How White People Can Turn Shame Into Anti-Racist Action
A list of ways to think about racism that lead to the type of actions needed to end it.
The Black-led, multiracial uprisings following the police murder George Floyd have provoked countless lists of things white people should and shouldn’t be doing.
White people should learn Black history, read books like White Fragility, post black squares on social media (but without the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag), and shop at Black-owned businesses. We shouldn’t center our emotions or ask people of color about racism or let family members get away with racist language. Ultimately, we should be “feeling miserable.”
As a white person who has long supported movements for racial justice — and as a socialist who believes that racism is the “American Blindspot,” as W.E.B. DuBois called it — I’m happy that more white people are waking up. But as a meditation teacher trained in mental health counseling, I find the lists unhelpful and maybe even counterproductive.
The problem isn’t what’s on the lists, it’s the attitude. Should and shouldn’t are the language of shame, and shame encourages self-conscious paralysis rather than learning, growth, and action. This is because — unlike its cousin guilt — shame is self-centered. Its target is “I” — I, in my essence, am wrong. I am not living up to an expectation or standard, so I am bad, wrong, evil, unworthy.
Shame leads to a “trance of unworthiness,” as psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach calls it, which makes true, lasting change much harder. Why should I try to change if I’m worthless? “The experience of shame — feeling fundamentally deficient — is so excruciating that we will do whatever we can to avoid it,” Brach writes.
In fact, shame triggers the sympathetic nervous system in the same way that fear does, leading to a “fight, flight, or freeze” response, the body’s chemical and physical reaction to danger. In other words, rather than encouraging us to act — which is what fighting racism requires — shame more often than not keeps us stuck in patterns of self-blame.
“Internalized feelings of inadequacy are a massive block to moving forward in a good and healthy way,” writes English literature professor Nora Samaran. Her book about rape culture, Turn This World Inside Out, helped me understand the inadequacy of shame when it comes to social change. “To completely transform this culture of misogyny, men must do more than ‘not assault,’” she writes. Rather than getting caught up in shame, men must do the work to heal ourselves and other men. “The truth is that you already are good enough. You always were. Your actions can be not good enough, and your essence remains good.”
This doesn’t mean that men — or white people — shouldn’t be held accountable. Yes, some things should be shamed in public, like catcalling or waving a Confederate flag. It’s just that our actions — good and bad — aren’t indicative of who we really are underneath them, which means we have the ability to change, we are worthy of being changed.
Samaran also points her finger at guilt, which is productive only under certain circumstances. “There is a quality in guilt that paralyzes,” she writes. Researchers have found that guilt encourages growth only when it is felt about a specific action. When we feel guilty about, say, not doing enough to help someone or being better off than others, it often leads to feelings of being stuck — because, like feeling shame, it’s about the essence of who we are, not what we’ve done.
What does healing look like for white people? Aren’t white people privileged? Shouldn’t I feel bad about my role in this racist society? Shouldn’t I feel miserable? These questions flood my mind as I try to square my hatred of racism with the inadequacy of shame and guilt. They’re good questions, and the slight discomfort they cause me doesn’t mean I shouldn’t ask them. Luckily, friends, thinkers, and historians have helped me untangle the knotted mess of race and racism to begin to answer them. I am grateful for the ideas that have helped me feel grounded and decisive — rather than shameful — in these rapidly shifting days and weeks.
So, rather than a list of shoulds and shouldn’ts, here’s a list of ways to think about racism that lead to the type of actions needed to end it.
Race is “real but not true”
The Nepalese Buddhist monk Tsoknyi Rinpoche tells a story about crossing a towering bridge made of glass. Taking his first steps, his body locked up and wouldn’t go any farther. But then he realized that, though his fear was real — it was happening inside of him — it wasn’t true. Hundreds of people were crossing in front of him. He likely wasn’t going to die. Yet he still felt afraid — the thoughts and emotions he was experiencing were as real as the breeze on his skin.
His fear was “real but not true,” he said and continued:
“Not true means you’re not going to die. But it’s really real that you feel it. So, I kindly sympathize with myself and be kind to myself: ‘I know you. You’ve got this symptom, but it’s not true. You will be okay. By really understanding your suffering [while acknowledging] it’s not true, you can make it. You can cross.’”
“Real but not true” is useful when thinking about racism because, just like Rinpoche’s fear of heights, race isn’t true. Beyond superficial differences like skin color and hair texture, there’s no biological basis for grouping human beings into different races. Being “black” or “white” or “brown” is socially constructed, an idea forced into our heads by actions, i.e., laws, norms, and institutional processes.
Race is a “product of racism,” according to Barbara and Karen Fields, authors of Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. “We see racism not as an attitude or a state of mind, like bigotry: it’s an action.”
But that doesn’t mean that race is insignificant, that we should be colorblind, that “All Lives Matter.” Race is real because racism is real. Black and Brown people are disproportionately killed by police and caged in jails and prisons. It would take the average Black family 228 years to build the same amount of wealth of the average white family has today. The poverty rate for Native Americans is three times that of white people.
Unless you believe that people with darker skin are naturally inferior and therefore deserve these disparities — unless you’re a white supremacist — you must admit that racism is the cause. You must also admit that white people are privileged in certain ways more than the wealthiest and most successful people of color. Take Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Harvard professor infamously arrested while trying to open the jammed door of his home in the affluent Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s hard to imagine that happening if he was thought of as “white.”
Understanding our privilege is necessary but insufficient
It’s tempting to think that all we have to do as white people is understand and apologize for our privilege. We should examine our unconscious bias, shop at Black-owned businesses, and avoid cultural appropriation. We should learn Black history and call out other white people who say racist things. These are all good things to do. They’ll help us get along better with friends, neighbors, and coworkers of color. They’ll decrease the harm we cause others. But focusing solely on changing individual behavior doesn’t challenge the root causes of racism: laws, norms, and institutional processes.
Aware of our privilege, we must act. Yet, we must do more than call out white people who say racist things and buy books by Black authors. We must, as political scientist Adolph Reed writes, shift our focus from the “ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of prejudice or intolerance” to the “social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality.” We must disrupt, dismantle, and replace the institutions that require racism for their existence.
In “Roots Deeper Than Whiteness,” David Dean summarizes the work of historians who’ve uncovered the origin of racism in North America. No one was considered “white” before the late 17th century, when landowners in colonial America began passing racist laws to repress revolts by African slaves and European indentured servants. That is, the white race was essentially invented by the ruling class as a means of social control, as a wedge to drive apart the lower classes. Dean writes:
“White identity was created as a tool to cement virtually all colonists of European origin, regardless of wealth, into a common superior racial category, creating solidarity along lines of race and reducing it along lines of class.”
As the editors of the 1990s magazine Race Traitor put it:
“The white race is a historically constructed social formation … people were not favored socially because they were white; rather they were defined as ‘white’ because they were favored.”
This imaginary superiority gave non-elite European colonists a leg up over Africans, both free and enslaved. But the advantage was only slight. W.E.B. DuBois, writing in the mid-1930s, called it:
“a sort of public and psychological wage … which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.”
Today, we can see echoes of this psychological wage in the dog whistle racism of the Republican Party (and, unfortunately, from some Democrats too). When Trump says Mexican immigrants are bringing “rapists” and that inner-city Chicago is “worse than the Middle East,” he’s taking a page from an age-old ruling class playbook. He’s driving a wedge through the working class along the color line.
Racism continues to be the enduring thorn in the side of movements for a higher minimum wage, #MedicareForAll, addressing climate change, and more. As legal scholar Ian Hanley Lopez has documented, since the Civil Rights era, dog whistle racism has allowed the rich and powerful to “hijack government for their own benefit.”
But well-meaning white people focused on privilege sometimes essentialize race — act as if it’s true — in harmful ways too. A video was shared in the days after George Floyd’s murder in which a white person demands that other white people leave a protest. “This is not your hood! If you want to participate follow me!” she yells, as numerous Black people plead with her to allow the protest to remain multiracial. Presumably, she was gathering white people to protest as a group in coordination with Black-led organizations. But how does it help Black people — or for that matter anyone fighting for change — to have less people alongside them? How does identifying and separating by race help fight racism?
That’s the problem with focusing solely on privilege. It redirects demands to change systems and institutions towards changing individual behaviors and attitudes. It turns politics into an inward journey rather than a shared journey for universal freedom and justice. It cultivates shame and guilt rather than strength and comradery. It substitutes self-absorption for solidarity, the substance of political power.
If we’re not organized, we’re powerless
The biggest lesson I’ve learned doing communications in the labor movement for the past five years is that, more than anything else, organization matters. Every election season, an untold number of union members hit the pavement nationwide to get out the vote for particular candidates. They knock on the doors of others in the nearly 15 million strong labor movement — they mobilize the already organized.
But mainstream election coverage rarely mentions this crucial aspect of politics happening behind the scenes. That’s because in the U.S., politics — especially elections — is viewed as a popularity contest. As David Kaib writes, “Much political talk feels a bit like a bunch of people sitting in their living room watching football having heated arguments about what the coaches on their favored team should do.”
Before I got a job in politics, I wasn’t a member of a union, community group, or any sort of political organization. I didn’t even think about them. I didn’t realize that every day, millions of people work alongside their fellow union members, get calls and emails from the union office, and go to union meetings. Others attend meetings for groups like Black Lives Matter, strategize with their comrades in political organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, protest in solidarity with prison hunger strikes, or provide mutual aid in their neighborhood. That’s politics. That’s what creates the conditions for something like the massive protests we’ve seen in the past months, which in turn have created the political conditions for policy, legal, and electoral change to take place.
I’ve learned that if I really want to make change, I must join movements to dismantle the institutions that require racism to survive — which, in our racist society, are those that serve the ruling class. The police, imperialist war, the prison system, and many others cannot be reformed — in the long run, they must be abolished or at least dramatically transformed.
The organization White Awake puts it this way: “If white people are serious about confronting white supremacy, then we need to tie our anti-racist work to a larger vision for social change — one that leverages the power of working people to disrupt and overcome the power of the capitalist class.”
The editors of Race Traitor: “If enough of those who looked white broke the rules of the club to make the cops doubt their ability to recognize a white person merely by looking at [them], how would it affect the cops’ behavior? And if the police, the courts, and the authorities in general were to start spreading around indiscriminately the treatment they normally reserve for people of color, how would the rest of the so-called whites react?”
We’ve seen how a good number of white people have reacted as cops in riot gear have beaten, run over, and teargassed other white people in recent weeks: with horror.
Knowing why we’re doing this work is crucial
At this point you might feel overwhelmed. There’s a ton of hard work to do on so many fronts.
That’s why shame doesn’t work — it doesn’t provide enough fuel to sustain us for the long haul. We need to recognize what’s in it for us if racism were to be rooted out and destroyed.
Clearly, there are material gains to be had. “Day by day, as brown-skinned immigrants and religious minorities are attacked, nearly all of us are threatened by continued attempts to cut Medicare and Social Security as well as a refusal to address skyrocketing costs of housing, higher education and healthcare amidst four decades of stagnant wages,” David Dean writes.
But it’s about more than solidarity and material needs. We must reflect on why we’re interested in liberation in the first place. What’s in it for you? Why do you care about racism? The answer has to be more than you want to be a good person. “White people need to be real about which aspects of humanity they will gain by abolishing whiteness,” writes Aaron Goggans, artist, writer, and cofounder of Black Lives Matter DC.
That’s what David Dean means by “roots deeper than whiteness.” Before we were white, we were English, Irish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian. Some of our ancestors were members of the ruling class, sure, but the odds are that most suffered oppression somewhere along the way. They toiled in fields owned by feudal lords. They languished in jails filled with other poor people. They sweated in factories during the early days of capitalism. Two-thirds of all who came from England, Scotland, and Ireland to the American colonies during the 17th century came as indentured servants — an astounding figure given the cartoon story we’ve been sold about our Founding Fathers coming here for religious freedom. Dean writes:
“From 1500 to 1800, millions of subsistence producers living in village communities throughout Europe were thrown off their lands by powerful aristocracies. Some European immigrants did come to the British colonies, and later, the United States, fleeing religious persecution and violence but most were running directly from this economic deprivation.”
Yet, our ancestors also established elaborate traditions, celebrated together, performed rituals, connected with the land, and fought back against the powerful. Most if not all of this wasn’t simply forgotten — it was bargained away for the superficial protection of whiteness. “In the 1700’s poor Protestant Scotch-Irish settlers, including some of my ancestors, were placed on the western edge of the colonies and pitted against indigenous peoples,” Dean writes. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, laws were passed in over 30 states mandating their participation in “Americanization programs” run by state and local governments, civic organizations, and corporations. “They were no longer to be Polish-Americans, Hungarian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, but simply ‘white’ Americans.”
The takeaway here isn’t that we should reclaim our Polish-American or Italian-American identity. Nationalities are just as socially constructed as races. It’s that the more we learn about what’s been taken from us by white supremacy and capitalism, the more we have a reason to be in the fight. The more we learn about all the aspects of humanity that we’ve lost by being “white” — the traditions, the rituals, the community, the connection with nature — the more grounded and whole we can feel at protests, political meetings, and strike picket lines. The more we realize that capitalism doesn’t serve us either — or if it does, only in narrow, material ways — the more we recognize that the struggle for Black liberation is a struggle for human liberation.
In other words, for everyone to be free — including those of us who are white — the white race and the institutions that thrive because of it must be abolished once and for all.
