Becoming a White Antiracist

A Practical Guide for Educators, Leaders, and Activists

Stephen D. Brookfield, Mary E. Hess

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781620368619
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Technology

As this book was being written, the United States exploded in outrage against the murder by police of people of color across the country. Corporations, branches of state and local government, and educational institutions all pledged to work for racial justice and the Black Lives Matters movement moved into the mainstream as people from multiple racial and class identities pledged their support to its message. Diversity initiatives abounded, mission statements everywhere were changed to incorporate references to racial justice, and the rampant anti-blackness endemic to US culture was brought strikingly to the surface. Everywhere, it seemed, white people were looking to learn about race. "What do we do?" "How can we help?" These were the cries the authors heard most frequently from those whites whose consciousness of racism was being raised.This book is their answer to those cries. It's grounded in the idea that white people need to start with themselves, with understanding that they have a white racial identity. Once you've learned about what it means to be white in a white supremacist world, the answer of "what can I do" becomes clear. Sometimes you work in multiracial alliances, but more often you work with white colleagues and friends. In this book the authors explore what it means for whites to move from becoming aware of the extent of their unwitting collusion in racism, towards developing a committed antiracist white identity. They create a road map, or series of paths, that people can consider traveling as they work to develop a positive white identity centered around enacting antiracism.The book will be useful to anyone trying to create conversations around race, teach about white supremacy, arrange staff and development workshops on racism, and help colleagues explore how to create an antiracist culture or environment. This work happens in schools, colleges and universities, and we suspect many readers will be located in K-12 and higher education. But helping people develop an antiracist identity is a project that occurs in corporations, congregations, community groups, health care, state and local government, arts organizations, and the military as well. Essentially, if you have an interest in helping the whites you interact with become antiracist, then this book is written very specifically for you.Watch our BWAR YouTube playlist, where authors Stephen Brookfield and Mary Hess chat about some common themes from the book.

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WHY WE NEED WHITE ANTIRACISM

Writing 60 years ago, James Baldwin observed that for whites to lose their innocent belief that they live in a humane country, they had to experience an upheaval in their universe that profoundly attacked their sense of their own reality. Even those whites who saw through the idea of white supremacy found it difficult to act on that awareness. In Baldwin’s (1962) always prescient words: “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity” (p. 9). This book invites you into danger, into thinking through what it means to lose an unconscious, unwitting white supremacist white identity and embrace a new one, a proudly antiracist white identity.

We need this book. By “we,” we mean the two of us, your two authors. Both of us have spent many years addressing white supremacy and racism in different contexts and struggling to find a way through all the contradictions, dilemmas, and emotions inherent to such work. We have worked with many schools, colleges, and universities, but also with seminaries, community groups, health care, congregations, arts organizations, social movements, nonprofits, the military, corporations, businesses, and many other settings. Because of where we live—St. Paul, Minnesota—we have almost always found ourselves doing that work in predominantly white environments. Over the years we have noticed that most of the institutional members, learners, and participants in community organizations we encounter (and also many of their leaders, staff developers, and teachers) see race-based work with whites as focusing mostly on understanding the benefits of diversity and inclusion, and on trying to support the BIPOC minority in the organization. There’s usually a strong emphasis on cultural competency, on working in ways that are sensitive to different cultural traditions.

We heartily support efforts at inclusion and culturally responsive practice. But we are also struck by the fact that much diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work does not focus on whiteness—particularly on understanding what it means to have a white racial identity, how whites learn and enact white supremacy, and the way white supremacy ensures the continuance of racism. It’s quite possible, in our experience, to attend a diversity training event and never hear the words racism, white supremacy, or even white racial identity. In the work we’ve done we’ve found that when we shift the focus onto racism, white supremacy, and white identity, our primarily white audiences often become skeptical and bemused.

Consequently, we’ve had many conversations where we’ve asked each other for advice and for leads on good resources. When we do this we usually end up decrying the lack of a book, written from the perspective of learning, that focuses on how to help white people develop an antiracist identity. Both of us are educators, and although we both engage in antiracist work outside our professional roles, we are always interested in the dynamics of learning. But we’ve never been able to find the book we really needed—a book that explores how to help whites learn what an antiracist white identity entails, and that details what it means to enact that identity in everyday actions and practices in both individual and collective ways.

So, quite simply, we decided to write the book that we needed! As it turned out the years we spent writing it—2019 and 2020—were incredibly tumultuous ones involving catastrophic climate change, a global pandemic, and economic collapse. For us, though, the most significant upheavals were those around racial justice. We were inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, outraged by the growth of anti-Blackness in the United States, and staggered by the way it became legal to tear immigrant families apart at the U.S. border and imprison children like animals in cages. Each week brought further instances of the slaughter of people of color and the demonization of anyone not of white European descent. The murders of Philando Castile in the St. Paul suburb of Falcon Heights and of George Floyd in Minneapolis brought things home to our doorsteps and we became used to police helicopters over our houses, looters running through our yards, constant demonstrations, and the smell of smoke and tear gas.

When we would tell friends, family, and colleagues about the book we were writing on creating an antiracist white identity, people would say, “We need that book!” Then, as word of the book spread and we were invited to teach courses, run workshops, speak to community groups and congregations, people would ask, “When’s it coming out? We need it!” For a while we felt the pressure to hurry the book up but then we realized that whether or not the book was published 2 months or 2 years in the future was really immaterial. It wasn’t as if racism was going to go away! And we kept telling ourselves that the events and outrages that were foremost in our minds as we were writing specific chapters would be replaced by many others, equally murderous and violent, by the time the book appeared in print and online.

Why a Book on an Antiracist White Identity?

Many best sellers on race and racism are written by people of color who chronicle the lived experience of being on the receiving end of racism. Acclaimed experts on race and racism, and most professionals in charge of DEI offices and initiatives, are also people of color. So it’s not surprising that most whites typically look—as the two of us often do—to people of color when we’re trying to figure out what being antiracist really means. There are, of course, exceptions to this—witness the enormous popularity of Robin DiAngelo’s (2018) work on white fragility.

But we feel there are traps in automatically turning to people of color to educate whites like us about racism. First, this instinctive and seemingly obvious choice underscores the mistaken notion that race is a problem of people of color. Our position is that race is really a problem of white people. That’s because racism is the process by which one racial group entrenches its power over all other groups by enforcing the idea (through policies, institutional practices, and cultural habits) that the dominant racial group deserves its position of superiority. In the United States, the dominant racial group is white.

Whites maintain their racial power by persuading all racial groups to internalize a view of the world that accepts this situation as normal and natural, as just the way that things are. This view of the world is the core of white supremacy, the idea that, because of their supposedly superior intelligence and greater capacity to use logic and reason to come to objective decisions, white people should naturally be in positions of power and authority. As long as whites have an unexamined white supremacist worldview lodged in their consciousness, they won’t see the need to involve themselves in any effort to bring about sustained change. Why would they? After all, in their minds it’s not their problem, is it? So understanding how white supremacy is learned, how it becomes so deeply internalized, is crucial to dismantling racism.

Second, always turning to people of color to take on the work of teaching whites about racism, while the same time they are trying to negotiate a white supremacist world, is an unfair division of labor. Fighting everyday racism takes an enormous psychic and physical toll and requires constant networking, collective organizing, and the provision of emotional sustenance (Solomon & Rankin, 2019). To survive in a war against white supremacy takes everything you have and leaves you bone tired, even when faith and community lift you up. So it’s exhausting for BIPOC individuals to be asked to devote effort to educating whites about their racial cluelessness. Those people of color who do find the time and emotional energy to work with whites in this way are committing an enormous act of generosity.

Perhaps even more troubling, though, is that expecting people of color always to take the lead in educating whites about racism removes any responsibility from the shoulders of whites of having to think through the next steps they should take. Too often we’ve seen whites turn to people of color and ask, quite innocently, “What should we do?” And, equally frequently, we’ve seen people of color reply, often exasperatedly, “Work it out for yourself.” When pressed further they will usually say, “Find out about what it means to be white. Become aware of your own white identity and how that affects how you navigate the world.” So we need books that help white people think through what it means to have a white racial identity and how to get other whites involved in developing an antiracist white identity.

The biggest problem to achieving any measure of racial justice, however you define that slippery and contested term, is the continuing existence of the ideology of white supremacy. As long as the idea that whites are innately superior flourishes in people’s consciousness and is enacted in institutional behaviors, cultural messages, and political policies, racism will continue largely intact. So for us, helping whites become aware of the ideology that legitimizes their power is a major antiracist project.

Of course, becoming aware of one’s whiteness and what that means for your life is the start, not the end, of developing an antiracist identity. We don’t think you can be seriously antiracist without a thorough understanding of how your whiteness benefits you, of how it means you don’t have to deal with the consequences of being perceived as a person of color in the United States. But too often we’ve seen whites (including ourselves) think that by simply becoming aware of white privilege they have somehow transformed themselves into becoming white antiracists. Just being aware of racism, and deploring and condemning it, doesn’t mean you are antiracist. As a white person you can quote W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Rosa Parks, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde. You can wear Black Lives Matter caps and T-shirts. You can send around videos of Kimberly Latrice Jones, Alicia Garza, or Opal Tometi. But as you do those things your whiteness means that the system still continues to advantage you and you can continue enacting multiple racial microaggressions without being aware of that fact.

Understanding how racism and white supremacy work allows you to see the system in action and is a helpful precursor to getting involved in changing it. But an antiracist identity is only truly realized when you take individual and collective action to challenge white supremacy. An antiracist white identity is inherently activist.

Why Confronting Racism Is Necessary for White Mental Health

When white people are asked why they are interested in becoming antiracist, they typically cite the need to stop the violence and cruelty enacted against people of color. They will talk of the need for racial justice; of the loss of life, hope, and talent represented by mass incarceration and police murder of unarmed people of color; and the corrosive effects of not challenging a political economy built on slavery and genocide.

When the two of us speak of these antiracist motivations, we typically get a lot of approval from white colleagues, students, and friends who consider themselves “woke” or who think of themselves as trying to live a better, antiracist life. Sometimes people of color also express appreciation, although it’s often tinged with an unspoken sentiment: “Duh! How did it take you so long to see what’s going on in front of your eyes?” A dynamic we’ve often observed in multiracial settings is whites earnestly striving to testify to their commitment to antiracism, while people of color are forced to sit and listen to a series of confessionals along the lines of “I used to be racist but now the scales are lifted from my eyes and I see injustice everywhere.”

Our advice is that you should assume that people of color are tired of having to confer blessings and absolution on whites who desperately need to know that people of color see them as allies, as good white people (Sullivan, 2014). BIPOC folks have probably been burned by countless instances in which white folk profess a commitment to antiracism and then don’t follow through with the daily hard work of calling out white supremacy whenever they see or enact it.

When explaining why you as a white person are interested in becoming antiracist, we advocate considering taking a different tack that may seem at first to be counterintuitive—the tack of selfishness, of personal interest. Following the advice of two white men—Tim Wise in White Like Me (2011) and Chris Crass in Towards Collective Liberation (2013) and Towards the “Other America” (2015)—we suggest that people of color will be far more likely to take your antiracist expressions seriously—at least initially—if you talk about the fact that you’re doing this for yourself, that it’s in your own best interest to do so.

In many ways, striving to become an antiracist white person is motivated by a concern for your own mental health as much as anything else. This is because if you accept the myth of white supremacy, then at some deep level you know that you’re living a lie. And living this way is deeply alienating. You know that who you really are—a fallible, imperfect being struggling to make sense of the contradictions and complexities of daily existence—is not who white supremacy has told you that you are. White supremacy tells you that you’re superior to people of color and that that’s why you deserve your relative wealth, power, and privilege. Your supposedly elevated intelligence and ability to make calm, logical decisions mean that you, or people like you, should quite naturally control the levers of power. White supremacy also tells you that people of color should be kept marginalized and barred from positions of influence because of their imputed volatility, emotionality, and irrationality.

But every day you encounter clear empirical evidence that white people are not inherently more humane, rational, intelligent, or reasonable than people of color. Equally, you see the reality of humanity, compassion, strength, resilience, and a clear-eyed focus on the prize of racial justice among colleagues and friends of color. You see video of trigger-happy cops, rousting people of color and responding to benign and compliant actions by emptying their magazines into Black bodies. Processing this either forces you to a 180-degree reconsideration of the identity narrative you’ve been sold—whites are calm and reasonable and people of color are unpredictable and violent—or it triggers a convoluted reordering of the truth you’ve witnessed whereby cops’ actions are always justified by a real and immediate threat to their lives.

So in many ways, being white means you’re at war with yourself. On the one hand, you’ve been conditioned to think that your racial identity as white means that you, and others like you, constitute the norm of how a human being should think, feel, and act. On the other hand, the world constantly illustrates to you the insanity of that belief.

When you live a life as a white person based on racial lies, you have to spend a lot of emotional energy maintaining an untenable fiction. It’s almost a form of racial schizophrenia. Your socially constructed racial DNA tells you that you constitute the preferred norm, that you represent the universal standard of how people should behave. Your daily reality, however, teaches you the opposite. So deconstructing the myth of white supremacy is really necessary for your mental health. That’s why thinking through, and acting on, the need to be a white antiracist is really a selfish act of personal survival. If you don’t try to do this, you’ll go crazy.

There’s another selfish reason why you need to try to develop a white antiracist identity. If you accept the myth of white supremacy, then you live in a state of constant fear. When you’re accused of racism, you have to expend a lot of emotional energy explaining it away by insisting that you’re really a good person, that your actions and words didn’t mean anything or intend to harm, and that you’ve been misunderstood or misinterpreted. Every time you witness righteous anger expressed by people of color, white supremacy tells you this is further evidence of “their” volatility and emotional instability. You start thinking about buying a gun, about preparing for the race war that must be coming.

Living in this state of constant fear is a psychosocial cancer that eats away at your well-being. Being constantly afraid of coming disruption and planning how to respond when it happens is exhausting.

Of course, living with the very real fear of death is the lifelong reality of so many people of color. For them reaching inside your jacket gets you killed. Talking back gets you killed. Not complying quietly and immediately with commands gets you killed. And sometimes complying with those same commands gets you killed anyway. White fear is exhausting but the two of us don’t live our lives knowing that we’re marked by law enforcement as potentially unstable and uncontrollable, liable to explode into irrational violence at any moment.

Finally, living with learned racism is an act of self-denial, of cutting yourself off from pleasure. Living in fear of a BIPOC planet means you forego access to the alterity of experience. The project of life, and the chief social learning task of adulthood, is understanding that your experience, no matter how varied and multifaceted that might be, is still only that—your experience. Coming to the realization that you share space with people who experience life in a bewildering variety of ways is sometimes threatening, particularly if that realization means that your assumptions about how the world works are shattered. But it’s also beautifully sensuous. It opens you up to new realities and to the joy of complexity. Human growth and development are premised on the promise of transformation, of coming to understand that the world is not settled...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Advance Praise for Becoming a White Antiracist
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Our Racial Stories
• 1 Why We Need White Antiracism
• 2 What is a White Antiracist Identity?
• 3 What it Means to be White
• 4 Helping People Become Aware of Their Whiteness
• 5 Using Stories to Uncover Racism
• 6 Embracing The Discomfort of Race Talk
• 7 Running “Real” Discussions Around Race
• 8 Getting People to Think Structurally About Race
• 9 Using Your Power to Empower White Antiracism
• 10 Sharing the Powerful History of Antiracist Work
• 11 Responding to Institutional Resistance Against Antiracist Activism
• 12 Being an Antiracist White Ally
• References
• About the Authors
• Index
• Backcover