Micro: White People Lack Public Spaces to Heal Our Hurts Without Shame or Supremacy

When we try to talk about race and racism in public, hyper-vigilant Woke Allies become proactively punishing of other White people. “White people need to sit down, shut up, and listen! White people need to be uncomfortable for change to happen!” But science says that’s not how we learn best or retain information in the long run. We need to be in active dialogue. We learn better when uncertain, not when we’re stressed. We can have positive knowledge retention or identity retaliation. But we can't have both.

One of the most common spaces where race is discussed happens today in “Safe(r)” or “Brave(r)” Spaces.

These spaces can pop up anywhere.

From community centers to board rooms, Safe(r) or Brave(r) Spaces serve to support cross-cultural dialogues. With the hope that (almost) everyone will share openly and authentically.

Often these spaces prioritize the voices and experiences of People of Color, LGBTQ people, disabled people, and people with a non-normative identity.

The logic typically is that White, straight, cisgender, or men have had the mic for centuries. Now it’s time to sit in the audience and listen, internalize the message, and take action.

Before the conversation even gets underway, a White person—seeking to position themselves as “The Good White”—says something like this:

“White comfort + white tears = weapons of mass destruction. We whites should never be allowed to sit in comfort, ever again. We must do ALL the work. We must lift up PoC, for no reason than it must be done. Not for back slaps, not for accolades. Proper allies work in silence, and expect nothing. Whites must atone, and atonement entails deep discomfort 24/7” (This is taken from a real social media post on LinkedIn)

Suddenly White people try to set up a hierarchy of Woke allyship. Some may start clapping their hands or nodding their heads. The silent White people are immediately suspect.

The key problem with silencing, punishing, and shaming rhetoric is simple: Science says that’s not the best way to learn and retain information, long term.

First, we learn better when we’re in active dialogue. Not when we’re being lectured. When we can seek clarity. When we can offer our perspective. Trial and error.

Second, we learn better when uncertain, not when we are continually stressed.* Emotional states connected to fear and stress negatively impact our learning and memorizing ability.

Sure, a little stress comes with trial and error. But, humans actively seek reward and pleasure. Too much stress and we can check out.

Lastly, our bodies actively store experiences of sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust in our long-term memory banks to avoid them later.* Being pleasure and reward seekers,* our bodies prioritize remembering what situations to avoid.

Suppose we’re made to sit in silence to listen to the Critical Studies theory. There’s nothing people can do to stop being racist/heteronormative/cisnormative/misogynist. In that case, we will avoid that conversation as much as we can if it comes up again.

Safe(r) and Brave(r) spaces are made for cross-cultural dialogues and community building. If people don’t want dialogue and just want to vent (all of which can be healthy in moderation), Healing Spaces for any identity are perfect for this.*

As humans, we learn best when we are curious and have the container to try and fail without punishment. We can have positive knowledge retention or identity retaliation, but we can’t have both.

(*”Healing spaces” may be a newer concept for folks. Check out what the Appalachian State University did to support their Students of Color)

Calls to "de-center" Whiteness have become code for removing or ignoring White people altogether. De-centering Whiteness should be about adding more — not eliminating—voices to the conversation. We don’t need to have conversations about race and racism with the same amount of voices. We need to have them with more voices. It’s not about redistributing the pie, so everyone gets a small piece. It’s about getting a whole new *larger* pan, so we’re not fighting over slivers of equity.

In Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion offices and Racial Equity trainings across the country, there’s a lot of work around “de-centering Whiteness.”

The general consensus around uncentering Whiteness is that all we’ve ever known in the US is the White perspective. We need to gather as many perspectives outside of Whiteness and learn from them.

While this, again, doesn’t allow White people to share their current perceptions.

As Robin DiAngelo puts it:

“I don’t care where [White people] are at [when I start a training]…[O]ther than the degree that I need them to move…There’s a couple of strategies I use. One of them is, I don’t open the floor for questions or comments until I’m done. I’m not going to fight my way through it. And I tell people, “If I do a good job at it, you will not be comfortable.”

(*Weapon of Choice Podcast. (2018, July 13). We need to talk about white people featuring Robin DiAngelo. Soundcloud. com)

As a social worker, this goes against a core principle we hold:

to meet people where they’re at, not where we want them to be.

In social work, we call this “self-determination.”

You are in charge of identifying and clarifying your goals. Unless you are actively harming another person through this identification or clarification, The Spillway will be there to back you up.

Unfortunately, the use of “de-centering” has been, for many trainers and educators, a code for “removal.” A removal of Whiteness.

In spaces like Safe(r) and Brave(r) Spaces where vulnerability and honesty are prioritized, groups and individuals should interrogate White reactions to race and racism when they happen. Not blow past them or dismiss them.

White people can quickly get really defensive in the conversations about race and racism.

Does it stop the conversation you have in its tracks? Yes and no, conversations are two-way.

If one person can’t listen or understand another person, or worse: is silenced, it’s less of a conversation and more of a monologue.

With defense mechanisms, we must give them space to unpack themselves to understand better the presumed threat which elicited such a response.

Instead, these defense or guilt mechanisms are often labeled as “white fragility” and dismissed, tossed aside, and defined as an unwelcome behavior within ‘the work.’

Fragility comes from a place of trauma. Fragility manifests in sensitivity, unfamiliarity, (in)experience, socialization, stimuli, and fear of the beholder.

Yet this relay sport of violence and hurt continues around the room, a microcosm of the larger cultural dialogue.

De-centering Whiteness should be about adding more—not eliminating—voices to the conversation. We don’t need to have conversations about race and racism with the same amount of voices. We need to have them with more voices.

It’s not about redistributing the pie, so everyone gets a small piece. It’s about getting a whole new *larger* pan, so we’re not fighting over slivers of equity.

CRT can and must do more to address the shifting power dynamics of our future. AND CRT mustn't go away. We need it for our future. It's helped us to get to this moment.

Critical Race Theory has created a lot of frustrations for White people. But, if we can open ourselves to the possibility: CRT has also been a tremendous intellectual and actionable gift for White people.

CRT builds a container to have critical conversations about race.

CRT can and must do more to address the shifting power dynamics of our future.

CRT mustn’t go away. We need it for our future. It’s helped us get to this moment.

As The Spillway was founded on social work principles, we believe it is critical to meet people where they are at. We use and mirror the language of the population we are serving. We try to gain a specific understanding of what harm we’re being asked — if at all— to support White people with. Often, that means leaving ourselves open in an attempt to understand hurts that we don’t understand or experience as hurts.

Any two White people may not have the same racial experiences. Our sexualities, genders, abilities, religions immigration status (and more!) can inform how we experience our Whiteness.

Currently, some White people are shortsightedly trying to avoid the conversation altogether by silencing an exceptional educational and practical tool to understand better the shifting power dynamics in our country.

Let’s build a container where we can hold our frustrations in a healthy and productive way.

Some White people are trying to use CRT to create unsustainable and punishing long-term conversations about race, ignoring some glaring issues that need to be addressed.

Let’s build a container where we can hold our frustrations in a healthy and productive way.

Just because there are some problems with the current understandings of CRT doesn’t mean all of it is problematic.

Ultimately, most White people haven’t sought support around their hurts for centuries. Now, this hurt has turned into a callus that feels like the expected standard operating procedure for life within most White people.

The CRT we (re)build together can help us talk about it.

Only 0.669% (~$557M) of the total amount given to address the racial impacts within education, health, human rights, and social rights from foundations between 2003 and 2021 has been given to support White people.

According to Candid’s Foundation Directory Online, 111.58 billion dollars have been granted by foundations, funds, and trusts for race-related work in the fields of education, health, human rights, and social rights between 2003 and 2021. Most of the time, foundational giving goes on to power the non-profit and grassroots sectors in tandem with charitable giving and federal dollars.

Of this 111.58 billion dollars, 557 million has been designated for people of European descent.

To put this into perspective, if you eliminated virtually all of the foundational giving for people of European descent in education, health, human rights, and social rights over the past twenty years, 99.3% of the funding would remain. Only 0.669% of the total amount given to address the racial impacts within education, health, human rights, and social rights has been granted to support white populations.

This percent exists in sharp contrast to the 49.3% earmarked for African American and Black populations, 22.7% for Native populations, 22% for Latino populations, and 4.6% for Asian populations.

Importantly, these figures aren’t exclusively about advancing racial justice or equity. It’s merely about race-specific work.

Concerning racial equity, attempts to determine how much funding supports White people are explicitly ignored in recent literature. The anti-racist movement largely views White people independent of the paradox we find ourselves in: We are only perpetrators and never victims of race and racism. So funding streams for racial equity (for better and worse) don’t exist in the same way for White people.

Exploring the allocation of philanthropy’s response to race and racial justice, the Philanthropic Institute for Racial Equity released a detailed analysis of the past five years of funding in the Fall of 2021.

This report explicitly removed White people supporting White people from the study altogether.

As the data describes, the removal more than likely happened because there wasn’t enough data on White groups organizing with other White people.*

(*Earlier in December 2021, The Spillway reached out to the Philanthropic Institute for Racial Equity to confirm numbers around White people supporting White people. When we get a response we’ll update the page! Update Feb 2022: still no response.)

Yet, by removing White people from the analysis, White people become even more absent from the conversation of racial justice and equity. As if race and racism don’t severely impact us as well.

How is racial justice not also about healing the historical and intergenerational trauma we hold as White people? Is this not both harm reduction and prevention?

The report from the Philanthropic Institute for Racial Equity merely exemplifies the larger social problem of how shame is deeply embedded in how race and racism in the US can be discussed:

We, as White people, don’t have a problem; we are the problem.*

To be clear, grants or funding to support White people should not be redistributed from the already paltry amounts given to address the racial justice and equity movements.

Let’s not redistribute the same pie; we need a larger pie tin.

This isn't about centering Whiteness in funding. It's about ensuring that Whiteness is in dialogue.

When we’re not in conversation with ourselves or others, we’re not learning.

We’re not changing.

We’re not healing.

We have to start funding our healing.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion trainings don't always-and very rarely-work for White people

Interestingly, recent studies from The University of Pennsylvania and Harvard have found that diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings don’t change the behavior of (either) men or White people, specifically.

In general, the one-size-fits-all model and unconscious bias trainings don’t work consistently and increase hostility.

Diversity training, as a practice, need to be reconfigured from their handout, lecture, and group discussion format. This format was popularized by HR departments during the 1960s in response to the Freedom and liberation movements.

But is there anything to learn?

Often, trainings are about sharing or discussing new information.

In this age of technology and the prolific events of the 2020 Uprising and the 2021 Insurrection, HR departments would be hard-pressed to find a person who didn’t have thoughts about race and racism.

And if Conspiratorial Culture and Woke Culture have taught us anything, collectively:

facts don’t matter.

Feelings and fear do.

This is where we find our way back to the three primary paths for White people:

White saviorism/shame,

color-blind fundamentalism, or

White supremacy.

Because feelings and fear matter so much to the vast spectrum of White people, there needs to be a place where White people can work through these feelings, free of judgment.

At The Spillway, we believe our healing is possible.