Whiteness: The Question

This is part of a series of pieces that explore what I have learned about whiteness, race, and human beings in the last 30 years. I am writing for readers, primarily white readers, who believe that racism exists and that it is bad, and I assume a basic level of understanding of racial concepts. A word about language: Currently I am using three phrases throughout these essays to encompass people of color, all of which are debated: “people of color”; “Black, Indigenous, and people of color/BIPOC”; and Global Majority and Indigenous people/GMI people”. All of them are meant to encompass the wide range of people, the majority of people around the world, who do not claim European heritage or who claim more than European heritage.

Some of the ideas in here have been and will be explored more fully in other pieces — please subscribe and come along for the ride!

When I left office and began having intentional conversations about whiteness, I began to have a clear question about what framework white people might need to effectively work with one another on issues of race. To even ask the question of my conversation partner, however, required me first to lay out three propositions as well as the question.

They are:

Proposition One: It is the work of white people to lead other white people away from an investment in whiteness and out of racist behavior. (White people are not the only people who do or could do this work, but it is work that white people can and should do.)

Proposition Two: Blame, attack, criticism, fear, anger, and shame are not a sound basis for sustainable social change. Long-term change is built on human connection, compassion, love, and seeking what’s truly human in one another coupled with accountability and expectation. (It is not an act of love to treat other people badly or to allow someone to treat other people badly.)

Proposition Three: There is no widespread secular framework through which white people can work with one another explicitly as white people based on love and compassion; the only current secular framework through which that conversation is approached is through white supremacy.

The Question: Can we create a framework through which white people can work with one another on the basis of love and compassion rather than shame in order to do our part to end racism, a framework that does not condone or appear to condone the racism on which whiteness is predicated?

Each of the propositions is contested, and the question may not have an answer.

The Question: Can we create a framework through which white people can work with one another on the basis of love and compassion rather than shame in order to do our part to end racism, a framework that does not condone or appear to condone the racism on which whiteness is predicated?

I will be open up front and say that I am not sure there’s an answer to this question yet.

Why is there not an answer yet?

First, for a time, in a world whose systems have been so thoroughly created to get better outcomes for white people, almost any framework created will have the impulses of those systems embedded in them somehow. Anyplace we white people start with a framework will have the impulses of our whiteness in them — until we quiet and release the impulses of our whiteness. It’s a catch-22, and I think it has stopped some of us from even trying to make a beginning. Even so, I think it is important that we start. We white people get to head toward one another and toward a set of agreements with each other that we intend for racism to end, for us to be part of that, and for us to reclaim our humanity as we walk fully into everyone else’s humanity. It will necessarily be an iterative process, but a valuable one.

Second, I think that there is not an answer to the question about framework yet because in this cultural moment, the pull to feel shame ourselves and its corollary, the pull to shame other people, is quite strong.

We are rewarded for finding newer and more clever ways to denigrate other people in general, and, in specific, people who we believe are doing harm. (When I say “we” I still mean white people — this idea may or may not hold for people of other races, but it is not my intention nor place to say.) This is most stark on social media. We are living in a time where bad news spreads quickly and the experience of hope and efficacy spread slowly. Levying criticism at people online, albeit unleavened by solutions or genuine communication with one another, is a way to feel like we are doing something useful. It is easy, doesn’t take much time, and if enough people do it occasionally it can change the course of an issue. It usually only has the impact of a mob, however. In side that mob, though, you can get some satisfaction and some good feelings — the algorithms are designed to give us hits of our brain’s feel-good chemicals, and mass social media criticism provides plenty of opportunity to do that.

I can speak from the user end. Things I said or did were frequent sources of social media critique. For example, as a regular champion for Somali and Somali-American people in Minneapolis I would recieve occasional waves of death and rape threats from white people (and their bots). Eventually I stopped looking at my social media accounts very much and had staff monitor them for trends, to see if anything rose to the level of needing action. Mostly it never did. It just left me needing to do the emotional work of staying open and responsive in a situation that was designed to at least try to elicit shame, caution, fear, and wariness in me.

All of this makes it harder to engage one another with compassion, however.

We white people also shame one another under the guise of course correction. For too long in history too many bad actors have gotten away with too much, for example, so we shame who we see as current bad actors in order to correct past harm (as well as to try and prevent current harm). The impulse to correct and repair past harm is a good one. Using the tools of oppression to do so may not get us where we say want to go, however.

It is dicey to call out the method while supporting the reason. I feel nervous just typing about this. For too long in history too many of us have been expected to stay silent about injustice. For white people, we have been socialized not to see injustice let alone say anything about it. So when we can actually see injustice and we raise our voices to name it and object to it, we are tempted to conflate questioning the manner in which we object to injustice with support for the injustice itself.

Now, sometimes questioning the process is used to deflect from the issue at hand or to disingenuously self-represent as a supporter of an issue while putting up significant resistance to actual change. White people do this a lot, and we do it well. For example, some of us we say we support housing options for all, but object to every housing plan that comes to our neighborhood. Some of us say we want to elevate educational outcomes for kids of color, but object to every single plan put forward to achieve that result. We do this, and it is understandable that we get called out for it. I will write more about this in the future.

But the point remains: sometimes the way white people call each other on our BS is inside the problem we say we are trying to solve. Part of the reason is because we don’t have access to commonly held frameworks that allow for accountability about our whiteness while honoring the human being inside the whiteness.

As mayor of Minneapolis, I was publicly shamed for two years by white people on the right and the left who disagreed with my response to a police shooting. It felt awful. I saw myself tempted to respond from my pain and anger and frustration by judging the people judging me, by writing them off altogether like they were writing me off. I could also feel that the temptation itself felt awful. I didn’t want to ignore people’s legitimate anger about systems that were failing people of color even when that anger was aimed at me. I didn’t want to ignore people’s genuinely-felt fear about what changes to the status quo would mean for them and their children even when that fear was aimed at me.

I decided to do my best not to take the anger and fear that were directed at me and reflect it back. I did my best to remember their humanity so that I could keep holding tight to my own. In the end, it changed how I approached policy. I still got fired in a blaze of public glory when I ran for re-election, but I didn’t add to that heartbreak by losing myself in resentment and acting out of the place where I felt angry about being shamed.

For these reasons, I think this is a difficult moment to propose a framework for white people that includes as part of the solution easing up on shaming one another for the problem. It’s one of the reasons I am careful about terms and explaining what I don’t mean: I understand the risks. I think the risks are worth it.

In upcoming essays, I will focus on models that I do think have promise. The work of the Othering and Belonging Institute at University of California-Berkeley[i] is a vital reframing of the problem we face: among other things, it rejects the disconnection from other people’s base-level humanity that jeopardizes our relationship to our sense of our own humanity. Another example is self-help; flaws and all, it may provide a path through the forest.

For now, though, I invite you as the reader to sit with the question I have asked, reflect on the challenges to answering it, and share with me whatever ideas you have about a framework that could be useful.

[i] I am proud to be a Senior Fellow at the Othering and Belonging Institute.