What is “White People’s Work?”
I’ve had the opportunity to be part of a number of very frank, open conversations with Black people since the current BLM uprisings began. In every case, the message I heard was “It’s on you. It’s time for white people to do their work.”
In my group’s “Ally’s Journey” the first two steps for a member of a dominant group to becoming an ally (or advocate or accomplice) to any targeted group are to 1) own your privilege and bias, conscious and unconscious, and 2) take responsibility for and clean up the impacts of acting out of these. The third and fourth steps are 3) listen with empathy and compassion, and 4) Take new actions and create new practices, but I say that without serious work on steps 1 and 2, steps 3 and 4 are lip service at best.
When I speak with white people about race, those who have not done any serious work with themselves consistently deny privilege and deny bias.
Denial of Privilege:
· I’m not privileged, I grew up poor and made it on my own.
· I’m not privileged, I’m [Jewish, Muslim, an immigrant, the child of immigrants, not rich, etc.] and have been discriminated against all my life.
· I’m not privileged, I barely get by economically.
Denial of Bias:
· I’m not biased, I have [Black, Brown, Asian, Gay, Trans, etc.] friends.
· I’m not biased, I’m part [Black, Brown, Indigenous, etc.]
· I’m not biased, I like Soul Food, Black music, etc.
All of these and other denials result from a failure to do deep work to confront the accidents of birth that are privilege and the enculturation that is bias. They carry with them an avoidance of shame and guilt, but responsibility and accountability are impossible where shame and guilt (and blame) are in the picture.
White people doing their work requires first a recognition that none of us were born with bias, and that privilege is an accident of birth. Some things are innate — skin color, eye color, height, hair color, etc. are determined by chance combinations of our parents’ genes. Other, non-physical traits are no less an accident of birth than genetics — we did not choose what nationality, religion, culture, etc. we were born into, and experientially these “accidents” seem as much a part of us as the physical ones. In a rational world, no blame or shame would attach to any of these, yet they do. Similarly, we were not born biased — as Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote in South Pacific, “you’ve got to be carefully taught.” Since none of us had any control over what we were taught, shame and blame should not be an issue, but they are.
So the first step in white people’s (or any dominant group’s) “work” is to take shame and blame out of the conversation and dig deeply into our privilege and biases, conscious and unconscious. I would contend, and evidence indicates, that it is practically impossible for a white person in the United States to have grown up without racial bias, so let’s dig into it and out ourselves. My teacher, the late Fritz Perls, said “awareness itself is curative,” so let’s get aware of what is festering beneath the surface of our denial. Let’s recognize that even the poorest white person is privileged over a Black person in so many ways — nobody gets stopped, much less arrested or shot, for “jogging while white.” Let’s out our unconscious racism so that we can run it rather than having it run us.
Let’s do our work.
