Humanizing to heal
In my last piece I reflected on how white supremacy culture depends on us leaving our hearts at the door when we enter workplaces. But how did we come to close our hearts?
"White people can close our hearts and maintain our power. Opening is defiance."
—Carlin Quinn, Founder + Director, Education for Racial Equity
It was the last day of an Undoing Racism/Community Organizing workshop facilitated by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, where the mantra is “the work of Undoing Racism is centering humanity in all we do.” The participants’ humanity had been nurtured for the past two days as we learned how racism was constructed and how it can be undone through anti-racist organizing.
Early in the day an Indigenous woman shared through tears about her father’s struggles to access healthcare. A Black woman followed, in tears about her own family’s health challenges. Their vulnerability set the tone for an emotional conversation about Internalized Racial Oppression. By the end, my heart was swelling with connection, grief, joy, possibility. In a voice memo I recorded to express this overwhelming sense of aliveness, I said I feel so human. Like at the end of a long, deep meditation, I feel like a soft clump of cells.
Two weeks later, on a call with another white woman participant, this pure feeling dissipated. “What did you think about the workshop?” I asked eagerly. She had to think hard to remember that day. As my questions probed her memory, I sensed that she’d shut down. She hadn’t been emailing or texting – she just wasn't quite there.
I do this too. When “difficult” feelings show up, my tendency has been to turn away from them. Stay tidy, “steady.” Thanks to therapy I can now see the signs: furrowed brows, squinty eyes, fake smiling. I get silent or, more often, I over-share. This tendency has been helpful in some cases, but it’s an instinctive reaction with harmful consequences and violent roots.
We’re immersed in a country that started as a business; a country whose economy has been built on the backs of Black and Indigenous people. Dehumanizing violence toward bodies of color and the land has always been (and remains) a hallmark of our society.1
White women have been active participants in this violence. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers notes in They Were Her Property that “slave-owning women not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, they took part in them, profited from them, and defended them.” In Southern Horrors Ida B. Wells revealed the direct relationship between white women’s lies and the lynching of Black men. In recent years, several Black people such as Whitney Spencer have shared how white women perpetuate acts of violence in even the most “liberal” workplaces. These actions have been effective for acquiring and maintaining power in a culture that convinces us our value is wrapped up in how much money and power we possess, and disposes of us quickly if we don’t have “enough” of either.
And so white women have learned to shut down, to dissociate when feelings arise that threaten our status in the power structure. We have learned to dehumanize ourselves in order to survive generations of dehumanizing others.
Pause… Consider... Based on your identities, how might you and your people have been separated from your hearts? How might that separation be harming others, or yourself? (Now is also a good time to take a deep breath, notice what’s happening in your body...)
Despite the heavy truth of history, we can exhale. Because “we do have the medicine,” Autumn Brown of AORTA recently reminded us in her special event on healing the wound of white supremacy. “The medicine” is the anti-racism frameworks, tools, equity audits and culture shares. It is also permission to pause our racing minds and feel our feelings–not through weaponized white tears, but through deep connection in solitude and trusted community. It is acceptance that we won’t always be confident in our self-expression and we won’t have easy answers; it is trust that our people will still be there as we do the uncertain, messy work of transforming.
In the voice memo I recorded after Undoing Racism that day, I said Everyone’s acting outside of ourselves based on our socializations. And we’re all suffering from it. But there was a sense of suffering together today. And that feels surprisingly serene. Human.
Let this be your invitation to sit with the pain and grief of our violent culture, to contend with your complicity or risk in it. In our collective grieving, how might we embrace the power of our humanity? How might we find possibilities for opening our hearts in defiance of the violence, for shaping a culture of care?
With care,
Alyssa
P.S.: Last year I had the honor of reflecting on my relationship to my heart in Episode 7 of the Creation for Liberation podcast. I start speaking around 13:15, but I recommend listening from at least 7:25 where the host, Chetna, offers some framing and cool heart science.
If you find yourself confused or in doubt about these statements, I suggest starting with an Undoing Racism workshop and/or Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism