Building on Resmaa’s framing, I have been also thinking about power. It seems that power can show up as clean or dirty, as well. For example, when we believe that you having power or voice means that mine is silenced or that power is a zero-sum game, I think we are acting from dirty power.
But, when we see that power can grow across communities, that it can be a source of community transformation and well-being, and that we are all stronger when we see, hear, and find solidarity with each other, I believe we are acting into clean power.
Podcast - University of Arizona, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Center for Compassion Studies
Resmaa: There’s a white spoken word artist that I heard the other day, and he said something else that made my brain kinda go ‘click!’ and go ‘yeah, that's it!’ One of the things that he says is that when it comes to white people, and he’s talking about his own people, when it comes to white people, it’s important to realize that white body supremacy is the water, not the shark.
And many times progressives are always looking for the Trump shark, or the KKK shark, or the Mike Pence shark, right, they're looking for the shark, right, but not the fact that they are steeped in the water. And when white progressives put themselves on this continuum of, you got Trump’s over there and you got ‘good’ white people over here, what is happening is they forget that that continuum that they're on, the one that says they’re a good one is actually a sliding continuum.
It is not a fixed continuum. It slides. And when white progressives...this is something that Jim White has been saying lately, is that progressive white supremacy is as damaging as devout white supremacy. What I mean by devout white supremacy is that those who are so dedicated and devout to the destruction of people of color. Those are the devout ones, right? But the progressive ones, that insidious type of white body supremacy...that even though they say they don’t believe in white body supremacy, they are steeped in white body supremacy and those notions of who black people are in relation to who they are is still steeped in white body supremacy.
And if that goes unexamined, they continue to wound people of color, and then feign...and then won’t take responsibility for that wounding. So part of it for me is that when it comes to healing this thing about white body supremacy, white bodies have to begin to get together to figure out how they’re gonna create a container, a cultural container by which they can begin to develop culture to begin to actually attack it.
White body supremacy...the abolishment of white body supremacy, currently as it stands...white people have no notion how to begin to deal with that culturally. They have a notion around segregation. They have a notion around assimilation. They have no notion around abolishing white body supremacy, or racism, or anti-racist things. They have strategy around it, but not culture.
The KKK, the devout racists, have a culture. They have symbols, they have colors, they have music, they have dance, ways of speaking, ways of standing, ways of being, all that different type of stuff. What does the white liberal have other than strategy and a racial resume, right? And if I’m a fourteen year-old white boy, having music and symbols and a shared historical understanding, even if I know that the shared historical understanding is abhorrent, I still have something that speaks to me more so than picketing, and sitting around, you know, something that I’m protesting. That does not sustain culture. And until white liberals begin to actually develop a culture around anti-racist, abolishing, somatically abolishing white body supremacy, until they begin to think about this as a culture and less about this as a strategy, they will continue to re-wound people of color.
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