Us & White Supremacy
Now is when we create something new, something healing, together
Dear Ones,
I’m going deeper today into what this space is all about — what we are focused on as a community here.
Take some quiet moments to digest this. And then, if you are a paid subscriber, comment on the post to deepen the discussion even more.
With Love,
Cecelia 💗
PS:
We will hold our first Community Coaching session next month.
Are you interested in gathering via Zoom for live conversation on these topics — and especially in exploring how to integrate them into your life and work?
Be sure to sign up for a paid subscription now, so you don’t miss that chance!
If you’d love to do that but it’s financially difficult for you right now, let me know.
I’d genuinely be happy to comp your subscription and welcome you into the fold — no questions asked. Community is what we’re about here, and that’s what we’re prioritizing here, every day.
Join us!
I’ve learned a lot about White Supremacy, over the years.
I remember a Peace Studies course in college being especially instructive in helping me — a young White woman who had grown up in a small Midwestern town that was almost entirely White, and who was attending a college that was also almost entirely White — examine race and how I related to it.
In that class, I remember reading Peggy McIntosh’s essay helping us all “unpack the invisible knapsack” of White Privilege. One other experience I remember vividly was being aghast and actively recoiling when, as we watched the film The Color of Fear, which is essentially a circle of men sitting around and talking about race and racism, one of the White men openly confessed to being a racist. I couldn’t believe it! How vile! And then I came to realize, as the film unfolded, that that guy was actually quite self-aware. He was just acknowledging the endemic racism around and within him, knowing that that was how he would transform it.
During those same years, I volunteered for a program where, once a week, my fellow college students and I would all pile into a fifteen-passenger van, drive three-plus hours south, and spend a few hours after school with a group of immigrant kids from Mexico and Latin America, tutoring and mentoring them. They were in that town because it had a meat-packing plant, and their parents had come for those jobs.
The director of the program, a Latino himself, had a poster in his office that struck me deeply then — and that has lived within me since.
The poster had this quote:
“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
At the time, the quote was attributed to “Lilla Watson,” which I believed and repeated for years. But I later found out that she had spoken this in a speech at the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi. Yet, she was uncomfortable being credited alone for the sentiment, because it came from a group that she had been a part of, a collective of Aboriginal Rights Activists that had been organizing in Queensland, Australia in the 1970s and had crafted the phrase together.
Even that story has shadows of White Supremacy in it — which I would realize after many more years of learning and growth….
Poison, Not Hoods
We all know about the white hoods. The glowing torches. The genocides. The swastikas. The fascism. These explicit and in-our-face forms of White Supremacy are so obvious that anyone can see them.
Yet, over the years, I’ve come to see how much White Supremacy has evolved to operate in much more nuanced ways.
Much has been said and written about this already — and, as in the case of Tema Okun’s Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture, folks have often over-simplified and even weaponized these reflections.
Please don’t do that, y’all.
For my part, what I am doing here at For the Love of Humanity is guiding you deeper into your own self, into your most essential being — because I know that, as human beings, our being is the source of what we experience as reality. And that anything we call “culture” is really just the ways we are being together.
So if we want to change anything about our culture, or our experience of the world around us, the place to start is within our own being.
That’s what we’re focusing on here.
So, then….
Today, we’re focusing on White Supremacy and the ways it manifests internally, within our own beings — and thus, the ways it manifests in our culture (or the ways we are being together).
An important note, before we begin:
I am using the language of “we” and “our” and “us” intentionally, because as I’ve already written, there is no “us” and “them” among us humans.
There is only “us.”
Lilla and her comrades understood this.
They knew that, not only is there no liberation for one without liberation for all — but even more, the truths that will set us all free are most likely to be found when we are collaborating in community with others, and not because of one special “hero” or leader saving us.
We all need to be liberated from White Supremacy.
And the way that will happen is in community.
Now, I realize that this kind of solidarity may seem foreign to those of us who have been socialized to be “White.”
And I also realize that, if we identify as White, it can be hard to understand how White Supremacy harms us.
After all, the express outcome of its movement within a society is that we come out on top. We are prioritized. We are imitated. We are the model that is understood to be the norm, the ideal. The whole world morphs to create a format that prefers us.
I mean, sounds pretty nice, right?!
I’m sure our Black and Brown siblings sometimes wish the world was that way for them. Who wouldn’t?
Here’s the thing, though.
The Ways of Whiteness that are being prioritized, imitated, modeled, and preferred are actually toxic to any human being who is exposed to them…
…including folks coded as “White.”
We are human too, so White Supremacy harms us too.
As illustrated in this powerful piece of art from my brilliant and talented spiritual sister Melanie Walby, these ways of being are essentially poison that we are ingesting.
As long as we let "Whiteness” reign supreme, we will continue to poison each of our beings — and the shared ways of being, or culture, we co-create together.
Let’s go deeper.
Erasure Over Honoring
What does “white” mean, in the most literal sense?
Without color.
Or in other words, without variety.
Or in other words, empty. blank. erased.
“Whiteness” in our world has created a need to erase everything that makes us unique, or at least different than others.
The ideal, in this reality, is that anything that distinguishes you as different than the bland, monotone norm we have all decided to grant supremacy… will disappear.
We lose our unique color and beauty.
We lose our authenticity.
We lose our truest self.
We lose both the expression and acceptance of our innermost being. We never get to experience that profound joy! Because we don’t let ourselves.
This is how the “domination” energetic imprint of Whiteness affects each of us, in oppressive ways. As we live and grow in — and are trained and conditioned by — this world animated by White Supremacy, we learn to live in an outside-in orientation (looking outside of ourselves for what is OK, what is “acceptable,” what we should do/say, how we should be), rather than an inside-out one (where we freely live in the world as guided by our own innermost beings).
Why would we choose this form of imprisonment?
Why would we not honor our true selves — and honor the true selves of all of our fellow humans, too — as the beautiful, unique creations we are?
The extent to which we do not do this for ourselves is proportional to the extent to which we cannot do this for others — and, relatedly, the extent to which we cannot do it for the living beings of the natural world either.
We are all oppressed by this erasure of Whiteness.
We are all drinking this poison.
Disconnection Over Connection
When I use the word “lonely,” what comes to mind for you?
In my experience, loneliness does not just happen when I am alone. I’ve also felt profoundly lonely when I was in a house or room full of people.
What about you?
My guess is that this resonates for you, too. Because loneliness is really about disconnection — or a lack of being seen, heard, known.
There is a profound loneliness in White Supremacy.
For White Supremacy to truly be supreme, humans cannot be too connected to other humans. They can’t care about them too much. At the very most, they can only care about a small circle of others.
And yet, as I said above, even if they’re “connected” to a degree with others, it’s not too deeply — because their deepest, truest selves are not allowed. They must mostly just play a pre-determined role.
Thus, humans are disconnected from their true selves.
They are disconnected from others.
And even more, they are also disconnected from the natural world around them, which is seen as merely an object to be used and exploited, rather than a fellow living being to know and honor and be in relationship with.
Disconnection is the norm, in this reality.
And humans are left yearning.
Lonely.
Longing…
…for something they often can’t quite articulate, but that is the deepest part of who they are: the part that inherently knows and is love… the part that knows that it is actually intimately connected to everything and everyone around them.
We have all been taught to disavow and forget this part of ourselves.
We have all been taught to disconnect.
From ourselves.
From others.
From the natural world.
And thus: we are all disconnected because of Whiteness.
We are all drinking this poison.
Individual Over Collective
Our dominant culture — the one informed and animated by White Supremacy — will always see and prioritize the individual over the collective.
Remember: connections between us and other humans, and between us and the natural world, are minimized in this orientation!
We are taught that we are lonely, separate individuals, as if living on an island.
And everyone else is too.
And if that is the reality we accept, we are then creating a reality where we are not only lonely, but we are in competition with everyone around us.
Thus, everything is a fight.
We win.
Or we lose.
We dominate.
Or we are dominated.
We insist that power-over is the dominant dynamic between us. Either we have power over someone else, or someone has power over us.
A framework of shared power (power with others) is not prioritized — or even acknowledged as possible.
We are all stressed and harmed by this individuating element of Whiteness.
We are all drinking this poison.
Scarcity Over Abundance
One more element of Whiteness that is related to all of the above is that the combined dynamics of Whiteness fester a belief in scarcity over abundance.
If we are living in a reality as described above, we have been taught, and learned, that there is not enough of anything good to go around.
So.
We must fight for what we want.
We must hoard it.
We must block others from getting it… so we can have it.
If we share it with anyone, it must be a very small and well-defined group of people we’ve decided are our in-group.
Our inherently generous selves are eclipsed by this lie of scarcity in Whiteness.
We are all drinking this poison.
Losing Our Humanity
When I sit with the images above, tears come to my eyes.
I’m filled with such enormous love for these kids.
Their purity.
Their joy.
Their light and sparkle.
I’m also filled with sadness.
For us.
For the adults we are now — those who used to be kids like this, but who were well-conditioned by this harsh, White-Supremacist-dominant culture of our world, to be different than they are.
White Supremacy robs us all of our humanity.
We may trade in our humanity for power. Or privilege. We may disavow our humanity in order to be able to do things like ignoring, demeaning, stereotyping, incarcerating — or simply just holding prejudice against, and segregating ourselves from, the vast majority of our fellow humans.
White Supremacy teaches us to do this.
But we have been hoodwinked by it.
We are poisoning ourselves. And we are poisoning others.
No more.
Time to stop the poison. Time to start the remedies.
I want us to disavow these lessons we’ve learned, rather than our humanity.
I want us to re-connect with that purest part of ourselves: who we were as children, before this confused world conditioned us to be otherwise — the part of us that is joyful, light, sparkling, full of love.
I’m calling forth that part of you now.
I’m calling forth this powerful medicine from within all of us.
May it be so.
May the healing process begin.
Here.
Now.