What You Gain by Letting Go

Someone (Hayden Dawes) posed a series of questions recently:

For the White people who are committed to dismantling white supremacy, what have you gained in doing the work? We often hear about the losses, but what makes it worth the struggle for you personally?

I thought this was such a fresh approach that I wanted to pull together some of my very real benefits that I’ve gained in learning to let go of whiteness:

1. Connection to Myself: I wonder sometimes how many white people realize how much being raised-white affects our connection to our SELF. We dissociate, we leave our bodies, we don’t connect with our insides. This article by Becky Thompson and Vicky Watson explains the trauma of whiteness in greater detail. The reality is this: if we’re raised to believe in whiteness, to internalize it, then it’s as if we were raised to believe that drinking a little bit of mercury every morning. Until we can heal ourselves from that, then we’ll always be stuck in the repetition of these terrible, harmful cycles.
2. Community with a Wider World: Staying stuck in whiteness and all-white spaces means we lose out on community. When we come out of that delusion, we see how much we have in common with everyone else. As Setha Low has pointed out, the predominantly white gated communities we build for ourselves are constructed out of equal parts fear of the other and a desire for “niceness,” by which she means the ways that we make aesthetic and moral judgements. When combined, she writes these “inscribes racist assumptions on the landscape.” In a world in which we let go of our fears and our insidious desire for “niceness,” we get something much richer: real, authentic connection to other human beings. In my life that has meant getting to know people who are raised differently than I was, people who have different life experiences, who come from other parts of the world. For me, this has mostly been from living in New York City and being in queer spaces. There are a thousand ways that people can do both and never encounter difference, but if you seek out difference and connection, then those friends, lovers, kin are the beautiful, beloved community.
3. Greater Knowledge: Listen, I’ve gotten smarter letting go of whiteness. I think sometimes the efforts to stamp out “critical race theory” is as bold an effort to radically embrace ignorance as you’ll ever see. The fear, I think, is that by gaining the knowledge on offer from critical race scholars that raised-white people will forever be assigned to the purgatory of guilty feelings about being settlers and the beneficiaries of colonialism. I have good news: it’s not like that. On the other side of letting go of whiteness is a profound relief at seeing the world as it is. The moment you understand that being a good ancestor is more important than having good ancestors, is the moment you begin to exhale.
4. Healthier Aging: This seems odd, but it’s true. There’s a fascinating research project that looked at aging in a sample of 35 cities around the world. One key predictor for what researchers call “age-friendly” cities and communities is social inclusion, in other words, how much a part of things do you feel? In terms of importance, social inclusion was second only to housing as a predictor of how happy people were with growing older in their cities. The lesson I took from this is that it’s the flip side of what Jonathan Metzl observed in his brilliant Dying of Whiteness. That is, if we can learn to let go of whiteness and our desire for white-only spaces, then we can be part of social inclusion and have a relatively healthy old age. But, if we stay locked into whiteness (and the gated communities it inspires), then we lose out on so much and ultimately, shorten and impoverish our own lives.

The question Hayden Dawes posed reminds me of the work we do in SURJ, which is to focus on the “stakes” for white people in the fight for racial justice. I think of this as a practice, much like cultivating equanimity or keeping a gratitude journal.

Learning to let go of whiteness is a practice that keeps me anchored in what it means to be more fully human than the way I was taught when I was raised-white.