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Angela Davis famously said that “in a racist society, it’s not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist.” For too long, the fear of being seen as racist kept white people from owning their complicity and privilege.
We live in a new era, where it’s no longer enough to look away or get points for simply “not being racist.” Truthfully, it never was enough. People who identify as Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) have known this truth long before the world’s eyes were opened to the violence of George Floyd’s murder and all the systemic racism that made it possible.
As white people invested in our own unlearning and owning the uncomfortable truth that we are complicit in and benefit from white supremacy, we must transform shame and avoidance into humility and emotional resilience.
Becoming antiracist not only requires the shedding of old behaviors and assumptions, but also requires the creation of new ways of being and relating to ourselves and our personal narratives and family histories.
When thinking about the breaking open that happened in me, and that continues to happen as a necessary condition of lifelong antiracism work, the concept of acceptance comes to mind. Psychologists acknowledge that acceptance, a critical element to personal change, is also the center of humility. I am not so right or infallible that I cannot be humbled by all that I do not know.
Acceptance of our own imperfections, messiness, mistakes, and flawed pasts is critical to unlocking the important confrontation of our complicity in white supremacy.
Through a reflection of my own experiences and those I’ve encountered in leaders throughout my career, here is what I have learned about how acceptance and humility can strengthen the work of racial justice.
Intent vs. Impact
How many times have you heard a well-intentioned comment or action that causes harm? Because people don’t normally have the tools to contend with the impact of their words, they don’t hold themselves accountable to the fact that there is a dissonance between their intention and the impact on someone else.
Acknowledging our own faults and vulnerabilities is critical to taking responsibility. When you can get past the fact that you don’t have all the answers, grace and emotional resilience are more possible.
Good intent is not enough when the impact is harmful. A part of humility is moving past the need to express good intent as absolution for harmful impact.
So how do we help aspiring white allies to move past this place of discomfort? As antiracist practitioners, how do we harness the pain of that moment of realization to transform it into an actionable launching pad for genuine and non-performative allyship? Or, as white people trying to connect intent and impact in this work, how do you more constructively work through shame and defensiveness?
My Identity Exploration
I turn to my own journey to help answer these questions. As a white, latinx, queer, and invisibly disabled woman, I have had a complicated journey born of understanding the particular way my intersectional identities have benefited from white supremacy.
When I was younger, I thought that my hispanicity and queerness excluded me from having to grapple with white supremacy. I didn’t think this consciously, but looking back, it was not something I thought concerned me. This is the myth of whiteness. The microaggressions I had experienced growing up and in the workplace exposed me to a variety of stereotypes and prejudices based on my gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability. But never my race.
Raised by a strong South American single mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, my first language was Spanish and I always felt very connected to my hispanicity. I had inherited the language, culture, and heritage of a complicated ancestral history in South America, marked both by indigenous erasure and white colonist conquest. I was the product of that history, while also aware that my skin color and my cultural heritage could trigger or often confuse people.
It wasn’t until college, where I studied race, culture, and gender, that I started to reckon with how my whiteness had protected and propelled me. I realized that simply being a part of other marginalized groups did not give me instant access and understanding of how to be antiracist. I had a lot to learn.
As I’ve continued to move on this path of lifelong learning and unlearning, I was lucky enough to have developed friendships and mentors who held me compassionately accountable to maintaining a growth mindset when it came to dismantling my prejudices and unconscious biases. I am particularly aware of this as a white DEI practitioner. This industry centered around equity, representation and owning power/privilege is not immune to the co-opting of spaces by white practitioners.
Lifting the Veil of the Past
I learned a lot of grace about the resilience that comes from owning my part when the veil was lifted on my ancestors’ complicity in white supremacy. I grew up observing anti-Black sentiments, which is not uncommon in the hispanic community. When I asked about our family line in South America, my grandmother always denied we were anything but white. I think I always questioned this narrative, but was directly confronted with its deception after my mother shared a previously unreachable part of our ancestry after receiving the results of my grandmother’s DNA test.
When we shared the results with my grandmother that she was 25% indigenous from the Andean region, she responded with defensiveness and denial. Presenting as white, and fed a cultural narrative of white supremacy growing up in Peru, it was no surprise why she would defend the lie that kept her protected. While her response wasn't justified, it did reveal how strongly denial and defensiveness factor into keeping white supremacy alive.
After finding these results, my mother embarked on researching our family line (another white privilege) to find out the source of indigenous erasure committed by the oral histories of our family. We learned, among other things, that Tawantinsuyu ancestors had been erased from my great-grandmother’s paternal line, an act typically performed by the Spanish crown in order to delegitimize mestizo blood.
We also learned that my great-grandfather, a patrón of a plantation in Peru, had fathered several children with the indigenous women he employed on the hacienda, never formally or financially recognizing them. My grandmother tells a chilling story of when she met her half-sister, Olympia, for the first time as a young girl, only to be scolded by her mother to never speak to her or allow her in the home again.
These stories have always disturbed me. However, it was not until a few years ago that I started to fully accept the complicity and confront the atrocities of my white ancestors. In the last few years, I see that my antiracism journey is not and cannot be complete without truly looking at myself and my privilege through the lens of my family history.
Acknowledgment requires Emotional Regulation
So when you discover a history like this, as many white people do, what do you do with it? The same pain from realizing you might be racist when you so desperately don’t want to be categorized as such also comes into play. “But I am good!” you might think. “I am not my ancestors!” you might say.
After having directly experienced this pain and the continual evolution required to own it, I am here to tell you that acknowledging the privilege and benefits your family line incurred from history is absolutely necessary to dismantling those same forces taking hold in your life.
It shifts the conversation from “I am not my ancestors!” to “Who do I want to be in spite of or despite of my ancestors?” White supremacy mythologizes and glorifies a past without acknowledging systematic genocide, institutionalized oppression, and historical erasure of black and brown pain and experiences. If we can get past the point of virtue-signaling or attempts at defending or absolving ourselves, or our ancestors, we can get to the real work of becoming antiracist.
Often, our sense of identity can create invisible barriers that keep us from accepting our own involvement in perpetuating white supremacy. When discovering your own participation in these structures, it’s important to create space for a new type of story or way of regulating your own shame.
Are you calling upon compassion and a desire to uphold justice in your new awareness? Or are old habits or stories intervening? Whether we like it or not, we have to embark on the tough work of decolonizing our minds and histories to make room for new truths, and move constructively through the pain of acceptance.
The Price of Denial
After having directly experienced this pain and the continual evolution required to own it, that acknowledging the privilege and benefits your family line incurred from history is absolutely necessary to dismantling those same forces taking hold in your life. and professional lives.
This is not about white guilt, this is about having the ability to realize that your story is not the only story. Your pain is not the same as someone else’s pain. And your privilege, success, and freedom, have come as a result of black and brown institutional oppression. Period.
Accepting that you come from a complicated legacy is an important step toward practicing the vulnerability needed to break free of the defensive white fragility that keeps race dialogues stuck.
So, wherever you are on the continuum of denial/acceptance, I kindly implore you to remember what's at stake. This work is messy and you don't have to be perfect. Is your comfort more important than making the vulnerable commitment to dismantling racism and white supremacy cultures?
You decide.
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Are you a DEI professional looking to elevate your impact? Or are you new to antiracism work and need a trusted space to more clearly define your goals?
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