I will never know what it’s like as Mya Thwet Thwet Khine did, to grow up under a regime that wants me dead; or like Julio González Arango, how it feels to resist the brutality of colonial and imperialist projects knowing it could get me or my family killed.

And this didn’t only apply to people experiencing more layers of marginalization and oppression than me. I would also never know the specifics of Ross Beaty’s experience of grief, or his daughter’s. And yet, like the others, I could be sure they had been wounded by the same broken world as I had been, and therefore, needed, and deserved, liberation just as much as me or anybody else.

Healing

Being embraced by, and then learning to participate in, true community was what allowed me to finally start owning my racial identity. I was finally able to admit that yes, white supremacy has formed core parts of my identity, in ways that have led me to harm others and myself in ways I must continue to be accountable for. However, this aspect of my identity is not the end of the story. Although my whiteness is a materially important part of who I am, it is not what ultimately defines me. Collective liberation helped me begin to dismantle the pyramid of white supremacy and replace it with a new story––a story about our shared grief, our shared humanity, and our shared liberation. It is a story which tells us the very same thing the good news of the gospel tells us: that it is not our mistakes or our brokenness that define us, but rather the wholeness weaving our brokenness together that makes us who we are. When we grieve together––in a bar after a lost campaign, or by reading aloud a shared narrative métissage ––we are reminded of this, even if only fleetingly. When we share one another’s pain, we overcome false division and experience ourselves and each other as we truly are––threads in the same tapestry, beloved parts of the same body of Christ, roses growing and dying and fighting and yearning for the same eternal spring.

In this way, grieving is not a period in our lives as much as a way of being alive, a way of being in relationship. Grieving is not a finite process after which we end up finished and “healed.” Rather, it is an ongoing orientation towards living as if life is worth the pain. It is an imperfect, messy practice of letting life (and therefore loss) do its work on us, letting it destroy our pyramids, our hierarchies, our stories of domination and isolation, trusting that even though we may not feel it yet, there is something beneath all of these that is, and always has been, holding us.

Whether we name that ground God, Love, Life, or Community, grief work is the work of falling to our knees to meet her, again and again, in sorrow and humility and compassion. To me, this is liberation. Grieving together helps us find the ground that is infinitely more real than our fears, and this liberates us. It liberates us from needing to be superior in order to be worthy. It liberates us from believing we need to be in control to be safe. And, perhaps most profoundly, it liberates us not from suffering itself, but from our fear of suffering, reminding us we never did, and never will, bear our suffering alone.

Not to take pain away but to help carry it 

you are less alone than 
you ever thought possible 

yes,
there is the armour of your
essential loneliness,
the way no one will ever really be enough for you


but really,
it’s not about you. it’s not about enough.  


it’s about the letter the Zapatista women
wrote in 2019 to say they love us and 
they know the 


fight is long and 
so hard

but there is this thread 
sister, comrade, listen. there is 

this thread we know of,
thick and strong and woven
between us and everyone
who dreams

you are pulling,
they are pulling,

and 

we are pulling 

with them.

––

[1] Beverly Daniel Tatum, ‘Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?’: And Other Conversations About Race, (New York NY: Perseus Books Group, 1997), 94, quoted in Tema Okun, “From White Racist to White Anti-Racist: The Lifelong Journey,” Dismantling Racism Works, https://www.fammed.wisc.edu/files/webfm-uploads/documents/diversity/LifeLongJourney.pdf. 4-5.