One afternoon I was foolish enough to think I’d had the original idea of writing about the Five Stages of Grief but instead changing it to the Five Stages of Whiteness — the Five Stages out of Whiteness, that is. The Five Stages of White People Becoming Woke. I googled these phrases to make sure my idea was snowflake unique only to be disappointed that plenty of people had already written of how white people stair step into being woke.
Then I got to thinking. While I could fairly deeply chronicle my journey into a realization of matters of race, racism, and reconciliation, I could not articulate with near the same amount of detail my journey into whiteness, my road into a world where race was at the core of my identity yet also an invisible and unmentioned piece.
It’s like those islands in the Pixar film Inside Out. The film is set inside the mind of a young girl named Riley, and five emotions — Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust — help Riley navigate how to feel about and react to her pre-teen world. She has five “core memories,” shown as floating islands around the control center hub of her inner self. The…
