white People Ain’t Free
This week, an image came to me. Ghana, Elmina fort. Door of No Return. Dozens of Enslaved Africans walk from the dungeon, to the ship. African men and women, shackled to each other, in line, walk through the door of No-return. They crouch, they drag, they stumble. They can’t run: the whole process was designed to make sure they couldn’t. Forced in an overcrowded dungeon for weeks. A cramped, filthy, dark space. The light, the heat of the sun, and the movements of their bodies are all shocking. They are rushed through a tiny door, so they don’t stand upright. All measures taken to foster physical weakness, discomfort. I visited the Amina fort in 2002. I’ve thought of this image many times. I identified with the Africans. The image made me and still makes me angry.
But just last week, for the first time, 18 years later, I realized the Africans were not alone. There were European settlers overseeing the whole thing. Europeans designed the whole thing — interestingly even in my writing in the prior paragraph, the presence of the people who forced the Africans in cramped spaces is missing. People shut out the light from the dungeons, people detained people forbidding them to bathe or release excrements outside the dungeon. During the walk from the dungeon to the ship, people bore whips, guns; people shouted, cackled, scrutinized each and every African, watched. White people. How could those white people perpetrate so much injustice, inhumanity, torture, villainy, and atrocity? What did it feel like to be them? What were they feeling?
Even as all these years I’ve struggled with the presence of whites in lynchings, I had still erased, sanitized, the presence of whites in some of my images of Elmina fort, Ghana. There’s something bigger at play here than me not paying attention. For us progressive white folks, it’s a lot easier to identify with the pain of enslaved Africans, then it is for us to identify with our own ancestors. Erasing their presence, we numb the pain we would feel if we dared to identify with them.
Are these the actions of free people? What did the European overseers feel? What had them not rebel? Not be enraged? Remembering the gorgeous waves of the ocean off the coast of Amina. No! If they were free, these Europeans would be relieving the intense heat by bathing in the ocean. Or gazing at the sunset. Or listening to music. Or back home with their families. Something else, anything else. Free people don’t enslave others. White people’s hands and feet were unshackled but their hearts and bellies had to be shackled to shackle others. We know from epigenetics that trauma is handed down from one generation to the next. In that regards, what ancestral trauma were those white men holding? Middle-age torture-chambers? Famines? Catholic Inquisition of witches? Families ravaged by war? What pains numbed them to the impact of dehumanizing others?
I spent the weekend reading My Grandmother’s Hands. Author and trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem offers a wealth of exercises and insights for Black folk, white folk, and law-enforcement professionals to identify the tenseness we carry in our bodies and what narratives the feelings are connected to. The work is profoundly brilliant.
I’m a firm believer that this is the next essential step for white movement-building. We must know our own history, know our own trauma. That trauma is the reason I feel a knot in my stomach even as I’m writing this.
As a white progressive, I spent years in predominantly Black spaces. It contributed to a stage in my growth, me overcoming my assumptions about Black folk. It served a purpose. But I cannot continue identifying with the pain of people of color to access my own humanity, while dismissing the pain of my own ancestors. It does not serve a socially just world for me to ignore my ancestor’s burden. It’s just another way to avoid my own feelings. Hurt people, hurt people. I must discover, learn, shine light, expose, and eradicate both my own hurts and those of my ancestors. I invite other white progressives to do the same. It’s an essential phase in liberation.
So for the white progressives who want to do something, anything to reduce the rise of white nationalism, here’s my invitation. Read My Grandmother’s Hands. Do every exercise in the book. Let’s begin to identify what unresolved wounds our ancestors carried. What unresolved wounds we are still carrying. We have unresolved wounds we’ve been suppressing for centuries. As must as I love Robin D’Angelo’s book White Fragility as a map to understanding our perceived fragility, we can’t think our way through this. The fragility is pointing to wounds that have not healed. We are performing microagressions all over the place because of our own concealed pain. Now that we understand white fragility, we must heal it.
And we can’t do this work alone. Healing white fragility isn’t something we do alone at home by reading all the books we can, and then walking into the world saying the perfect thing so we are never criticized again. We must do this in community (Stay tuned for an article on how to create these communities). We must give up our masks and grow our capacity as a community to be vulnerable, share, trust, take responsibility, take restorative, just actions. The more communities we can create, the more we’re likely to not repeat old mistakes.
Societally, we are walking the edge of a razor. On one side, is repeating world war and genocide. On the other side, is the transformation of the pain we’ve been repeating for centuries. We are not destined to repeat the pain. The more of us access, tap, and unravel the mysteries frozen in our bodies, the less likely we are to repeat the historical atrocities we so fear.
We need community and camaraderie, but this is not an excuse to say to people of color: “We’re wounded, too.” I’m not promoting color-blindness. I’m not equating our pain to that of people of color. I get that we’ve had it easy for generations in which we set up systems that are wreaking havoc in communities of color for generations. All I’m saying is that the descendants of the people who were shackled and the descendants of people who kept them shackled have different healing journeys, but healing is needed for both. People who have both ancestries have another journey, still.
I’m talking about white people getting to the source of what pain we are numbing, dislodging the wisdom of our hearts and our bellies. We need to feel our own pains, stop numbing, stop transactional relationships, stop disposability and one-upmanship among white folk, so we can actually have a deeper humanity for ourselves, and people of color, too.
This is a conversation for white communities to have within ourselves. So we can create systems of mutual accountability for our health. Upholding the oppressive systems of capitalism, patriarchy, and apartheid has wreaked havoc on our bellies, our families, our communities. Here’s a study that says it all: the rate of suicide in white communities and homicide in Black communities is the same. Same pain, different expression.
Cause as long as we’re upholding a system of oppression, we ain’t freaggin free.
