I am not comfortable giving advice or dispensing “shoulds.” At the same time, I have waded into the swamp of racism and white supremacy and can report my own realizations as I continue to scrape off the muck. So this is an interior monologue that I share because I’ve learned a lot from other voices and we can only do this together.
We see them everywhere. On the internet. Cable TV. Family gatherings. White people who feel judged, feel rejected, feel misunderstood, feel hated by People of Color “just” for being white. And, if I’m honest, I must admit to having had twinges of those feelings myself. “I’m a good person...why do you blame me?” What is really going on?
First, any pull to blame People of Color for our own feelings is misplaced. Even if there are some who hate all white people, and many who feel pretty ambivalent about us, I would be astonished if that were not at least a part of the response to being the targets of a powerful system of oppression for generations. The real cause of those reactions and of the discomfort that we white people feel is white supremacy. This system has perpetrated inequity, terror and violence on Black and brown people for hundreds of years. Every time progress is made to overcome this evil, it morphs and calls itself by other names to continue protecting - well, people who look like me. And so far most of us have remained either blissfully ignorant or took part in the project.
Another source of my own discomfort was revealed by peeling back the layers. When I look deeply I realize that I feel brokenhearted by the barrier - no, rift - no, chasm - that has been constructed between myself and other human beings because of the system of white supremacy. Some of us want to skip the step of fixing the problem and go right to “we are all one.” When that is not well-received, again, the go-to is to blame People of Color and feel rejected and hurt.
I feel an urgent need to change things and, also, helpless. I feel rage at the pain being inflicted and deeply frustrated at my own complicity in it. I harm people I care about just by existing. So much easier to blame them for not seeing me as “one of the good ones” - or to blame myself and feel hopeless - than to sit with that pain and find my own path through it.
As a person who does Dharma practice I’m fascinated by the way that the concepts of “awakening” and being “woke” share some underpinnings. Both concepts are looking for authentic manifestations, but can invite pretense for those hoping to join a movement without doing the hard work. And both realities are processes rather than destinations - never really “finished” but always finding the next layer to explore.
Like the process of awakening, I’ve found that living in, trying to understand, reacting to systems of oppression is not about discovering the “correct” behavior and mimicking that. Right Action follows Right Thought. And that takes practice.
Similar to working with difficult emotions in meditation, I find that I need to bring attention to places where my real thoughts and questions regarding race and racism live - notice and label them - and let them move through. This can be uncomfortable, even devastating. Sit with discomfort. Sit with not knowing. Sit with despair. The more I can do this, the more my authentic racist/anti-racist self emerges; the more I find where fear holds me back from doing what I know is right; the more I can clear away the messages installed by a racist society and find Right Action.Ultimately everything is paradox. The ideal and the real coexist. There is no such thing as race, and racism is all too real. We white people must learn to forgive ourselves or we won’t be able to do what is required to ensure that all beings are free. So forgive yourself. And, at the same time, don’t ever expect People of Color to forgive you. Be okay with that. Or sit with the discomfort.
