One of my concerns (here at home in progressive Seattle and at 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology) is that don鈥檛 just manifest themselves in swastikas, hooded robes, bad cops, cover-ups and white nationalist ideology. Overt supremacy causes us, those of us who consider ourselves progressive, to psychologically suppress and distance ourselves from our own bias and supremacist characteristics. Our impulse is to say, 鈥淲e are not like that!鈥� However, this psychological dissociation never allows us to get to the covert seeds of racism planted deep within all of us who are part of the White majority.

A while back I was at a party in my neighborhood. I struck up a conversation with a young Black woman. As we introduced ourselves to each other, she told me she had come to Seattle to work in the medical field. I鈥檓 ashamed to admit it, but my first thought was that she must be a medical technician or a traveling nurse. As we talked more, she told me she was an OB/GYN. While Linda and I walked home, I shared my deep embarrassment over my initial assumption. I am limited by the stories that I have access to, my bias, and my blind spots.

In the middle school my sons attended, 97% of the student population (students of color) were referred to as 鈥渕inority.鈥� The 3% of the student population who were White were still referred to as 鈥渕ajority.鈥� The mental model where the most are called minority and the few are labeled as the majority is crazy-making in the message it sends. It鈥檚 a wonder that any of these children passed the state math exam. Minority less than鈥� majority greater than鈥hink of the impact!

As a White man, I hold within me the and individual achievement. These myths infer that I 鈥渒now鈥� and I can help. However, these mental models interfere with the posture I must take to deconstruct my own racist ideas. The way forward begins with weakness and vulnerability. These are counter-intuitive to power and privilege.

What if I admit I don鈥檛 know and I can鈥檛 help? Can I sit in the liminal space that 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know鈥� creates? Can I continue to go through the painful and disorientating process of unlearning the power that affords me the confidence to always have an answer? It starts with 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know.鈥� It鈥檚 hard for White men to access the social narratives and psychological categories necessary to live into weakness and vulnerability when we have been called the majority. It鈥檚 hard to live into the ambiguity of who I am and move into places where I don鈥檛 know where I fit in when so much of me has been afforded the privilege of self-determination.

To admit that I don鈥檛 know means that I must be in proximity to people who see the world differently than me. I must live in the middle of other narratives that decenter my own. Doug Hall, one of my professors in my doctoral program, claimed that one of the challenges for White men doing justice work is the painful process of 鈥渦nlearning鈥� power and all you think you know.

My life must be lived in and with difference, which exacerbates the feelings of vulnerability and discomfort that whiteness has been socialized to avoid. This will shake my social identity. Seattle White progressives are great at listening to public radio and accessing public libraries. But, public transportation? No thank you. Public schools? Not my kids. The position of proximity is one of vulnerability and illumination.

I cannot read my way out of the problem of my perceived power and the deconstruction of white superiority. It won鈥檛 happen at one protest or one church service. The protest march or the BLM sign in my front yard might make me feel better when I feel powerless to prevent police pushing their knee into the neck of George Floyd; however, these events serve merely as an inoculation if only done in isolation. These moments of crisis serve as an indictment鈥攔evealing how far I am from the problem and from a network that is building systemic change.

Where do I live? Where do I shop? Where do my kids go to school? Proximity illuminates the issues and affords me the gift of stories other than my own. Deconstructing the isn鈥檛 simply about having more diverse friends. It means living in a way that sees and feels the impact of police brutality, the opportunity gaps in education, and the inequity of politically underrepresented neighborhoods. Until those problems become my problems, nothing will change.

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As the poet Claudia Rankine describes in her , Black life is a condition of mourning. Our Black brothers and sister, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters don鈥檛 live with the thought or the hope that the latest act of racial violence will be the last. They know that the sin of racism in America is deep and long and face the reality of that daily in ways that I will never experience. As a White woman with unearned privilege, I have the 鈥渓uxury鈥� of being able to express my grief and anger without fear of reprisal or violence from those in power. I have the 鈥渃hoice鈥� to engage or not engage. As Roberts and Rizzo 聽¹ note in their recent article on racism in America, 鈥減ower enables passivism.鈥� White people鈥擨鈥攈ave been passive too long. This is where I must start鈥攁cknowledging my privilege and passivity, and grieving and repenting of that. And then I must take responsibility.

And my heart is still broken. Even as I write this, I am aware of so many Black, Indigenous, and Mothers of Color whose hearts have been broken at the deaths of their children under a system of racism and oppression, be that from violence or from neglect of our healthcare and social service systems. At a recent BLM protest, a White individual held a sign that read, 鈥淚 understand that I don鈥檛 understand, but I stand with you.鈥� So what does it mean as a White faculty member in a predominantly White institution to stand with? I start with my whiteness.

Individually and with others in my institution, I grieve and reckon with our place in this cultural moment. As a psychologist and an educator, I am called to lifelong learning. But that is just the starting place for me as White woman. A responsibility that comes with privilege is to speak out and act against the injustices that go back to our founding history in America. This is a process that will continue to unfold and take shape, both personally, in the classroom, and institutionally. Miguel De LaTorre states that 鈥淭here can be no faith, in fact no salvation, without ethical praxis. To participate in ethical praxis is to seek justice鈥� 聽². I will continue learning, and I must also acknowledge the harms of our current systems and actively seek justice(Micah 6:8). Healing will occur in our communities as we take action. As a teacher, this action will include my commitment to continued research and personal learning, inviting voices of color and diversity in my syllabi and reading assignments, and working to make my classes and our institution places of safety and welcome for all students and employees.

It will get messy. It is messy! These are hard conversations to navigate and hold in our body/mind, but they must happen. It is especially difficult that most of these conversations must happen virtually, rather than with others in the same space. We are experiencing layers of collective trauma. We are confronting the brutality of systemic racism in addition to the isolation brought on by COVID-19. Anger, grief, fear, despair, uncertainty鈥攖hese are all appropriate responses to pandemic and racial trauma.

Even though I may not fully understand, I grieve with the BIPOC communities. Our collective grief and action can lead to cultural shifts. We are not victims of our culture, we shape our culture. Text, soul, culture鈥攖his is a crucial part of our mission. I have much to learn, and I and students to stay in these conversations and to continue the work of grief, self-reflection, and action. May this lead to a more loving, just and equitable culture鈥攆or all of us.

鈥淭he role of the teacher is not just to listen, to extend care and compassion, but also to wait in the silence of grief and concern for the notes of humanization to emerge and to amplify those notes so that a student can be reminded that they are, even in times like these, a being becoming, emerging. Even in this moment, even in pandemic and tragedy and fear, we are all nonetheless鈥攁nd in some ways, more so than when comfort and peacefulness abide鈥攊n a process of becoming more human. As we are confronted by the aches and diseases of our culture, we can be reminded that culture is distinctly human, and so part of our common project.鈥� Sean Michael Morris 聽³

Links that I have found helpful in learning/praxis/taking action:

• Resmaa Menakem鈥檚
• Claudia Rankine,
• Layla Saad鈥檚 workbook,

References:

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As I heard this message, I nodded my head and felt in my heart that Tisby was correct in starting with this story. I agreed that we all create a culture together, and only together can our society change. Those who are White in America, however, have more power and voice and benefit most when nothing changes. Tisby鈥檚 call is for all Americans to and societal structures that are harmful for all of us: White, Brown, Black, other, in-between, out of the norm, first generation, twelfth generation, etc. We as Americans have to do the work in our bodies, as well as our minds, if we are to heal our collective harm, our embodied hurt, and our lingering traumas. I can acknowledge this, yet I still find it difficult to move outside of what Resmaa Menekem has termed, 鈥渨hite-body supremacy.鈥� As he contends in his book, :

Social activism is necessary for changing the world in positive ways. But if our collective body is to fully heal from the trauma of white-body supremacy, we must create cultural shifts as well. White-body supremacy is already a part of American culture鈥攊n the norms we follow, the assumptions we make, the language we speak, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. This is the case no matter the color of our skin. This means we must create new expressions of culture that call out, reject, and undermine white-body supremacy.

This won鈥檛 be quick or easy鈥攂ut there is no other way.

, there is only the long path of reform, restructuring, and relearning our systems of being the United States of American. For this to happen, however, we have to feel the shift and change in our bones. New laws may be written and enacted, but until the hearts, minds, and bodies of Americans feel that all humans are truly created equal, we will remain ensnared in white-body supremacy.

If this claim about the necessity of bodily feeling and bodily healing is true, then the classrooms of predominately White institutions (PRI), such as 天美视频, present a challenge. Our students of color have always been attuned to the daily reality of white-body supremacy, but since the deaths of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Michael Brown in 2014, our students of color have become even more hyper-attuned to the news and the realities of living in a non-white body in the United States. As a White professor, my body has not caught up to the level of anxiety and terror that our students feel on a daily basis, but I can create spaces of safety and agency. I can research and read more theologians of color. I can make my reading lists and lectures more diverse and multifaceted. As Jennifer Harvey, author of , said in a recent Wabash webinar, 鈥淏rown and Black Students Matter!,鈥� not only do White professors have an obligation to challenge the status quo around race in America, but we are guilty of 鈥減edagogical negligence鈥� if we do not work to change the dynamics in our classrooms and on our campuses.

If this kind of change is to happen, then I have to acknowledge my own lack of bodily attunement to the terror in my own body. If I am to love and teach well, then I have to learn to love my story and my body more, with brutal honesty. Also, until I can own my own White fragility and desire to be 鈥渨oke鈥� (which is a word I think no White person should claim), I have to stop and apologize to my students for not having the capacity to know viscerally their daily reality. I understand now that this apology is not just to our students of color but to all of our students. To re-create a more equitable society, .

An equitable classroom requires more mutuality and agency for every student so that we can work together to teach rather than indoctrinate, to grow our minds together rather than to mimic or repeat what was given to us. With this in mind, I will commit to decentering the white-body supremacy of the theologies in which I have been educated and formed. For this to happen, I need to do as much work on my whiteness as I do to create more diverse syllabi and classroom experiences. I believe our theology will be more robust and life-giving because of this work. Our call is not into self-hate but into a redeeming and liberating love. This is why our school鈥檚 mission is to train students toward and for the sake of loving God, neighbor, and self. I commit myself once more to this task.

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I walked away from our time with those students in 2018 understanding that things would need to change, and that those changes would not just be semantics on a syllabus but would need to include a revision of the structure(s) that had developed around the practicum process since its inception. I didn鈥檛 know what all of this meant, exactly, but I knew revision was needed, and that the restructuring needed to be significant.

Fast forward to a wrap-up of spring 2020, and the Practicum-turned-Listening-Lab department is now in a process of transition. Our work since spring 2018 has included continued shifts away from an approach to storytelling that had been more individualistic, sometimes paternalistic, and that had often favored whiteness. Rather than a storyteller being placed in a 鈥渉ot seat鈥� to defend themselves and often their people, what we鈥檙e seeking instead is a form of shared storytelling with a more collective edge and emphasis, with contributions to and support by the group as a whole. Our frame and its containers (what holds us together, or not) are changing.

I hear the need for change coming through the voices of activists and protesters that ring out across our streets these days demanding health and healing for systems and constituents that have privileged some and ousted and oppressed too many. As helping and healing professionals, our job is to listen first and to speak or respond second. The renaming of practicum as 鈥淟istening Lab鈥� is emblematic of this orientation. From where I sit, I can see where practicum processes and personnel have erred, at times, on the side of over-speak. I can see where we have given voice to those who already had it and have potentially silenced those whose voices have not typically been tended to by a society built on and by white supremacy. Our work is and will remain messy, but messy is not an excuse for allowing structures of power and privilege to remain intact and unchecked.

Speaking of messy, what will need to get even messier in the days ahead is our in-house conversations about whiteness (white supremacy). This past week I read a helpful article by a clinical psychologist named Dr. Natasha Stovall, who has an interest in 鈥減utting whiteness on the couch,鈥� per her Twitter account. In , Stovall points to how the work of counseling and psychotherapy is to tend to 鈥渢he thing鈥� that isn鈥檛 being named or tended to in the context of a client鈥檚 life. Either party (therapist or client) who is not at liberty to name that thing is/are inevitably bound by or colluding with it. If Listening Lab is one of the first places in our curricula wherein students practice sitting therapeutically with another, then whiteness has to be more explicitly named and deconstructed, even in an all-white section of students and leaders. A few years ago we began to assign Ta-Nehisi Coates鈥� work, as required reading. In as much as this has been an important marker in our discussion of oppressive systems (like whiteness), we cannot stop there.

Systems built on and by power are often fragile systems. I was recently introduced to an alternative through and his . Menakem speaks of 鈥渨hite stamina鈥� and how it can stand in stark contrast to its all-too-familiar counterpart of white fragility. White stamina is a willingness to remain in tension-filled conversations around race, despite the uncomfortability of doing so. If white supremacy invites fragility and collapse, white stamina offers persistence where none may have existed before.

Moreover, if Stovall demands that whiteness be outed as 鈥渢he thing鈥� it is, and Menakem suggests that stamina can be grown where fragility has been predominant, then clarity comes to and for a department (Listening Lab/Practicum) whose job it is to become and to remain relevant and equitable in pedagogy and praxis in a 21st Century that is requiring change, if not revolution. In solidarity to such, if we seek to be credible in our training of students to be(come) people who engage in transforming relationships, then we (Listening Lab/Practicum team members) need to be ever-forming and transforming in relationship ourselves.

There are more changes to come in the days ahead for Listening Lab. Stay tuned throughout the upcoming 2020-2021 school year for updates on such happenings. We are grateful to remember that goodness has come from the practicum processes through the years, and we are eager to continue the revision and growth that is to come. We have our work cut out for us, but we also know there is no looking back.

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