Moving From Ignorance to Anti-Racism

I’ve been asked to tell my personal narrative as a cisqueer white woman who has come to spend much of her time ranting on Twitter about white supremacy and all the ways we must resist it. I’m not exactly sure how this qualifies me to teach other folks about anti-racism but for knowing that I want other folks to bypass some of the hangups I went through.

There are multiple concise models for naming the progression from insulated, ignorant white folks to white folks who actively resist white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalism. Notably, Barnor Hesse’s 8 White Identities and Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s 6 Stages of Racial/Cultural Development, both of which I drew from for this project. In this writing, I’ve roughly broken my life up into periods that somewhat follow Hesse and Tatum’s models and/or reflect defining periods of growth and change.

1. Benign Ignorance & Insulation

I grew up in an insulated, wealthy, majority white suburb of Minneapolis where the only non-white people I met were brown kids adopted by white parents. I was raised in the “color-blind” early 90s in a community that was arguably “non-racist” but had done no critical introspection about white privilege, white supremacy, or complicity in systems of oppression. The non-white people I met were notable to me as a young person and I have distinct memories of what Hesse might refer to as White Voyeurism in college. I did not experience feelings of white guilt and I absolutely was proud to distance myself from racists in the world. I refer to this time as “benign” ignorance because I really prided myself on being a nice person who was open-minded but I also wasn’t able to talk about my own role in upholding white supremacy in our society. So while I *felt* “benign”, I can’t determine the unintentional harms I may have caused people by being ignorant. I believe this is a key first step: introspection.

2. White Saviors & Voluntourism

I walked into college (at a private liberal arts college in MN, you know the type) knowing I wanted to Help People but didn’t know what that meant. College sociology and social work classes taught me some of the basics of white privilege, structural violence, and poverty but I didn’t do the necessary self-interrogation to see my own personal role in these systems. Instead, I was still very much caught up in the draw of Helping Poor People and the extremely problematic depictions of poor and exotic Black and brown people throughout the world, I planned to study abroad in Tanzania. During this period I experienced lots of curiosity about poor, Black, and brown people but without sensitivity and in a really self-serving way. Most of my desire to Help People- at this stage for sure- was about how it would reflect on me and make me a Good Person but without understanding how my desire to help might actually turn out to be harmful. I especially think of myself during this time as being particularly vulnerable to notions aligned with White Saviorism but couldn’t name them as such. Yet.

The way my earliest introductions to white supremacy were framed, especially at a college that promoted global service, resulted to me jumping into “helping people” through white saviorism and voluntourism. I’m really glad a small voice in my head prevented me from strolling farther down this path. Utterly distressed about the state of global poverty and a cultural tourist at heart, I was well-suited for Helping People in Africa and spent a couple different stints in African countries during college. I want to point out that I believe this is a really natural and almost encouraged thought process that many white people experience. The problem with this thinking was a failure to recognize how white supremacy and white imperialism really drive the unacceptable conditions many Black and brown people of the Global South live in. At this stage, however, I only had a small inkling of this. I characterize this part of my journey as really a self-absorbed one: I was learning about poverty and I wanted to help people but I really wanted to do those things as a way to make *myself* feel good. During a 5 week voluntouring stint in Zambia, the problematic nature of this type of white savior programming only just started to creep in because I could see that the people being “served” by these volunteers really weren’t being prioritized and weren’t given the tools to make independent change. With a natural mind for justice, I started to realize these Tanzania and Zambian communities were, on some level, dependent on these mostly white European and American young people with absolutely NO skills to prepare them for this work. For example, one of my volunteer roles in a small community clinic in Zambia (for a medical voluntouring project) was to count and bottle prescription medications. To be clear, here in the States, you need significant pharmaceutical training to do this kind of work. But this clinic couldn’t run without high school grads and gap year travelers and backpacker types to do the work we frankly weren’t qualified to do. How then, could this community be expected to become independent? (I could spend a long time on this subject!) Still, in 2008, I didn’t have the language to talk about these issues, it was just a feeling I had inside that something I was doing wasn’t right.

3. Charity Models & Otherizing the Poor

By the time I had returned from two different travels to Africa and graduated college, I was certain about becoming a helping professional and actively pursued jobs in non-profits. It was actually my experience in Tanzania that pushed me to start volunteering and then working at a local Minneapolis homeless shelter. My first full-time job after graduating college was at a local non-profit food shelf providing rent assistance and other resources to the poor and struggling. I became really proud (and, if you ask my siblings, elitist) of my work with non-profits because I could “never work for a corporation”. My thinking at the time was really focused around the idea that people were poor and needed social services to get support (as opposed to designing new systems that didn’t cause poverty in the first place). I liken this to treating symptoms not causes: I was really focused on symptoms. During this time, I traveled again, to learn Spanish in a rural village in Guatemala and then to visit some friends in the Peace Corps in Peru. I still was flirting with the idea of going into international service work but I was committed to finding a program or organization that I felt was going to empower communities and wouldn’t be problematic or harmful to the impacted community the way that I was beginning to realize the Peace Corps was. (Ask me about my opinions on the Peace Corps if you really want a rant!) I really wanted to work abroad but a tiny voice of consciousness wouldn’t let me do this with just any random organization I found. The juxtaposition of my travels abroad, the charity-minded people at the food shelf, and the justice-oriented people at the homeless shelter really start to push my personal consciousness-raising.

4. Justice & Meeting People Where They’re At

Over time, I started to become frustrated working at this food shelf because I realized, once again, how poorly the clients were being treated by the staff and volunteers of this organization even as they were hungry and homeless. I didn’t have the insight or consciousness to connect all the dots, but I started to have the language around the difference between charity and justice. Specifically, I remember becoming irate at the idea that a person who is hungry should have to grovel in gratitude or prove their worth for needing food. Because food and shelter are supposed to be basic human rights, right? Right?! But this is not what I observed working at this food shelf. Looking back, this really felt like “leveling up” in a video game. I left the food shelf and became a street outreach worker where I was able to work in a way that better reflected my evolving values of justice, partnership, and advocacy. I no longer was interested in pitying the Poor Over There and working at a charity but rather being in true community and partnership with those who were less privileged and more marginalized than me. I developed an interest in systems change because I was tired of providing band aid fixes to oppressed people. I have vague memories during this time of the death of Trayvon Martin, the incarceration of CeCe McDonald, and the Occupy Movement but these didn’t impact me personally for the most part. In fact, I really judged the few protests I knew about because I still had some belief that the non-profit model was the “right” or “appropriate” or “respectable” way to make change. And yet, at the end of the day, my clients were still sleeping under bridges and in cars, and it didn’t seem like any social service organization (even the ones I worked for and loved!) were doing much to fix this problem. It was here that it started to occur to me that maybe people (usually white, non-poor people) who ran these non-profits didn’t actually WANT to fix these issues because then they would put themselves out of business.

I want to be clear that even during this time, as recently as 2014, I still couldn’t bring myself to say the words “white supremacy” out loud. Seriously. It made me THAT uncomfortable to name this icky thing. So while I was starting to understand the massive, intentional, and SYSTEMIC nature of oppression, I wasn’t quite ready to name my own role.

5. Lost & Fucking Up

Becoming frustrated with the slow, incremental “change” of non-profits and government social services that left my clients marginalized, homeless, and dying on the streets, I left the street outreach job even though it was the best job I’d ever had. I was starting to feel lost about how to effect change and what my identity looked like if not as a non-profit worker. So, in late 2013, I traveled. Again. Another 3 months in Central America with lots of time to reflect and read about radical social movements in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Cuba- not to mention the US’s violent, covert role in many of these wars.

This period of time was a really difficult one for me. I applied to and was accepted to grad school for a Master’s in Social Work with a focus on global/international work. I deferred my acceptance but never attended. I took a job at one of my previous organizations to work temporarily for them as an administrative assistant (a job but not one I was passionate about). I contemplated going to an intensive training to learn how to become an organizer. I couldn’t figure out the ethical and *effective* way to work against oppression. I got depressed and I found Twitter. I started consuming everything I could on Twitter about how white people should act so as not to be racist and, in a catalyzing story that I’ve told a few times on Twitter, I had a big-to-me fuck up with a Black queer woman with a large platform that nearly sent me spiraling back to my “benign” ignorance where I started. It was also during this time that I finally came to terms with my asexual and queer identities. What a time of being lost AND finding so much.

The universe does seem to have a plan for each of us and all of this soul-searching left me primed for action on August 9th, 2014 when Mike Brown was killed.

6. Language & Learning & Taking Responsibility

I dove in deep. Suddenly I was attending protests regularly (after never having attended one and judging so vehemently previous protest movements) and I even found myself in Ferguson protesting. I was supporting Black youth as they organized actions in Minneapolis and St. Paul. I was tweeting. I was shutting down highways with my car and my body. I got arrested. Three times.

And most importantly, I was learning. And reading. And- arguably- consuming everything I could find from the most radical people of color I could find. Predominantly on Twitter. It was in the Twitter streets where I could finally start taking responsibility- not guilt- for the role that we all, as white people, play in our white supremacist society. And I was talking about these issues all the time. With my friends, my family, my Twitter acquaintances, and to my own self. I learned about intersectionality and settler colonialism, about anti-Blackness and Islamaphobia, about anti-capitalism and #WhiteFolkWork. It was an explosion of introspection and learning because finally I had arrived at a place where I could name and be accountable to the ways in which I benefit from a society designed to benefit me on the back of someone else. It was the first time I felt like I was finally grasping a hold of the elusive “right” way to make change that I never could find as a white savior voluntourist, a charity worker, a non-profit worker, or a graduate student. Basically the reason I ended up here is because the other ways I had tried in the past STILL didn’t truly promote equality or JUSTICE for people with less privilege or darker skin than me.

The key thing about this “last” phase? It never ends. We don’t arrive at the End and settle down into our perfectly anti-racist world with no further work needed. We are socialized by the world we live in so naturally we should expect to still find ourselves caught in our old ways of thinking. It is natural to struggle through and need to stay vigilant in our (un)-learning. Which is why I was asked to write this. So other white people can read it and hopefully find themselves along the road.

I can be most easily found on Twitter @colocha_rachel. I encourage you to reach out.