How I Came to Understand Why White Women Have a Direct, Personal Stake in Racial Justice

A version of this post first appeared in the gender justice collaborative INTERSECT Northwest’s Women’s History Month blog series.

I grew up in a small, mostly white town in rural Southern Oregon. The kind of place where you bring your neighbor a casserole when they’re going through a rough divorce. Where all the kids ran around in the summer until called in for dinner. Where my dad once accepted half a hog as payment for professional services.

Other than chafing at my high school’s dress code which effectively regulated only girls’ clothes, I didn’t perceive that I was treated differently for being a girl, or for anything else. I could play sports. Teachers praised my work. I got a job at the local ice cream shop just by walking in with a resume.

I thought that life was pretty fair. That discrimination was something rare, extreme, and overt, like calling another person a slur to their face. That sexism and racism weren’t things that affected me.

My journey to understanding how those very much do impact me — impact us all — came later in life.

This Women’s History Month, I want to share that understanding in part by talking about the women in my lineage — my ancestors, me. And what’s happened to us: domestic violence. Sexual violence. Immigration/fleeing fascism. Addiction. Alcoholism. Overdose. Forced institutionalization. Child abuse. Suicide. These are just the traumas I know about.

Whiteness did not protect us. I name that because I think a reason many white women cooperate with our current system and the ways it treats people of color — even when doing so feels wrong in our gut — is because we believe whiteness will protect us.

I’ve come to learn not only that it won’t, but that it produces the very violence we suffer. Which means white women have a direct personal stake in changing things.

What Is Whiteness? How Does It Harm White People?

I invite everyone, especially other white-bodied folks, to think about power. Who has it, and who doesn’t. How it shows up in our culture.

Power is the ability to make decisions that affect our lives and the lives of others.

We currently live in a power-over culture. Certain groups have the power to decide how and whether other groups can live, love, work, move, learn, heal, eat, pray, and play. Lawmakers have power over constituents. Bosses have power over workers. Police have power over residents. Landlords have power over tenants. Teachers have power over students.

Those in power have created policies and practices that materially benefited many white people at the expense of people of color. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

That’s whiteness: both the idea that there is even a race called white, and the social, political, and economic system set up to materially benefit white people. It’s intertwined with other power-over systems that materially benefit people who are male, wealthy, straight, cisgender, American, Christian, able-bodied, etc., over those who aren’t.

I say materially — as in food, housing, and other things money can buy — because that’s as far as the benefits go. And they come at a steep, steep cost.

Power-over systems require violence to keep going. Not only the bloody violence that makes headlines, but the quiet violence that is going to school hungry, being evicted, or having to work oneself to the bone.

It’s the witnessing and participating in this violence that harms us:

“It disconnects us from our body. It disconnects us from our emotions. It makes it difficult to empathize with others… That damages our relationships with our family members, with our intimate partners, with our children… You have to deaden a person in multiple ways in order for them to be a dominant group that participates in the oppression of others, because that is not how the human animal is evolved. We are evolved where if we see somebody getting hurt, it’s as if it’s happening to us, and our whole being experiences that as trauma.” — Eleanor Hancock of White Awake

Hearing these words five years ago knocked the breath out of me. They viscerally landed in my body as true. All of a sudden I saw clearly that the horrible things that had happened to me and my ancestors were all linked.

I realized that all violence is interconnected: in our current (and past) power-over culture, we both participate in and experience violence. It messes us up inside. To cope with/survive that, we disconnect from ourselves. That messes up our relationships. We show up in ways we’re not proud of. It hurts. We disconnect further. Which makes it easier to be complicit with violent systems, and the cycle continues.

That’s why whiteness cannot protect white women. Because where there is one kind of violence (say, race-based), there will always be other kinds of violence (like gender-based).

Never mind the impact on our relationships.

This may be my most personal stake in ending the power-over systems that create disconnection. Because while most days I don’t experience (interpersonal) violence, every day my relationships—with my loved ones, with my body, with my community, with the land—aren’t what I want them to be. I’ve done and continue to do a lot of work to change that, but I still feel grief and pain about it.

(Incidentally, just as disconnection begets violence and damaged relationships, the good news is that the reverse is also true: healing begets justice and connective relationships. Trauma healing and social change go hand in hand.)

Racial Justice Helps Get Everybody Free

Aboriginal activist Lilla Watson once said, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

That’s how I understand my anti-racist practices now. They’re not allyship — a term that has never resonated with me because it seems like something a white person could opt in or out of as convenient. They’re not doing something nice on behalf of people of color. They’re solidarity:

“The idea of solidarity describes the ways in which we are bound together and how we can act, in concert, to change our circumstances. It is a form of reciprocity rooted in the acknowledgment that our lives are intertwined. Unlike identity, solidarity is not something you have, it is something you do—a set of actions taken toward a common goal.

A solidarity aiming at transformational change demands we not just recognize and sympathize with the plight of others but also join them as equals, reaching across differences without erasing them. Solidarity in its sublime form shatters the boundaries of identity, connecting us to others even when we are not the same.

Solidarity both produces community and is rooted in it, and is thus simultaneously a means and an end. Solidarity is the practice of helping people realize that they—that is to say, we—are all in this together. ”

It’s with this understanding that Fannie Lou Hamer’s words make sense to me: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”