White Supremacy Culture: A Personal Journey towards Awareness and Accountability
by Ashley Gregory, LMFT
As a queer-identified, able-bodied and cisgendered woman with class and race privilege, I strive to prioritize naming how social locations shape the ways we move and show up in our lives. I believe those of us with privilege(s) are presented with opportunities to examine our values and actions with honesty, humility and openness. My hope with this imperfect piece is to enliven anti-racist study and exploration. Focusing on racial formation and white supremacy culture in this writing is intentional, however, is not meant to downplay or discount the role of intersecting categories of gender, sexual orientation, ability, nationality/immigration status, age, class or religion. In upcoming pieces, I will discuss interlocking systems of privilege and oppression, the origins of identity politics and delve deeper into white supremacy culture.
Defining Terms
White supremacy culture is the idea (ideology) that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions.
White supremacy culture is an artificial, historically constructed culture which expresses, justifies and binds together the United States white supremacy system. It is the glue that binds together white-controlled institutions into systems and white-controlled systems into the global white supremacy system. [from Sharon Martinas and the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop] (1)
Unearthing My Privilege
I didn’t grow up wanting to be a psychotherapist. As far back as I can remember, I’ve loved dinosaurs. The movie Jurassic Park came out in 1993, but I am almost positive I knew the word “paleontologist” before then. I remember sitting in a ditch, filling a small plastic tube--the ones used to hold a single rose--with dirt. I grew up going to museums, zoos and libraries. I saw people who looked like me, white and sometimes women, in positions of authority, which gave me a sense of choice and possibility. My life reflected the race, class, citizenship and gender-conforming privileges of my family, privileges with violent histories.
My Unspoken Questions About Privilege
As a child, messages about cultural acceptance were confusing at best. My Southern California elementary school had a “Multicultural Day” every year where we learned about celebrations and food from around the world. At the same time, I didn’t understand why people around me were so angry when families came to the United States from Mexico. Many of my classmates were from Mexico and Latin America. There were palpable rifts in the process of making friends. There were also moments of possibility. I remember proudly singing songs in Spanish, dressed up as a fairy in a musical production of “Hansel and Gretel.” Something changed in my fourth grade year when suddenly we weren’t speaking Spanish anymore at school. Instead, we focused on glorifying the genocidal California Mission system. Nationalism, racism and xenophobia prevailed and the rift became an abyss. As I look back, there were moments when a part of me felt uneasy and had questions about the messages I heard from the media, from family members and at school about my classmates and their families, yet I wasn’t even sure how to form the words.
Getting Uncomfortable Answers About White Supremacy Culture
Those gut-wrenching “something is wrong here” sensations continued, building up as my home life became increasingly scary and unpredictable. Ultimately, my privilege gave me the opportunity to understand my privilege. The private high school I went to effectively prepared me to attend a state college. My intention was to become a wildlife biologist. Barely a semester into college, that plan began to unravel. Too many questions went unanswered. My first sociology class was like a gateway drug. I needed to understand and Ethnic Studies made the most sense of the world. Native American Studies, Ethnic Studies including Black, Latinx and Asian-American Studies and Women’s Studies arose out of demands for higher education to prioritize the knowledge and experiences within these communities. What I learned was shocking, disorienting and powerful. Coming to terms with having been lied to all your life is overwhelming. Where to direct all the anger, sadness and guilt? Part of my answer was--and is-- to stay committed to understanding, reflecting and acting.
Why Race was Invented
In their pivotal text Racial Formation in the United States, Omi and Winant stress that “the emergence of a modern conception of race does not occur until the rise of Europe and the arrival of Europeans in the Americas” (2, p.61). When power-hungry European businessmen came into contact with indigenous civilizations, they found a way to justify mass murder by religious doctrine. Later, when conditions in the United States changed, “European colonial powers established “white” as a legal concept in 1676 after Bacon’s Rebellion, during which indentured servants of European and African descent united against the colonial elite” (3, p.125). Then the wealthy European settler-colonialists gave “white” servants privileges, like land, access to guns and the ability to form militias, effectively squashing the possibility of overthrowing them. Laws made by the wealthy for the wealthy changed the once shared conditions of people from different geographic locations (4). Hence, race is an ever-changing category, created to maintain wealth and power for social, political and economic purposes, enshrined in every aspect of society.
Understanding The Smog of Cultural Racism
As Beverly Daniel Tatum explains in her book Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (5), “cultural racism” is a part of our collective experience because it is “like smog in the air.” This smog is made up of “the cultural images and messages that affirm the assumed superiority of Whites and the assumed inferiority of people of color” (p.6). Dr. Daniel Tatum offers countless examples of the ways in which these unspoken and direct messages, from very early in life, shape identity development. In other words, the smog of cultural racism creates the conditions of how we understand ourselves and one another.
Taking it Personal: Reflections to Consider
How have you noticed the social/political/economic categories of race shift in your lifetime?
What does the “smog” represent to you?
How does the smog of cultural racism show up in your life?
What does it mean to be aware of white supremacy culture?
There are no swift solutions to doing the work of acknowledging privilege. It is an engaged process of openness to unknown and uncomfortable experiences. Over and over, mistakes will be made. What do you need to keep going?
In my client-centered work, I strive to maintain an awareness and respect for personal experiences and intersectional identities. I believe healing happens in powerful community action and when we invite ourselves to be fully honest and aware.
~ Ashley
For more resources and ideas on where to begin/continue:
White Awake
White Awake is an online platform and nonprofit organization focused on popular education for people who are classified as “white”. We believe this is important because white people are socialized, and awarded limited types of privilege, to align ourselves with the capitalist, ruling class at everybody’s expense. White Awake addresses the particularities of white racial socialization with tools and resources that prioritizes spiritual practice, emotional process, compassion, and curiosity alongside historical analysis and intellectual rigor.
https://whiteawake.org
Catalyst ProjectCatalyst Project helps to build powerful multiracial movements that can win collective liberation. In the service of this vision, we organize, train and mentor white people to take collective action to end racism, war and empire, and to support efforts to build power in working-class communities of color.
https://collectiveliberation.org
Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)SURJ’s role as part of a multi-racial movement is to undermine white support for white supremacy and to help build a racially-just society. That work cannot be done in isolation from or disconnected from the powerful leadership of communities of color. It is one part of a multi-racial, cross-class movement centering the leadership of people of color. Therefore, SURJ believes in resourcing organizing led by people of color, and maintaining strong accountability relationships with organizers and communities of color as a central part of our theory of change.
https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org
*The film 13th on Netflix by Ava DuVernay: explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States;" it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. (https://www.avaduvernay.com/13th/)
*Support: The Sogorea Te Land Trust is an urban Indigenous women-led community organization that facilitates the return of Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands in the San Francisco Bay Area to Indigenous stewardship. Sogorea Te creates opportunities for all people living in Ohlone territory to work together to re-envision the Bay Area community and what it means to live on Ohlone land. Guided by the belief that land is the foundation that can bring us together, Sogorea Te calls on us all to heal from the legacies of colonialism and genocide, to remember different ways of living, and to do the work that our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do. https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/
Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960’s to the 1990’s. Michael Omi and Howard Winant.(1994)
Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change. Cynthia Kaufman. (2003)
What is White Supremacy? By Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez
http://www.pittsburghartscouncil.org/storage/documents/ProfDev/what-is-white-supremacy.pdf
Beverly Daniel Tatum. Why Are All the White Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And other Conversations About Race. (1997)
