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The Quiet Death Of Antiracism
When hurting “them” is more fun than helping “us.”
At the beginning of last year, in a piece for The Atlantic, Nellie Bowles described the mood at an antiracist seminar she attended in May of 2021.
It wasn’t great.
One participant admitted that she felt ashamed to be white and hoped she’d come back as a person of colour in her next life (don’t worry, she was harshly reprimanded by the group for “exoticising black people”).
Another confessed that knowing her “very existence perpetuated whiteness” made her wonder if the world would be better off without her. “The darkest place I go is thinking it would be better if I weren’t here. It would at least be one less person perpetuating these things,” she said.
And guest speaker, Robin DiAngelo, had an extended moment of crisis as she pondered if the phrase “Black Brit,” was offensive.
But Bowles’ key insight came during a different session called, “Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism,” where, the course facilitator (a man named Resmaa Menakem), drove home the importance of keeping “white bodies” separated from “bodies of culture,” with a vocalisation exercise:
…Menakem intoned, “All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture. Everybody…