Dear Reader, Hello.
I’m thinking about making changes. I’ve been doing this every day for nearly two months, and I’m not sure if I can keep going. I’m getting busier and busier. I’m realizing that I don’t need to actually write about dismantling whiteness in order to think about it. It’s not that I want to stop that work, but that taking the time to write a full post about it might not be the way to go about it for me anymore. Staying rooted in something that I’ve been doing is also something to watch out for. Deciding to keep doing something just because I said I was going to keep doing it is not a good reason.
I really encourage you to read “Fear of a Black Uprising: Confronting the white pathologies that shape racist policing” by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in The New Republic. It very clearly connects white supremacy with policing. I don’t think I can really do it justice by trying to explain the whole thing, but I’m going to think about this passage:
…The behavior of police in the United States has hardly been about law enforcement; it’s instead been about the protection of a very particular status quo. And that status quo is tied directly to the maintenance of the inferior status of Black people. It is a calculated legal institutionalization of white dominance that’s been kept in place for all of American history…And no matter the context surrounding it, this obsessive focus on the preeminence of whiteness remains central to the concept of America.
America not as a place but as a concept. A concept of the preeminence of whiteness. Everything about the idea of America is rooted in white supremacy. America the idea was created when white people came here and thought they were better than the people already living here. It grew because white people thought they were better than the people they brought in slavery. Nothing has really changed. This idea of dominance is still here, built into everything we know, so we don’t even notice it unless we look close enough.
But here’s the thing about ideas: they can be changed. If I think of America as a concept, I can think of it as something tenuous, something that can be shifted. We all have to lose our investment in the idea of America. Everything about it—its very foundations. The founding fathers. The electoral college. It’s all upholding white supremacy. We can’t keep going with America as the America we know. We can’t keep doing anything at all—not anything—without questioning why we are doing that thing and asking ourselves if it is upholding white supremacy.
Prompt and Action (both at once!): What does America mean to you? How does thinking about America as a concept change the way you think about it? How attached are you to certain ideas about America? What would it take for you to let go of those ideas? Do some brainstorming and re-imagining to think about how to let go of the America you have known. What are you clinging to? Why? Keep pushing and digging at that. That impulse to hold on is the thing that is keeping us from making the radical changes that are needed right now. Find ways to let go.
My affirmation from a few days ago from the “On Confidence” post was: I am good at adapting to changes and incorporating new ideas and actions into my life. And it’s true. I am. I am happiest when I keep changing all the time.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to adapt away from daily posting. I think it will be more like weekly. I’m not totally going away, just scaling back. I started this because I didn’t have a job and didn’t have much to do, but here I am with a lot more to do and a job keeping me busy, and that changes things.
I encourage all of you to keep thinking about how to dismantle your own whiteness every day without me. I don’t think you need me to guide you through it so closely anymore. You’ve all been doing a lot of practice. But I’m not going to leave you all on your own just yet. I’ll be back again next week with more.
Until then,
Gwen