01/07/2023
๐๐ก๐ข๐ญ๐ ๐๐จ๐ฆ๐๐ง: ๐๐ฏ๐๐ซ๐ฒ๐ญ๐ก๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐จ๐ฎ ๐๐ฅ๐ซ๐๐๐๐ฒ ๐๐ง๐จ๐ฐ ๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ซ ๐๐ฐ๐ง ๐๐๐๐ข๐ฌ๐ฆ ๐๐ง๐ ๐๐จ๐ฐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐จ ๐๐๐ญ๐ญ๐๐ซ...
An eye opening book that makes us aware of our programmed racism, white supremacy and white feminism.
A must read to save humanity.
Thank you Regina Jackson and Saira Rao.
Awareness is the first step, then speak up, don't reside in silence, become an accomplice of anti-racism!
Highlights as food for thought from the book:
White women:
You are expected to be perfect. To be perfect you are supposed to be nice. To be nice you must stay silent.
You see oppression strictly through a gender lens. You understand how you are at a disadvantage as a result of misogyny, but you refuse to recognize your white skin privilege.
By ignoring your white privilege, you ignore your white power. When you ignore your white power, you uphold white supremacy.
Colorblindness is a form of racism: if you donโt see color, you donโt see white power and if you donโt see your white power, you donโt see your racism. If you donโt see your racism, you cannot dismantle it. If you cannot dismantle it, you are actively supporting it.
Until and unless your feminism includes a racial analysis, none of us will ever be free of white supremacy and patriarchy.
White feminism is an attempt to regain power from the patriarchy. You act like white men. You set yourself apart as better. You are entitled to come first. You compete with each other. You exert your entitlement over each other, you establish a pecking order and then you exert it collectively over indigenous, brown and black women.
In schools, being white is the norm, the default, everyone else is the other.
Being shocked by white violence is white privilege. Black, indigenous and brown people are not shocked by white violence, they live with white violence every day.
The worlds are different for white people and people of color.
Instead: โI understand our violent white supremacist past and present and how we, white people, are responsible for it and benefit from it. Until and unless we white people dismantle white supremacy, I understand how there can be no unityโ.
White supremacy is destroying all of humanity and the earth.
Our pain is a downer, is pessimisticโฆ
It has never been safe for black people in this country.
The trauma of white culture: you need to be perfect, an objectively impossible task, trying for something over and over again that is unattainable. You feel like a perpetual failure, that is trauma.
you need to be nice, which leads to silence. You are silent when you are abused by men by each other, when you abuse us.
White supremacy culture => Perfectionism => unattainable => trauma => feel bad about yourself => silence
Self-care, self-improvement:
You are responsible for your own happiness, this is the toxic positivity of white wellness.
A positive attitude cannot end oppression.
White wellness ideology does not heal the trauma of white supremacy culture.
It replaces it with toxic individualism within the confines of the system. It promotes elitist, entitled wellness.
I can get more, I can do more, I can be more, me me me...
White wellness doesnโt promote wellness beyond self.
White wellness isnโt concerned with systemic, communal wellness: eradicating poverty, building adequate housing, establishing free health care, ending hunger, abolishing injustice.
Dismantling your racism isnโt about learning something new. Its about unlearning that which you know deeply. You cannot escape the fact that you have been programmed to be racist.
Volunteering and donating to causes does not absolve you from being racist.
White supremacy is a construct invented to allow for the oppression of others.
Your whiteness gives you advantages, privileges that black indigenous and brown people do not enjoy.
Your whiteness is preventing you form being in authentic community with other people.
Your whiteness denies our humanity and, in turn, prevents you from being fully human yourself.
You are consumed by your own shame rather than being consumed with the hard work of examining your racism.
The change is awareness. Awareness of your whiteness, awareness of your silence.
This awareness enables you to start being less afraid of confronting your truth about your complicity in white supremacy racism and xenophobia.
There is serious systemic racism still at play in this country.
It is time for every white person to look into the mirror, recognize the ways they uphold centuries of hate, and make a commitment to themselves to just stop causing other people pain and suffering because of the color of their skin.
Look inside, tell the truth, and commit to change. Change only happens when staying the same is too uncomfortable to bear and is, therefore, no longer an option.
This is work that requires you to be intentional about what you value in your life, to look in the mirror every day and decide to be an accomplice to anti-racism.
White women are socialized to be the peacekeepers and to diffuse tension. White silence is violence.
Your white entitlement is so normalized , it is often difficult to recognize the white supremacy within your everyday actions.
White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better
