So. Uh.
*uncomfortable blinking*
What are we doing now, exactly?
Hey there, fellow white people. I AM NOT SURE, EITHER.
Okay, so we’ve looked systemic racism in the face and found that it looks like all of us. We’ve bought a LOT of anti-racism books and we’re writing in our journals and sharing links and black squares on social media. And now… what?
Inertia looms, right? The initial burst of shock and outrage is waning on our feeds, and so our momentum is waning with it. Golden retriever pictures and herb garden updates and other things white people like are creeping back on to everyone’s timelines, and we can choose to return to the white privileged state in which we ignore anti-racist protests, and racism in general, if we wish.
There’s also the dampening effect of facing reality. We just completed a steep uphill sprint, fueled by the adrenaline of collective action, to what we assumed was the highest peak of social justice. Yet now that we’re atop it, doubled over and panting and super duper red-faced, we see that it was merely a foothill at the bottom of Mount White Supremacy. Now we stand staring up at fourteen thousand feet of societal entrenchment, and all we packed are the two camping sporks we impulse-bought at REI.
Plastic camping sporks.
I think this is the first time many white people have grasped the enormity of white supremacy, both in scope and insidiousness, and that understanding is key to starting us down the path of anti-racism work. However, seeing a leviathan of a problem, one that spans through levels of society both reasonably within and hopelessly out of our reach, can be paralyzing. It is very tempting to look at that mountain, look at our sporks, and then throw up our hands and say, “What difference does it make what *I* do?”
We need to resist this temptation.
Our discomfort and our desire to check out don’t outweigh the suffering of people of color who don’t have the luxury to say this work is too big to do.
Yes, the mountain is huge. Yes, we and the sporks are small. But that doesn’t mean we can’t all start chiseling away in our own spaces and begin to make a dent in it (as you likely know, three white guys tunneled out of Alcatraz with nothing but stolen cutlery, so there’s a precedent here). Everything I’ve ever read in my spiritual white lady ramblings says as long as you’re doing your inner work, even small changes matter. No, that’s not even the right way to put it. Really, small changes are the ones that matter MOST, because that’s how we lay the path to huge structural transformation.
That goes for everything you want to change in the world, but I think it’s particularly useful advice for anti-racism work among us white people. The small changes you make will be visible to—and discussable with—the other people in your life, and if you’re white, those people are probably also mostly white. Digital echo chambers mean resistant people are likely impossible to reach online; the only way for them to have meaningful conversations about this is person to person. Like with you and me, for example.
So, maybe don’t even think about the big picture. Just think about your picture.
For me, that’s a classroom, with a white teacher delivering the educational goods to a room of predominantly white faces. There are a lot of elements of the wide shot I cannot directly change—school funding formulas, accessibility of social services, teacher diversity, school integration—but I’m trying not to use those as an excuse to check out. I’m reading multicultural research for educators, and I’m getting myself ready to actually facilitate conversations about race in the fall rather than trying to defuse and redirect them. I’m looking at the racial diversity of authors in my curriculum. I’m buying more middle grades books with nonwhite main characters for my bookshelf, and I’m making sure I read them and am ready to recommend them to my kids.
Those are not big changes. But you know how doctors say the best kind of exercise is whatever you’ll actually do? I think the only way we can keep from talking ourselves out of this work is to think of it similarly; not by imagining we’ll all immediately run a marathon, but by planning to do a few lunges while we brush our teeth and then working up from there. The best kind of anti-racism action to start with is the one that you will do. And then, if we accept that we have to keep doing more and more small things for the rest of our lives, the marathon, the mountain, whatever metaphor you like for dismantling institutional racism, will be within our collective grasp.
