How Can White People Help End Racism?
Welcome! This week, we are starting a new series for adults, aimed at diving into the importance of educating ourselves and our own White communities and how we can end racism together. We think the most important place we can begin is truly understanding why we need to do this work. We’ve found a few letters from Black writers, and one from a White writer, explaining the importance of learning our own history and then educating others. Each author took the time to address the issue, so we’re going to take the time to read their words and unpack the responsibility we are undertaking.
We invite you to join us on this journey of discovery, dismantling, and relearning and we hope you’ll take an active role in the discussion down below!
End Racism by Finding Yourself
The BIPOC Community has done enough. More than we deserve. It is not right or fair of us to ask them what they need us to do to end racism. They need a chance to sit, to heal. It is up to us to reflect, identify each issue, determine how to dismantle it, what our individual role in that can be – big or small – and then continue to educate those around us. In our homes, our schools, our offices, our communities. It will not be easy work. If we really, truly want to bridge the racial divide between Black and White we must first understand ourselves, where we have come from, and what we have been given. You can’t see a divide if you’ve been carried over it. You must travel through it.
Here’s the thing, when we start to see the issues – when we open our eyes to what is really happening – we want to help. We want to jump up and say, “What can I do? Give me a task.” However, the tasks are not to be given. No one else, especially not BIPOC community members, is responsible for explaining how to right centuries of wrong. It is on us – solely our responsibility – to pull apart the systems our ancestors have built.
White People: I Don't Want You to Understand Me Better, I Want You to Understand Yourselves
We begin this with the following article, a letter from Ijeoma Oluo, self-identified black woman and feminist. She makes a blunt, and appropriate point, that survival has never depended on our knowledge of our own culture, or anyone else’s culture. We have not ended racism, because we haven’t needed to.
The original article can be found here: https://medium.com/the-establishment/white-people-i-dont-want-you-to-understand-me-better-i-want-you-to-understand-yourselves-a6fbedd42ddf
Please take the time to read her letter, and then explore the discussion questions below.
Discussion Points
Again, please feel free to contemplate these individually, or comment below with your thoughts. We highly recommended printing this and making notes – or beginning a journal. Many of the concepts and topics will come back around again and again.
- At the beginning of the article, Ijeoma says to us: “Y’all know almost nothing about us and even less about yourselves. Why? Because you don’t have to.” Again, near the end, she continues, “Your survival has never depended on your knowledge of White culture. In fact, it’s required your ignorance. The dominant culture does not have to see itself to survive because culture will shift to fit its needs.”
Sit with this truth for a minute. Reflect on the notion that White people do not have to consider how society is structured – Why? Because it was structured around our race. Every fiber of the current societal structure was woven around the ideals and advancement of the White race.
This may not be apparent right away, and that’s ok. There will be many, many times when we must step back and say, wow, this is new to me. When this happens, sit in the discomfort. It may take many weeks to unpack it. Being uncomfortable is how we end racism.
But put a pin in this idea and watch as we see it coming up over and over: White people do not have to understand the society in which they live in order to participate in it.
- Ijeoma makes the point that White people will feel compelled to make her understand that they are, of course, the exception to these truths and not the rule. The natural response to being told we’re doing something harmful or wrong is to prove why we are not.
We, as White people, are complicit in the perpetuation of racism in America.
That statement is not negotiable. It is fact. If it makes you uncomfortable, well, that’s why we’re here. Despite your claims to be “not racist,” racism is so deeply engrained into the very fabric of who we are and where we come from, we do not always see it.
Sit for a moment and think about the structures that Ijeoma mentions in her letter:
- Race was invented as a function of capitalism
- Slavery was repurposed into the prison industrial complex
- The police force was created to return Black people to slavery
- White people claim to rightfully own stolen land
How many of them were you familiar with? How many did you learn in school or were taught growing up? Be honest with yourself. Think about the ways the systems were folded into the White Supremacy modeled and then passed on to us as the “norm.”
- Ijeoma concludes by saying “Find yourselves white people. Find yourselves so that you can know what whiteness is. Find yourselves so that you can determine what you want whiteness to be. Find yourselves so that you can stop your loved ones from voting for a definition of whiteness that you no longer want to subscribe to. Find yourselves so that racism no longer surprises you.”
This is the purpose of this week. To understand the WHY behind finding ourselves, so we can move forward to redefine what Whiteness is and how we can teach change going forward.
Think about the parts of Ijeoma’s letter that struck you the most. What will you carry with you as we begin our work? What did you take away from this particular article that will help you to define your work going forward? What do you think is the first step in ending racism?
