Theory of Indivisibility: Current Complexities of Systemic Racism
This post corresponds with Episode 25 of my podcast Theory of Indivisibility, where I talk about the evolution of systemic racism. Be sure to check it out on Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify, or Stitcher!
In the previous transcript, The Evolution of Systemic Racism, I shared an essay that I wrote in 2016 titled, “Why Police Kill Black People…The Whole Story” that weaves in the evolutionary origins and current complexities of systemic racism. I concluded the show by sharing some proposed solutions that are aligned with my Theory of Indivisibility.
To cover the final two systems that we’re going to discuss in season 1, Systemic Racism and Education, I’ll share essays I’ve written that explore each one.
Today, I’ve included an essay I wrote in 2020 that covers my own personal coming of age story while navigating Systemic Racism: “Why I Walked Away From White People”.
In this Theory of Indivisibility series, we have been exploring the evolutionary origins, current complexities, and how my Theory of Indivisibility applies to the following social systems: Power-Over, Patriarchy, Religion, Ownership, Capitalism, Democracy, Systemic Racism, & Education. Be sure to go back to the first transcript of my podcast, Theory of Indivisibility, and catch up if it’s your first time here!
Why I Walked Away from White People
In 2007 I moved to the Metro Atlanta Ga. region from my home town Philadelphia, Pa. Shortly after that, I became an elementary school teacher at a school in East Point, Ga. where all of the students and over 95 percent of the staff were African American.
I’ll never forget a time when my colleagues and I were socializing and while I forget the exact context, at some point “white people” came up. One of my colleagues’ (who was born and raised in Mississippi) entire body language and attitude changed as she emotionally exclaimed her distrust and dislike for “white people”. Of course, I had heard many African American people in PA express a level of distrust or dislike for “white people” before…but this was different. She meant it with all of her soul and I believed that there was nothing that anyone could say that would ever change how she felt.
I could empathize with why she felt that way…
While growing up in Philadelphia, I attended a school in the heart of West Philly, Martha Washington (K-8), where the students and staff were about 99% African American. My neighborhood, Wynfield, which was on the edge of West Philly was also predominantly African American.
My first relationship in close proximity with a “white person” was with my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Crane. The next was with my 5th-grade teacher Mrs. Anderson. Other than meeting a few “white” kids at hotel pools while traveling south to spend the summer in Apalachicola Florida with my grandparents, I didn’t have any “white” friends during those formative years of my life.
During my 8th grade year at Martha Washington, my teacher Mrs. Williams brought in a movie titled Mississippi Burning for us to watch. I’ll never forget how devastated I was watching that movie. It was my first introduction to the violence and cruelties of race and whiteness (AKA white supremacy) in this country. The lasting thought on my 12-year-old mind after watching that movie was “I hate white people”.
High School
In 1993 I was accepted into Central High School, a four-year college preparatory magnet school that is also the second oldest public high school in the United States. While most public high schools in Philly were racially homogenous Central was uniquely diverse because it accepted teens from all over the city who met their rigorous admissions standards. So at the age of 13 and for the first time in my life I attended school with and began to regularly socialize with “white people”.
I met Sarah Stanley, a “white girl” from the Roxborough section of Philly, in homeroom during my freshman year. We connected and became friends instantly. Sarah was super cool. She spoke with a familiar cadence and used slang that we used in my West Philly neighborhood so it made it really easy for us to connect.
Throughout our time in high school, Sarah always had my back. During that first year at Central, we were in the same Spanish class and I fell behind in my grades. Failing that class would have led to me being kicked out of Central and being sent to my neighborhood high school. Sarah refused to let me fail so she helped me during and after class until I got back on track to pass.
During freshman year, I also met Evan Barneby, a “white dude” from the predominantly African American Germantown section of Philly. We met at a basketball court called the blacktop at our school where those of us into basketball would convene daily during our lunch break. Our bond was forged over basketball and cheesesteaks. On Fridays after school we would meet up at St. Joseph’s Univesity to work on our games and play pickup together at the auxiliary gym of the college campus which was near my house. Then afterward we would walk across the street to Larry’s Famous Cheesesteaks and share a large cheesesteak called The Belly Filler.
Throughout my high school years, my friendship with both Sarah and Evan continued to evolve. They were apart of the crew. I spent time at both of their homes and got to know their parents and siblings and they came to my home often and did the same. As I reflect back now I realize how the interactions that I had with Sarah, Evan, and their families, would become instrumental in my evolving perception of “white people”.
My first long term romantic relationship was with Megan Jackson and it started when we were seniors at Central. Megan’s mother was “white” and her father was African American. We spent a lot of time together during our three-year relationship including spending a lot of time at her home with her parents. Her mother and father were both really cool to be around and they treated me well. Her father even let me drive his car to our senior prom. That was a big deal and I was honored.
Megan identified as mixed/biracial and I don’t remember giving it much thought at the time. I grew up being told that if someone had “any black in them” then they were considered black. Later in life, I would begin to question that concept.
College Years
I attended undergrad at Kings College in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania. My primary motivators for choosing Kings were the opportunity to be a starter on the men’s basketball team right away and the opportunity to stay relatively close to Philadelphia where Megan would be attending Temple University.
Kings was a culture shock. The student body was 97% “white” and I could count on one hand how many African American students attended who weren’t football or basketball players. I had to navigate several race-related incidents during my time there. One, in particular, motivated me to create and wear a white t-shirt inscribed with the words “Don’t Smile In My Face And Call Me A Nigger Behind My Back” while standing near a busy part of campus all day.
I wanted to transfer from King’s College on several occasions. However, I had a “white” ally named Father Thomas O’Hara who was influential in my decision to stay. During my freshman year, Father O’Hara was my professor in a class that addressed elitism and social hierarchies in American society. That class would plant some of the earliest seeds of my evolution as an activist who routinely questions the status quo.
Every time that I wanted to leave my mother and Father O’Hara would listen to my gripes, ask what they could do to support me, and then encourage me to endure. Father O’Hara, who eventually became president of Kings College while I attended, would share with me the value he perceived that I added to the campus and ultimately I chose to stay to make whatever positive impact I could.
After my sophomore year, things began to improve significantly. I was much more comfortable on campus and some friendships began to really blossom. The men’s and women’s basketball teams traveled to away games together so we spent a lot of time together. Some of my closest friends were on the women’s team, which interestingly remained all “white” my entire time there.
During the summer after my junior year, a group of men’s and women’s team players agreed to live and work in Dewey Beach Delaware together. For some reason, all of the men’s team members backed out last minute but I chose to move forward because I thought it would be a cool experience. So I ended up living with six “white” women that summer and sharing a room with Denise. The next summer I moved off campus and became roommates with Denise’s cousin and women’s basketball player Maggie for my final semester of undergrad.
Denise and I are good friends to this day and we’ve consistently made time to speak and catch up over the years. I can say the same about several other friendships with “white people” that were cultivated during my time at Kings College and a few years after graduation while living and working in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Two of those friendships stand out in particular. One was with Dave Jannuzzi and the other was with Dave Favata.
Dave Jannuzzi was a standout All-American basketball player for our cross-town rival Wilkes University. During our four year careers opposing one another, he and I weren’t friends at all. We were rivals. Upon graduation, Dave and my friend and Kings College All-American teammate Corey Dickerson began working out together to prepare for playing professional basketball overseas. I began to get to know Dave better through he and Corey’s budding friendship.
During that same time period, Corey and I went into business together to open a hip-hop clothing store in downtown Wilkes-Barre. Dave came to us and asked if he could place his new basketball clothing line in our store and also asked if he could invest. We agreed and from that point forward Dave and I began to develop a friendship and a business partnership. We’d go on to partner on another business venture and I got to know his family really well and vice-versa. Dan Jannuzzi, Dave’s older brother, became an investor in my tech startup business in 2014 more than ten years after we all became friends.
Dave Favata owned a local pizza shop with his family. He worked closely with Dave Jannuzzi and me to launch another business venture in the area during that time. Dave Favata became a trusted friend through this process and he and Carey, his girlfriend at the time, even allowed me to live with them temporarily at one point while we were building the business.
What stands out to me the most about my friendship with both Dave’s was how much they and their families trusted and believed in me and followed my lead in our business endeavors. Two people and two families who grew up and lived in the predominantly “white” and conservative region of North-Eastern Pennsylvania.
Adulthood
In 2014 Michael Brown, an unarmed young African American man, was killed by a police officer in Ferguson Missouri. It was the latest of such incidents that those of us who grew up in African American neighborhoods were all too familiar with.
The incident became a very polarizing topic of debate in the news and on social media. Especially on Facebook where I had accumulated a pretty large and diverse “friends list” since joining. In 2014 my Facebook friends list consisted of family and friends that I grew up with, back home in Philly…friends and colleagues from my undergrad and post-graduate years in Wilkes-Barre…business associates from around the country from my time working in network marketing…and friends and former colleagues from my time teaching in Atlanta.
I instantly recognized a gap in perception about the incident between many of my family and friends of African descent and my friends and associates of European descent.
Author’s Note: Notice how I transitioned from referring to “white people” and “black people” to “people of European descent” and “people of African descent”. This transition happened as I moved into adulthood.
Due to my diverse experiences and relationships, I was able to listen to both sides with a level of empathy and understanding and tune out the polarization fed to us by the media.
A few years prior, through my doctoral studies, I was exposed to a communications framework for conflict resolution called Authentic Dialogue and a framework for understanding the root causes of societal problems called Systems Thinking. These tools significantly increased my consciousness and awareness and also provided me with the tools I needed to support my innate belief that yes, it is possible to reject and evolve past the oppression, polarization, and fear that keeps people divided due to social systems like race.
Empowered with these tools and driven by my innate desire to unify people, I started a Facebook group and eventually a podcast called Race Haven: Solutions-Focused Dialogue About Race Relations In America. My goal for Race Haven was to create a space where people from all cultures and ethnicities could come together and learn to listen in order to understand one another and find common ground, not to win an argument or debate.
It was a huge success. I received a lot of feedback from people about how their hearts and minds were being expanded. The authentic dialogue that occurred in the Facebook group and on the podcast sparked a lot of learning from one another and also from the myriad of articles and resources shared that provided present-day and historical context for race relations. I personally began to do a lot of research to answer the questions that were coming up for me during this time.
Questions like:
What is race anyway?
Why does racism exist?
What makes someone “white”?
What Makes Someone White?
Long before we were born there were several decisions that were already made for us by Oligarchs from the distant past. The social, economic, and political norms that European kings, queens, and Abrahamic religious leaders set into motion still dominate our way of life in America and other colonized territories around the world.
Like, for example, the gender binary and heterosexuality social constructs that say that you are a boy and should only be attracted to girls if you’re born with a penis and that you are a girl and should only be attracted to boys if you are born with a vagina. The problem with these types of standardized decisions is that, like everything in nature, humans are dynamic, complex, and always evolving…there is no standard.
As a result of these decisions, for thousands of years, homosexual and non-gender conforming people born into colonized societies have had to hide their true identity and play the predetermined socially acceptable role given to them or accept the consequences of being morally shamed, ridiculed, ostracized, punished, and/or even killed.
Predictably, most people chose and still choose to perform gender-conforming heterosexuality in order to reap the privileges and avoid the consequences. Consequences that many gender-conforming heterosexual people grow up unaware of.
Whiteness operates in the same way. People who identify as “white” didn’t choose to be “white” and no one has ever been born with truly white skin. Yet, most people of European descent continue to accept and perform whiteness, usually unknowingly, because of the inherent privileges and to avoid the consequences of not doing so. Consequences that many people of European descent grow up unaware of.
Erasure
One of the lasting legacies of colonization is erasure. When European Oligarchs initiated the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and theft of Indigenous peoples lands on Turtle Island (what many natives call North America) to increase their wealth and power they also set into motion systems for erasing the true identities and cultures of millions of people.
Later, the founders of this country would pick up that baton and continue executing from the playbook of superiority, power, and privilege by initiating the following forms of erasure.
Indigenous people on this continent were forced into government and religious run boarding schools where they were taught English and Christianity and forbidden from speaking their native languages and their native spirituality practices. Later they would be forced from their homelands into reservations where millions of them still reside and are basically forgotten. I rarely if ever see representation of Indigenous people in American popular culture and media. It’s like they were truly erased.
When enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas they were given new names, forced to learn English, forced to reject their native cultural and spiritual practices, and forced to adopt Christianity. As a result descendants of enslaved Africans like myself were robbed of our true identities. We don’t know what tribe, ethnic group, or territory we descend from on the vast continent of Africa. We don’t have any connection to our present-day family members who are still there. We don’t know our true culture and we don’t know our real names. Those things have all been erased.
The concept of mixed/bi-racial people is also born out of the systems of colonization, race, and the enslavement of African people. For centuries, this concept forced people who, for example, have a parent of African descent and a parent of European descent to identify as “black” and created social norms, stereotypes, and policies that identified them as “black” and oftentimes prevented them from truly connecting with their European families and cultural heritages. Essentially erasing the opportunity for them to embrace and connect to the fullness of their identities.
The social norm created by the system of race of a “black” “white” racial binary has created a “pick a side” dynamic that has caused a lot of people with parents from different ethnicities to experience feelings of isolation, confusion, and an inability to connect or fit in culturally. The shame in this is that the science of genetics proves that all humans descend from Africa and that genetically we are all “mixed up” and contain genetic elements from diverse regions around the world. Furthermore, the Humanae Project provides a wonderful visual collection of the multitude of shades and colors that make up the human species. None of them look “black”, “white”, or “mixed”…they simply look like individual people who represent the vast canvas of colors that comprise the human species.
For thousands of years and before people of European descent began to ride the wave of colonization and immigrate the Americas they were Spanish, English, French, German, Irish, Italian, and etc. people who had diverse cultures, languages, religions, and traditions. Colonization and the invention of race has served to distance many of them from the richness of their cultural heritage and connection to their native countries and traditions as well.
Over the course of several generations, many descendants of American immigrants of European descent were indoctrinated into nationalism, an element of whiteness that states with certainty that America is “the best country in the world”. I never quite understood this belief.
Like…how could someone say this with absolute certainty if they haven’t experienced living in every country around the world? This statement of belief is rooted in a sense of superiority and serves to devalue or erase the lived experiences and cultures of people from around the world who love their village, town, or country as well.
So, when and why did people of European descent become “white”?
Race — The Power Of An Illusion
In 2016 I watched part 3 of a documentary series titled Race — The Power of An Illusion. It was an extremely enlightening, thoroughly researched, and powerful account of the creation of “race” and “whiteness” as social constructs and how they became so deeply embedded into our society and individual consciousness.
“Race is one topic where we all think we’re experts. Yet ask 10 people to define race or name “the races,” and you’re likely to get 10 different answers. Few issues are characterized by more contradictory assumptions and myths, each voiced with absolute certainty.
In producing this series, we felt it was important to go back to first principles and ask, What is this thing called “race?” — a question so basic it is rarely raised. What we discovered is that most of our common assumptions about race — for instance, that the world’s people can be divided biologically along racial lines — are wrong. Yet the consequences of racism are very real”.
— Larry Adelman — Executive Producer — Race: The Power of An Illusion.
Ancient peoples stigmatized “others” based on language, customs, and religion but they did not sort people by “race”. It wasn’t until Europeans began to colonize the Americas and initiate the trans-Atlantic slave trade that the concept of “race” began to take form in an effort to distinguish Europeans from enslaved Africans and define who was privileged and who was property or second class.
In the 1600s European scientists began using pseudo-science to conclude that so-called “white people” were a superior “race” of people. Throughout the next 300 plus years, they used stereotypes that became widely believed social truths to support their theories. Theories that were later debunked by scientists in the early 1900’s. However, after 300 plus years it was too late…whiteness was thriving.
In the 1800s, when the enslavement of African people in the Americas began to be challenged on moral grounds, racial prejudices escalated into the violent and oppressive ideology of white supremacy. By the mid-1800s, race had become the “common sense” wisdom of white America, explaining everything from individual behavior to the fate of whole societies. Throughout this era laws, policies, and institutional practices were enacted that gave “white people” power and privilege over “non-white people” and gave rise to systemic racism.
So in conclusion…what I learned is that approximately 400 years ago powerful men of European descent created the ideologies of race and whiteness to protect and justify their wealth, power, and privilege…and it stuck. It stuck because the structure of the social, economic, and political systems created around race gave commoner people of European descent privileges for buying-in and accepting race and whiteness.
After learning this history back in 2016 I thought to myself…
Fuck them! Fuck the Oligarchs who created race and whiteness. Why should I continue to honor their decisions?
And that’s when I made the decision to reject the social constructs (systems) of race and whiteness…i.e walk away from “white people”.
Systems
Intuitively, we all understand systems and we know that something is wrong with our current social, economic, and political systems. However, the idea that “the system is broken” is misguided. In reality, our social systems are working exactly the way they were designed to work. Before elaborating, let’s get a better understanding of what a system is.
In the book “Thinking in Systems”, author Donella Meadows explains the following:
“A system is an interconnected set of elements — -people, cells, molecules, companies, beliefs, or anything — — organized to perform whatever functions are required to achieve something.
A system must consist of 3 kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a purpose. The human body is a great example of a complex system. The human body consists of integrated, interconnected, & self-sustaining systems that all work together cooperatively to maintain life. We have the respiratory system, nervous system, neurological system, skeletal system, digestive system, and many more.”
What’s Wrong With Our Systems?
In Thinking In Systems, Donella Meadows explains how she uses a Slinky when teaching about systems. She stands before her class with a Slinky perched on one upturned palm and with the fingers of the other hand she grasps the slinky from the top part-way down its coils. Then she pulls the bottom hand away.
The lower end of the Slinky drops, bounces back up again, and yo-yo’s up and down, suspended from her fingers above. “What made the Slinky bounce up and down like that?” she’d ask her students.
“Your hand. You took away your hand”, her students would say.
So then she’d pick up the box the Slinky came in, hold it the same way, and repeat the same actions. When she removes her bottom hand from the box nothing happens. The box just hangs there.
So what made the Slinky bounce up and down like that?
The answer lies within the Slinky itself. The hands that manipulate it either suppress or release some behavior that is latent within the structure of the Slinky.
Once we begin to see the relationship between structure (how a system is designed) and behavior (the results a system consistently produces based on its design) we can begin to understand how our social systems work, what makes them continually produce dysfunctional results, and how to shift them into healthier behavior patterns.
As the Slinky example illustrates, a system may be manipulated or triggered by outside forces, but the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of the system itself. The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior. An outside force or event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system (i.e the Slinky box) is likely to produce a different result.
Think for a moment about the implications of that idea:
Do political leaders cause recessions or economic booms? Or are ups and downs inherent in the structure of a market economy?
Did President Trump and President Obama divide the country? Or is divisiveness inherent in the structure of a debate-based representative democracy where political leaders compete for votes by highlighting differences in ideals & beliefs?
Is poverty the failure of impoverished people as individuals? Or is economic stratification inherent within the structure of Capitalism?
And lastly…are people of European descent “white”, racist, and privileged because they choose to be…or are they born and indoctrinated into societal structures where superiority, privilege, and power are disguised as success and “the American dream” because of decisions made by Oligarchs from the distant past?
Systems vs. Individual Choices
Since learning about and developing a “Systems Thinking” lens I no longer see individual people’s attitudes and beliefs as the root cause of societal ills like systemic racism. Yes, many individuals have problematic attitudes and beliefs that have caused suffering and oppression…however their attitudes and beliefs as individuals are not the root cause.
I’ve learned, as illustrated in the slinky example above, that a systems structure/design is the root cause of the problematic attitudes and beliefs that lead to systemic racism (and all forms of oppression). It’s been the immense amount of privileges, indoctrinated fears, and stereotypes that created the feedback loops which subconsciously incentivize people of European descent to accept the superiority, power, and privilege embedded in our societal structures for them since this continent was colonized.
To solve the problem at its root, system structure must first be understood and then changed, so that new feedback loops can be designed which cause people to subconsciously develop attitudes and beliefs that foster social & economic equity and equality as a natural part of their everyday existence.
I often get pushback when I have a conversation with people about systems being more powerful than individual choices. I understand because I didn’t have this belief prior to learning systems thinking myself. However now, I can clearly see the patterns and root causes within oppressive systems and I teach others how to do the same through my podcast, Theory of Indivisibility.
For example, because of the fact that I was born with a penis, I grew up being indoctrinated into a variety of ideas about what I needed to think and do in order to be successful at being a “real man”. Later in my adulthood, I learned that many of those ideas were sexist, misogynist, and rooted in superiority, power, and privilege over women and LGBTQ+ people because of the social construct of patriarchy that, like racism, was created and embedded into human societies by Oligarchs from the even further distant past.
Once I understood the system’s structure of patriarchy I began to intentionally reject it by unlearning the indoctrinated attitudes and beliefs I was taught growing up. I learned to replace those old attitudes and beliefs with new ones by listening to women and LGBTQ+ people who communicate how they’ve been oppressed. I now move through the world conscious not to use my unearned male privilege in a way that is oppressive to women and LGBTQ+ people.
Rejecting Race & Whiteness
Race and whiteness have no scientific basis. I refuse to refer to human beings as “white people”. I refuse to honor the superiority, power, and privilege that instigated the creation of “white people” and the creation of race.
I am intentional about referring to people by their name and rejecting the norm of also adding a race. So instead of saying, “my white friend Evan” when speaking to people…I simply say, “my friend Evan”. If I need to generalize and only if it’s truly relevant for context, I’ll say “he’s a person of European descent”.
I usually don’t answer the “race” question on applications or surveys. I love, embody, and embrace Blackness as a culture…I reject it as a race. Blackness is rooted in empowerment and resilience and was born out of resistance to whiteness.
I don’t feel like people of European descent are superior to me, and I don’t assume that all people of European descent are bigoted or prejudiced against me. Whiteness and white supremacy thrive on division and fear.
I don’t perpetuate comparisons of people’s self-worth or success based on standards of whiteness (i.e. power, wealth, social status, academic degrees, materialism, etc.).
I changed my name from Scott Speed to Sundiata Soon-Jahta. My father named my older brother N’Namdi which is Nigerian but felt the need to give me a European name, Scott, six years later so that I could “fit in” better. My given last name, Speed, was forced onto my enslaved ancestor by an enslaver. I changed my name because I reject the idea that I need a “safe name” in order to “fit in” with whiteness and I changed my last name to reclaim agency over my identity, reject that enslaver’s decision, and reconnect to my African heritage in a way that is meaningful to me.
I don’t perpetuate the negative stereotypes of people of Indigenous, African, Asian, or Latinx descent that the creators of whiteness created to justify their superiority, power, and privilege.
Unfortunately, it is common for me to hear some African American family and peers make negative blanket generalizations about “what black people can’t get right”. That never sat well with me even before gaining a systems thinking lens. Now that I understand systems thinking I realize how much context and nuance that those blanket generalizations lack.
I’ll often speak up and say something like, “why are you so critical of African American people when the negative side effects of generations of poverty and disenfranchisement manifest instead of being critical of capitalism and systemic racism? For generations, the combination of capitalism and systemic racism created the conditions for and relied on enslaved and impoverished African American people to exploit for free and cheap labor in order to function and create wealth for the few.”
Solutions-Focused
I recently had a conversation with my friend Keisha, an African American woman who grew up in metro Atlanta communities and schools that were predominantly African American. She shared with me that she doesn’t feel comfortable around “white people”. She shared that she hadn’t been around them much in her life outside of her time in the military and that she never cultivated any meaningful friendships with anyone “white”.
As the conversation continued it broke my heart to hear her share that while she was traveling recently she realized that she even feels a sense of inferiority when she’s in the presence of “white people”. It was this conversation with Keisha that caused me to reflect on my life and write this essay.
I asked myself:
Why don’t I feel discomfort around people of European descent?
Why don’t I feel a sense of inferiority to people of European descent even though society was designed to embed those feelings in me?
Does this mean that I’ve healed from race and whiteness?
If yes, why have I healed?
I concluded that it was because of the friendships and relationships that I had forged with people of European descent throughout my life. However, based on our history of race-based oppression and violence and the polarization and fear that gets fed to us in the news media I can understand how many African American people who never form authentic relationships with people of European descent could feel how Keisha feels.
When I moved to Atlanta in 2007 it was the first time that I lived and socialized in predominantly African American spaces since my adolescence. When I would hear some African American people say critical things about “white people” in my mind I would always think about how I knew so many people of European descent who those critiques didn’t apply to.
My solutions-oriented mind wished that there was a way to distinguish between people of European descent who abused their unearned privilege and perpetuated whiteness and those who, like many of my friends, rejected whiteness through their beliefs and how they lived.
“White people think that they are better than us”
“Colin Kapernick isn’t in the NFL because white people don’t want him in the NFL”
“White people are the reason everything is fucked up”
“I don’t trust colinizers (presently used as a condencending substitute for “white people”)
Both in conversations and on social media I consistently hear people make statements like the ones above. Blanket generalizations about people of European descent.
As an anti-oppression activist, I am firm in my belief that words matter. I am firm in my belief that if we are going to create social systems with feedback loops that are solutions to the complex problems of our time then we must learn to speak with the complexity and nuance that we are truly trying to convey. We must be intentional with our words and we must name the system’s structures responsible for social issues like systemic racism.
I often think about how adult’s words land with children and how that impacts how they grow up understanding the issues in our society. When a child hears “black people always… (insert negative stereotype or generalization)” they are being groomed to accept stereotypes and generalizations as truths that represent an entire group of people. Stereotypes and generalizations also neglect the context necessary for understanding systems structures.
Rejecting stereotypes completely, naming systems, and adding a simple “some” or “many” before generalized statements would go a long way in grooming a young person’s mind for processing complexity and nuance. The “some” or “many” signals “not all”, the fact that no group of people are all the same, and creates space for further critical thinking. And by naming systems structures we empower young people to understand that they can reject oppressive systems and create or adopt something new.
Fortunately, many teens and young adults of this era already move through the world with a level of consciousness and awareness of systems structures that did not exist when I was a teen and young adult.
So instead of…
“White people think they are better than us”
“Colin Kapernick isn’t in the NFL because white people don’t want him in the NFL”
“White people are the reason everything is fucked up”
“I don’t trust colinizers”
More conscious, complex, and nuanced statements would be…
Many people of European descent think that they are better than us because of whiteness.
Colin Kapernick isn’t in the NFL because a lot of the fans of European descent who haven’t learned to reject whiteness believed that his peaceful protest was disrespectful to soldiers. And since they make up the majority of paying fans NFL owners are afraid of potentially losing money by hiring him.
European Oligarchs from the past and the social, economic, and political systems that they created are the reason that we are facing so many social and environmental issues.
I don’t trust people of European descent who haven’t rejected race and whiteness.
I unpack things for my children (ages 12 and 8) in this way. Yes, it requires a lot more thinking and using a lot more words however I am ok with doing it because I view it as my contribution to creating the solutions that we need to move beyond the oppression and divisiveness embedded in the systems of race and whiteness.
Closing
In closing, I’d like to share my hopes and welcome critiques.
Whenever I write an essay or release a podcast rooted in my Theory of Indivisibility I am simply sharing my best thinking towards ending divisiveness and oppression and creating sustainability, liberation, and unconditional love…for all. I welcome critiques aligned with those efforts.
I hope that my thoughts inspire or agitate you to want to learn more about how our social, economic, and political systems are designed, to question the why behind your thoughts and beliefs as I have, and inspire you to unlearn or reject indoctrinated attitudes and beliefs that perpetuate oppressive systems like race and whiteness.
I’ve heard the critique in the past that my systems thinking approach to solutions “lets white people off the hook”. With that in mind, I’ll leave you to ponder the thoughts on this sentiment from one of the most brilliant writers, intellectuals, and educators of our time, Bayo Akomolafe when he was confronted with similar sentiments during a lecture:
“What does it mean to let white people off the hook?
The question comes from shared and growing sensitivities to the dynamics of critique — a reckoning with the fact that in our attempts to dismantle whiteness we often reinforce it. It comes from an understanding that justice often gets in the way of transformation.” — Bayo Akomolafe
Thanks for reading…
Until next time,
I love y’all, Peace
Dr. Sundiata Soon-Jahta
We are building community around this work here. This is a place where you can gain access to support for your work (liberation, anti-oppression, sustainability, & etc.) and discussion groups for ongoing reflections and authentic dialogue about creating solutions.
2023. Podcast brought into written form by Ray Lightheart
