What is whiteness doing to us all?

Hi - I’m Bridget G Barnicle.  I am a white, cisgender, American woman in a heterosexual marriage. I generally go by the pronouns she/her although I will  happily be referred to by any pronoun as I think pronouns suck.  I think gender sucks.  As a woman, I think gender has sucked for me.  So I sure am happy that so many people - especially young people right now -  are working on blowing gender up.  I love to see them just being themselves with no hesitancy and proudly existing out loud outside of any male/female binary and straight norm.  And let’s be clear, if they are white, they can feel pretty safe to do that.  

They don’t feel safe.  I’m not saying that.  I’m saying that even if they belong to another marginalized identity they feel pretty safe, by comparison to anyone whose skin is black.  No one should ever do this, but if you lined up a group of people who all belong to at least one historically marginalized identity and let a bunch of white people say anything on their minds over a long period of time, a lot of groups would be the recipients of hate, but the ones who were black - and especially those who also belonged to other groups that are often marginalized -  the black people would experience the most.  Now don’t start getting all perfectionistic on me and start tearing down my argument.  It’s just an idea.  But I’m not the only one who thinks it.  I just don’t find that a lot of white people want to talk about that.  White women don’t want to talk about how white Americans - about how they themselves -  think about and talk to and treat people with black skin.  Or do they?  That question is why I’m here. 

I have a practice in Portland, Oregon called Resolve Therapy.  We help people feel better by caring about them while they face all the hard truths of their lives.  People, with all their unhealthy behaviors, are still wired to love and to grow.  I hold this truth at the center while I get to know my clients.  When they are known and accepted, by me and by themselves, they heal - as much as they can - from whatever has been hurting them. 

In my therapy practice I often talk about therapy as work.  And it is.  I will say to my clients things like “you have worked so hard to get to this place where you can speak up for what you need.”  My clients will say things like, “I know that this is going to be hard work every week when I show up, but it is the kind of work I need.”  

For anyone who has been in therapy for a significant amount of time, they now know important things about themselves that they probably were not taught by their family members, or in school or by the culture they live in.  I know this because I have never had a client who learned in their youth that they are OK just as they are, and was taught how to love and take good care of themselves and others.   

People come to therapy to learn who and how they are.  And to get there, they have to tell the truth and let themselves feel things.  

But there is something happening with my clients that I need to talk about.  My clients are mostly white women.  We can explore why that is another time, but it’s the case.  So when I talk to those women, I find that there is an anxiety in them that remains, even when we have talked about all the childhood trauma, the adult trauma, the undiagnosed adhd or other neurodivergence that caused them to act in ways that felt wrong or broken.  

This anxiety is not explainable and it is a flavor of anxiety that I don’t see in my clients of color.  And I think it is because there is a difference in what we are talking about.  

Of course, you might imagine that with my clients of color we are talking about how to survive the stressors of normal life - just like my white clients - PLUS we are talking about how to survive the stressors of racism.  I tell a lot of my friends that I get to hear a lot of emotional truth.  So here is some truth -  there is racism, it is relentless and it is painful.  For all my clients of color. 

When I toggle back to the white clients, they are fretting a lot.  Healing from real pain and rejection and cruelty of their own, but fretting in ways that are different.  It’s like the things they are upset about don’t ring true as the root causes of their upset.  I can’t explain it all, but I can tell you about something that has happened that makes me very curious.  

When I hear about their discomfort, I have wondered if I see an underlying cause that they don’t see.  I have taken to talking with my white women clients about the culture of whiteness that they have always lived in.  A culture that, more and more, I see as a cult.  A chronically unsupportive cult.  With rules. 

I look to Tema Oken’s work about white culture to help us discuss it.  Oken says that white culture holds itself and its ways as the best or most supreme ways, and that it values certain things over other things.  It says you have to be perfect to be valuable, I tell them.  And they nod, reflecting on their own tortured search for perfection.  It says that things aren’t true unless someone with power wrote it down or measured it, and they nod, reflecting on the times they have said that something bothered them at work or in a relationship and told that they were overreacting.  That their felt experience was not proof.   Then I turn to Sonya Renee Taylor’s work, The Body is Not an Apology.  And I tell them this:  All this around us, everything we are doing here right now would not be happening if the people who lived on this land were not tricked and killed for this land to become America. All the wealth this rich country enjoys  - that we enjoy today - would not be here if our forebears had not built the richest economy in history by enslaving millions of humans to work for free, whipping them, raping them, taking their children,  putting human beings in steel collars and murdering them at will, so that we could build the generational wealth that has built us into a nation run by white, male billionaires today. 

This thing we are doing here, very much like a cult, rests on a belief that is simple:  

There are good bodies and bad bodies.  

We have to keep believing that.  All of us.  Because if we all start to believe that all bodies are good, then we have to admit that the ways that all our systems still treat black people like they are lesser beings than white people, is very simply designed to keep white people - like us -  never having to share much power at all.  Then what is happening here is tragic and wrong and cruel beyond comprehension.  It is almost too painful to look at.  Almost.  

We white women buy the good body/bad body idea in one very common way - white women are supposed to be so skinny that we disappear.  Because if they keep us starving, if they tell us that our bodies are bad if they are not starving - we won’t pay attention to what we know.  That the truth of how bad things are for Black, Indigenous, People of Color, especially ones that are trans or disabled, is much much worse than we want to admit.  And we are doing very little about it.  That awareness is living just below our consciousness.  And the way we are still doing very little to change it, is making many of us very very anxious.  

You are the closest to the ones with the power - the white men - so you actually hold an enormous amount of power and awareness of the truth.  And you have been taught all of your life - by parents and teachers and neighbors and tv and movies - that you are supposed to ignore it.  To shut up about it.  And you do.  

Because while the truth will set you free, it is a kind of free that scares you.  That is unknown.  That might make your husband and your friends and your family and your coworkers and your neighbors mad if you talk about it.   A truth that will probably hurt before it sets you free.  A kind of freedom you are willing to forgo ever feeling to avoid the pain of looking at your place in whiteness.  

I tell them that like a dysfunctional family, whiteness is a chronically unsupportive environment.  Nobody who loves you wants you to starve!  And every time you say that your body is too fat or too old, you are feeding the white supremacy cult of good bodies and bad bodies.   You are upholding that system.  But I say, you don’t have to be in the cult forever.  You can love your body as it IS.  So, it’s all well and good to put a Black Lives Matter sign on your lawn, but starting today you can love your body as it is - and you can do THAT to dismantle racism.  

For white ladies, that is some revolutionary shit.  

I am telling you all this because every time I have walked this road with a white woman, she has shed some anxiety.  Right then and there.  I feel it.  She feels it.  And from there on in, we are talking truth. 

I am so grateful to so many racial justice activists for this awareness.  I owe it all to them.  Most of them are Black women.  Their hard-won wisdom and fortitude is here to teach us how to be good humans and as writer Layla Saad reminds us, to be Good Ancestors.  As activist Brittney Packnett Cunningham says in her podcast Undistracted, the roots of the tree are the fruits of the tree.  We are the fruits of the tree.  

White women are taught to be victims until we are violent.  But the Karen phenomenon lays it out for us.  We are actually incredibly powerful. And we are leaving much of our power for good on the table.  If we face the truth about whiteness we can find our place in building this multi-ethnic democracy that values all of us.  For all the mothers’ children.  

Our children don’t have to believe that they are better than other people.   And they don’t have to carry the burden of being perfect.  They can be good enough to be in the rainbow.  They can love and be loved.  

But they need us to know how to do it first.  

Join me on my podcast, Bound, where we will explore whiteness, what it’s doing to us and how to get free.