Unlearning Racism as a Spiritual Practice

by Eily Marlow

Trayvon Martin would be 26 this year if his life still blessed this earth. I recall my anguish when hearing the news of his murder back in 2012. That a jaunt to the convenient store could be fatal to a black teenager was grief I as a white mother would likely never fully understand. However, when a jury of his peers acquitted George Zimmerman of his murder, I fell sobbing on the kitchen floor immobilized by emotion. I felt grief yet I was even more overwhelmed by a feeling of shame. I knew our society held implicit bias against black people, but the fact that a jury agreed that a man could patrol his neighborhood and shoot an unarmed youth he perceived as a threat made this bias not only explicit but acceptable. Never would a white youth walking home from soccer practice in an affluent neighborhood face this horror. I had known that the courts, police and many other institutions were present to defend families that looked like me, though on this day it felt like a flood light shining on my complicity. Knowledge that these systems supported white dominance did nothing to stop them. No longer was a racist act by one man at the center of this narrative for me. No longer was this “their” story, but my own. As we live through the trail of Derek Chauvin in 2021 this reality feels all the more real.

Defining White Supremacy

Layla Saad defines white supremacy as, “a racial ideology that is based upon the belief that white people are superior in many ways to people of other races and that therefore, white people should be dominant over other races.” Most of us would never resonate with this, it might even make our blood boil. Yet white supremacy shapes so much of our society’s institutions and culture, it is the water we swim in that as white people we often don’t see. One glaring example is the fact that the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family. It also resides in our subconscious mind and sometimes pops up in real ways around who we fear and how we judge others. For example, most white people live in predominantly white neighborhoods and send their children to predominantly white schools. Many of us have few friends who aren’t white. Most leadership positions in our organizations and workplaces held by white people.

Moving Beyond Guilt and Shame

White supremacy is a white person’s problem, and we need to begin to recognize and speak about the role it has in our institutions and everyday lives. However, when I first tried to speak about white supremacy, my hands got sweaty, my voice shook and it was hard to find the words. How could something I felt so strongly about be so difficult to talk about? How could I not jump full boar into something that I had no doubt was one of the greatest barriers to God’s justice? This was the hold white supremacy had on me. It is a system that makes my shame feel stronger than my outrage. Shame is an insidious and familiar inner beast and at least for me my greatest obstruction to action. It is not an unfamiliar feeling, as it is a tool patriarchy has employed throughout our lives as women to fuel inaction. This is why it has been so important for me to find spaces to speak honestly with other white people about the moral disconnect I have experienced between my real care and my inaction, my deep sense of urgency around racial injustice and my equal tendency to want to shut down.

Making it Personal

Through Wood and Water retreats, we have created a Lenten reflection circle of white people reflecting on the book me and white supremacy by Layla Saad. Instead of filling our minds with more knowledge and letting ourselves get distracted by abstractions or what “other people do,” we have tried to engage this conversation personally. What am I doing or not doing to counter white supremacy in my neighborhood, my family, my workplace? What do we need to confess and repent in order to move forward in constructive ways that actually make a difference? Saad provides 28 days of focused questions so that we can reflect on how white supremacy shows up in our lives, in our thinking, and in our relationships. Taking the next step to talk openly and honestly with others about this is vulnerable yet paves a path to communal commitment that can fuel action.

Becoming a "Good Ancestor"

My pathway out of shame was another narrative flipping reality. Instead of only feeling badly about the experiences of others, I also started to understand the negative effects white supremacy was having on my own life. Growing up in a white enclave separated me so much from the broader world where I now so thirst to belong. It prevented me from having meaningful relationships with people of all backgrounds. Growing up with a white identity that trumped any ties to my Welsh/Scottish cultural heritage disconnected me from a richer storyline from which I saw others drawing resiliency and strength. Though perhaps the most important reason to work to dismantle white supremacy comes out of Layla Saad’s call to “become a good ancestor.” For me this is tied to my desire to parent my white children well. What can I do now so my children can experience the joy of living in an equitable and beloved multi-racial community? How can I become an anti-racist parent so they don’t spend their adult life plucking out the weeds of racism from their beautiful fields of consciousness in order to live in this world with their full humanity intact? The work is equal parts dismantling and equal parts building the world we want to live within.

Building Takes Work

But the building does take work. And sometimes as white people the internal work of unpacking racism feels so disorienting that we never feel “woke” enough to become a builder in the work for racial justice. Though the reality that systemic racism lands a higher proportion of Black, Indigenous and people of color at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder makes most acts of social justice simultaneously work to build racial justice. Working for rent stabilization, educational equity, and affordable childcare is building racial justice. Decriminalizing drug possession and supporting youth programming is building racial justice. Making sure there is a diverse pool of candidates before hiring and stepping aside when a person of color can lead in the workplace is building racial justice. For those of us who identify as Christian this is nothing less than building the kin-dom of God. And we have been promised that when we become the menders of broken walls, God will guide us continually, even in parched places (Isaiah 58:11-12). This Lenten journey has been a time to repent (literally to “turn around”), to confront the ways I have been complicit in death-dealing systems, yet also to build hope that we can embrace a new way of life, one that nurtures abundant life for all people.

_________

Eily Marlow serves as the Program Associate for Vocation and Reflection in the Center for Civic Engagement at Macalester College. She enjoys working with people as they discover how their values and convictions inform their actions in the world. She understands vocational discernment as both a personal and communal activity and believes listening to and sharing life narratives to be transformational.