The Spillway Social Media Day 1 - Accessible Spillway
Most White people think The Spillway was created for someone other than themselves.
Conservatives think it was made for liberals.
Liberals think it was made for conservatives.
Truth is/was/always will be: The Spillway was made for White people who want to build more compassion, patience, empathy, and understanding in the center of White culture. And welcome if you’re liberal, conservative, or somewhere between or beyond.
One thing I’ve noticed over the past month and a half: the content was too long for most folks. That’s fine. It was that way by design. We’re not used to having this conversation, let alone in a public space.
With the website more operational, and the podcast up, we’ll integrate content between multiple platforms. Social media will become far more sound-bite-y and focused on building community. The website will exist to support a more nuanced and drawn-out conversation.
You know where to find us if you have questions, comments, concerns, ideas, or emotional outbursts!
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The Spillway Social Media Day 2 - Hurt people can hurt people
“In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...
This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation
How many of us -- White people -- respond to conversations and actions around race and racism today is a trauma response.
Want to learn more? Stick around.
Don't want to wait? Check out our podcast or other social media posts!
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The Spillway Social Media Day 3 - The 3 Things We Do When Hurt
1. Why do you think some White people need to hurt others?
2. What do you think is driving the current wave of White nationalist violence?
3. Do you think that feeling hurt leads White people to hurt others?
4. What can we do to help White people who are hurting?
5. How can we create a society where everyone feels seen and heard?
When exposed to ostracism, researchers found that being acknowledged and included reduces aggressive behaviors in people who feel ignored.
When threats to our control, self-esteem, meaningful existence or belonging occur, we reflexively feel the emotions of sadness or anger.
When we evaluate our response and the individual conditions that inform our realities, we typically follow one of three paths.
1️⃣Path one: we seek solitude and tend to our bandages.
2️⃣Path two: we seek attention through corrective actions through sharing, helping, and comforting to reconnect pro-socially.
3️⃣Path three: we seek attention by behaving irresponsibly through harassment, distress, and violence to reconnect anti-socially.
Through each of these paths, the harmed all seek some release of the energy we were given. The energy from ostracism or harm — like the First Law of Thermodynamics — will more than likely translate into some other action. But that energy cannot be created or destroyed. 🔥
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The Spillway Social Media Day 4 - Marshall Rosenburg Quote
1. How do you think about harm and healing in your own life?
2. Have you ever done something that caused harm to someone else, even if you didn’t mean to?
3. What is your understanding of the saying “An injury to one is an injury to all”?
4. Do you feel like there are things that you need or want to heal in yourself before you can be more effective in your work for social justice? If so, what are they?
5. What do you think are some ways we can support each other as we work towards healing ourselves?
"As ineffective a strategy as it may be, violence is oftentimes an expression of a yearning to heal. It is a cry for peace. As Marshall Rosenberg [a transformative figure in the Nonviolent Communication movement] says, ‘violence is the tragic expression of unmet needs.’ Needs for healing. Needs for release. Needs to be seen or heard. Needs for pain to be legitimized."
- Kazu Haga
These unmet needs manifest into violence, following the third path many people travel in response to being hurt.
Hurt exists all over the political spectrum.
Pain is borne of and yet transcends identity. Anyone can and will be hurt. Perhaps being hurt reminds us that we’re human. At a base level, hurts arise out of conflict.
Conflict begets innovation. And yet, optimistically, conflict only generates innovation when humans take the first two paths: self-reflection and pro-social behavior.
However, identities don’t always have the same resources or skills to transcend hurt. And when hurt people don’t have resources or services and choose — however consciously— path three, insurrections happen. Dylann Roof happens. Bernie Madoff happens. Harvey Weinstein happens. Karens happen. We hurt as White people.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 5 - Shame and Supremacy Spectrum
1. Why do some White people feel they must ignore or downplay racism?
2. Why do some White people feel guilty or ashamed about racism?
3. Is it more beneficial for society to feel guilty or ignore racism?
4. What implications does this have on the conversation about race in America?
5. How can we work together to create a society where we don't have to feel guilty or ignore racism?
Researchers from the University of Nashville and Maryland have begun studying White people’s perceptions of being White. First, researchers defined a spectrum of White people’s responses to race, from avoidance to guilty to shame.
They found that White guilt and political affiliation are primarily related:
🔴 Republicans mainly express avoidant behaviors while
🔵 Democrats mainly express behaviors of guilt.
Rather than find a direct correlation between acts of racism and the avoidance to shame scale (a straight line), researchers found something that looks a little more like V (or a curvilinear relationship).
🔵🔴 We have begun to feel so guilty about race and racism in the US that shame prevents our need to engage socially.
As a social worker, I connect people and organizations to services and resources that can support their needs. Again: “Violence is the tragic expression of unmet needs.” - Marshall Rosenberg.
Currently, there are alarmingly few social service mechanisms in place to support the unique needs of White people. The Spillway exists to support this tremendous gap in services for White people.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 5.5 - FAQ Decentering Whiteness
When we use de-centering Whiteness, it means sharing all of our stories and experiences without priority to Whiteness or White people’s experiences. No more, no less: Pass the mic so everyone gets the same amount of air time.
White people, in the dual perpetrator/victim role, need to have space to reconcile and repair while building positive, consensual, and affirming representations and realities of White culture.
In Third Wave AntiRacism, White people use "de-center Whiteness" to
1︎⃣ force Indigenous, Latine, Asian, Black, Middle Eastern North African, and SE Asian leaders to do more work
2︎⃣ give ourselves a way out from reflecting on ourselves and our actions
3︎⃣ engage in 4th dimensional accountability abuse
4︎⃣ create a hierarchy of White people, with the most punishing and shaming at the top
🙋🏼 And this isn’t about who’s leading a conversation, but the content of the conversation.
↱ If the community guidelines at the top say to “decenter” then make efforts to decenter AFTER making sure everyone (not just power holders) in the space can agree on a definition of what that means.
↱ If the conversation is about increasing BIPOC representation/leadership roles/policy makers in X, Y, or Z industries, then make efforts to decenter.
↱ If the space is a healing space for BIPOC, then make efforts to decenter.
Seemingly there’s a formula for de-centering: The role of (insert any race but White here) in (insert noun here).
Remember decenter doesn’t mean ignore, nor give free license to dump on White people without accountability in Brave and Safe spaces. (Healing spaces are different, we’ve been over this a million times.)
There’s a massive problem in being asked to decenter Whiteness in conversations about race or racism— when the root cause of race and racism, historically and currently, is Whiteness. AND the way forward is together, without replicating the harms and conditions of White supremacy under the guise of White shame culture.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 6 - Ask a Question
Seriously. Come up with the question.
As I started the podcast, I reached out to some White people to see if they had any ideas on what I should ask.
🔵 What are YOU…
🔵 Why are YOU…
🔵 How can YOU…
🔵 Why can’t WE…
🔵 Why are WE…
Take a moment to consider if your question was a YOU question or a WE question.
As White people, we’re so curious about “other” White people that we can forget our Whiteness.
The paradox of being White in the US is that we are both the perpetrator and the victim of race and racism.
This paradox has split us into two mindsets:
🔵 White people who feel shame for being associated with our role as a perpetrator
🔵 White people who feel frustrated that we could ever be a victim of our own making
The reality is that when taken to the extreme, each mindset can be really hurtful to ourselves and those around us.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 7 - Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress Pt 1
Coined by Dr. Rachel MacNair in the titular book published in 2002, Perpetuation-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) looks at how causing harm and trauma to others creates traumatic stress within the perpetrator.
PITS is controversial because it asks our culture to see murderers, rapists, executioners, and domestic abusers as human beings. Historically—and currently—it’s been much easier to name any of these individuals or groups of people as inhuman.
As animals.
Monsters.
As a “them,” not as part of “us.”
As Dr. MacNair says, “suggesting they are traumatized is suggesting they might be human.” Suggesting they might be human implies they can be complete, complex, and nuanced beings that aren’t static.
We don’t have to like this fact, but we can’t ignore it. If we refuse to acknowledge that perpetrators are human, we don’t allow for the possibility that
⭕️ the unethical treatment could have been prevented,
⭕️ the perpetrator needs support, or
⭕️ healing or rehabilitation is possible.
Moral injury is the “lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”
Trauma requires an inability to move beyond the traumatic event. 👭🏻Two people can share an experience. 🙎♀️ But if one person gets mentally or emotionally stuck in that experience, it turns into trauma for that person.
Moral injury informs PITS.
Twenty years ago, Dr. MacNair’s work focused on PTSD, primarily used in the few decades leading up to the new millennium. During this time, PTSD was almost exclusively utilized to understand the consequences of certain occupations: soldiers, first responders, and police officers. However, over the last two decades, PTSD has come to encompass the experiences of some social identities in response to the traumatizing impacts of rape culture, White supremacy, and heterosexism.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 8 - Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress Pt 2
Many White people experience a moral injury regarding race and racism. Shame and Supremacy culture have caused individuals to do some really bad things. These events and actions can cause "stuckness" for many White people, making it hard for them to move on from the pain they've caused—or have witnessed others cause.
Because this form of stuckness has gone on for so long, we have begun to understand it as nothing more than typical White culture. So lots of people don't see it as a problem.
In reality, so much of White culture is a trauma response.
🟩 A response to the pain and struggles we fled in Europe before we immigrated.
🟩 A response to the interGenerational trauma our bodies hold.
A current and historical response in the PITS we have from “ perpetrating, failing to prevent [the violence of other White people], or bearing witness to acts [against People of Color] that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”
As we know it today, White culture is built around PTSD and responses to that traumatic stress. Because PTSD symptoms are held within those with the social power to enact racist actions (White people), this becomes known as PITS. A vast majority of White people have perpetration-induced traumatic stress.
The main goal of The Spillway is to help White people understand our individual and collective problems, find healing, and build a White culture that isn't full of stress.
⌛️IN CONCLUSION🔚
Through PITS, we understand that White people in America are both the victims and the perpetrators of racism. If we explore and understand these stressors, we can know our role as victims. However, understanding that we have these problems first helps us know our role as the perpetrator.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 9 - Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress Podcast
The past two posts have been about Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS).
😅 🤯 It can be a lot to take in.
If there are parts that feel confusing or if you learn better through a conversation as we do, check out Episode 8 on The Spillway podcast and the Chute Block on PITS.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 10 - Richard Livingston Video
We keep hearing a variation of "education is the only way" when thinking/creating action around ending racism with colleagues and mentors.
Unsurprisingly, we hear this from many academics, teachers, and trainers/facilitators. But, unfortunately, everything looks like a nail if all you have is a hammer.
What if there was more than one way to solve a complex social problem?
As one of the top social psychologists and one of the nation's leading experts on the science underlying bias and racism in organizations, Robert Livington's new book advocates for less education and more relation.
In our upcoming book, we talk about deep canvassing and how talking, hearing*, and relationships are incredible tools for social change.
*Not waiting to talk. Hearing to respond and then add.
How are you in a good relationship with
🟢 yourself?
🟢 with other White people?
🟢 with People of Color?
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The Spillway Social Media Day 11 - Empathy is not an endorsement
As you can imagine, we say, "Hurt people can hurt people" a lot when we introduce the work of The Spillway.
A person at a training the other day said, "Of course! But that doesn't excuse White people's behavior."
We're not here to create excuses.
We're here to create empathy.
Although, it's important to point out that excuses are based on the intention of the action. And often, within Shame culture, intentions don't matter; only impact does.
A trauma-informed approach doesn’t excuse, defend, or justify the impact of systemic or interpersonal racism. We don’t believe that racism or oppression can ever be justified. But being hurt does help us to understand the intentions that create the impact.
If we ignore the intentions of other people’s actions, we’re not actively trying to prevent further impacts.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 12 - Pronouns
In his book, You Are More Powerful Than You Think, Eric Lui points out that we often use the pronoun "they" to talk about things we don't like or frustrate us.
For example, "they" decided school will now start an hour later, even though that screws up everyone's commute. Or "they" made it hard to opt out of the more expensive insurance plan. We might also ask, "when are they going to clean up these abandoned lots?" or "I hate how they just ignore reality and live in their partisan bubble." In each case, we're talking about something that someone else did or is doing that isn't fair or reasonable.
What happens when we replace “they” with “we.”
🟢 We decided to start school later.
🟢 We made it hard to opt out.
🟢 When are we going to clean up?
🟢 I hate the way we ignore reality.
🟢 We are changing the character of the community.
You, too, can perform this find-and-replace function. It’s easy to execute. It’s more challenging to accept that we are always co-creators of situations we don’t like. (Let’s own that.) It reveals how often and casually we otherize others (Let’s stop that.), and it reminds us that we are always someone else's they (Let's catch ourselves). We can make a bigger we starting now--that's where all power begins.
1. We build worlds together, not alone.
2. We should use "we" when referring to groups of people.
3. When we use "they," it creates a distance between us and others.
4. Using "we" helps us feel connected to others.
5. Let's try using "we" more often to build a sense of community with each other
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The Spillway Social Media Day 13 - Which White people?
There are many White Americans who identify their race as their ethnicity.
How we express or identify our race can sometimes mean two things.
If you identify your race or ethnicity as White, The Spillway was built to support you to work with our Whiteness without shame or supremacy.
1️⃣ How do you identify yourself?
2️⃣ How does not identifying with a race make you feel?
3️⃣ Does it bother you that there are people who see you as White?
4️⃣ How do your family and friends identify you?
5️⃣ What would you like people to understand about race and identity that they don’t currently understand?
*Right now, a lot of government forms do not differentiate between White people and Hispanic or Latine people. We think this is unfair because
🔵 Hispanic and Latine people have a different political and social capital than White people,
and Pew Research finds that both
🔵 Hispanic/Latine populations are not seen by other races as fully assimilated into Whiteness, and
🔵 Hispanic/Latine populations are more frequently identifying outside of Whiteness.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 13.5 - FAQ Capitalize W in White
1︎⃣ Open any dictionary you like: “White,” in reference to race, is a proper noun because it can fit—individually or collectively— in the categories of person, thing, and idea.
2︎⃣ Being White is a cultural identification.
Because White Supremacy is so invested in individuation, a collective cultural identity is typically mocked. Most people who have identified with Whiteness to date—publicly, politically, or socially—have revealed themselves to be self-identifying White supremacists.
Furthermore, because we've been preoccupied maintaining our "default" position, White people have shared social experiences that we've unspoken and unexplored (because we've been busy maintaining our "default"). One of the responsibilities within The Spillway is to identify the culture that has been hidden in plain sight.
Finally, to a frequently mentioned idea that Whiteness began as a strategy to marginalize and oppress others, so it isn't an identity but rather a method:
Yes, that is how Whiteness began a long time ago (and it can still be reinforced today).
What was invented cannot be undone.
For centuries, White people have treated People of Color differently. In remarkable ways, Native, Asian, Black, Latine, Middle Eastern/North African, and Southeast Asian populations have engaged in a century (if not centuries) worth of pride and identity reclamation—independent and at times in response to Whiteness othering them.
Suppose White people are the only race of people who do not have a shared culture. In that case, our lives and realities as White people will only serve to further appropriate cultures outside of our own. Culture is important because it includes "the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation."
Find a tarot deck, make yourself a cheesy casserole, check out some Live Laugh Love art, watch "Downtown Abbey" or "Game of Thrones," and blast Dolly Parton or Celine Dion through your car.
We capitalize “White” here because saying that White people are not a race of people is helping to continue the project of White supremacy and shame.
The Spillway Social Media Day 14 - Shared culture
1️⃣ It can be challenging when you feel like your culture is constantly being questioned or under attack.
2️⃣ For many people, White culture is just a way of life, and they don't think about it.
3️⃣ It's important to remember that everyone has their definition of white culture.
4️⃣ There's no right or wrong answer regarding white culture - it's just what works for you.
5️⃣ Being part of the White culture doesn't mean you're wrong or good - it just means you're human.
White people in Shame or Supremacy Cultures don't usually think about ourselves as having a shared history or culture because we don't see being White as making us different from other racial and ethnic groups.
However, we believe having Whiteness without shame or supremacy is crucial.
We capitalize the "W" in White to show that it is an integral part of our identity and to name that White culture—specifically White American culture—exists, for better and worse.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 14.5 - FAQ Myth that White Culture Doesn't Exist
Culture is the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and material objects that are passed from one generation to the next. White culture in the United States is specific to the United States. Europeans in Europe have different cultures because they identify with their national origins more than their skin color. In the United States, when people are asked what race they are, they often say "American" because this connects to our ancestral concepts of race.
For many people, it can be hard to tell the difference between US culture and White culture. For centuries, White people have held almost all of the social power in the United States. This power has created national norms, values, and beliefs that have been defended as the status quo. The Freedom and Liberation movements changed how people think about the world.
The scripts that were used before, like the
〉 White,
〉 nuclear,
〉 suburban,
〉 patriarchal scripts,
are no longer unquestionably used.
Important things happen in waves. This includes both good and bad things. The current situation is a result of these waves. Some people want to change Whiteness so it is more like US culture, while others want to keep things the way they are now.
There is no denying that White culture exists. It may have been created for bad reasons, but it is still here. Claiming that it doesn't exist or only talking about the bad things about White culture doesn't help us heal as a community. Yes, White culture was created as a way to divide and conquer the world, but this is changing. We can't remove White culture from the table any longer. So let's turn it into something we can be at peace with - something based on empathy, patience, compassion, and understanding that is fundamental to our norms, values, and traditions.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 15 - White people are hurting INTRO
You'll notice at The Spillway that we talk a lot about how people who are hurt, hurt other people. For example, White people are hurting right now. "Hurt" can mean two different things. It can mean when someone is injured or in pain, like when you get a cut. It can also mean that someone is feeling bad because of something that happened to them in the past.
Peer-reviewed research all points to something we can routinely ignore: feelings significantly impact our bodies.
"Hurt" is an umbrella term ☂ that includes a lot of different emotions within the emotional states of sadness, anger, fear, and frustration.
We have 5️⃣ theories about how and why White people are struggling. It can be challenging for people from Shame culture to hold this list. This is because the idea of "White people" and "struggling" is encouraged.
🧐 For example, take The Great Replacement Theory, which we discuss in one of the theories. Some White people think it's funny that other White people believe this theory. And we laugh without recognizing or honoring that some of us have genuine sadness, anger, fear, and frustration, which leads a lot of White conservatives to believe this theory.
1️⃣ What are some things that "hurt" White people?
2️⃣ How do you deal with the hurt that comes from being White?
3️⃣ Why is it so hard for some White people to accept that some of our injuries come from being White?
4️⃣ How do you unlearn how hurt has been normalized in your life?
5️⃣ What are some things you've done to try and understand how pain manifests in your community/society?
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The Spillway Social Media Day 16 - White people hurting T1
We are looking at current working theories about why White people are hurting and how this hurt translates into our culture of Whiteness and White people. Here’s the next working theory:
Theory #1️⃣: The public sector no longer unabashedly centers nor caters primarily to straight, White, middle-income men.* Or, when it does, the Shame culture takes notice.
Look at Disney. Daily Wire+. Cracker Barrel. Each is caught up in controversies or sells pitches related to individual identity.
The free market began to formally recognize the blended value# of corporate social responsibility in response to the social movements of the 2010s.
It was rare to find a rainbow flag 🏳️🌈, menstrual cup 🩸, or natural hair product section💈 in a big-box retailer at the beginning of the decade. Social movements gave rise to corporate citizenship required by the growing Millennial and Gen-Z markets^
💫 Millennials and Gen-Z overwhelmingly want companies to address social justice issues (78%).
💫 Millennials and Gen-Z will opt to shop elsewhere if the brand has different values than the buyer (76%).**
Intersectionality is not trending. It is now a market force. The free market has begun shifting its focus away from White consumers.
*For some White people, this is exciting and is understood as progress. For other White people, this drives concerns of the conspiracy of The Great Replacement
#“Blended value,” coined by Jed Emerson, means that the actual value of a company cannot be separated from its economic, social, and environmental impact. As a result, companies now have a triple bottom line.
^Which now outnumbers the Boomer and Gen X markets combined
***Elsey, W. (2018) Why your company should be more socially responsible. Forbes Magazine
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The Spillway Social Media Day 17 - White people hurting T2
We are looking at current working theories about why White people are hurting and how this hurt translates into our culture of Whiteness and White people. Here’s the next working theory:
Theory #2️⃣ Everything we took for granted growing up is steadily changing…without us.
White people are projected to become a minority in the US by 2044 or 2050. This change happens in addition to the following:
More people identify outside or independent of the gender binary. 🏳️⚧️
Fewer people (66%) identify as "exclusively heterosexual." 🏳️🌈
The middle class is shrinking as the share of aggregate income in the United States has fallen from 62% to 42% over the last fifty years. 💸📉
Steadily, the Rockwellian way of life has been scattered to the periphery. ✝️
Nostalgia for this way of life lives among a lot of White people. So much so that it galvanized much of President Trump's base in 2016 and 2020 with the theory that
1. America was once great
2. it now no longer is,
3. but we can return to greatness.
Clinical psychologists often interpret nostalgia as a way of dealing with the depressive current circumstances we find ourselves in or are pointing towards in our future.
👤 Sam, a participant in our podcast's White Men’s Focus Group episode, illustrated this point multiple times throughout the show.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 18 - White people hurting T3
We are looking at current working theories about why White people are hurting and how this hurt translates into our culture of Whiteness and White people. Here’s the next working theory:
Theory #3️⃣ Sensory overload and a loss of (over) representation—
Most White people have been exposed to other cultures' traditions, values, and norms more frequently in the past decade than ever before. (This is true for everyone, not just White people. But there’s a fundamental difference…)
Thanks in large part to the
💻 internet,
👔 Diversity Equity Inclusion and Belonging (DEI&B) offices,
🎥 Hollywood and television with expansive storylines, and
📱 social media
We’ve been flooded with access to different cultures. And for some White people, this is exciting! And for others, it’s terrifying.
White people have never had to deal with this before. As a result, we lose their sense of familiarity through the office during the day, big-box retailers on the way home, and television at night.
📎 Take a look at the compassion of UCLA’s annual Hollywood Diversity Report. From 2014 to 2022, the overall representation of White people in films dropped 32.6 percentage points. Even UCLA used the word “underrepresented” for White people in describing the downward trend.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 19 - White people hurting T4
We are looking at current working theories about why White people are hurting and how this hurt translates into our culture of Whiteness and White people. Here’s the next working theory:
Theory #4️⃣ The self-inflicting wound of control—
There’s a punishing need for control driving conspiracy theorists and social justice vigilantes alike.
Researchers have found that individuals who perceive a loss of control have a stronger desire for power. So to put this another way, when we feel like we're losing control, we quickly try to get as much control back as possible and then try to get even more power.
One of the most common ways we attempt to regain this control as White people is to present ourselves as an authority figure within the environment we lost control in. We do this when we:
🔵 repeat an alternative set of facts
🔵 repeat the competition of who’s the most “woke”
🔵 repeat a mistrust in any mainstream news sources or peer-reviewed data
🔵 repeat the belief that a college education makes us superior
White people with an avoidant or guilty attachment style end up competing to be the dominant authority figure. We do this while failing to realize that our desire for this authority comes from a shared place of harm: a loss of control.
For people who experience intense shame around race, nearly all social control is deferred to People of Color. This happens under the assumption—that most White people in Shame Culture believe—that control must happen (replicating White Supremacy Culture), and it’s better to be controlled by People of Color. What thoughts, feelings, and actions cannot occur until permission is given to White people by People of Color.
Part of being human is the desire to control our destiny. For centuries we, as White people, have controlled our future and those around us.
Losing some of this control has created a self-inflicting wound as we now attempt to control other White people.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 20 - White people hurting T5
We are looking at current working theories about why White people are hurting and how this hurt translates into our Culture of Whiteness and White people. Here’s the next working theory:
Theory #5️⃣ True Self vs. Conditioned Self (or the Role of Shame)
or
Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress —
For some people, this won’t make sense. However, for people in Shame Culture, this theory usually makes the most sense:
According to the Pew Research Center, most White people aren’t talking about race with people of other cultures and ethnicities. In 2021, Pew reported that a majority (54%) of White people think that talking about racism is terrible. This is in the face of the Uprisings in 2020.
However, Charles Cooley's "The Looking Glass Self" concept suggests that we often see ourselves through other people's eyes.
💡The theory states that our general understanding of who we are is a mixture of what we believe ourselves to be and what others believe us to be:
I am not who I think I am.
I am not who you think I am.
I am who I think you think I am.
As White people, we 1️⃣ know race exists.
We also 2️⃣ know that every time it’s brought up, it’s not always—in fact, it’s usually not—affirming.
Especially when we talk about White people from a historical lens.
Because of this, many White people have become conditioned to believe that being White is inherently associated with being wrong.
This conditioning makes us believe that other people think the same way about White people. We feel ashamed just because we are White, and this shame leads to
💬 "I think that you think I'm racist just because I'm White." We then avoid discussing race and racism altogether because we're afraid of how the conversation might end. We can have too much anxiety, frustration, and shame around how we think the conversation might go. So we hide our true selves.
This theory is part of a larger conversation about Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress. If you want to know more, you can listen to the Chute Block: Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress episode on The Spillway podcast.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 20.5 - FAQ White Trauama Doesn't Exist
TL;DR: Listen to our podcast episode on Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress.
White supremacists think that different races should be separate from each other. They believe this is good for White people.
When someone tries to mix races, Supremacy culture can see this as a threat to the health and well-being of White people. People who are White usually do not think about the trauma that happens when someone is racially violent. This activates our Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress.
And yet, people who believe in White supremacy think that White people are perfect and innocent. Trauma, for white supremacists, is any attempt to tarnish the perceived “perfection” of Whiteness.
The Spillway is based on the principles of social work and trauma-informed care. We understand that violence is never justified, but unmet needs can sometimes cause it. People who don't get what they need can sometimes react in harmful ways. Some people respond to this at the moment, while others may carry the trauma around without knowing it (interGenerational trauma. There’s a podcast episode for that, too). This type of trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. Only recently have we started talking about this kind of trauma about racial justice.
Rachel MacNair's scholarly work explores how perpetrating trauma can have negative psychological, emotional, and physical repercussions. MacNair's work finds that this stems from a moral injury. A moral injury is defined as the "lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations." If left untreated, moral injury can lead to negative traumatic stresses. For example, while engaging in overt racism leads to PITS, MacNair finds that bystanders who don't intervene can also experience traumatic stress.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 21 - White people hurting in the comments
Have you seen other White people talking about how they're hurting on social media?
It seems like a lot of people are posting about our frustrations and disappointments. (Especially on 📰 news or 🔴political pages🔵!)
As we understand that White people are hurting, it might seem like social media is becoming a place for confessions.
🧊 The tip of the iceberg often looks like people piling on and shaming, trivializing, or ridiculing the subject of each post. Yet, beneath the surface, many people ask for recognition, empathy, and resolution.
‘If I can’t have my humanity, you can’t have yours.’ <— they all seem to say
If you see something that you want to share, tag us on Instagram or Facebook.
⌾ We're here to help each other.
⌾ We're all in this together.
This is our COLLECTIVE liberation.
If you want to explore more about the mechanics of how this refusal of each other’s humanity plays out in public and where it stems from, you should check out Fred Jealous’ episode on the podcast.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 22 - interGenerational trauma 101
It’s tough to alter our genes or our DNA.
Yet, a field in biology known as Epigenetics studies how our bodies interact with 🧬DNA🧬.
Epigenetics seeks to understand how social or environmental factors impact our body’s ability to read or act upon a 🧬DNA sequence🧬.
Most importantly, our bodies’ chemicals that we use to read or act upon a 🧬DNA sequence🧬 are inherited from our biological parents.
These chemicals, which transcribe and translate our DNA, can be significantly modified by our diets, exposure to pollution, and even prolonged or profound social events.
Currently, data suggests that these chemicals are passed on for five generations.
Meaning:
how our
parents
👴👵
and their parents
👴👵👴👵
and their parent’s parents
👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵
and their parent’s parent’s parents
👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵
and their parent’s parent’s parent’s parents
👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵
bodies read their DNA is how we, today, can continue to interpret our genes. Or: your biological great-great-great-grand-parents.
This means that the diets, pollutants, and extreme social events since the early/mid-1800s still impact our body’s ability to read and act upon our DNA sequence in the 2020s.
Keep in mind that to make you, over five generations, 62 people passed on how your body will read its DNA.
That’s 62 different human experiences of diets, pollutants, and significant social events that inform our bodies today.
It’s fascinating to know how my ancestors responded and experienced anything firsthand from
🇮🇪 the potato famine in Ireland 1850…
🇵🇱 the smog of the industrial south of Poland…
🇺🇸 the enslavement of more than 4 million Africans and their descendants in the US…
…lives within me today.
We study history to know ourselves.
To fully unpack this, you should check out the Chute Block: interGenerational trauma on The Spillway’s podcast!
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The Spillway Social Media Day 23 - White people descendents of Europe trauma
We Learned How to Colonize Ourselves First: Or, The History of White People (pt 1)
🌍Before Europeans began taking resources and people from different continents, Europe was populated by tribes and cultures that were indigenous to the land. These cultures later translated into what we now call Celtic Tribes.
Today, most people think of Celtic ancestry or culture in the United States as being related to 🇮🇪 Ireland and 🏴 England.
But, the Gauls, Irish, Gales, Britons, Galatians, and more than 100 different tribes were all Celtic tribes across what we now call "Europe."
All White people are descendants of these tribes.
🇺🇸 US History never goes this far back. Or it never goes in-depth because it is seen as irrelevant to the origin story of our country's founding.
We experience this as "European History," not as a history of White people.
This is a massive disservice to understanding our country's founding since much of US History is taught through the lens of European (White) settler colonialism. And these White settlers just kind of popped up out of nowhere.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 24 - Defang the violence of our history
We Learned How to Colonize Ourselves First: Or, The History of White People (pt 2)
Some call the colonizers and settlers within our ancestry—who lived in Europe—"empires." This is a way to distance ourselves from the violence our ancestors' actions caused.
The 🇬🇷 Greek Empire was one of these empires. It was followed by the 🏛Roman Empire and then the 🦅Byzantine Empire. Finally, the 🦅 Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, and within a generation, cross-continental colonialism formalized with the creation of the 🇪🇸 Spanish Empire in 1492 and the 🇬🇧 British Empire within the decade.
Racism, as we know it today, wasn't formally invented until around when the 🦅 Byzantine Empire fell. At that time, empires were expanding mainly through class warfare. But today, empires expand under the banner of 💸 globalization/trade.
Many White people have a deep connection to the idea that we may never know our ancestry because forced assimilation and colonization destroyed our ancestral heritage—partially through the creation of the social system of race.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 25 - We don't do ancestry we do geography
Christopher Columbus was not 100% Italian OR The Unarticulated History of White People…
Because of colonization (which includes things like rape, coercion, murder, and assimilation), many people have lost their bloodlines - including White people.
When White people celebrate ancestry, we are celebrating where we come from and our less tribal affiliation (or, in other words, the people who make up our group).
An example of this is Christopher Columbus.
Genoa, which is now in what we call “🇮🇹 Italy," was mainly repopulated by the Ostrogoths - a 🇩🇪 Germanic Celtic Tribe - after the fall of the Roman Empire in ~476 CE.
Over the next 600 years, Genoa changed hands to the 🦅 Byzantines (East Roman Empire), to the Lombard (🇩🇪 Germanic), to the Frankish Empire (🇫🇷 France).
By 1451, when Columbus was born, Genoa was an independent city-state.
Genoa's culture stretched into what we now call 🇩🇪Germany, 🇫🇷France, and 🇮🇹Italy.
Even after Columbus set sail, Genoa was incorporated into the Kingdom of Savoy (now 🇫🇷France) in 1815 and later by 🇮🇹Italy in 1946.
The land that Genoa occupies has been claimed by countries we now call 🇩🇪Germany, 🇫🇷France, and 🇮🇹Italy.
It wasn't until the Revolutionary War that Columbus was even thought of as a key figure in 🇺🇸US history.
Many immigrants from 🇮🇹Italy tried to assimilate into US culture as quickly as possible in the mid-1800s. They did this by claiming Christopher Columbus as their own, even though he was from a different city-state in Italy. Yet, Columbus became a symbol of safety and access to resources for new Italian American families traveling through Ellis Island. He also represented the connection between the old and new worlds.
Even though geographically and culturally, it’s safe to say that Columbus was only 1/3 Italian, for many Italian Americans, he represents their heritage and culture.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 26 - Subtext of leaving Europe for US
The Emotional Subtext of the Founding of White America
Part One: ”Freedom”
Intergenerational trauma is passed down through 🧬genes🧬. This happens over five generations (which includes the 62 people who made you) and usually takes 150 years⏳.
150 years ago, our ancestors were dealing with the trauma from 150 years before their birth. This has had a big impact on us today.
The first immigrants to Turtle Island (the US) came from 🇪🇸Spain, 🏴England, 🇸🇪Sweden, and 🇳🇱Denmark. They came for religious freedom and economic opportunities.
We know this.
This isn't a new or controversial idea,
AND there's something more going on here that we need to understand:
White people came to this land to escape the harms of Christianity and capitalism.
And we don't talk about it.
In search of religious freedom, Puritans, specifically, only held space for the rights of other Puritans. Within fifty years of settling in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630-1680), Puritans executed at least four Quakers— White people—for their religious beliefs. Puritans banned Quakers for their settlements outright by 1658.
What they fled from, they merely replicated:
⭕️ ideological righteousness
⭕️ violence
⭕️ murder
…on Quakers. On citizens of the Wampanoag Nation. Hurt people can believe they are healed because they transferred that harm onto someone else.
Part of being a White person without supremacy or shame in the US is holding the truth that we can be both the victim and the perpetrator—even in our history of seeking freedom.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 27 - Replicating the harms of Eurpoe on Natives/Enslaved people
The Emotional Subtext of the Founding of White America
Part Two:
”Economic Opportunity”
One of the dominant narratives about the founding of the US is White people's desire to leave Europe and find new 💰economic opportunities.
However, when they arrived, they didn't create a new financial system. Instead, they reproduced the conditions of capitalism that they were trying to escape.
This happened even though there were already Native Nations operating sustainable economies and governments. However, in order to make sure that 🏴English, 🇪🇸Spanish, and 🇫🇷French settlers held power in the US, they had to impose their own governance and economic systems.
This imposition looked like this:
⭕️ Some White people killed some 50 million Native and First Nations people while also trying to assimilate Native people into White culture. This was because they wanted the land that these people had been living on for many years.
⭕️ And then, later on, some White people enslaved about 4 million African people. They did this mainly for money.
Even after realizing how bad things were for them under capitalism and religious fundamentalism, some White people chose to continue these terrible systems. Many other White people benefit(ed) from these actions.
Remember, our intergenerational trauma started around 1646-1696.
This trauma happened *before* Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706. Or Sacagawea (Sakakawea), who was born in 1788. Frederick Douglass, who was born in 1818…
Our body's chemical responses to our DNA can still be impacted by these events today.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 27.5 - FAQ Desperate to Be Oppressed
We usually think about how different social groups oppress each other. (For example, parts of group X may be discriminating against group Y.) White supremacy and shame are structured so that individuals belonging to two distinct groups—while both being White—rarely understand each other as members of the same fabric. Let alone, attached to our “combined destiny,” as Dr. King called it.
Many White people are afraid of becoming racial minorities in the US. Some of us are so afraid that we’re doing things like:
⤷ engaging in politics as a way to get revenge,
⤷ conducting violent acts or insurrections, and
⤷ actively trying to maintain control through ideological compliance.
This makes it hard for us to move forward together because some of us feel threatened. Telling someone they're not oppressed doesn't make the problem go away. In fact, it just makes the problem worse because it is a form of denial, minimization, and a lack of understanding.
There is no assurance that any two people will encounter the same social situation in the same way. The challenges faced by Native people are often diverse from those experienced by Asian or Hispanic individuals and other Native persons. There are different problems that people face. Some problems might be less time-sensitive than others, but that does not mean they are not real problems.
Generally speaking, oppression is not the same for every person. White people's problems are like new sports in the Olympics - 🥋 🛹 🏄 they may not have as much credibility as established Olympic sports, but that doesn't mean they are any less real. Olympic purists may look down upon these new sports, but that doesn't mean they are wrong.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 28 - Meritocracy
In his 1970 manifesto, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes that the revolution must confront the idea that the role reversal between the oppressed and the oppressor is inevitable. This happens when we have a near-perfect example of Freire's words in colonization and empire-building.
White people have a long history of hurting ourselves and others. White people who were once peasants in Europe became tyrants after White settlers 'promoted' themselves. This cycle of violence has been passed down through generations, and it affects how we behave today.
(And not only us: when Whiteness is expressed through supremacy or shame, it can be harmful to families and Communities of Color.)
One example of this is the belief that a meritocracy is healthy. Meritocracy says that the Celtic tribe didn't try hard enough to survive, which is not true.
“If I don’t pull myself up by my bootstraps, I’m going to continue to be a peasant. And I traveled all this way from Europe for a new life.”
Why do we lose value if we’re not educated or “skilled?”
Victim-blaming is a textbook trauma response.
And yet, the paradox of being White without supremacy or shame is to know we are both victims and the perpetrator.
If we interrupt the violence of meritocracy, we begin to interrupt our paradox of Whiteness.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 29 - no one asked for interGenerational trauma
Trauma responses have been passed down for many generations of White people.
300 years ago is a long time, but it doesn't have the same impact on us biologically as it does mentally. This is called historical trauma.
Epigenetics tells us that the events 300 years before our birth can impact our body's ability to read our DNA.
The works of
📗Bessel Van Der Kolk,
📘Mark Wolynn,
📙Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger, and
📕Resmaa Menekem
show us that trauma can be entrenched through our bodies and passed down to future generations.
❝Most White immigrants to the New World didn’t heal from their trauma…
Then they blew much of their trauma through the bodies of Africans and their descendants. This served to embed trauma in Black bodies, but it did nothing to mend the trauma of White ones.
Much of our current culture—and most of our current cultural divides—are built around this trauma…
None of us asked for this trauma. None of us deserves it. Yet none of us can avoid it.❞
-Resmaa Menekem, My Grandmother’s Hands 📕
As White people, we currently experience this as a functioning—not necessarily a debilitating—trauma because it’s all many of us have ever known.
To address this intergenerational trauma, we need to heal.
At The Spillway, we seek to (re)focus the unique experience of being a White person in North America without supremacy or shame.
We do this by expanding our compassion, connectivity, and empathy for ourselves and each other with the belief that our healing is possible for our collective liberation.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 30 - CRT Complicated Reality Pt 1
Critical Race Theory doesn't currently exist in a way that a lot of White Americans understand.
There are three versions of CRT:
1️⃣ the legal principle,
2️⃣ the academic conversation about race and racism, and
3️⃣ the version where it’s just a synonym for anything related to race and racism in political conversations.
🅿🅾🅸🅽🆃 🅾🅽🅴
The legal principle started in Ivy League schools in the 1970s and '80s. Back then, affirmative action helped more students of color get into universities. But educational systems still haven't updated their studies to include other perspectives beyond what White people want.
Many students of color started to push for change in how racism was taught in schools. This led to the development of critical race theory (CRT), which is a way of thinking about race and racism. Law schools began to change their ways, and other parts of universities followed.
Critical legal studies began in the 1960s, but CRT really took off in the 1970s. This caused a huge movement of critical studies that covered many different areas, like language, disabilities, women's issues, gender identity, Latino issues, and more. Even whiteness became part of the critical studies movement in the 1990s.
🅿🅾🅸🅽🆃 🆃🆆🅾
These classes became required courses to help professionals work better with the general population. The idea is that if we want to help people, we should first learn about them. This spilled out of universities and into the plans of community organizers, social workers, teachers, hospitality majors, and marketing majors. As a result, there is a lot of variation in how CRT is taught. But there are three key ideas that connect all the different theories in CRT:
𝟙 Racism is common. It happens every day.
𝟚 White people control what it means to be racially liberated (this is called "interest convergence").
𝟛 Race is something that we create together (it's "socially constructed").
Each of the statements on this list is true, but they don't always translate for White people. We’ll see why in the next few posts…
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The Spillway Social Media Day 31 - CRT Complicated Reality Pt 2
This week we’re unpacking why Critical Race Theory (CRT) doesn’t always make sense to a lot of White Americans. Today we’re looking at the first theory of CRT:
🟦Racism is commonplace. Racism happens everyday🟦
Yes, racism happens every day.
Even the Heritage Foundation (an extremely conservative organization) agrees that racist policy still exists, even in its own roundabout way. Policies and law are, after all, cultural (organizational, legislative) and societal values-statements.
🟦 Last year alone, California reached a settlement with formerly incarcerated individuals because it valued sterilizing people with ovaries—without their consent—during their incarceration. Most of whom are Black, Native, Latine, and Asian.
🟦 State legislatures are still struggling to update and change environmental pollution and structural hazards (lead pipes, asbestos) in urban areas, which are largely populated by communities of Color.
🟦 In July 2022, the Supreme Court—again—gutted landmark legislation on Native tribal sovereignty by removing the rights of Native jurisdiction over crimes committed in Indian country.
A majority (56%) of White Americans (79% of Republicans and 27% of Democrats) believe that "little or nothing needs to be done" to ensure equal rights for all Americans regardless of their racial or ethnic backgrounds. [Pew Research]
And yet, for many White Americans, these aren’t examples of racism. In tomorrow’s post, we’ll explore why.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 32 - CRT Complicated Reality Pt 2.5
In the last post we looked at how racism is still happening in the US in the 2020s. Today we’re taking a look at why many White people don’t define this as racism…
According to William Frederickson's award-winning and highly acclaimed book “A Short History of Racism,” racism may not entirely exist today in the US. It’s American racism isn’t the core of his argument for the book, but he looks at what repeated patterns show up in racist cultures.
Frederickson argues that for textbook racism to manifest in society, five things need to be present:
1️⃣ The official ideology of the masses is explicitly racist.
AS OF TODAY: there seem to be two racial ideologies: Black or all Lives Matter. Both of these ideologies aren’t explicitly racist, but this shouldn’t ignore the implicit color-blind racism of “All Lives Matter” rhetoric and actions.
2️⃣ Laws exist forbidding interracial marriage.
AS OF TODAY: Loving v. Virginia overturned interracial marriage bans in 1967.
3️⃣ Social segregation is mandated by law and not the act of custom or private acts of discrimination.
AS OF TODAY: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made all public forms of social segregation illegal.
4️⃣ Outgroup members are excluded from holding public office.
AS OF TODAY: Vice Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, Senators, and Representatives of Color held/hold public office. (Voting is a whole other matter)
5️⃣ Access to resources and economic opportunities is so limited that most outgroup members are kept in poverty.
THE MOST RECENT Census Data from PovertyUSA in 2018 finds that 74.6% of Native Americans, 79.2% of African Americans, 82.4% of Hispanic Americans, and 89.9% of Asian Americans (same as white Americans) live **outside** of —albeit archaic lines of — poverty.
So when most White people say that racism doesn’t exist anymore in the United States at a systemic level, we are, however vaguely, pointing to these facts.
Yes, racism happens every day, but many White Americans believe it is not common.
For many White Americans, “culturalism” seems to be the bigger -ism than racism. (We’ll get into this later)
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The Spillway Social Media Day 33 - CRT Complicated Reality Pt 3
This week we’re unpacking why Critical Race Theory (CRT) doesn’t always make sense to a lot of White Americans. Today we’re looking at the second theory of CRT:
🟦White people dictate the terms of racial liberation🟦
Yes, White people dictate the terms of racial liberation when white people are 🇺🇸 60% of the US population but makeup
👱🏻♂️ 96% of governorships,
👴🏻 92% of Fortune 500 CEOs,
👨🏻💼 82% of state legislative bodies,
🧑🏻💼 80% of federal courts, and
👩🏻💼 77% of Congress.
Despite the progress that has been made, White people are still in the majority of decision-making bodies at the federal and state levels.
This is why critical pieces of legislation like The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Education Amendments of 1972 were passed. Both Acts are divided into Titles, which name different public activities (employment, housing, voting, education) and then say it is illegal to discriminate against people in these areas based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin (and later sexual orientation and gender identity).
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed after a long filibuster and a lot of opposition from Southern Republicans and Democrats. Two months after it was signed, Republican strategists for the presidential election that November tried to get black people not to vote. They said that "we can't get them to vote for us."
But Black people still voted anyway. And the Republicans lost.
Now, in 2021, most states that have introduced voting restrictions are Republican strongholds. These are states that have voted for the Republican candidate in the past two presidential elections. But Georgia and Arizona, which have always been red states, have also introduced restrictions.
The Supreme Court is creating bad law by refusing to address race directly. This makes it harder for people who believe they have experienced racial discrimination to prove their case in court. Meanwhile, White Americans will continue to have a large say in what counts as racial liberation.
But what happens when White people become a minority in the next 20 years?
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The Spillway Social Media Day 33.5 - FAQ Can't We Ignore Race?
What was invented can’t be un-invented.
The toothpaste is out of the tube on race.
For centuries, White people other-ed People of Color. And in remarkable ways, Native, Asian, Black, Latine, Middle Eastern/North African, and Southeast Asian populations have engaged in a century (if not centuries) worth of pride and identity reclamation—independent and at times in response to Whiteness othering them.
🧐 Suppose White people are the only race of people who do not have a shared culture.
In that case, our lives and realities as White people will only serve to further appropriate cultures outside of our own. Culture is, after all, "the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group."
Claiming we don’t have a culture is akin to reinforcing Whiteness as the baseline, as the norm.
If you think the cultural pride that Native, Hispanic, Black, Asian, Middle Eastern/North African, and Southeast Asian populations have will go away any time soon, by all means: keep pushing the fantasy that the world will quickly be color-blind.
You can be mad.
You can critique it.
But it's not changing, Sisyphus. 🪨🏔
And this isn’t to say that this is permanent. We’re talking about social identities that change over time. But we’d bet good money that different cultural prides aren’t going to radically change within a few lifetimes.
So rather than being mad.
Rather than critiquing it.
We need to find ways to connect and reclaim our Whiteness to a broader fabric of humility and humanity.
All while we position ourselves toward our collective liberation.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 34 - CRT and Interest Convergence
At The Spillway, we're discussing how to use critical race theory in practical ways. As White people, we're not just talking about it, but embodying it, and understanding the legal framework behind it.
This includes the works of Derrick Bell, who is considered a founding father of CRT.
Derrick Bell theorized that social change happens when the people in power allow it to happen. He said that the interests of the ‘have nots’ and the ‘haves’ need to align for justice to occur. And that even the Constitution doesn’t have the power to make this happen.
He named this “interest convergence.”
As interest convergence so eloquently theorizes: every step—every single step—towards systemic equity in this country has required that people in charge, like White people, straight people, cis people, and men, agree to it.
You and I both need these people on our side. Mind you: 👴🏻policy makers, 👱🏻♂️legislators, 👨🏻💼CEOs, and 🧑🏻💼principals--important decision makers-- are starting to look and identify as something different from White people right now. And that shift is terrifying the hell out of some White people.
A core philosophy of The Spillway is: we’re gonna get a lot father in our liberation with 🍯honey than with vinegar.
This is a hard pill to swallow, but it's true. The more we as White people decenter other White voices and White needs, the less sustainable racial justice work will become. Yes, White people have had the mic for centuries. I understand why some people might want to pull the power cord. But we need to try Critical Race Theory if we want to get this current contingent of 231.9 million White people in the US on board.
Do we need to make everything about White people? No. That’s not what we’re saying. There are calls every day to shut White people down, and shut White people up because we have had the mic for too long. But when that call comes from inside the house? And White people appropriate the harm, violence, and conditions that Asian, Native, Latine, SE Asian, Black and marginalized populations of Color have been subjected to — that just creates more harm in the form of distracting us from our collective liberation.
Shaming people can feel good and give you some short-term benefits, but it's not worth it in the long run. Putting energy into shaming someone only leads to more problems, like another teenager going on a shooting rampage, another insurrection, or White nationalists attacking an LGBTQ pride event.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 35 - CRT Complicated Reality Pt 4
We’re unpacking why Critical Race Theory (CRT) doesn’t always make sense to a lot of White Americans. Today we’re looking at the third theory of CRT:
🟦Race is socially constructed🟦
Just like capitalism, gender, and borders, race is something that is socially constructed.
This means that it doesn't have a set value or meaning until we decide what it is. For example, money only has value because we give it value.
The same goes for gender- we learn about it from a young age and then reinforce the stereotypes.
Another example is borders- they only exist because we put them on maps and then agree that they are real.
Socially constructed concepts can change over time depending on the culture. This means that what previous generations understood about these concepts may be different than what we understand today. However, we can still understand how they worked before by looking at how people in previous generations interacted with them.
Race, being socially constructed, is no different.
Remember what beloved founding father Benjamin Franklin said when Germans started immigrating to the US:
“[I]n Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans
also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased…But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.”
-Ben Franklin
(Ol’ Ben was conflating culture for skin color.)
It is unclear what the future of race will be, but it is likely that White people will become a minority group in the next 25 years or so. This change means that the idea that White people will always be in charge of racial issues is wrong. The way we see race is not set in stone, and we cannot predict what will happen in the next decade.
When people think that racism is prejudice plus power, it means that anyone can be racist. But right now, many White people are preventing us from talking about race and racism.
If you don't talk about it, race and racism will radically change, but we’ll miss you from the conversation. And we’re building a collective liberation for all of us. We need you, too.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 36 - CRT Baby and Bath water
Cancel and Shame Culture have weaponized the contradiction that social identities (race, (dis)ability, gender, sexuality, etc.) have fixed and unchangeable traits.
There’s a cognitive dissonance in Woke Culture that race is socially constructed—a pliable social status—yet it also holds a fixed/innate/immutable caveat around White superiority and permanency: White people will always be racist. White supremacy will never go away.
If White people will always be racist, what’s the incentive to achieve the unachievable?*
(*Insert Albert Einstein quote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”)
Is it to perform “the work” around other White people and People of Color so we can feel like the “good White person?”
In Summer 2021, many of the anti-CRT bills taken up by state legislatures were about removing language around “inherently racist” or “inherently superior” from public school curricula.
These clauses are perhaps the only critically helpful parts of the bills.
However, Republicans, much like CRT, went too far in their theory of change by shooting themselves in the foot.
Enter the 📜 Stop W.O.K.E. Act and the 📜 Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, both of which many states are trying to emulate.
Republicans attempted the exact opposite of CRT—and in some cases succeeded—to eliminate even the smallest chatter of race, racism, and power dynamics.
CRT provides a way for people to have conversations that can help improve things for white people in the future. This is important not just today but also in the future. To understand power dynamics, race, and racism today, we need empathy and compassion.
Some people think it's good to have children who are racially literate. They say this because there are some problems with CRT. But these problems don't mean that the whole approach is wrong. In fact, we threw the baby out with the bathwater on this issue.
The idea that there’s one right way to do anything or Either/Or thinking is a tool of White Supremacy and Shame Culture. Where there is nuance there is understanding. And these bills are not about nuance.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 37 - Punishing and Support Pt 1
In "Safe(r) or Brave(r)" Spaces, people talk about race. These spaces can be in any place. And because of DEI&B work, it’s becoming more common place.
PART 1︎⃣
People of Color, LGBTQ people, disabled people, and people with a non-normative identity often have a voice in these spaces. The idea is that for centuries, White, straight, cisgender, or men have talked without listening to others. Now it's time for them to listen and take action.
Before the conversation even starts, a White person says something like this to try to seem like they're good people:
❝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 White person’s very real social media post)
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.
1️⃣ 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.
2️⃣ 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.
3️⃣ 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.
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.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 38 - Punishing and Support Pt 2
Safe(r) and Brave(r) Spaces don’t always work for our collective liberation.
Part 2︎⃣
In Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion offices and Racial Equity trainings across the country, people are working on "de-centering Whiteness." This means that we have been taught in the US from a White perspective and need to learn from many other perspectives. However, this does not allow White people to share their current perceptions.
Robin DiAngelo puts it this way:
“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]
In spaces where people are encouraged to be vulnerable and honest, it's important to question White reactions to race and racism when they happen. This includes listening to others and trying to understand their perspective. However, sometimes White people get really defensive in these conversations.
These defense or guilt mechanisms are often labeled as "white fragility" and dismissed. This happens when people don't want to deal with the sensitivity, unfamiliarity, inexperience, socialization, and fear of the beholder that comes from a place of trauma.
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.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 38.5 - FAQ Segregation by a different name
Jim Crow laws were a series of black codes passed by Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the intent of segregating the races and maintaining white supremacy.
The term "Jim Crow" is believed to have originated with a white minstrel show character from the 1830s, but the laws themselves didn't gain traction until after the Civil War. While Jim Crow laws varied from state to state, they typically prevented blacks from voting, holding office, serving on juries, or marrying whites. They also segregated public facilities like schools, restrooms, and water fountains.
The impact of Jim Crow was far-reaching, and its legacy can still be felt today.
While Jim Crow laws were about segregation and oppression, healing and affinity spaces are about liberation and empowerment.
These spaces are intended for marginalized groups to come together and heal from the trauma of discrimination and violence.
They are also places where people can celebrate their culture and build community. In many ways, they are the antithesis of Jim Crow laws. Healing and affinity spaces acknowledge the pain of the past while also affirming the strength and resilience of marginalized communities. In doing so, they provide a blueprint for a more just and equitable future.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 39 - CRT 2.0
Critical Race Theory has been very frustrating for White people. But, if we can open ourselves to the possibility: CRT has also been a tremendous intellectual and actionable gift for our collective liberation.
CRT builds a container to have critical conversations about race.
Yes, 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 so that we can gain an understanding of what harm, if any, is being asked of us in order to support White people. Often, that means leaving ourselves open in an attempt to understand hurts that we don’t understand or experience as hurts.
People can have different experiences of race depending on things like their sexuality, gender, ability, and immigration status. Some White people are trying to avoid talking about race altogether. This is a bad idea because we need to have these conversations in order to understand
1︎⃣ our full selves
2︎⃣ the experiences of those around us, and
3︎⃣ the shifting power dynamics in this country.
We need to be patient and create a safe space for these conversations so that everyone can participate. This is our ❖ collective liberation ❖.
Let's build a container where we can hold our frustrations in a healthy and productive way.
Sometimes people have problems with the current understandings of CRT, but that doesn't mean all of it is bad.
Most White people haven't sought support around their hurts for centuries. But 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 build together can help us talk about it.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 40 - Funding Gap White Trauma Pt 1
Part 1︎⃣
The Candid Foundation Directory Online says that between 2003 and 2021, 111.58 *billion* dollars was given to organizations working with race and racism in education, health, human rights, and social rights. Most of this money came from foundations, funds, and trusts.
Out of this money, 557 million - 00.49% - was designated for people of European descent.
This means that if you eliminated the funding from foundations for people of European descent in these areas over the past twenty years, 99.51% of the funding would still be available.
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.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 41 - Funding Gap White Trauma Pt 2
Part 2︎⃣
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 the numbers of White people supporting White people. When we get a response, we’ll update the page! Update September 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? Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress? 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 in Shame Culture:
We, as White people, don’t have a problem; we are the problem. And we can’t (won’t?) work to prevent the problem because White people will, are, and forever be White supremacists; so what’s the use?
❖❖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.
White supremacy says only focus on my needs.
White shame says only focus on your needs.
The Spillway says let’s focus on our collective needs for our collective liberation.
The Spillway Social Media Day 41.5 - FAQ Profiting off Racsim
Non-profit organizations make money by solving social problems.
For example,
☀️ climate change,
🥗 hunger,
🧑🔧 unemployment,
👶 adultism, or
👪 intimate partner violence
We have harm reduction and preventative services and organizations for all of these problems.
The Spillway is able to get funding because racism, White supremacy, and White shame are still problems in the United States. However, we get money because a problem exists. If we got money, but didn’t work to make the problem go away, that would be rightfully suspect.
Incite has written a good article that names this problem as the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC). Incite names that social service organizations/businesses/governments “Encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them.” If the problem never goes away, the funding never goes away.
Because of this, there’s often lots of pushback around preventative services.
▷ Syringe Services Programs (FKA needle exchange programs).
▷ Masculinity Workshops.
▷ Supervised Injection Sites.
▷ Universal Basic Income.
If we’re not trying to prevent a problem, we can’t be surprised when it happens. Especially when it happens over and over again, like with racism.
We’re committed to eliminating The Spillway as a whole. In our founding By Laws The Spillway will shut down by 2123. The Spillway should not have to exist in the first place. We’re looking forward to living in a society where such services aren't required.
Because the work of healing White traumas—explicitly, calls for White practitioners to support White people— we felt it ethical to found The Spillway.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 42 - DEI doesn't always work
Interestingly, recent studies from The University of Pennsylvania and Harvard have found that diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings don’t change the behavior of people. In general, the one-size-fits-all model and unconscious bias trainings:
1︎⃣ don’t work consistently and
2︎⃣ can increase hostility.
Diversity training, as a practice, needs 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. This period is known as the Second Wave of AntiRacism* as it was about teaching White America about the moral flaw of racism to enact social change.
*Coined by John McWhorter
Often, trainings are about sharing or discussing new information.
But is there anything *⃣new*⃣ to learn about race and racism?
In this Third Wave of AntiRacism and the age of technology along with 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 Shame 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 collective healing is possible.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 43 - White people problems_perp and victim
The paradox of being White in the US is knowing we have the capacity to be both a perpetrator and victim of racism. Often at the exact same time.
Interpersonally, the field of social justice and anti-racism work has primarily focused on reactive services to Whiteness and White supremacy.
Yet, anti-racist trauma-informed practice isn’t doing nearly anything productive by way of preventative work.
We currently perform prevention in Third Wave AntiRacism* when
➤ A White person is demanded to “check (their) privilege,” and the conversation stops there
➤ We shame a White person immediately for merely ~talking~ about race as prevention to ~any~ kind of action by a White person
➤ We confuse “accountability to” for “permission from”
➤ We demand continual hyper-vigilance around the appearance or experience of complicity in White people
*coined by John McWhorter
If some of this list doesn't make sense to you, that's okay. You should be aware of it though. This is how people in Shame culture interpret preventative work in race and racism:
We perform prevention through humiliation and shunning in Shame culture.
It's almost as if there's some Shame Industrial Complex that profits off of making bandaids rather than translating trauma-informed care onto White intergenerational trauma and Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress.
We must be proactive and reactive to heal our hurts and interrupt our ability to harm others.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 44 - We need prevention tools
1︎⃣ What do you think are some preventative measures we can take to address white supremacy and racism?
2︎⃣ Why do you think it's important for White people to have preventative services?
3︎⃣ What would be your ideal preventative service for White people?
4︎⃣ How can we work together to make sure these services are available to everyone who needs them?
5︎⃣ What is your biggest fear about preventative services for White people?
We need to reevaluate the desire to solely fund reactive supportive services (in general, but especially in places of collective liberation). We shouldn’t have to wait for harm to happen interpersonally.
Harm is already - and has been - happening to people in solitude.
And yet funding for supportive services, as the Philanthropic Institute for Racial Equity report finds, are laughable at trying to build an equitable future.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 45 - A Path Toward White Racial Healing
We need to build independently - yet historically informed - from our current models of how race and racism unfold in contemporary US culture.
People who are hurting continue to hurt other people.
For centuries, White people have been hurting themselves, each other, and others, creating deeply ingrained wounds that can feel indefinite or irreversible.
And because we experience these feelings as indefinite or irreversible, they also don’t feel like anything we know. We haven’t allowed a healing space for White people to name what’s going on internally.
˲ Let’s slow down.
˲˲ Let’s listen to our bodies.
˲˲˲ Let’s reengage with the world in a way that empathy, compassion, patience, and understanding inform and lead our work.
˲˲˲˲ Let’s redefine Whiteness to be a positive representation of White people full of self-reflection and pro-social behavior.
Being ostracized can be difficult, yet we should hold and know that we are not alone in this experience, nor is this the end of our conversation of Whiteness as White people.
At The Spillway, we believe that every White person holds the paradox of being capable of being a perpetrator and a victim at the same time.
How we heal this paradox today will help inform our tomorrow.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 46 - White people leave seats
Mainstream markets in the United States have started to fold in populations that have identified outside of straight, white, and middle-class men.
These markets have found ways to make money through intersectional praxis or the way different types of people work together. Bonded by the efforts of the billion-dollar Diversity Equity and Inclusion industry.
But there is still a lot of work to be done when it comes to increasing representation in media, management, school boards, E-Suites, tenure-track faculty, and so on.
And yet— there’s this thing that happens that we don’t really talk about. And it’s happening more and more to White people. White men, especially.
🪑Often, people use the metaphor of a person with a marginalized identity bringing a seat to the privileged table of decision-making.
⑁ If someone who is privileged leaves their seat at the table, where do they go?
⑁ Are there any conditions or rules for their absence?
⑁ What does this mean for the person who is not there?
⑁ Who cares that the seat is empty?
As White people leave these seats at the table, we don't just disappear. We often don't appreciate how hard it is emotionally for those who are left behind or who are leaving.
Remember, this is our collective liberation. When we honor new forms of representation, we also need to consider honoring this newer emotional experience of White people. In Shame culture, it’s really easy to just say
🙄 get over it
🙄 cry me a river
🙄 so desperate to be oppressed
because that doesn’t require more of us to consider the needs of the whole community.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 47 - Audre Lorde and Tools
As White people become a racial minority in the US*, people invested in liberatory futures must make choices to address this hurt before it compresses even further.
We haven’t always made the healthiest choices when we’ve had decision-making power. And we’re seeing some White people becoming violent: terrified at the thought of losing that power.
Remember the oft-quoted Audre Lorde charge:
“For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
⭐️ Compassion
⭐️ Empathy
⭐️ Patience
⭐️ Understanding
are not tools our culture traditionally ascribes to Whiteness or White people.
This is not to say that White people, acting individually or in pockets, cannot be compassionate, empathetic, or invested in healing our trauma. Rather…
It’s difficult to name a stereotype or common occurrence within most White people that are rooted in compassion, empathy, patience, or healing; among White men especially.
Some White people may have a different perspective.
Still, a growing body of research shows that White people in America aren’t received or perceived—by ourselves and others—with compassion and empathy.
Let’s change that.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 48 - Norms Values Traditions of White people Pt 1
Intrapersonally, White people don’t often see movement leaders, authors, or public intellectuals looking to heal White intergenerational trauma or Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress.
At the end of August 2022, there were only five results in all Google for “White intergenerational trauma” (when you take out The Spillway’s results).
Suppose there was one place to immediately profit off a new societal touchstone (to appear culturally relevant). In that case, it’d be academia struggling to make itself relevant.
Currently, enrollments are plummeting, and employers don’t want to pay people for advanced degrees.*
Perhaps the closest we got was a flashpoint in the late '90s/early ‘00s when universities began flirting with the construction of departments on White Studies.*
(*To be clear: This is about White people studying/talking/thinking about White people. To name a few: bell hooks, Toby Ganley, David Roediger, Toby Ganley, and especially James Baldwin have written tremendous bodies of literature on the study of Whiteness as a survival tactic for people who are Black in the US.)
These departments changed the way Whiteness was studied in universities. White studies became mostly about anti-racism, power, and critical race theory. It changed from studying White people's traditions and values to studying how White people are connected to other races. According to critical studies, this is all White people are and will ever be. So it was fine for universities to change the name of White studies to anti-racism work.
By 2012, even CNN asked, "Has ‘Whiteness studies’ run its course at colleges?”
White shame has actively stopped White people from studying White people as anything more than racist Energizer Bunnies (“it just keeps going and going and going”).
Ironically, this has happened in one of the only spaces where the sole purpose of the field (education) is to study and think about the world around us.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 49 - Norms Values Traditions of White people Pt 2
Students, faculty, and staff are often researching worlds different from their own in academic and institutional research.
Access to research funding and tools has been elaborately hidden behind the walls of ivory towers. Historically, this has meant that the populations excluded from these walls have experienced the brunt of research.
Vine Deloria Jr., Laura Nader, and Kim TallBear each talk about, in TallBear’s words, the need to “research up.” This call to “research up” comes from the need to:
1︎⃣ Ensure that a personal or communal experience is articulated through a first-person narrative.
2︎⃣ Diminish outgroup bias in reporting.
3︎⃣ Stop exploiting another person’s experience for personal gain.
Or, to put this in the proverb popularized in the West by Chinua Achebe, “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
We need lions and hunters to tell their own stories.
It is important for White people to research and explore our unique needs, histories, and futures. If we don't do this, we are doing ourselves a big disservice.
There are two types of voices that are talking to White people right now:
1️⃣ Some White people who talk about our issues from a critical perspective, and
2️⃣ Some White people who think that if we ignore social problems, they will go away.
But when we ostracize ourselves in this way, it makes it harder for us to see what unites us. This division causes more pain.
The Spillway seeks to bridge that divide by finding out our commonalities without shame or supremacy.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 50 - Accountability
Shame culture has a lot to say about accountability, mainly because Supremacy culture refuses sustainable accountability processes.
Yet both of these cultures, in trying to reach each other, have started talking past each other, not with each other.
✴︎ Supremacy culture says, “only focus on my needs.”
✴︎ Shame culture says, “only focus on your needs.”
The Spillway is trying to build a culture that says, “let’s focus on our collective needs.”
Even Robin DiAngelo, in her new book, expands Shame culture by insisting:
❝In the context of anti-racism, white people must be accountable to people of color rather than decide for ourselves what is or isn’t needed, demonstrated through checking in with BIPOC people and following through on our commitments.❞
This thinking doesn’t allow for collaboration, connectivity, or community. Instead, it’s about permission seeking and —again—requiring Black, Native, Asian, Middle Eastern/North African, South East Asian, and Latine people to do our work for us, to save us. (While also ignoring the possibility that we have needs in a collective movement as well)
As Resmaa Menakem said in his first book, 📕 My Grandmother’s Hands, “Imagine a roomful of African Americans in 1970 asking Tony Bennett to invent hip-hop for them…Not only is it not my job to lead you out of white-body supremacy, but I would do you a profound disservice by trying to do so.”
? ? ? So how do we do this accountability thing?
Be in conversation with people who don’t necessarily think as you do about race and racism.
Ask questions.
Get curious.
Hold these conversations with compassion, patience, empathy, and understanding.
This doesn’t have to be your ideologically-polar opposite cousin at the holidays. It can be your coworker, your Dad, your brother’s boyfriend, or your mom’s childhood best friend who stops by Tuesday mornings for coffee and cruller.
Yes, we know this sounds overly simple.
We also know this sounds incredibly daunting. So we wrote a book about it. We made a podcast about it.
You might want to check it out.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 51 - Accountability Abuse
You could say that “Accountability Abuse,” coined by Tada Hozumi, is another way of thinking about the toxicity of Cancel Culture.
We remember when other people make mistakes in our culture of competing, winning, and dominating. So it’s an easy action to make us feel better about ourselves.
We say in so many words, “I know I’m not perfect but at least I didn’t make ❖that❖ mistake.”
People make mistakes.
People can also do tremendous, intentional harm.
And you are not that mistake or harm for the rest of your life.
But how do we know that a person has changed? Through accountability processes that consider the humanity of every person involved:
1. What does the person who has been harmed need?
2. What does the community that supports the person who has been injured need?
3. What does the person who has harmed need?
4. What does the community that supports the person who harmed need?
We're not engaged in an accountability process if we miss any of these steps or fail to follow through on any of these actions. So instead, we’re engaging in punishment—accountability abuse.
So often, in Shame culture, we often refuse to engage in Action 3 and Action 4 because the culture believes that White people aren’t supposed to have needs, wants, desires, or feelings. Or we can, and they’re not to be trusted.
Online, we also experience a lot of White people appropriate Action 2 when another White person does something racist. White people will begin dogpiling onto the person who created harm so that we may both:
1️⃣ Perform/demonstrate our commitment to antiracism in public
2️⃣ (attempt to) Alleviate our Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (check out the podcast episode if you haven’t already!)
The German-Swiss psychologist Arno Gruen succinctly says, “…the actual source of our cruelty and callousness lies in the rejection of our own suffering. They more inhumanely we behave, the more we repudiate our suffering and betray that human self we were never permitted to have.”
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The Spillway Social Media Day 52 - 4th Dimensional Accountability Abuse
The 4th Dimension adds the layer of time.
Much like we can find the coordinates within north/south, east/west, and altitude/depth—having a 4th-dimensional understanding would mean we would know what happens before, during, and after a specific moment in time.
When we map this onto social identity, it begins to sound more familiar:
A lot of White people struggle with holding calls for accountability for actions that weren’t/aren’t part of our current culture.
I didn’t steal Native land.
I didn’t enslave anyone.
What’s more, many White people in Shame culture have connected with this idea that the social identities of race have fixed characteristics.
Specifically, White people will always be racist.
As our accountability methods can turn into abusive forms (see earlier post!), many White people in Shame culture are trying to hold both our ancestors and descendants to task.
In our desires to be a Good White Person, we attempt to transcend our Allyship beyond the confines of time.
4th Dimensional Accountability reminds us to see each other for the person in front of us, outside the history book and crystal ball.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 53 - Arno Gruen Appreciation Day
I had never heard of Arno Gruen until Fred Jealous (Season 1, Ep 3 of the Podcast!) kept recommending Gruen’s work every time we talked.
A Swiss/German psychologist, Gruen came to the States in 1936. Graduated from NYU and taught at Rutgers University for almost two decades. In 1979 we went back to Europe, where he spent the rest of his days until he passed in 2015. He published a lot, but his two main books are The Betrayal of Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women & The Insanity of Normality: Towards Understanding Human Destructiveness.
Gruen believed we live in a culture of dominance, not love. He’d argue that many of us don’t even know what love is. Our lives have been built on the understanding that some transaction must occur to be loved, loving, and lovable.
You bought dinner = I love you/you love me.
You took out the trash = I love you/you love me.
You held the door open for me = you love me / I love you.
You did or did not do a thing = you love me / I love you.
If you take away the conditions, is there still love? Or is it appreciation? Thankfulness?
Define what you love about another person and see how many conditions are attached:
They make me smile.
They make me laugh.
They care for me when I’m sick, hungry, tired…
They buy me things.
They teach me things.
Gruen advocated for understanding other humans as inherently capable of love and lovability. Because if we keep attaching conditions, we’ll continue this hamster wheel of competing/win/dominate. And that these conditions keep us from being our whole, authentic, autonomous selves.
There are some pretty great quotes and ideas from this philosophy that will make their way into the broader work of The Spillway. But, for now, enjoy these pull quotes from The Betrayal of Self.
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The Spillway Social Media Day 54 - Shame Segment Intro
I have some stories to set up for the next few weeks of posts on SHAME.
Story 1️⃣
After the Insurrection in 2021, I told a White person --a friend--that I wished those who “stormed the Capitol” had their own political party. I want to know and anticipate their next move rather than pretend they were all Republican. I prefer to know what people are thinking while still in the thinking phase rather than meeting people in the doing stage.
My friend hated this idea. They hated it so much asked to stop talking about the subject and that we’d have to agree to disagree.
The thought of legitimizing the Insurrectionists in any capacity was overwhelming for them.
✴️ Ignore it.
✴️ Flee.
✴️ Freeze.
✴️ That’s how we fight it.
Little did I know that my being White was impacting this conversation.
The next afternoon we found ourselves circling the same conversation after the organization my friend worked for was offered space for the employees to try to make sense of the day before.
Without even referring to our conversation from the day before, my friend found it essential to share that they wished we didn’t have a two-party system. They suddenly wanted to exchange ideas freely before they bottled up into an insurrection. A few of their colleagues—all People of Color—suggested this brilliant idea. So my bad idea from the day before was suddenly not bad.
Story 2️⃣
I text a handful of White friends a quick informal poll about what they want to ask White people. (Maybe you’ve seen the post?)
I get a response:
“I have zero connection to being white. And I don’t want a connection to it honestly. Whiteness is wrapped up in christianity for me and [I’m] not interested in a “we” perspective…I’m super happy you are doing this work. I think it is important work. And also, it is not work I want to do personally right now.”
Story 3️⃣
In the late Spring, The Spillway was in its first cancelation campaign.
White people began messaging most of my private connections on a social media site. They warned people not to associate with me because they translated our mission into my being an apologist for racism. Compassion has no place in antiracism work.
The Spillway Social Media Day 55 - Shame Culture Day 1 - Introduction
Our tagline at The Spillway is “Whiteness without Supremacy or Shame.”
It’s at the bottom of nearly every social media post.
We say it in every podcast episode.
It’s the title of our forthcoming book…
There’s a lot of literature, cultural conversations/actions, and academic energy directed at understanding and neutralizing White supremacy. We take this to mean that most people know what White supremacy is in the US.
In my work, I’ve seen more well-intentioned White people run—not walk or even pretend to saunter—in the other direction when they see me coming. I have had more White friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances rave about the importance of my work in private, yet refuse to support my work in public. I experienced this massive disconnect between the people I was surrounded by and their inability to talk about their being White.
When White people around me did talk about race publicly, they’d use (and still do) phrases like:
⬜️ I’m trying to be less White.
⬜️ We need to decenter Whiteness from everything.
⬜️ White people are so desperate to be oppressed.
⬜️ You cannot trust White people.
⬜️ White people shouldn’t lead anything related to race and racism.
⬜️ I hate White people.
⬜️ White people need to sit down and shut the f*** up.
I knew these phrases because I used to say them too—a lot.
When I asked a dear friend and colleague of mine to be on the podcast, she immediately had reservations:
❝Loran, I know you to be many things. But all this talk about compassion, patience, empathy, and understanding feels like a you I haven’t met yet.❞
Oof. It felt like a punch to the gut.
This came from a person I’ve known for seven years and have worked in the trenches supporting LGBTQIA+ populations.
And my friend was right. I was talking all this, but she hadn’t seen me walk the walk…ever. This fantastic phone call made it clear how deeply embedded I was in Shame Culture.
I’m writing this section on Shame out of autobiography and from my experiences of the people I surrounded myself with; those who love me couldn’t overcome their conditioning to be ashamed of themselves.
The Spillway Social Media Day 56 - Shame Culture Day 2 - Define
“Shame” isn’t often associated with being White when we talk about race and racism. Usually, when we’re talking about White people, we’re generally talking about Supremacy. However, sometimes conversations can go deeper, and the discussion veers into topics of White “guilt.” (White “fragility” is a massive part of this conversation. too. More soon.)
In many ways, guilt can foreshadow shame, even though they both have distinct characteristics. So let’s start with guilt first and work our way to Shame.
Miller and Garran, who have written a textbook about American racism for social service providers, define “White guilt” in the following ways:
1️⃣ White people may experience guilt about their privilege or because they have internalized racial stereotypes that conflict with their egalitarian values.
2️⃣ People of any race may feel guilt over how they have treated or responded to members of other racial and ethnic groups.
3️⃣ We find guilt helpful because it signals internal unrest…[that we must] turn into positive advocacy and action.
Shelby Steele, the author of 📕 White Guilt (2007), pinpoints the freedom and liberation movements of the 1960s as building the foundations of our mainstream understanding of White guilt. Black Power & Freedom Movements, 2nd Wave Feminist Movements, AntiWar, and Gay and Lesbian Liberation movements all brought the ethics and morality of authority into question.
“The so-called counterculture,” Steele writes, “born of this consciousness, reflected both this crisis in traditional authority and the search for new sources of authority.”
Who has the right to define the status quo?
Why does a select population have exclusive rights to define “normal”?
What can we do to change how decisions are made and who makes them?
It was in these movements that PITSS became mainstream. More and more, White culture grew into a consciousness that—finally—knew that racism was amoral. To atone for the violent and devastating acts of racism, White people began invoking 4th Dimensional Accountability Abuse, where White people
⬜️ have not,
⬜️ are not, and
⬜️ will never have
equitable and just morals and ethics in matters of race and racism.
The Spillway Social Media Day 57 - Shame Culture Day 3 - Origins
Shelby Steele continues, “Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of Whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist. The great power of White guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself. Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise…Thus, America and all its institutions suddenly needed something from Blacks—a people who in the past had been needed for little more than manual labor—[moral authority].”
Shannon Sullivan, the author of 📕 Good White People, goes so far as to say that you can’t even talk about White Shame without talking about class hierarchies in US Culture. This happens when middle-class White people deflect racism by blaming poor(er) White people for most of the problems associated with racism. This way of thinking usually goes something like this:
🙋🏼 I’m not racist because I’m ashamed of being White. The real problem is White people who aren’t ashamed. And I’ve never seen a rural, poor, White person say they were ashamed of being White. So that makes me a Good White Person and them bad.
More often than not, middle-class White liberals believe there is a ☀️ one-right-way ☀️ to end racism, and that’s through education. The idea is that if you’re not educated, you’re more likely to be racist. And as our social (identity) and economic (income) factors greatly influence our education and, therefore, class level: if you’re not educated, you’re probably working class or in poverty.
✴️ If MIDDLE CLASS+ then EDUCATED, then NOT RACIST
So the inverse must be true, right?
✴️ If RACIST, then NOT EDUCATED, then NOT MIDDLE CLASS+
Sullivan concludes, “Encouraging White people to feel ashamed of their whiteness as a response to racial injustice implicitly caters to the hegemonic and narcissistic interests of middle-class white people. It encourages middle-class white people to experience a raced emotion that buttresses their class/race supremacy, and it keeps lower-class white people “in their place” by promoting an emotion that is unavailable to them.”
The Spillway Social Media Day 58 - Shame Culture Day 4 - Guilt v Shame
How are shame and guilt different?
Individually, What do they mean?
To understand this conversation better, we look no further than that go-to expert for all things Shame related: Brené Brown, PhD, MSW.
In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brown defines them as follows:
Guilt: I did something bad
Shame: I am bad
Guilt is a state of being. We can come in and out of it.
Shame—on the other hand—is a trait. We just *are*.
Guilt: I did something racist.
Shame: I am racist.
See the difference? The “I did” versus “I am” has tremendous implications. “I did” gives way to action and change, whereas “I am” is permanent and unwavering.
If we stay in any state of being for too long, it starts feeling less like a passing episode and more like a personality trait. It becomes something harder to escape as we get stuck.
Shame is stuckness: an inability to move beyond. And the failure to move beyond hurt is a required element of trauma.
Brown continues:
❝It’s when we feel shame or the fear of shame that we are more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors, to attack or humiliate others or to stay quiet when we see someone who needs our help.
…when we apologize for something we’ve done, make amends to others, or change a behavior we don’t feel good about, guilt is most often the motivator. Recognizing we’ve made a mistake is far different than believing we are a mistake. Of course, you can shame someone into saying, “I’m sorry,” but it’s rarely authentic.❞
Let’s say that part one more time because it has incredible implications for our shared culture:
✴️✴️When we feel shame or the fear of shame, we are more likely to attack or humiliate others.✴️✴️
When we know this, we know that shame can manifest in two ways:
1️⃣ The shame we hold inside around our White identity
Self-talk looks like this:
Because I am White, I am bad because I do not have—nor will I ever—a moral compass around race and racism. Therefore I am bad.
2️⃣ The shame we place on other White people for being White.
Shared space talk looks like this:
Because you are White, you are bad because you do not have—nor will you ever—a moral compass around race and racism. Therefore you are bad.
The Spillway Social Media Day 59 - Shame Culture Day 5 - Accountability
We must discuss what we’re intentionally not discussing in this series.
Here we’re talking about feeling and experiencing shame as a White person for being White and how some of us are shaming other White people when our Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress is activated.
When we do racist things, we must be in a community that cares enough to help bring us back into patience, compassion, empathy, and understanding with ourselves and each other. Accountability processes help us with this: to help take responsibility for our actions by explaining, justifying, and answering for what we’re doing.
If I feel shame for something I have done...
Regardless of whether you hold me accountable while simultaneously validating my humanity, I still feel shame...
That's on me.
I'm in charge of my emotional experience.
Because shame overrides our prefrontal context, in times of feeling shame, when we’re held accountable for a racist action, we’re in survival mode. We’re in a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode. We’re not even thinking. Brenè Brown even has a beautiful episode on Unlocking Us about this exact topic: Brenè on Shame and Accountability.
Once we can get our brain “back online,” as Brenè says, we can make every effort to switch from shame to guilt. This takes time and practice. To change our gears from “I am a bad person,” which we can’t create action around, to “I did a bad thing,” which we can create action around. Granted, this work doesn’t always happen instantaneously or come easy to many of us.
If your accountability process includes
calling other White people names,
refusing their humanity, and
telling them that they are the mistake they just made,
that’s now on both of you.
Because not only will they feel shame, but you’re reinforcing shame within yourself. (Not to mention, you're reinforcing White Shame culture for community members who witness the interaction.)
The problem of White Shame Culture arises when we don’t give space for other White people—who activate our Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress—to modify their behavior. Instead, we’ve painted their behavior as their personhood.
The Spillway Social Media Day 60 - Shame Culture Day 6 - Norms Values Traditions
For many of us—Gen X, Millennials, Gen-Z—we’ve been conditioned from birth to believe that we don’t have any moral or ethical compass around issues of race and racism. This conditioning has created a culture—shared beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects passed from one generation to the next—of White Shame.
Out of this work, we begin to see the two foundational principles of White Shame which help to build a culture of shared norms, values, and beliefs:
1️⃣ Past, present, and future White people do not have a just or ethical moral compass.
2️⃣ Collectively, only People of Color hold a moral or ethical compass.
We believe that we don't have an ethical or moral compass when it comes to race. And that other White people don't have it either. No White person does. This means that anything we do, see, or hear from ourselves or other White people cannot be trusted.
This has a lot of emotional, psychological, and physiological implications, which all stem from a lack of trust. At a base level, White shame means waking up every day and saying to yourself—however consciously—
🗣 I cannot firmly believe in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of my capacity to tell right from wrong in matters of race.
🗣 I cannot firmly believe in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of any other White person’s capacity to tell right from wrong in matters of race.
These stories we tell ourselves help to foster a negative self-image of ourselves and the White people around us. It becomes this reinforcing cycle of shame that we cannot get out of, and we cannot make sense of it. We become the Allegory of the Cave (Plato’s Cave) whereby we’ve been living in this world, so shame spiraling for so long, it’s ludicrous—blasphemous even—to suggest otherwise.
In White Shame Culture, we locate truth outside of ourselves.
Suddenly life becomes easy because we now don’t have to do the work of knowing right from wrong.
We don’t have to think anymore.
We only have to rely on and demand that Native, Black, Latine, Asian, Middle Eastern/North African, or SouthEast Asian people make us whole.
And that’s not okay for them or us.
The Spillway Social Media Day 61 - Shame Culture Day 6.5 - Norms Values Traditions
Our inability to trust ourselves through White Shame Culture has created a culture of co-dependent White people.
Typical traits of 👥Co-Dependency, as defined by the American Psychiatric Association, revolve around a single criterion:
The excessive and pervasive need to be taken care of, submissive, clinging, needy behavior due to fear of abandonment.
Being called “Racist” is one of the absolute worst fears of White people within White Shame Culture. If we’re called “racist,” everyone around us will abandon us. So we reinforce dependent behaviors so we never have to worry about our fear actualizing.
We have become so far removed from actions leading to our interdependence. Unfortunately, we see this consistently show up in accountability abuse. Or as Robin DiAngelo exemplifies this point in her newest book on 📕 White Affinity Spaces:
“In the context of anti-racism, white people must be accountable to people of color rather than decide for ourselves what is or isn’t needed, demonstrated through checking in with BIPOC people and following through on our commitments.”
In statements like these, White Shame Culture removes the collective nature of our liberation, as White people aren’t encouraged to be accountable to ourselves, too. It reinforces that we can never have a moral or ethical compass to trust in cross-racial relationships.
Psychologist Arno Gruen warns: “The source of aggression and destructiveness lies in our culture, not in the individual. And everything that reinforces the fragmentation of our personality and closes off our inner world contributes to the creation and growth of our destructive drives.”
Translation? If we disconnect from a culture of shame and lean into a process of compassion, patience, empathy, and understanding, we can begin internally healing and listening to our autonomous selves. Disconnecting allows us to seek and find the truths in our ethical and moral compasses for our collective liberation.
The Spillway Social Media Day 62 - Shame Culture Day 7 - White Fragility
For those unfamiliar, “White Fragility” is a term coined by Robin DiAngelo that is loosely defined as White people’s inability to tolerate racial stress. Whenever issues or topics of race and racism come up, our fragility is activated, and we shut down or act out. DiAngelo says, in the titular book:
❝it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.❞
Translation: White fragility only understands our liberation in terms of White people’s perpetration of harm, of our internalized superiority and entitlement. It is not that our inability to tolerate racialized stress is a demonstration of our unhealed and unregistered Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress and interGenerational trauma.
🚫White fragility isn’t a trauma-informed method. White people are always—and only—grappling with superiority and entitlement around race and racism, never a complex or nuanced mental, emotional, or physical space.
White people can’t have that because White Shame culture dictates that we don’t have a just or moral ethical compass.
White fragility fails to account for the reality that White people are negatively impacted by race and racism, too. Rather, it’s a tool we can deploy onto other White people, making space for us to become the Good White Person™️ because we identified an “other”—a “bad”—White person.
Nearly every time I’ve heard a White person talk about someone else’s White fragility, it’s been in the context of “At least I’m better than them.” This makes a lot of anti-racism work a game of competition, not liberation.
You’re not being fragile; you ✨are✨ fragile.
Remember, Shame grows in unwanted identities.
White fragility insists that our moral compass is exclusively driven by superiority and entitlement and cannot be trusted. It also continues the single-story narrative that White Supremacy is the only block to our collective liberation by not considering the harmful consequences of White Shame.
The Spillway Social Media Day 63 - Shame Culture Day 8 - Intent v Impact
White Shame Culture knows the work of micro-aggressions, where this conversation frequently comes up.
This is not to say that acknowledging micro-aggressions is an act of White Shame Culture. It’s not. It’s to say how we 🌟handle🌟 micro-aggressions, which reinforces White Shame Culture. This post is specifically made for people who are new to micro-aggressions.
In micro-aggressions, White people took this idea of impact over the intention and turned it into a tool to reinforce White Shame Culture.
Micro-aggressions happen when a person from a different social group un/intentionally makes a remark that belittles, alienates, or dehumanizes a person from another different social group.
🔵 Someone is hurt: that’s the impact.
🔵 Someone hurt that person: that action—and the ideas/feelings that led to that action—are the intention.
Micro-aggressions are born on the borders of cultural difference:
In my culture, we do X, Y, Z. And when I do that to you, who comes from a culture that may do A, B, C—X, Y, and Z may not mean the same things as A, B, and C.
🔴 Men do this to Women (“You’re prettier when you smile!”)
🟠 Straight people do this to Gay people (“Which one of you is the guy?”)
🟡 Cisgender people do this to GNBT people (“I also wanted to be a boy when I was a child.”)
🟢 Middle/Upper income people do this to poor and working class people (“You should get a mortgage, that’s cheaper than renting.”)
In theory, microaggressions add a step of reconciliation where ✨only the impact✨ is examined between the two people so that the person who un/intentionally hurt the other person knows why not to do it again. (“Here’s why X, Y, and Z don’t feel good to me/hurt me.”)
There’s no step in this process to examine the intention of the person who un/intentionally hurt the other person:
➡️ What did you mean when you said “X,”
➡️ Why did you say, “Y?”
➡️ Where were you coming from with “Z?”)
White people within Shame Culture took this omission and turned it into “your intention doesn’t matter” and “f*** your White feelings.”
Micro-aggressions live in the gap that can exist between the intention of our words and the impact it has on others.
The Spillway Social Media Day 64 - Shame Culture Day 9 - Intent v Impact pt2
Ignoring intentions in micro-aggressions reinforces the cardinal rule of White Shame Culture: Because you, as another White person, don’t have any ethical behavior when it comes to race, your experience is inherently invalid. When we believe this, there’s no reason or justification to understand where the offending party was coming from. It doesn’t matter. In racial micro-aggressions, the offender is usually White, so it’s irrelevant.
It may be important to remind people here that, critically, the racial micro-aggressions we’re talking about here are White people in dialogue with other White people. Sometimes, People of Color come up in conversations between White people. That’s when this battle of impact and intention can occur and when White Shame Culture overrides the conversation; when a White person refuses to hold the humanity and growth of another White person for our collective liberation.
Or, to double down: a microaggression happens publicly between a White person and a Person of Color. People invested in White Shame Culture will make sure to be extra shaming towards the offender, refuse their humanity, and will not offer any individual support. This makes sense in White Shame Culture because the offender doesn’t need to actually learn anything here because White people don’t have a moral or ethical compass. Learning isn’t necessary.
White Shame Culture cuts us off from our autonomy by placing our only path towards collective liberation through knowledge. Because we don’t trust or ourselves or other White people to have a positive emotional experience, it becomes imperative that we only engage with our minds, as if our collective liberation is some sort of algebraic formula.
One of the most important things we can do for our collective liberation is to build cross-racial and cross-cultural inroads of empathy, compassion, patience, and understanding. To do that, we need to share our joys, sorrows, high spirits, and despairs with each other. We can’t do that if the most consistent messaging out of White Shame Culture is for other White people to shut up and listen. We have to be in conversation, too.
The Spillway Social Media Day 65 - Shame Culture Day 10 - Gentrification
Let’s start with the obvious: gentrification is harmful.
Gentrification—or the process of wealthy people swooping into a lower-income area to buy up land and buildings, which raise property values and subsequently taxes and the prices of goods and services which displace lower-income families—is harmful to our collective liberation.
And yet, there’s a sizable movement within White Shame culture that’s inadvertently reinforcing segregation through its efforts to stop gentrification.
👉🏻 Within White Shame Culture assumes that White people always have class mobility and fluidity. And while this is true for some White people, it’s not generalizable beyond White people with a college degree or more.
According to US Census Data, 🤓 of White people who receive social safety net benefits (SNAP, WIC, CHIP, SSI, TANF, etc.), 61.2% don’t have a post-secondary degree. In addition, 30,309,201 White people were eligible and enrolled in Medicaid in 2021. That’s more people than the second largest state in the US—Texas (29.7 Million). There are a lot of poor White people in the US.
Yet, as a tool of the White middle class, White Shame culture transfers a “bootstrap” 🥾 mentality to all poorer and working-class White people.
As if ❝they’re White, they can get out of poverty if they want to. They just have to (a) be White and (b) try. They can get a better job if they really want it.❞
This misnomer continues, as White Shame culture believes that If/when a White person moves into a predominately non-White neighborhood🏠 we will inevitably change the market values, taxes, and prices of goods and services. End of discussion. For some reason, the nuances of class and gender don’t apply in these conversations.
Again, this line of middle-class White Shame thinking creates a villain of the poor White person who doesn’t feel shame for trying to find affordable housing. It also reinforces the practice of racial segregation whereby White people shouldn’t share neighborhoods with People of Color.
Gentrification happens when middle-class people—usually White—move into a poorer or working-class community and extract land, resources, and services.
The Spillway Social Media Day 66 - Shame Culture Day 11 - Movement Leaders- White women
Who’s building and shaping White Shame Culture in tangible and lasting ways? Two particular groups: White Women and White LGBTQ folks. To be very clear: I’m not trying to make these two groups villains or scapegoats.
Just like we think of specific characteristics which *can* contribute to ideologies surrounding White supremacy (White, rural, less than a college education, working class, Christian, men), a different configuration builds specific characteristics which *can* contribute to White Shame Culture. We’ll get into that in a second…
Many White women in the US are walking a tightrope with other White people.
🗣 Speak up: you’re a bitch.
🙅♀️ Don’t speak up: get walked all over.
Not to mention, White people have appropriated the term “Karen” and now routinely deploy it against White women—extracting it from its use in racism. I’ve asked many White people what brings them to the work of collective liberation. Sadly, I’ve heard “I don’t want to be called a Karen” from White women.
Who’s trying hard not to be called or perceived as a Karen?
White, middle/upper class, college educated, suburban and urban, non-practicing Christmas and Easter Christians.
There’s knowing better than you did before—so we can be better people.
If we don’t know better, we might make mistakes that hurt others.
After all: knowledge is power.
Then there’s knowing better than another person to make ourselves feel better.
If they don’t understand better than we do (or think we do), it can activate a sense of superiority…the Good White Person…the “Wokest,”…the antithesis of the Karen.
Some of the most punishing and shaming interactions I’ve witnessed have come from White women
👩🏼🏫 at a lecture hall…
🏢a community meeting…
⛺️ around the campfire…
📱 the comments sections of social media…
all in the name of deflecting attention. There are some really great examples in our Prologue episode of the podcast!
And we do this as if to say, “Don’t look at me! I’m berating this White person over here. And the ferocity, tone, and conviction in my voice and choice of exaggerated language indicate that I’m a Good White Person.”
The Spillway Social Media Day 67 - Shame Culture Day 12 - Movement Leaders- Robin DiAngelo
A good example of the White woman at the center of White Shame Culture points to inarguably the most famous of White women in antiracism: Dr. Robin DiAngelo.
She’s been molding and building Third-Wave Antiracism for decades, she literally wrote the book on White Fragility, and she is, arguably, the current leading White person in all things antiracism.
It’s really important to give credit where it’s due. And that’s with the evolution of Robin DiAngelo’s thinking and approach to 3rd Wave Antiracism.
As earlier discussed, “White Fragility” isn’t a trauma-informed approach and further expands the work of White Shame Culture. In many ways, “White Fragility” mixes 4th-dimensional accountability abuse with White people’s current reluctance, inability, fear, and anxiety around talking about race and racism. It ignores interGenerational trauma and Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress.
Data suggests that DiAngelo is finally beginning to understand that this approach of shaming people doesn’t work.
📊 Looking at the use of “fragility, “shame,” and “guilt” in her last three books,
📉 her use of “fragility” has FALLEN, on average, 86%
Meanwhile,
📈 her use of “shame” has GROWN, on average, 147%
📈her use of “guilt” has GROWN, on average, 36%
To our knowledge, DiAngleo hasn’t explicitly stated her positioning as to why she’s quietly walking away from a theory that made her a household name. We can only speculate.
So what we will say is this because we don’t have all the facts:
As DiAngelo is expanding her point of view and process to become more trauma-informed, how many people will make this switch with her? In 2020, DiAngelo’s book sat atop the NYTimes Bestseller list for months as White people rushed to figure out how to make sense of the Uprisings.
How many of those White people have bought in or entertained a new antiracism theory or stance since that summer?
Arguably, in the imagination of the White psyche, DiAngelo, we will always associate DiAngelo with White Fragility and the tremendous steps back it has taken to our collective liberation.
Can White people move and grow with Dr. DiAngelo?
The Spillway Social Media Day 68 - Shame Culture Day 13 - Movement Leaders- LGBTQ folks
(some*) LGBTQuties
*more than one, less than all
Understanding that I was actively creating, encouraging, and expanding Shame Culture based on social identity has been one of my life's most revolutionary tipping points.
A friend from my undergrad days—who I still haven’t seen in person since before COVID—told me just last week that they “felt unsafe” having a conversation about racism with me because they “didn’t consent” to talking about how White supremacy shows up in their life. It immediately reminded me of the countless times I exaggerated language to shame people:
💥 Not sharing your pronouns is “an act of VIOLENCE.”
💥 Not acknowledging your cisgender privilege does “unspeakable HARM.”
💥 Misunderstanding what I’m saying is “a form of ERASURE.”
I’ve spent nearly a decade of my life finding faults and problems in cisgender people, cisgender places, cisgender things, and cisgender ideas so that I could weaponize them, shame them, and shame others for associating with them, all in the name of equality and justice. I can problematize just about anything. And now, I use this skill as a benign party trick. I’m the life of the party at a seven-year-old’s Princess Sofia-themed birthday party.
👉🏻 Thing is: I wasn’t an anomaly. I wasn’t acting in markedly different ways from the culture I was immersed in.
In season one of the podcast, we look at the intersection of gender and being White. We spoke when Trystan Reese shared why he thinks a lot of our White Shame culture is informed by Queer and Trans Shame.
This isn’t to say that Queer and Trans people created White Shame Culture. It’s to say that many Queer and Trans people who are White transferred the tool of shame onto the conversation and actions related to race and racism because that’s worked for us in terms of our genders or sexualities.
I know it’s worked for me. And it works for many trans and queer people—and people who love trans and queer people—because, for centuries, it was—arguably—our tool for creating change.
That time is coming to pass.
The Spillway Social Media Day 69 - Shame Culture Day 14 - Shame Mirrors Supremacy
Yes, the intentions of both Supremacy and White Shame Cultures are wildly different. However, the impacts are all too similar. Rather than creating new ways of being, thinking, and acting, White Shame Culture reassembled the tactics of White Supremacy Culture into the White anti-racism movement.
Importantly, the inverse of Shame Culture can be said of Supremacy Culture:
1️⃣ Past, present, and future White people have a just and ethical moral compass.
2️⃣ Collectively, only White people hold a moral and ethical compass.
🚨 Beware, there are shades and nuances to this. More often than not, the fluidity of the human experience will rarely put one White person squarely—and in all matters—neatly within one sub-culture. And as any sociologist will tell you, cultures ebb and flow as new generations come in or die out. Both Shame and Supremacy cultures are born in White Culture, which is why they mirror each other almost perfectly.
Formally assembled by Dr. Tema Okun, the tactics identified in the carousel were identified by countless participants and facilitators of dRworks (Dismantling Racism Works) in the late 1990s. Recently this list has come under scrutiny because MANY different cultures also use aspects of this list.
✨Shame and Supremacy methods for achieving their desired ends have very FEW differences.✨
Personally, I think the place where there isn’t overlap is in
✅ Right to Comfort
People in shame culture believe uncomfortability is a primary path to social change
Otherwise, I could make a case for any of the other tools.
Maybe each of these tactics could be its own post?
The Spillway Social Media Day 70- Shame Culture Day 15 - Shame is Destructive
Shame builds nearly impenetrable walls between other White people and us, which creates (at least) three distinct problems (all of equal concern):
⬜️ Shame makes us rely on Native, Asian, Black, Latine, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern/North African emotional and mental labor to save us.
White people built the ideals of perfectionism. To be perfect we can never mess up. Because if we mess up, it’s as bad as the worst imaginable racist act. It assumes that every relationship we’ve ever been in has always been perfect. We know that’s not true. Even with those we love the most and share our everyday lives with. So this quest for perfection becomes more about overriding our autonomy to protect ourselves from the perils of commitment or openness. This recreates a familiar cycle where we demand People of Color fix our problems while liberating us from our reality.
⬜️⬜️ Shame destroys relationships and community building within the broader White Culture.
Belonging to White Shame Culture means we constantly seek ways to ease our pain. In White Shame Culture, other White people remind us of our humanity which we must avoid at all costs. We’ve appropriated the hurt of race and racism and made it our own. We’ve unfriended and unfollowed all of our “problematic” relatives and high school friends on social media. We’ve created ideological echo chambers that aren’t about the diversity of thought as much as hiding behind people of Color. We’re more interested in virtue signaling than collectively building our liberation from the confines of race.
⬜️⬜️⬜️ Shame is awful for our mental health (which also impacts our emotional and physical well-being).
We get what we deserve, and White people don’t deserve good things. At least, that’s what White Shame Culture is all about. Research published in Scientific American finds that our experiences of Shame are often tied to lower self-esteem and higher rates of depression.
As Arno Gruen writes, “the substation of another’s will for our own causes us to lose the ability to function autonomously.”