Me and White Supremacy Week 1: Still a Long Way to Go

Featured image: Photo by James Eades from Unsplash. For the audio, see the YouTube video.

This is the first in a series of four #4forNow articles that will focus on my reflections and lessons learned from working through the book (and its companion journal) Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad.

4 for Now

This process has a weekly review built into it, so I thought I’d start by sharing my insights from Day Seven, inviting me to think about my previous answers and write about what I see regarding my personal complicity in white supremacy:

“I’m seeing that no matter how aware of white supremacy I think I am, there’s always more—a deeper level, or an aspect I hadn’t noticed or thought of as being white supremacist. I haven’t done a good job of avoiding white guilt, white fragility, and white saviorism.” There are moments, but “mostly it seems that when I hit one end of the spectrum, I overcorrect.”

This week covered white privilege, white fragility, tone policing, white silence, white superiority, and white exceptionalism.

Privilege was the easiest for me to journal about. (Then again, I’ve examined privilege before.) As unprivileged as I may sometimes feel, there is no shortage of ways I’m automatically granted power, voice, or comfort because of my skin tone. And I’d do well to remember my privilege when I have the opportunity to use it to fight the system.

I feel like I’ve improved regarding fragility and silence. My first reaction to (justified) generalizations of white people is no longer to defend myself. I speak up more now than I ever have before. But I realize I still have a long way to go. I do these things more … but not every time.

I had the most trouble exploring tone policing. Not because I think I don’t tone police; I know I do. But because I tone police white folks, too, how do I tell if it’s a race thing or one of my other biases? (This is something that has come up for me in other topics since, as well. I struggle with a lot of biases, and many of them overlap. I wonder if there’s a book for that? /half joking)

Another theme I’ve discovered is that I’ve accepted a lot of generalizations—which only came to my attention via racism—that I never ascribed to racism. As an example: growing up, I would hear news about, say, drug dealers shooting each other. My takeaway would be that bad people in bad places do bad things. “Black” never entered my conscious mind. But this type of news was often about Black people in predominantly Black places. It didn’t occur to me until looking back on it that it helped ingrain the stereotypes I learned through fictional media.

And of course, not having to look back on it is just another way I’m privileged.

Obviously, I’m just setting out on this particular journey. And to quote myself again, “I feel I’ve been improving since really starting this work last year, but there are still a lot of ingrained beliefs I haven’t let go of yet, and that affects my work now. I need to make sure I’m letting go of it all so I’m not perpetuating any of it.”

The next blog post will cover Week Two, which explores stereotypes and cultural appropriation.

4 for Later

1. Me and White Supremacy text and the Guided Journal companion by Layla F. Saad
2. Browse the #MeAndWhiteSupremacy posts on Instagram (This process started as an IG challenge a few years ago. So fair warning, you may have to scroll through more recent posts to find folks actually talking about the work.)
3. And check out the #MeAndWhiteSupremacy conversation on Twitter
4. Not ready to commit to 28 days? Check out this 40-minute workshop podcast from Andréa Ranae as a place to start.