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Why are we just talking about racism? Why arenât we doing anything?
Itâs a criticism that we hear regularly in anti-racism workshops and racial justice conversations. On some occasions, participants have dropped out of Zoom trainings rather than join in the small group conversations that explore personal experiences with racism. It shows up on evaluations and in questions during workshops.
I understand the impatience among white people who want to begin to tackle the inequities, and racist policies and practices that are becoming more and more apparent to them. And I especially understand it among my friends of color who cannot fathom how white people could fail to see and respond to injustices that are right in front of them, day in and day out.
And I also know this: If white people like myself do not do the work of developing a racial justice practice that includes a consciousness about how our racism has been formed in us, our actions to alleviate racial injustice will bring the contamination of racism with them.
Iâve been thinking about this a lot as we enter this season of Lent and its practices of repentance, examination of conscience and soul searching. If you were formed in messages that whiteness is natural, superior, and normed, then you might find Lent to be a good time to explore a racial justice practice that is culturally humble and self-aware, and that seeks to mitigate the effects such an education has had on you.
For white people, such a practice of racial self-awareness must also acknowledge the harm that our formation can do to people of color without our even knowing it.
A black consultant I worked with put it this way: âWhen white people do their work, I am safer.â The corollary is this: when white people donât do their work, black people are less safe.
âWhat, then, is a way to understand whiteness in the United States, and the specific power (often of life or death) that is offered to its possessors against other people?â asks historian T.J. Tallie in an article on the blog site Nursing Clio. He finds the challenge of asymptomatic Covid to be an apt analogy for the latent threats to people of color that white people carry with them. The analogy also provides some insight into what it means to acknowledge and check that potential harm.
ï»żA painful lesson of the last two years has been that the potential of having asymptomatic Covid meant that we might risk causing someoneâs illness or death without actually realizing it. Tallie calls that threat asymptomatic lethality, and he applies it to a key challenge of racial understanding.
âRecognizing the asymptomatic lethality of whiteness, like the ostensibly âhealthyâ but asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier, pushes past claims of innocence and instead focuses on the daily, deadly potential that white people can bring in a society structured through supremacist violence,â Tallie writes. He was writing in the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, and the phone call that initiated the police response. He was also calling to mind the threat that white dog walker Amy Cooper made to black birdwatcher Christian Cooper, when in response to their disagreement she called police to report that a black man was threatening her. He points out that this falls within a long history of lynchings and race riots that were prompted by false threats to white womanhood or white safety.
At its most extreme, the power for white people to do black people harm is lethal. But there are many degrees of pain that I can cause by my ignorance of the threat I carry as a white person. This is where I can foster microaggression, prompt feelings of inferiority and shame among black and brown people, unconsciously exclude people, or create environments that I donât realize are hostile or unwelcoming, where I unwittingly reinforce a white norm. And the thing is, I as a white person can bring all of these harms to the work of racial justice, to the actions I think are helping to end racial inequity, if I am not aware of it.
But here the Covid analogy is also helpful. The awareness that the virus could be asymptomatic made it even more imperative to wear masks, take tests, keep social distance, wash hands, get vaccinated. It was not just to protect ourselves, but to protect others who were even more vulnerable to the disease. Developing an anti-racist practice, then, might be like developing an anti-Covid practice. Given that we might not always be aware of its presence, we might have to take extra precautions to acknowledge and mitigate against its potential harm.
And that is why for white people âtalking aboutâ and acknowledging our national and local and personal legacy of racism and privilege must accompany the âdoingâ of actions that promote racial justice. The Anti-Racism Commission workshops, the parish book studies and discussions, the national Sacred Ground curriculum, the Loving Presence Adaptive Leadership trainings, the personal conversations, and the painful explorations -- these are all essential to mitigating a real threat to black and brown lives.
White people have been formed in a culture that often makes this threat invisible to us, and if we are not vigilant, it can infect our well-intentioned and heart-felt actions for justice as well. Lent is a good time to bring this painful reality to the cross of Jesus, and to live into a practice that privileges and protects the lives of others.
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