Even the perpetrator has to heal

Irna Landrum, who is black, invited Susan Raffo, who is white, to share a couple essays on *Daily Kos* about whiteness. Raffo explores the question: Why do white people, even progressive white people, get uncomfortable when referred to as white? It seems they see the word as a slur instead of a discriptor.

The first essay is Sweet Lull of White Supremacy. Raffo reasons this way:

White people are taught from an early age how to treat people (the Golden Rule and all that). They are also taught that people of color are an exception to these rules. They are taught to ignore the contradiction – that the disparity is normal. They justify their comfort while others suffer.

A lot of culture is an agreement about the best way to survive. Whiteness also teaches that one’s own life, survival, and comfort come first, more important than any values we might hold. Feeling that contradiction is to feel unsettled – which leads to wisdom. But whiteness protects against feeling unsettled.

Whiteness says the white body is entitled to “safety, security, comfort, enough energy, a strong sense of purpose and connection.” If that white body isn’t getting what it has been told it is entitled to then it isn’t working hard enough or (as supremacists teach) it is someone else’s fault. They must be controlled or made to go away (eliminated) until comfort returns.

Living with the contradiction is possible only if it is never made visible. When the contradiction is given a name the body goes into survival mode. And we get:

Gaslighting. White fragility. Whitesplaining. Microaggressions. White consolidation of power. Nepotism amongst those with power. Bystander silence. Scapegoating and targeting. White supremacist action. White folks not seeing, not believing, not feeling the impact of racism, thinking that somehow those impacted by racism must be overstating it, making it up, creating it. These are all examples of white survival responses.
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It takes a lot of energy to believe you are a deeply compassionate person while, at the same time, ignoring or not seeing or explaining away the hundreds of people hurting or angry right in front of you.

This is not something a single white person can do alone. If it were that easy, whiteness would have ended. Whiteness is elegant and smart. It has been figuring out how to survive much longer than the span of any individual life. It has systems embedded in U.S. history that can hold out longer than a single generation of white indignation.

The second essay is A Love Letter to White Kin. People who aren’t safe – who don’t feel safe – aren’t generous. Some people may be safe, but because of personal history don’t feel safe. Raffo realized this while talking to a white gay man who had “made it” but still felt unsafe. Before he can share he must heal.

There is also the person who has based his life on dominance and, in order to heal, must base his life on something else. We must find the original wounds.

Raffo identifies the original white wound. For Europeans it is

the violent disconnection of people from the land (which also means spirit, culture, community, history, medicine, music, food, and overall wonder of life). This wound re-entrenched itself when the idea of private property first showed up, at different times in different European regions, but slowly spreading like a plague. It matters deeply that for 500 years, Europeans fought against those who violently set up fences, taxed land use, and evicted supposed illegal homes. It matters deeply that even though the idea of private land ownership won, there are elements of this fight that never stopped.

This European wound transferred to the United States where it was rebranded as “whiteness.” This is about a cycle of violence. How those who were hurt became the perpetrators, doing unto others as was done to their great grandparents before. None of this could even be imagined without that first original disconnection, this movement toward private land ownership and food as profit, or the ability for some people to have more of a basic need while others around them are starving without enough. As an acquaintance of mine says, remember, everything Europeans did on this land they first did at home and to themselves.
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Healing is not something an individual body can do only on their own. Healing is about reconnecting with all life, including the lives of those who you have deeply hurt. When connected to the fullness of life, it is not possible to feel good and relaxed when someone near you is still suffering. Being connected to all life is sometimes about feeling good but it’s also sometimes about feeling pain and then, because of that pain, taking action. Reconnection and reparations.

A comment by urban unicorn supplied some background into the “disconnection of people from the land.” This commenter referred to Enclosure in England, in which common lands that benefit the community are fenced (enclosed) for the primary use of one person, usually the lord of the manor. Most of this enclosing was done in the 1700s. Wikipedia has a full description, though I didn’t read it all. urban unicorn added that many people came to America because they couldn’t acquire land at home.

A bit of background: Europe was a place with a very strong hierarchy, a strong enforcement of ranking. As one traveled on a road one could identify whether a fellow traveler was owner or owned and who the owner was. That idea came from the book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. I reviewed it in 2012 (though didn’t mention this particular idea).

Yes, Europeans brought their strong sense of hierarchy with them. Yes, our Founding Fathers instituted a democracy so they wouldn’t have to bow down before a king, but ranking was still kept strong – especially men over women, Christian over non, landowner over non, and white over black.

Commenter J Ash Bowie adds caution to this idea of European ranking being imported to America as the white person’s wound. The caution is that ranking wasn’t unique to Europe. In some of my recent fiction reading I was reminded that the caste system of India is three thousand years old. It is so stringent in its ranking that the British, highly conscious of class, admired it. Bowie also cautions that the idea of private property was also not unique to Europe.

Back to Raffo’s posts: Life is hard. We feel pain (such as watching loved ones die). But whiteness protects white people from feeling these hard things. And it does it through a system of contradictions, such as being white, yet poor.

The carrot and stick of whiteness is exceptionalism – “deserving to have your life be supported and loved, even as those around you are not receiving the same thing.” US institutions have a preference for whiteness that supports this exceptionalism – such as having the benefit of the doubt when stopped by police.

Exceptionalism is always a lie. It’s the loud dance that covers up the fact that too many of us don’t live in communities where people truly know us, know where we come from, and believe what we say because there is no reason to not tell the truth. Exceptionalism is the cry of the lonely who say, it’s not my fault. I am not abandoned. I am just better than you.
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This is a love letter because this isn’t just about ending white supremacy so that violence against indigenous people and people of color ends, although that is deeply important. This is a love letter because ending white supremacy is about choosing human-ness over whiteness, about dealing with the literal trauma of disconnection that allowed whiteness to emerge in the first place. And this is a love letter because within the cycle of violence, even the perpetrator has to heal.