MEZZO

When exposed to ostracism, researchers found that being acknowledged and included reduces aggressive behaviors in people who feel ignored. When threats to our control, self-esteem, meaningful existence or belonging occur, we reflexively feel the emotions of sadness or anger. When we evaluate our response and the individual conditions that inform our realities, we typically follow one of three paths.

Path one: we seek solitude and tend to our bandages.

Path two: we seek attention through corrective actions through sharing, helping, and comforting to reconnect pro-socially.

Path three: we seek attention by behaving irresponsibly through harassment, distress, and violence to reconnect anti-socially.

Through each of these paths, the harmed all seek some release of the energy we were given. The energy from ostracism or harm — like the First Law of Thermodynamics — will more than likely translate into some other action. But that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

In Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm, Kazu Haga writes

“As ineffective a strategy as it may be, violence is oftentimes an expression of a yearning to heal. It is a cry for peace. As Marshall Rosenberg [a transformative figure in the Nonviolent Communication movement] says, ‘violence is the tragic expression of unmet needs.’ Needs for healing. Needs for release. Needs to be seen or heard. Needs for pain to be legitimized.”

These unmet needs manifest into violence, following the third path many people travel in response to being hurt. We see this daily as the Right ‘refuse to live their lives in fear’ yet stockpile guns for protection and believe in medical freedom except for transgender youth and people seeking abortions. The Left values diversity of identities yet mandates groupthink. The Left offers intersectional nuance for just about anyone while deeply pigeonholing the White, straight, cisgender male experience into a monolith. Hurt exists all over the political spectrum. Pain is borne of and yet transcends identity. Anyone can and will be hurt. Perhaps being hurt reminds us that we’re human.

At a base level, hurts arise out of conflict. Conflict begets innovation. And yet, optimistically, conflict only generates innovation when humans take the first two paths: self-reflection and pro-social behavior. However, identities don’t always have the same resources or skills to transcend hurt. And when hurt people don’t have resources or services and choose — however consciously— path three, insurrections happen. Payton Gendron happens. Bernie Madoff happens. Harvey Weinstein happens. Ghislaine Maxwell happens. Karens happen. We hurt as White people.

Researchers from the Univerity of Nashville and Maryland have begun studying White people’s perceptions of being White.

Researchers defined a spectrum of White people’s responses to race, from avoidance to guilty to shame. They found that White guilt and political affiliation are largely related. Republicans mostly express avoidant behaviors, while Democrats mostly express behaviors of guilt. Rather than find a direct correlation between acts of racism and the avoidance to shame scale (a straight line), researchers found something that looks a little more like V (or a curvilinear relationship). We have begun to feel so guilty about race and racism in the US that shame prevents our need to engage socially.

As a social worker, I connect people and organizations to services and resources that can support their needs. Again: “Violence is the tragic expression of unmet needs.” - Marshall Rosenberg. Currently, there are alarmingly few social service mechanisms in place to support the unique needs of White people. The Spillway exists to provide support for this tremendous gap in services for White people.

Being hurt doesn’t give anyone license to hurt another person— intentionally or unintentionally. We must be responsible for our actions.

When it comes to race: White people can be both the victim and the perpetrator. White people can benefit from racist policies and actions. We know this. Yet, we’re also harmed as we try to police ourselves and those around us into compliance with supremacist or shameful rhetoric/action. But we rarely talk about how negatively racism impacts us as White people.

Part of being White in the US today — without supremacy or shame— is about not treating people how I want to be treated. It’s not about treating others how they want to be treated. It’s about treating others how we want to be treated.

Supremacy says, “focus only on my needs.”

Shame says, “focus only on your needs.”

The Spillway says, “Let’s focus on our collective needs.”

With the ability to be both the victim and the perpetrator of racism, the more I focus on building compassion, connectivity, patience, and empathy in my daily life as White person, the less I—and those around me—hurt.

Coined by Dr. Rachel MacNair in the titular book published in 2002, Perpetuation-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) looks at how causing harm and trauma to others creates traumatic stress within the perpetrator.

PITS is controversial because it asks our culture to see murderers, rapists, executioners, and domestic abusers as human beings. Historically—and currently—it’s been much easier to name any of these individuals or groups of people as inhuman.

As animals.

Monsters.

As a “them,” not as part of “us.”

As Dr. MacNair says, “suggesting they are traumatized is suggesting they might be human.” Suggesting they might be human implies they can be complete, complex, and nuanced beings that aren’t static.

We don’t have to like this fact, but we can’t ignore it. If we refuse to acknowledge that perpetrators are human, we don’t allow for the possibility that

⭕️ the unethical treatment could have been prevented,

⭕️ the perpetrator needs support, or

⭕️ healing or rehabilitation is possible.

Moral injury is the “lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”

Trauma requires an inability to move beyond the traumatic event. Two people can share an experience. But if one person gets mentally or emotionally stuck in that experience, it turns into trauma for that person.

Moral injury informs PITS.

Twenty years ago, Dr. MacNair’s work focused on PTSD, primarily used in the few decades leading up to the new millennium. During this time, PTSD was almost exclusively utilized to understand the consequences of certain occupations: soldiers, first responders, and police officers. However, over the last two decades, PTSD has come to encompass the experiences of some social identities in response to the traumatizing impacts of rape culture, White supremacy, and heterosexism.

Many White people experience a moral injury regarding race and racism. Shame and Supremacy culture have caused individuals to do some really bad things. These events and actions can cause "stuckness" for many White people, making it hard for them to move on from the pain they've caused—or have witnessed others cause.

Because this form of stuckness has gone on for so long, we have begun to understand it as nothing more than typical White culture. So lots of people don't see it as a problem.

In reality, so much of White culture is a trauma response.

🟩 A response to the pain and struggles we fled in Europe before we immigrated.

🟩 A response to the interGenerational trauma our bodies hold.

A current and historical response in the PITS we have from “ perpetrating, failing to prevent [the violence of other White people], or bearing witness to acts [against People of Color] that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”

As we know it today, White culture is built around PTSD and responses to that traumatic stress. Because PTSD symptoms are held within those with the social power to enact racist actions (White people), this becomes known as PITS. A vast majority of White people have perpetration-induced traumatic stress.

The main goal of The Spillway is to help White people understand our individual and collective problems, find healing, and build a White culture that isn't full of stress.

Who is White?

Being socially constructed, the idea of who constitutes as “White” has shifted over time. Today, it’s common to find people who differentiate between their racial expression and their racial identity.

RACIAL EXPRESSION

How we express ourselves is generally how we want people to receive us. Within Whiteness, we sometimes rarely think about this expression. For example, we don’t often question, “Am I being too White right now? or “Am I White enough?” Usually, the only time we think about this is when we’re asked about our demographics at the doctor’s office, admissions, or on the US Census.

RACIAL IDENTITY

How we identify ourselves is generally how we understand ourselves. (I know this sounds like circular logic, but stay with me!) Some White people understand their race in terms of national ancestry, not skin color. This is why, when some White people are asked what their race is—even though we check “White” on the paperwork at the dentist’s office—we’ll say, “Italian,” “Irish,” “German,” or “American.” Because some of us understand the color of our skin through the lens of national ancestry, racial identity and racial expression can be confused with each other.

Here at The Spillway, we understand ourselves as a resource and service for anyone that either holds an identity or expression of being White.

1. Open any dictionary you like: “White,” in reference to race, is an adjective turned proper noun because it can fit—individually or collectively— in the categories of person, thing, and idea.

2. Being White is a cultural identification.

Because White Supremacy is so invested in individuation, a collective White American cultural identity is typically mocked in liberal spaces. Most of this ridicule stems from the belief that people who have identified with Whiteness—publicly, politically, or socially—have revealed themselves to be self-identifying White supremacists.

Furthermore, because we've been preoccupied with maintaining our "default" position, White people have shared social experiences that we've unspoken and unexplored (because we've been busy maintaining our "default"). One of the responsibilities within The Spillway is to identify the culture that has been hidden in plain sight.

Finally, to a frequently mentioned idea that Whiteness began as a strategy to marginalize and oppress others, so it isn't an identity but rather a method:

Yes, that is how Whiteness began a long time ago (and it can still be reinforced today).

What was invented cannot be undone.

For centuries, White people have treated People of Color differently. In remarkable ways, Native, Asian, Black, Latine, Middle Eastern/North African, and Southeast Asian populations have engaged in a century (if not centuries) worth of pride and identity reclamation—independent and at times in response to Whiteness othering them.

Suppose White people are the only race of people who do not have a shared culture. In that case, our lives and realities as White people will only serve to further appropriate cultures outside of our own. Culture is important because it includes "the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation."

Find a tarot deck, make yourself a cheesy casserole, check out some Live Laugh Love art, watch "Downtown Abbey" or "Game of Thrones," and blast Dolly Parton or Celine Dion through your car.

We capitalize “White” here because saying that White people are not a race of people is helping to continue the project of White supremacy and shame.

The public sector no longer unabashedly centers nor caters primarily to straight, White, middle-income men. For some White people, this is exciting and is understood as progress. For other White people, this drives the concerns of the conspiracy of The Great Replacement. The free market began to formally recognize the blended value and triple bottom line of corporate social responsibility in response to the social movements of the 2010s.

It was rare to find a rainbow flag, menstrual cup, or natural hair product section in a big-box retailer at the beginning of the decade. Social movements gave rise to corporate citizenship required by the growing Millennial and Gen-Z markets. As of 2020, the combined Millennial/Gen-Z market now outnumbers the combined Gen-X/Boomer market.

Millennials and Gen-Z overwhelmingly want companies to address social justice issues (78%). Millennials and Gen-Z will opt to shop somewhere else if the brand has different values than the buyer (76%).

Intersectionality is not trending. It is now a market force. Look at Disney. Daily Wire+. Cracker Barrel. Each is caught up in controversies or sells pitches related to individual identity. The free market has begun the process of shifting its focus away from White consumers.

The Disruption of the Status Quo

White people are projected to become a numerically racial minority class as early as 2044 or 2050.

This change happens in addition to increasingly younger generations identifying outside or independent of the gender binary.

More people (66%) identify as something other than “exclusively heterosexual.”

The middle class is shrinking as the share of aggregate income in the United States has fallen from 62% to 42% over the last fifty years.

Steadily, the Rockwellian way of life has been scattered to the periphery.

Nostalgia for this way of life lives within a lot of White people. So much so that it galvanized much of President Trump’s base in 2016 and 2020 with the theory that

1. America was once great

2. it now no longer is,

3. but we can return to greatness.

For many White people in the US, the status quo of the traditional nuclear family has been upended.

Becoming a (numerically) racial minority within a culture we don’t find familiar becomes a one-two punch.

Theory #3

Sensory Overload and the Loss of Representation

Most White people have been explicitly exposed to more norms, values, and traditions from other cultures in far greater frequency this past decade than, perhaps ever. And it's not just only White people. Everyone has.

Take a look at the compassion of UCLA’s annual Hollywood Diversity Report. From 2014 to 2022, the overall representation of White people in films dropped 32.6 percentage points. Even UCLA used the word “underrepresented” for White people in describing the downward trend.

Through diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, to disassembling the one-story fits all method from Hollywood, and greater access to social media, the ability to connect to cultures outside of our own has grown exponentially.

White people have never had to do this before.

Through the office in the day, the big-box retailer on their way home, and the television at night, the sensation of routine familiarity is fading for many White people.

Psychologically, the less we see people who look like us, the more we can begin to feel ostracized and inadvertently hurt.

Audiences, employees, voters, and consumers of Color have long navigated these ostracizing conversations/actions from a dominant culture that is/was different from them.

Culturally, we’re now experiencing the learning curve for White culture. This learning curve is going unappreciated in the familiar pursuit of punishing privilege and accountability abuse.

Theory #4

The Self-Inflicting Wound of Control

Currently, there’s a punishing need for control driving conspiracy theorists and social justice vigilantes alike.

Researchers in France have found that individuals who perceive a loss of control have a higher desire for control.

To put this another way, when we feel like we're losing control, we quickly try to get as much control back as we can.

One of the most common ways we attempt to regain this control as White people is to present ourselves as an authority figure within the environment we lost control in.

We do this when we:

• repeat an alternative set of facts

• repeat the competition of who’s the most “woke”

• repeat a mistrust in any mainstream news sources or peer-reviewed data

• repeat the belief that a college education made us superior

White people who experience race through avoidant or guilty attachment styles end up competing with each other on who’s the dominant authority figure.

We do this while failing to realize that our desire for this authority comes from a shared place of perceived harm: a loss of control.

For people who experience immense shame around race, 100% of all social control is given to People of Color.

This happens under the assumption—that most shamed White people hold—that it’s better to be controlled by People of Color. That thoughts, feelings, and actions cannot occur until permission is given to White people by People of Color.

Part of being human is the desire to be in control of our own destiny.

For centuries we, as White people, have controlled our destiny, as well as those around us. Losing some of this control has created a self-inflicting wound as we attempt to control other White people now.

Theory #5

True Self vs. Conditioned Self (or, the Role of Shame)

According to the Pew Research Center, most white people aren’t showing up to conversations about race with people of cultures and ethnicities different from their own, if at all.

In August 2021, Pew reported that a majority (54%) of white people think that talking about racism is somewhat bad, bad, or are indifferent to talking about racism altogether.

In the face and shadows of the Uprisings last year, most white people consistently communicate an inability, a hostility, or indifference to talking about race and racism.

In 1902, Charles Cooley theorized a concept called “The Looking Glass Self.”

The theory states that our general understanding of who we are is a mixture of what we believe ourselves to be and what others believe us to be:

I am not who I think I am.

I am not who you think I am.

I am who I think you think I am.

As white people, we know race exists.

We also know that every time it’s brought up, it’s not always—in fact, it’s usually not—affirming.

Especially when we talk about White people from a historical lens.

Because of this, many White people have become conditioned to believe that being White is inherently bad.

This conditioning leads many of us to believe that other people—whether they say it or not—feel the same way about White people

This shame translates into

"I think that you think that I’m racist just because I’m White."

or

“Because I am White, I will always be racist.”

And then we shut down/avoid/dismiss the conversation about race and racism before it even happened. We can have too much anxiety, frustration, and shame around how we think it will end. So we hide our true self.

From an interpersonal to the systemic level, mainstream markets in the United States began folding in populations who were more than straight, white, middle-income men.

These markets have found returns on their social investments through capitalistic intersectional praxis.

With so much work around increasing representation in media, management, school boards, E-Suites, and tenure-track faculty, the inverse of the conversation is waiting to be had.

Often the metaphor of a person with a marginalized identity bringing a seat to the privileged table of decision-making is used.

As we extend this metaphor:

• Where did the privileged person in a decision-making role go if there was an empty seat or space at the table?

• Are there conditions or terms for their absence?

• What does the absence signify for the person who is not there?

• Who cares that the seat is temporarily empty?

As White people leave these seats at the table —either by choice or pressure—we don’t simply disappear and stop existing.

So often, we don’t appreciate the emotional needs of this transition.

Inter-Generational Trauma:

An Introduction

It’s tough to alter our genes or our DNA.

Yet, a field in biology known as Epigenetics studies how our bodies interact with DNA.

Epigenetics seeks to understand how social or environmental factors impact our body’s ability to read or act upon a DNA sequence.

Most importantly, our bodies’ chemicals that we use to read or act upon a DNA sequence are inherited from our biological parents.

These chemicals which transcribe and translate our DNA can be greatly modified by our diets, exposure to pollution, and even prolonged or profound social events.

Currently, there’s data to suggest that these chemicals are passed on for five generations.

Meaning:

how our

great-

👴👵👴👵

great-

👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵

great-

👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵

grandparents

👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵👴👵

bodies read their DNA is how we, today, continue to interpret our genes.

This means that the diets, pollutants, and extreme social events since the early/mid-1800’s still impact our body’s ability to read and act upon our DNA sequence in the 2020s.

Keep in mind that to make you, over five generations, 62 people passed on how your body will read its DNA.

That’s 62 different human experiences of diets, pollutants, and major social events that inform our bodies today.

It’s fascinating to know that how my ancestors responded and experienced anything firsthand from

the potato famine in Ireland 1850…

the smog of the industrial south of Poland…

the enslavement of more than 4 million Africans and their descendants in the US…

…lives within me today.

We study history to know ourselves.

We Learned How to Colonize Ourselves First: Or, The History of White People (pt 1)

Colonization far pre-dates the often-cited first wave of cross-Atlantic colonization of the 15th Century. That’s when Europeans/White people began extracting resources and people from different continents.

Before the common era, Europe was almost exclusively populated with tribes and cultures who—by the definitions of Classical Antiquity—were indigenous to the land of Europe.

These cultures later translated into what we now call

“Celtic Tribes.”

(*We’re painting in broad brushstrokes here. For more history, check out this site.)

Today we mostly associate Celtic ancestry or culture in the United States with Ireland and England.

Yet, the Gauls, Irish, Gales, Britons, Galatians, and more than 100 different tribes were all Celtic tribes across what we now call “Europe.”

All White people are descendants of these tribes.

US History never goes this far back. Or it never goes in-depth because it’s seen as irrelevant to the origin story of our country’s founding.

We experience this as “European History,” not as a history of White people.

This is a huge disservice in understanding our country’s founding since much of US History is taught through the lens of European (White) settler colonialism.

To be clear: this doesn’t mean that all White people across North America and Europe share a cultural ethnicity. At The Spillway, we mean to say that White American culture came from a collection of places; it didn’t just materialize out of thin air. As a friendly reminder, The Spillway focuses specifically on the White American cultural identity and experience.

We Learned How to Colonize Ourselves First: Or, The History of White People (pt 2)

In Western terminology, we often defang the violence of our colonizing ancestors within Europe, and we call them “empires.”

Perhaps we attempt to neutralize this violent history to distance ourselves from our historical trauma.

The Greek Empire*

(*We’re painting in broad brushstrokes here. There was also MASSIVE knowledge extraction from/and occupation of Egypt by the Greeks around 30 BCE (The Ptolemaic Kingdom)

begat the Roman Empire,

begat the Byzantine.

By the downfall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, within a generation, cross-continental colonialism formalized with the creation of the Spanish Empire in 1492 and the British Empire within the decade.

The Belgian, British, Portuguese, Danish, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Swedish, Italian, & Russian cultures originate from a larger culture that perfected colonization on what we now call “White people.”

But race as a social construct wasn’t formally invented until around when the Byzantine Empire fell.

The early empires were predominately expanding via class warfare. Today they expand under the banner of globalization/trade.

And yet, somewhere deep inside many White people, we can connect to the notion that we, too, may never know our ancestry because forced assimilation and colonization destroyed our ancestral heritage.

The Emotional Subtext of the Founding of White America

Part One: ”Freedom”

Operating from the science that tells us that intergenerational trauma is passed down genetically over five generations, this averages about 150 years.

Taking this further, 150 years ago, our ancestors were holding the intergenerational trauma of 150 years before their birth, too.

Putting it all together: the traumas starting between 1646 and 1696 can have biological implications for the earliest Boomers and the youngest Millennials.

The first immigrants to Turtle Island, or what we now call “The United States,” came primarily from Spain, England, Sweden, and Denmark. They came not only for religious freedom but for a chance for economic opportunities. We know this, though.

This concept is not new or controversial, but there’s a deeper emotional subtext here: White people came to this land to escape the harms of religion and capitalism.

And we don’t talk about it.

In search of this religious freedom, Puritans only held space for the rights of other Puritans.

In fact, Puritans were considered a radical sect of the English Church (protestants) who wanted to keep the church pure of Catholic influence and ceremony.

Within fifty years of settling in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630-1680), Puritans executed at least four Quakers— White people—for their religious beliefs. Puritans banned Quakers outright by 1658. They also refused early attempts to separate church and state in the middle of the 1600s.

What they fled from, they merely replicated:

ideological righteousness

violence

murder

On Quakers.

On citizens of the Wampanoag Nation.

Hurt people can believe they are healed because they transferred that harm onto someone else.

Part of being a White person without supremacy or shame in the US is holding the truth that we can be both the victim and the perpetrator even in our history of seeking freedom.

The Emotional Subtext of the Founding of White America

Part Two:

”Economic Opportunity”

One of the dominant narratives about the founding of the US is White people’s desire to pilgrim from Europe…

to colonize…

to immigrate…

to travel to…

…in search of economic opportunity.

“Economic opportunity” didn’t translate into “starting a new financial system.” Instead, settlers reproduced the conditions of capitalism they sought to escape.

Settlers reproduced these conditions independently and despite the Native Nations already operating sustainable economies and governments.

Yet, to impose their own governance and economic systems…

to make sure that English, Spanish, and French settlers held power in the US:

White ancestors felt it was justifiable to systematically murder an estimated 56 million Indigenous people while simultaneously attempting to assimilate Native and First Nations people into White culture. People who called this land “home” for tens of thousands of years before White people showed up.

And then, as White ancestors had to dominate their new economic system, they rationalized enslaving an estimated 15 million African people in chattel slavery, prioritizing profits over people.

Unfortunately, White settlers chose to continue these systems even after their first-hand knowledge of the pain they experienced from capitalism and religious fundamentalism.

Whiteness without supremacy or shame is about simultaneously holding the ability to be a victim and perpetrator.

Remember, our intergenerational trauma starts anywhere from 1646-1696. This trauma predates Benjamin Franklin who was born in 1706. Or Sacagawea (Sakakawea) born in 1788. Or Frederick Douglass, born in 1818.

Our body's chemical responses to our DNA can be impacted by these events still today.

One of the dominant narratives about the founding of the US is White people’s desire to pilgrim from Europe…

White Intergenerational Trauma pt. 1

“It is a rare peasant who, once ‘promoted’ to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself.”

-Paulo Freire

(He’s basically saying that it’s rare that once you get a promotion, you’re not going to become any different than the rude managers you used to complain about.)

In his transformative 1970 manifesto, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes that the revolution must confront the idea that the role reversal between the oppressed and the oppressor is inevitable.

In the project of colonization and empire-building, we have a near-perfect example of Freire’s words.

The history of White people is a well-documented history of self-inflicted and regenerating physical, emotional, and mental violence to ourselves and to others.

White people who were the ‘peasants’ of Europe (for various reasons) became ‘a tyrant’ once White settlers ‘promoted’ themselves.

This dance between the proverbial “peasant and tyrant” has created a genealogical chain of trauma that White people pass down in

our homes

our families

our communities.

And when Whiteness is expressed through supremacy or shame, we can pass this down to homes, families, and communities of Color.

This intergenerational trauma is a hurt that believes, among many things, that an idea like meritocracy is healthy.

What meritocracy says is “the now-extinct Celtic tribe didn’t try hard enough to survive.”

“If I don’t pull myself up by my bootstraps, I will continue to be a peasant. And I traveled all this way from Europe for a new life.”

Why do we lose value if we’re not educated or “skilled?”

Victim blaming is a textbook trauma response.

And yet, the paradox of being White without supremacy or shame is to know we are both victims and the perpetrator.

If we interrupt the violence of meritocracy, we interrupt our paradox of Whiteness.

White Intergenerational Trauma pt. 2

Trauma responses have been passed down, Millenia after Millenia, through White people.

Notably, the history of over 300 years ago doesn’t impact us biologically in the same way it can mentally. Therefore, we call it historical trauma.

When we look back at the Celtic tribes that were forced to assimilate and morph into the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Empires, this is historical trauma.

However, Epigenetics tells us that the diets, pollutants, and events 300 years before our birth can impact our body’s ability to read our DNA.

In Resmaa Menekem’s work, he calls this trauma entrenched through our bodies as “intergenerational trauma.”

“Most White immigrants to the New World didn’t heal from their trauma…

Then they blew much of their trauma through the bodies of Africans and their descendants. This served to embed trauma in Black bodies, but it did nothing to mend the trauma of White ones.

Much of our current culture—and most of our current cultural divides—are built around this trauma…

None of us asked for this trauma. None of us deserves it. Yet none of us can avoid it.”

-Resmaa Menekem, My Grandmother’s Hands

As White people, we currently experience this as a functioning—not necessarily a debilitating—trauma because it’s all many of us have ever known.

To address this intergenerational trauma, we need to heal.

At The Spillway, we seek to (re)focus the unique experience of being a White person in North America without supremacy or shame.

We do this by expanding our compassion, connectivity, and empathy for ourselves and each other with the belief that our healing is possible.

Defining White “hurt”

You’ll notice at The Spillway, we talk a lot about how hurt people hurt people. And White people are hurting.

“Hurt” and “Hurting” are tiny words with a considerable footprint.

There’s “hurt” as a verb. As in:

White people are hurting

Defined* as

physical pain or injury to.

(*We’re using Google for all of the definitions for this. It’s not the most in-depth, but it’s the most accessible.)

Physical pain refers to — physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury.

Then there’s “hurt” as an adjective. As in:

White people experience a lot of hurt around intergenerational trauma.

Defined as: physically injured

“Physical” meaning: relating to the body as opposed to the mind

Injury—having come up in both the definitions of hurt and pain & in the verb and adjective—becomes incredibly important.

Injury is defined as:

an instance of being injured

damage to a person’s feelings.

“Injured” is defined as:

harmed, damaged, impaired

offended

Without any explanation, in the definition of “hurt,” Google ties together our bodies and our feelings.

Peer-review research would agree with Google:

feelings greatly impact our bodies.*

[*Assari, S. (2017). Hostility, anger, and cardiovascular mortality among blacks and whites. Research in Cardiovascular Medicine, 6(1), 2-2.

Hadley, W., Houck, C., Barker, D., Wickham, B., Bogner, J., & Jelalian, E. (2020). Preliminary impact of an adapted emotion regulation intervention for adolescents with overweight and obesity attempting to lose weight. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 41(9), 706-715.

Heydari, S. (2017). The relationship between happiness, general health and life expectancy of cancer patients. European Psychiatry, 41(S1), S608-S608.

Lesko, C. R., Hutton, H. E., Fojo, A. T., Shen, N. M., Moore, R. D., & Chander, G. (2021). Depression and HIV viral nonsuppression among people engaged in HIV care in an urban clinic, 2014-2019. AIDS (London), 35(12), 2017-2024.

Liu, B., DPhil, Floud, S., PhD, Pirie, K., MSc, Green, J., Prof, Peto, R., Prof, Beral, V., Prof, & Million Women Study Collaborators. (2015;2016;). Does happiness itself directly affect mortality? the prospective UK million women study. The Lancet (British Edition), 387(10021), 874-881.

Miething, A., Mewes, J., & Giordano, G. N. (2020). Trust, happiness and mortality: Findings from a prospective US population-based survey. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 252, 112809-6.

Saimaldaher, Z. H., & Wazqar, D. Y. (2020;2019;). Relationships between caregiving stress, mental health and physical health in family caregivers of adult patients with cancer: Implications for nursing practice. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 34(4), 889-898.

Tuck, N. L., Adams, K. S., & Consedine, N. S. (2017). Does the ability to express different emotions predict different indices of physical health? A skill‐based study of physical symptoms and heart rate variability. British Journal of Health Psychology, 22(3), 502-523.

Willy-Gravley, S., Beauchemin, J., Pirie, P., Gomes, A., & Klein, E. (2021). A randomized controlled trial of yoga with incarcerated females: Impacts on emotion regulation, body dissociation, and warnings of substance relapse. Social Work Research, 45(1), 20-29.

Zhao, W., Wu, Z., Chen, J., Jia, H., Huang, Z., Chen, M., Gu, X., Liu, M., Zhang, Z., Wang, H., Wang, P., & Cheng, W. (2017). Survival prediction of anxious emotion in advanced cancer patients receiving palliative care: Survival prediction of anxious emotion in advanced cancer patients. Psycho-Oncology (Chichester, England), 26(10), 1463-1469.]

“Hurt” is this thing that is informed by damage, harm, impairment, or the offending of our feelings—which, in turn, can impact our bodies—becomes an umbrella term, covering a broad category of emotions.

As it currently exists, Critical Race Theory (CRT) doesn’t translate into a reality that many White Americans understand.

There are two versions of CRT:

1. The legal principle and

2. the academic container for conversations about race and racism.

The Legal Principle

Beginning in Ivy and Ivy+ schools throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the crux of CRT was borne in tandem and opposition with Critical Legal Studies.

This happened as affirmative action marginally increased enrollment of Students of Color in universities.

Still, educational systems hadn’t updated their studies outside of the interests of white populations.

Mainly led by students of Color, CRT slowly took form to create meaningful action around each schools' curricula and color-blind racism, which began under Nixon and formalized in Reganomics.

The Academic Container

As law schools began to change their cultures, other schools within universities began adopting these frameworks to think and create action around race and racism.

Critical legal studies of the ‘60s gave rise to CRT in the ‘70s which, in turn, created a mass movement of critical studies: Languages, Disabilities, Women’s, Gender, Latino, Masculinity, Class. (to name a few)

Even Whiteness became part of the critical studies movement in the mid-1990s. (more on this later!)

Each of these studies empowered people to think about liberation and oppression related to each individual movement.

These classes became required courses to support professions that work with the general population. With the rationale being: how can we best serve population X if we don’t know about population X?

The resulting courses spilled out of universities and into the action plans of community organizers, social workers, teachers, hospitality majors, and marketing majors alike. As a result, CRT—the academic container—varies widely from scholar to sect to industry. Yet, CRT's three foundational tenants serve as touchpoints between the many theories within critical race studies.

1. Racism is commonplace. Racism happens every day.

2. White people dictate the terms of racial liberation (re interest convergence).

3. Race is socially constructed.

This list, introduced in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic in 2017, has served as required reading for many social work schools and departments studying race and racism across the United States.

IF they exist in isolation, there is tremendous truth in each of the statements. (Spoiler alert for part 2: they don’t always work in isolation)

Again, the three most common pillars of CRT (the academic container) are :

1. Racism is commonplace. Racism happens every day.

2. White people dictate the terms of racial liberation (re interest convergence).

3. Race is socially constructed.

Let’s unpack each point. One at a time.

Yes, racism happens every day.

Heritage Foundation agrees that racist policy still exists, even in its own roundabout way.*

Policies and law are, after all, cultural (re organizational, legislative) and societal values-statements.

In 2021 alone, California reached a settlement with formerly incarcerated individuals because it valued sterilizing people with ovaries—without their consent—who were incarcerated. Most of whom are Black, Native, Latine, and Asian.

State legislatures are still struggling to update and change environmental pollution and structural hazards (lead pipes, asbestos) in urban areas, which are primarily populated by communities of Color.

In July 2022, the Supreme Court—again—gutted treaties between the US and the Muscogee Nation on Native tribal sovereignty by removing the rights of Native jurisdiction over crimes committed in Indian country.

And yet, 56% of White Americans (79% of Republicans & 27% of Democrats) believe that “little or nothing needs to be done” to ensure equal rights for all Americans regardless of their racial or ethnic backgrounds.

According to William Frederickson’s award-winning and highly acclaimed, A Short History of Racism, this 56% of White Americans are not entirely wrong.

Frederickson argues that for textbook racism to manifest in society, five things need to be present:

• The official ideology of the masses is explicitly racist.

• Laws exist forbidding interracial marriage.

• Social segregation is mandated by law and not an act of custom or private acts of discrimination.

• Outgroup members are excluded from holding public office.

• Access to resources and economic opportunities is so limited that most outgroup members are kept in poverty.

Currently, there seem to be two racial ideologies: Black or all Lives Matter. Both of these ideologies aren’t explicitly racist, but this shouldn’t ignore the implicit color-blind racism of “All Lives Matter” rhetoric and actions.

Loving v. Virginia overturned interracial marriage bans in 1967. The Respect for Marriage Act of 2022 made interracial marriage bans illegal.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made all public forms of social segregation illegal.

Vice Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, Senators, and Representatives of Color held/hold public office.

2018 Census Data from PovertyUSA finds that 74.6% of Native Americans, 79.2% of African Americans, 82.4% of Hispanic Americans, and 89.9% of Asian Americans (same as white Americans) live outside of —albeit archaic lines of — poverty.

So when most White people say that racism doesn’t exist anymore in the United States at a systemic level, we are, however vaguely, pointing to these facts.

Yes, racism happens every day, but many White Americans believe it is not common.

Again, the three most common pillars of CRT (the academic container) are*:

Racism is commonplace. Racism happens every day.

White people dictate the terms of racial liberation (re interest convergence).

Race is socially constructed.

Let’s unpack each point. One at a time.

Yes, white people dictate the terms of racial liberation when white people are 60% of the US population but makeup

96% of governorships,

92% of Fortune 500 CEOs,

82% of state legislative bodies,

80% of federal courts, and

77% of Congress.*

In light of the progress, White people like to attribute to the Freedom Movement, federal and state decision-making bodies are still predominantly held by White people.

Critical bills like The Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Education Amendments of 1972 were passed from these decision-making bodies.

🤓 Both the 1964 and 1972 legislations are broken up into Titles. Each title names a different public activity (employment, housing, voting, education) and then says it’s illegal to discriminate in this area based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin (and later sexual orientation and gender identity).

We’re still feeling the effects of these decisions in Supreme Court decisions like Bostock v Clayton County (2020) in Title VII (employment) claims & In the appellate courts with Gloucester County School Board v Grimm (2021) and in Title IX (education) claims in Soule v. Connecticut or Hecox v. Little.*

(*Meaning, it could go to the Supreme Court next (if they decided to hear it))

Notably, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed after an infamous seventy-five-day filibuster and tremendous opposition from Southern Republicans and Democrats.

Two months after Johnson signed the bill, Republican strategists for the presidential election that November tried to get Black people to stay at home on election day “because we can’t get them to vote for us.”*

(*Franklin, B. (1694, September 25) GOP Halts Plea to Negro Voters. NYTimes. Pg. 15 Retrieved from TimesMachine.NYTimes. com)

Considering this conversation into 2021: most states to introduce voting rights restrictions since the 2020 election are Republican strongholds these past two presidential elections (MT, IA, KS, KY, AR, TX, FL). Georgia and Arizona, historically red states, also introduced restrictions.

Voting rights advocates aren’t making huge assumptions when they claim that state legislatures may have motives based on race.

The Supreme Court—already a disproportionately white institution— is in the process of creating bad law as they refuse to address race directly while simultaneously making it harder to hear racial discrimination cases.

Yes, in 2021, White Americans largely dictate the terms of racial liberation. Yet what happens when White people become a (numerically) racial minority within the next 20 years?

Again, the three most common pillars of CRT (the academic container) are:

Racism is commonplace. Racism happens every day.

White people dictate the terms of racial liberation (re interest convergence).

Race is socially constructed.

Let’s unpack each point. One at a time.

Like capitalism, like gender, like borders: race is socially constructed.

Money has no value until we give it (and reinforce its) value.

Gender has no meaning until we are taught (and reinforce its) stereotypes.

Borders have no value until Google Maps tell us, and then we reinforce its boundary.

Socially constructed concepts change with a culture over time.

We can understand how generations and cultures before us understood and interacted—however differently—with social tools and concepts still in use today. But we know they're different because they’re socially constructed.

Like clothing: High heels were invented to help keep men’s feet in stirrups.

Like time: Since 1918, every year, we have changed our concept of time-itself during daylight savings time.

As sociology teaches us, our social systems change depending on a culture's mores, values, and traditions.

Race, being socially constructed, is no different.

Remember what beloved founding father Benjamin Franklin said when Germans started immigrating to the US:

“[I]n Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans

also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased…But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

-Ben Franklin

(Ol’ Ben was conflating culture for skin color.)

The future of race is largely unknown, except that White people will become a numerically racial minority class within the next twenty-five-ish years.

The race of people who hold the majority of power— be it in the board room or the Congressional chambers—will more than likely change within many of our lifetimes. This change completely upends the notion of interest convergence: that White people will indefinitely dictate the terms of racial liberation.

The social construction of race complicates the claims of Woke Culture that White people can and will always be racist and in a fragile state. Race is a construct: we don’t know what the next decade brings.

When the Left holds the notion that racism is prejudice plus power, then the act of racism has the potential to transfer from White people to people of another race.

However, currently, many White people— on the Left and Right—are actively gatekeeping who and how we talk about race and racism.

If we don’t talk about it, nothing changes

Borne of Critical Studies, Woke Culture has weaponized the contradiction that social identities (race, (dis)ability, gender, sexuality, etc.) have fixed and unchangeable traits.

There’s a cognitive dissonance in Woke Culture that race is socially constructed—a pliable social status—yet it also holds a fixed/innate/immutable caveat around White superiority and permanency: White people will always be racist. White supremacy will never go away.

If White people will always be racist, what’s the incentive to achieve the unachievable?*

(*Insert Albert Einstein quote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”)

Is it to perform “the work” around other White people and People of Color so we can feel like the “good White?”

The concept of “our work is never done” mirrors the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and the insistence that NonProfits feed into the problem to stay relevant. It’s hard to imagine this feels affirming to folks of Color.

In Summer 2021, many of the anti-CRT bills taken up by state legislatures were about removing language around “inherently racist” or “inherently superior” from public school curricula.

These clauses are perhaps the only critically helpful parts of the bills.

However, Republicans, much like CRT, went too far in their theory of change by shooting itself in the foot.

Republicans attempted the exact opposite of CRT—and in some cases succeeded—to eliminate even the smallest chatter of race, racism, and power dynamics.

(*As for why this happened, check out the section on Why White People Are Hurting)

CRT provides the container to have conversations that have the greatest potential to support White people in the future (not to mention today). Let alone to understand power dynamics, race, and racism today. To build empathy and compassion…

It seems misguided to want any children to grow up racially illiterate.

Yes, there are problems with CRT. But a few weak parts don’t challenge the structural integrity of the whole.

We just threw the baby out with the bathwater on this one.

One of the most common spaces where race is discussed happens today in “Safe(r)” or “Brave(r)” Spaces.

These spaces can pop up anywhere.

From community centers to board rooms, Safe(r) or Brave(r) Spaces serve to support cross-cultural dialogues. With the hope that (almost) everyone will share openly and authentically.

Often these spaces prioritize the voices and experiences of People of Color, LGBTQ people, disabled people, and people with a non-normative identity.

The logic typically is that White, straight, cisgender, or men have had the mic for centuries. Now it’s time to sit in the audience and listen, internalize the message, and take action.

Before the conversation even gets underway, a White person—seeking to position themselves as “The Good White”—says something like this:

“White comfort + white tears = weapons of mass destruction. We whites should never be allowed to sit in comfort, ever again. We must do ALL the work. We must lift up PoC, for no reason than it must be done. Not for back slaps, not for accolades. Proper allies work in silence, and expect nothing. Whites must atone, and atonement entails deep discomfort 24/7” (This is taken from a real social media post on LinkedIn)

Suddenly White people try to set up a hierarchy of Woke allyship. Some may start clapping their hands or nodding their heads. The silent White people are immediately suspect.

The key problem with silencing, punishing, and shaming rhetoric is simple: Science says that’s not the best way to learn and retain information, long term.

First, we learn better when we’re in active dialogue. Not when we’re being lectured. When we can seek clarity. When we can offer our perspective. Trial and error.

Second, we learn better when uncertain, not when we are continually stressed.* Emotional states connected to fear and stress negatively impact our learning and memorizing ability.

Sure, a little stress comes with trial and error. But, humans actively seek reward and pleasure. Too much stress and we can check out.

Lastly, our bodies actively store experiences of sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust in our long-term memory banks to avoid them later.* Being pleasure and reward seekers,* our bodies prioritize remembering what situations to avoid.

Suppose we’re made to sit in silence to listen to the Critical Studies theory. There’s nothing people can do to stop being racist/heteronormative/cisnormative/misogynist. In that case, we will avoid that conversation as much as we can if it comes up again.

Safe(r) and Brave(r) spaces are made for cross-cultural dialogues and community building. If people don’t want dialogue and just want to vent (all of which can be healthy in moderation), Healing Spaces for any identity are perfect for this.*

As humans, we learn best when we are curious and have the container to try and fail without punishment. We can have positive knowledge retention or identity retaliation, but we can’t have both.

(*”Healing spaces” may be a newer concept for folks. Check out what the Appalachian State University did to support their Students of Color)

In Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion offices and Racial Equity trainings across the country, there’s a lot of work around “de-centering Whiteness.”

The general consensus around uncentering Whiteness is that all we’ve ever known in the US is the White perspective. We need to gather as many perspectives outside of Whiteness and learn from them.

While this, again, doesn’t allow White people to share their current perceptions.

As Robin DiAngelo puts it:

“I don’t care where [White people] are at [when I start a training]…[O]ther than the degree that I need them to move…There’s a couple of strategies I use. One of them is, I don’t open the floor for questions or comments until I’m done. I’m not going to fight my way through it. And I tell people, “If I do a good job at it, you will not be comfortable.”

(*Weapon of Choice Podcast. (2018, July 13). We need to talk about white people featuring Robin DiAngelo. Soundcloud. com)

As a social worker, this goes against a core principle we hold:

to meet people where they’re at, not where we want them to be.

In social work, we call this “self-determination.”

You are in charge of identifying and clarifying your goals. Unless you are actively harming another person through this identification or clarification, The Spillway will be there to back you up.

Unfortunately, the use of “de-centering” has been, for many trainers and educators, a code for “removal.” A removal of Whiteness.

In spaces like Safe(r) and Brave(r) Spaces where vulnerability and honesty are prioritized, groups and individuals should interrogate White reactions to race and racism when they happen. Not blow past them or dismiss them.

White people can quickly get really defensive in the conversations about race and racism.

Does it stop the conversation you have in its tracks? Yes and no, conversations are two-way.

If one person can’t listen or understand another person, or worse: is silenced, it’s less of a conversation and more of a monologue.

With defense mechanisms, we must give them space to unpack themselves to understand better the presumed threat which elicited such a response.

Instead, these defense or guilt mechanisms are often labeled as “white fragility” and dismissed, tossed aside, and defined as an unwelcome behavior within ‘the work.’

Fragility comes from a place of trauma. Fragility manifests in sensitivity, unfamiliarity, (in)experience, socialization, stimuli, and fear of the beholder.

Yet this relay sport of violence and hurt continues around the room, a microcosm of the larger cultural dialogue.

De-centering Whiteness should be about adding more—not eliminating—voices to the conversation. We don’t need to have conversations about race and racism with the same amount of voices. We need to have them with more voices.

It’s not about redistributing the pie, so everyone gets a small piece. It’s about getting a whole new *larger* pan, so we’re not fighting over slivers of equity.

Critical Race Theory has created a lot of frustrations for White people. But, if we can open ourselves to the possibility: CRT has also been a tremendous intellectual and actionable gift for White people.

CRT builds a container to have critical conversations about race.

CRT can and must do more to address the shifting power dynamics of our future.

CRT mustn’t go away. We need it for our future. It’s helped us get to this moment.

As The Spillway was founded on social work principles, we believe it is critical to meet people where they are at. We use and mirror the language of the population we are serving. We try to gain a specific understanding of what harm we’re being asked — if at all— to support White people with. Often, that means leaving ourselves open in an attempt to understand hurts that we don’t understand or experience as hurts.

Any two White people may not have the same racial experiences. Our sexualities, genders, abilities, religions immigration status (and more!) can inform how we experience our Whiteness.

Currently, some White people are shortsightedly trying to avoid the conversation altogether by silencing an exceptional educational and practical tool to understand better the shifting power dynamics in our country.

Let’s build a container where we can hold our frustrations in a healthy and productive way.

Some White people are trying to use CRT to create unsustainable and punishing long-term conversations about race, ignoring some glaring issues that need to be addressed.

Let’s build a container where we can hold our frustrations in a healthy and productive way.

Just because there are some problems with the current understandings of CRT doesn’t mean all of it is problematic.

Ultimately, most White people haven’t sought support around their hurts for centuries. Now, this hurt has turned into a callus that feels like the expected standard operating procedure for life within most White people.

The CRT we (re)build together can help us talk about it.

According to Candid’s Foundation Directory Online, 111.58 billion dollars have been granted by foundations, funds, and trusts for race-related work in the fields of education, health, human rights, and social rights between 2003 and 2021. Most of the time, foundational giving goes on to power the non-profit and grassroots sectors in tandem with charitable giving and federal dollars.

Of this 111.58 billion dollars, 557 million has been designated for people of European descent.

To put this into perspective, if you eliminated virtually all of the foundational giving for people of European descent in education, health, human rights, and social rights over the past twenty years, 99.3% of the funding would remain. Only 0.669% of the total amount given to address the racial impacts within education, health, human rights, and social rights has been granted to support white populations.

This percent exists in sharp contrast to the 49.3% earmarked for African American and Black populations, 22.7% for Native populations, 22% for Latino populations, and 4.6% for Asian populations.

Importantly, these figures aren’t exclusively about advancing racial justice or equity. It’s merely about race-specific work.


Exploring the allocation of philanthropy’s response to race and racial justice, the Philanthropic Institute for Racial Equity released a detailed analysis of the past five years of funding in the Fall of 2021.

This report explicitly removed White people supporting White people from the study altogether.

As the data describes, the removal more than likely happened because there wasn’t enough data on White groups organizing with other White people.*

(*Earlier in December 2021, The Spillway reached out to the Philanthropic Institute for Racial Equity to confirm numbers around White people supporting White people. When we get a response we’ll update the page! Update Feb 2022: still no response.)

Yet, by removing White people from the analysis, White people become even more absent from the conversation of racial justice and equity. As if race and racism don’t severely impact us as well.

How is racial justice not also about healing the historical and intergenerational trauma we hold as White people? Is this not both harm reduction and prevention?

The report from the Philanthropic Institute for Racial Equity merely exemplifies the larger social problem of how shame is deeply embedded in how race and racism in the US can be discussed:

We, as White people, don’t have a problem; we are the problem.*

To be clear, grants or funding to support White people should not be redistributed from the already paltry amounts given to address the racial justice and equity movements.

Let’s not redistribute the same pie; we need a larger pie tin.

This isn't about centering Whiteness in funding. It's about ensuring that Whiteness is in dialogue.

When we’re not in conversation with ourselves or others, we’re not learning.

We’re not changing.

We’re not healing.

We have to start funding our healing.

Interestingly, recent studies from The University of Pennsylvania and Harvard have found that diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings don’t change the behavior of (either) men or White people, specifically.

In general, the one-size-fits-all model and unconscious bias trainings don’t work consistently and increase hostility.

Diversity training, as a practice, need to be reconfigured from their handout, lecture, and group discussion format. This format was popularized by HR departments during the 1960s in response to the Freedom and liberation movements.

But is there anything to learn?

Often, trainings are about sharing or discussing new information.

In this age of technology and the prolific events of the 2020 Uprising and the 2021 Insurrection, HR departments would be hard-pressed to find a person who didn’t have thoughts about race and racism.

And if Conspiratorial Culture and Woke Culture have taught us anything, collectively:

facts don’t matter.

Feelings and fear do.

This is where we find our way back to the three primary paths for White people:

White saviorism/shame,

color-blind fundamentalism, or

White supremacy.

Because feelings and fear matter so much to the vast spectrum of White people, there needs to be a place where White people can work through these feelings, free of judgment.

At The Spillway, we believe our healing is possible.

As White people become a racial minority in the US*, people invested in liberatory futures must make choices to address this hurt before it compresses even further.

We haven’t always made the healthiest choices when we’ve had decision-making power. And we’re seeing some White people becoming violent: terrified at the thought of losing that power.

Remember the oft-quoted Audre Lorde charge:

“For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Compassion

empathy

patience

healing

are not tools our culture traditionally ascribes to Whiteness.

This is not to say that White people, acting individually or in pockets, cannot be compassionate, empathetic, or invested in healing our trauma. Rather…

It’s difficult to name a stereotype or common occurrence within most White people that are rooted in compassion, empathy, patience, or healing; among White men especially.

Some White people may have a different perspective.

Still, a growing body of research shows that White people in America aren’t received or perceived—by ourselves and others—with compassion and empathy.

Let’s change that.

Intrapersonally, White people don’t often see movement leaders, authors, or public intellectuals looking to heal White intergenerational trauma.

At the beginning of December 2021, there were only seven results in all Google for “White intergenerational trauma.” And nearly all of them pointed back to Resmaa Menakem (who coined the term).

Suppose there was one place to immediately profit off a new societal touchstone (to appear culturally relevant). In that case, it’d be academia struggling to make itself relevant.

Currently, enrollments are plummeting, and employers don’t want to pay people for advanced degrees.*

Perhaps the closest we got was a flashpoint in the late '90s/early ‘00s when universities began flirting with the construction of departments on White Studies.*

(*To be clear: This is about White people studying/talking/thinking about White people. To name a few: bell hooks, Toby Ganley, David Roediger, Toby Ganley, and especially James Baldwin have written tremendous bodies of literature on the study of Whiteness as a survival tactic for people who are Black in the US.)

This came in response to the expansion of Critical Studies.

These departments quickly changed the course of study of Whiteness by the middle of the decade.

White studies became almost exclusively about anti-racism, power, and CRT.

White studies morphed into studying White people in connection to people of different races rather than White people's norms, values, and traditions. And this isn’t an either/or conversation. The critical problem here is that Whiteness studies only became about studying racism as if that’s all White people are/will ever amount to.

Which, according to Critical Studies, is correct. So universities were fine in rebranding White Studies as anti-racism work.

By 2012, even CNN asked, "Has ‘Whiteness studies’ run its course at colleges?”

White shame has actively stopped White people from studying White people as anything more than racist Energizer Bunnies.

Ironically, that this has happened in one of the only spaces where the sole purpose of the field (education) is to study and think about the world around us.Item description

Students, faculty, and staff are often researching worlds different from their own in academic and institutional research.

Access to research funding and tools has been elaborately hidden behind the walls of ivory towers. Historically, this has meant that the populations excluded from these walls have experienced the brunt of research.

Vine Deloria Jr., Laura Nader, and Kim TallBear each talk about, in TallBear’s words, the need to “research up.” This call to “research up” comes from the need to:

Ensure that a personal or communal experience is articulated through a first-person narrative.

Diminish outgroup bias in reporting.

Stop exploiting another person’s experience for personal gain.

Or, to put this in the proverb popularized in the West by Chinua Achebe, “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

We need lions and hunters to tell their own stories.

As White people, by not researching and exploring White people's unique needs, histories, and futures, we do ourselves a tremendous disservice.

Right now, some of the most prominent voices talking about/to White people are either

White folks who are expanding the shame narrative from Critical Studies

OR

White people who believe ignoring social problems makes them go away.

As we ostracize ourselves, we become more apt to articulate what separates us rather than unites us.

This separation causes more hurt.

The Spillway seeks to bridge that divide by finding out our commonalities without shame or supremacy.

Interpersonally, the field of social justice and anti-racism work has primarily focused on reactive services to Whiteness and White supremacy.

Yet, anti-racist trauma-informed practice isn’t doing nearly anything by way of preventative work.

We currently perform prevention when a White person is demanded to “check [their] privilege.”

We perform prevention through humiliation and ostracism.

Affinity groups happen, yes. But often, these occur in places of work where vulnerability and honesty could cost people their livelihoods.

It’s almost as if there’s some Woke Industrial Complex that profits off of making bandaids rather than translating trauma-informed care onto White intergenerational trauma.

When mapping this conversation onto other social problems:

Yes, it is paramount to have life-saving and reactive support ready to support people who are in overdose.

And: Organizations like Prevention Point, The National Harm Reduction Coalition, and SAFEProject work to provide preventative education, training, advocacy, and community building to reduce the harm on individuals, families, and communities when people overdose. They do this work in addition to also trying to prevent future overdoses.

Yes, it is critical to have harm-reduction strategies and reactive support services for femmes, women, people who are gender nonconforming, nonbinary or transgender, and families experiencing abuse or intimate partner violence.

And: Organizations like Breakthrough, Masculinity Action Project, The ManKind Project, or Dudefluencer target preventive works to explore and unpack toxic masculinity.

The paradox of being White in the US today is knowing we have the capacity to be the perpetrator and the victim of racism.

We must be proactive and reactive to heal our hurts and interrupt our ability to harm.

We need to build independently—yet historically informed—from our current models of how race and racism unfold in contemporary US culture.

People who are hurting continue to hurt other people.

For centuries, White people have been hurting themselves, each other, and others, creating deeply ingrained wounds that can feel indefinite and irreversible.

There’s clarity in understanding that we are all negatively impacted by race.

In believing we can author our own unknown future as White people, we should heed Michaela Coel’s advice to writers.

“In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to, in turn, feel the need to be constantly visible.

For visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success.

Do not be afraid to disappear, from it, from us, for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.”

Michaela Coel

Let’s slow down.

Let’s listen to our bodies.

Let’s reengage with the world in a way that empathy, compassion, patience, and understanding inform and lead our work.

Let’s redefine Whiteness to be a positive representation of White people full of self-reflection and pro-social behavior.

Being ostracized can be difficult, yet we should hold and know that we are not alone in this experience.

Nor is this the end of our conversation of Whiteness as White people.

At The Spillway, we believe that every White person holds the paradox of being capable of being a perpetrator and a victim at the same time.

How we heal this paradox today will help inform our tomorrow.

Welcome to The Spillway.