Election 2020: The spiritual crisis of whiteness

Photo credit: Dina Litovsky

N. B. This post focuses on whiteness and is primarily intended to speak to other white folks about the work we need to do in our own communities. As a white person, however, I am aware of my limited perspective on this topic, and feedback is always welcome.

It’s been a week since Election Day — and damn, has it been a week. An emotional rollercoaster doesn’t even begin to cover it. Actually, now that I think about it, the 2020 election absolutely reminds me of the distinct terror of riding the legendary Cyclone at Coney Island, which was built in 1927 and is somehow still operating: at first it seems like a quaintly harmless enterprise, but as soon as it gets going you’re just praying for it to be over as quickly as possible because you’re terrified the entire thing is going to collapse.

Yep, sounds about right.

So, we just staggered off the roller coaster with a mild case of whiplash, and while we’re thrilled to miraculously still be alive, we also still feel slightly nauseous.

First of all, I’m here to say that whatever feelings you’re feeling right now, you’re allowed to have them. Period. If you feel like popping champagne, do it. If you feel like hiding under the covers, do it. If you feel like drinking champagne while hiding under the covers, do that.

While you’re at it, it’s also generally a good idea to give other people the space to have their own feels and be in their own process, especially if they are coming from a different positionality than you. I’ve noticed over the past few days that I’ve gotten a little prickly when I’m in the mood to celebrate and I encounter resistance from someone — even if I totally understand their reasoning. The beautiful thing is that each of us can honor our own experience AND allow other people to have their own experiences! Let’s say you just got off the roller coaster and you are feeling on top of the world. That’s great for you! And also, your friend who is barfing into a garbage can is probably not going to be able to give you a high five at this particular moment.

Personally, I have been vacillating between gleeful meme consumption about Trump’s downfall and rather more sobering thoughts about how much of a racist shitshow the U.S. continues to be. Or to be more precise, how much of a racist shitshow white people continue to be. Because let’s be crystal clear: white people were responsible for Trump’s rise to power, and if it were up to the majority of us, he would still be in power. ICYMI, 55% of white women voted for Trump in 2020, up from 53% in 2016.

Photo credit: Kevin Banatte

Thankfully, Trump’s defeat was secured by Black voters in swing states like Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. It was the tireless organizing of people of color, specifically Black women, that propelled Biden to victory. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to women like Stacey Abrams, LaTosha Brown, and Aimee Allison. But we also need to do more than thank black people for saving us once again. A lot more.

In response to Joe Biden’s description of his campaign as “the battle for the soul of America,” Ibram X. Kendi posits that there is no singular soul because our nation is so divided. According to Kendi, we are currently experiencing “the battle between the souls of America”: the soul of justice and the soul of injustice.

White America is in a spiritual crisis.

This crisis is not new, of course. It’s the same crisis that Freedom Summer volunteers were responding to. It’s the same crisis that nineteenth-century abolitionists were seeking to address. It’s the same crisis that has played out on the stage from the early days of blackface minstrelsy to Elvis Presley to Madonna to Taylor Swift.

I used to think it was an identity crisis. I read about historical formations of whiteness and learned that in order for European immigrants to assimilate into whiteness they had to leave behind any telltale identifying marks of their culture: language, dress, food, music, etc. This rather violent process of "Americanization," though incomplete, unsurprisingly led to a lack of positive cultural identity among white people. To me, this helped explain why my mother and all her friends were obsessed with genealogical research and recovering lost cultural traditions.

In recent years, though, I’ve begun to wonder if the crisis goes beyond identity. After all, the violence of white racial formation wasn’t simply that it stripped Italians and Poles and Swedes of our cultural heritage. It also stripped us of something deeper. Because the deal that whiteness offers isn’t simply to trade in your lutefisk for a burger and fries (honestly, not a bad deal if you’ve ever tried lutefisk). Whiteness asks for a lot more than that. Whiteness asks for our compliance with its institutions and structures of violence. Whiteness asks for our silence as it dehumanizes 90% of the world’s population. Whiteness asks for our complicity as it systematically terrorizes those who dare to fight back. Whiteness asks for our blessing as it symbolically annihilates entire peoples, while cannibalizing and profiting from their cultural traditions.

The deal that whiteness offers is this: trade in your humanity for a seat at the table.

That, I believe, constitutes a spiritual crisis. And no, unfortunately I don’t have a foolproof plan to unlock the solution. In fact, I’m not even sure if problem-solving is the best approach. After all, the more we try to problem-solve racism (now, with infographics!), the more racism seems to defy our best efforts. No offense to my sociologist and political scientist friends, but this might be a bit of a master’s tools situation. If we’ve learned anything from the last four years, it’s that scientific data and facts cannot hope to compete with the power of an emotional appeal.

So here’s an idea: maybe it’s time for our own emotional appeal. I’m not talking about a paternalistic appeal to care about the suffering of others — or at least, not exclusively. I’m talking about an appeal that speaks to the suffering of white people within white supremacy: both the alienation from our own cultural and ancestral lineages as well as the denigration of our own humanity through our participation (active and/or passive) in regimes of violence and terror against black and brown people. These spiritual wounds are deep, and they require healing.

I want to be clear that by suggesting that white people suffer within white supremacy, I am in no way equating this suffering to the suffering of people of color within white supremacy, which is clearly incomparable. I also absolutely do not intend to negate the very real privileges and power that white people benefit from under white supremacy. What I am saying, however, is that white privilege and power are not freely granted; they involve a trade-off. And this tradeoff is a costly one, spiritually speaking.

At the risk of analogizing race to gender, consider this scenario: within heteropatriarchy, boys are taught that they are better than girls. And they benefit from male privilege: more freedom, higher salaries, not having to worry about walking home alone at night, etc. Yet upon closer examination, we can see that these privileges are not simply handed to anyone with a Y chromosome. In order to earn your place in the heteropatriarchy, you have to be willing to comply with its rules, and one of those rules involves repressing your emotions and/or channeling them into violence. Not the most spiritually healthy option, obviously. And of course, boys who fail to adequately comply with the rules themselves become the objects of violence. I would argue that the "masculinity crisis" scholars have been yammering about since the 1980s is largely a spiritual one as well. And in order to heal, men have to take a long, hard look at the spiritual wounding toxic masculinity has imposed on them — by making them into both objects and instruments of violence.

Whiteness and masculinity are not the same, of course, and they work in different (though often overlapping) ways. My point is that both systems dehumanize their adherents, by 1) depriving them of a formative human need (cultural belonging; emotional expression); and 2) requiring their participation and/or complicity in systematic violence and degradation of another group of people. Therefore, it stands to reason that in both cases, what is needed most is healing, on an individual and a collective level.

I think that one reason the left has been unsuccessful in combatting racism is that our approach has tended to be 1) rational, rather than emotional; and 2) punitive, rather than healing. It is my hypothesis that no amount of research on racial inequality and no amount of diversity trainings are going to convince 40 million white people not to be racist.

Instead, what would it look like to reconceptualize racism as an emotional and spiritual wound to be healed?

For those of us who are dedicated to doing antiracist work in our own communities, how would this reconceptualization shift our approach? How would it change our own relationship to whiteness?