Learning Anti-Racism with 360 New Friends by Dinah Bachrach

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For four days in April my partner and I immersed ourselves in a rare experience: The White Privilege Conference, convenient for us as it came to Seattle this year. We have gone to it several times over the last decade and it’s always been incredibly enriching. Attended by people of color, mixed race and white folks, it’s a rich immersion. In this piece, I will focus mostly on my experience as a white woman interfacing with black folks. The first day we did a pre-conference institute called Training for Courage taught by Ali Michael which covered worst case scenario scripts, strategies for navigating the news, taking feedback and maintaining empathic connection, creating a stereotype threat antidote, and confronting fears while affirming our values. All day we did exercises to explore these issues, learning how our bodies go to fight, flight and freeze and techniques to settle ourselves.

Each of the three days of the Conference had a powerful keynote address, followed by three workshop sessions, each 90 minutes with 12-15 offerings in each session time. The workshop leaders and staff were all seasoned, anti-racist educators, warm and engaging. The spirit and ethos were ones of respect, camaraderie and community: we are all on this journey together with different histories and levels of knowledge working against guilt and for learning, connection and accountability.

That was incredible to experience with 350 plus people for three days, in and out of so many workshops, dyads, small groups, large groups with a leader of one workshop being a participant in another. The sense of safety and openness of honest sharing without judgment made me feel a sense of community I have rarely felt before. Our last keynote speaker Jordon Johnson spoke directly about that, titling his talk:  A Frequency of Justice: Interrupting White Supremacy Within our Bodies. He played some songs and led a guided meditation to have us feel the “frequency” of being/feeling part of the collective, beyond our individual selves, in that large full audience…had us “lean into it”.  It was a rare moment for me.

And yet the night before that last day, I experienced the very real shadow side of the separateness of black and white cultures. That night on the program was an invitation to a dinner/karaoke party in the hotel ballroom. My partner and I weren’t staying at the airport hotel, but commuting each day from a friend’s house in Seattle, and are completely unfamiliar with karaoke so hadn’t planned to go. But as we were standing in the hotel lobby, adjacent to the ballroom, one of the WPC organizers urged us to go in so we did.

There were many empty tables and lavish, gourmet buffets of every type of food, plus desserts and a karaoke stage. Practically all the people who attended were black people, dressed to the nines, laughing and joking.  Some were singing, some were dancing but only a few the white participants chose to attend. And most of them, like us, were sitting at tables eating and watching the fun. Later I felt horrified and ashamed of myself and the many white folks who had chosen to not attend. It struck me that this was an important invitational offering by the dedicated mostly Black organization. I also felt a familiar sadness from my longing to be more comfortable and connected to this vibrant culture. I felt shy and uncomfortable, a spectator. There was a safety and connectiveness in our common dedication to fighting racism yet so much separation as cultures when it came to hanging-out and partying together.

Perhaps the most impactful workshop we did was by Kimberlee Yolande Williams who wrote a book titled: Dear White Woman, Please Come Home:  Hand Me Your Bias and I’ll Show You Our Connection. How have white supremacist structures driven white women to ignore and harm their sisters of culture? Kimberlee had a big presence, warm, engaging, direct and both thoroughly in command of teaching us and openly sharing her personal stories.

She defined Culture as the way a group tends to think, believe, communicate and behave e.g. the way we worship, dance, cook, do gender roles etc. (our conditioning). Every group one belongs to has its own culture. We follow expectations of the groups we are in. We are conditioned by reward and punishment, direct instruction and the background noise from community, educational norms, environmental conditioning, white supremacy culture and all other systems of oppression, and our historical selves (our Shadow) which sometimes precedes us.  She said: 1. Study your traditional role in history 2. Translate it into what it would look like today. 3.Choose to divorce it.

That caught my attention. What did she mean by that?  She spoke of the Black Codes right after the Civil War when many states required Black people to sign yearly labor contracts or risk being arrested, fined and forced into unpaid labor. In order to supervise Black people, a public meeting of more than five was unlawful assembly. And it was against the law to be without a job, and whites were to report this. So you have to go out and talk to your buddies on the street about what jobs might be available and you risk arrest in an unlawful assembly. If white people failed to report, they were in trouble too. That Shadow, historic self, often shows up today in work settings when white supervisors are unconsciously suspicious of groups of Black employees hanging out together during breaks feeling the need to check in on what’s going on.

 Another example was the Black Code that black people needed to always give the right-of-way to groups of white people walking down the sidewalk…to step into the street or be arrested. If a black person today yields the way to a group of white people walking abreast, they are acting out their historical selves. Kimberlee makes herself stand her ground.

This made me really wonder what would my traditional role have been as a white woman back in those days, how thoroughly conditioned I would have been to feel superior and entitled, and suspicious of black people And how does that unconsciously show up in me today? Despite the last few decades of conscious work on becoming more anti-racist, I am also aware that my implicit biases are always operating also, and of how my basic sense of entitlement and right-to-comfort can make me insensitive to black people in majority white spaces. Honestly If I were walking and talking with several white friends on a sidewalk and saw a black person coming our way, I probably wouldn’t move aside, but expect them to go around us. I hope now I will do better. But I had never thought of this coming from my historical self…like intergenerational trauma, this is intergenerational white supremacy at work.

Kimberlee used the metaphor of the bear and spoke of when you encounter “the bear in the forest”, which is anytime anyone asks you to do something different than what has been traditional for you or your people, your amygdala fires. You can’t change the hard-wiring so thank your brain for its kindness toward you and say to yourself: I forgive you for not being who you want to be. I set you free.  Own it, Apologize, and Don’t Circle Back. The bear can interrupt what your community taught you.

I highly recommend her book. Coming from a unique semi-fictional angle of a black woman whose life is dedicated to finding her long-lost white Sista (childhood best friend) among white women she encounters, it is part memoir and part lessons for the reader in the hurtful and clueless ways white women treat their black sisters. Despite the micro- and macro- aggressions she experiences, her longing and determined persistence for true sisterhood with white women touched me deeply and speaks to the longing I have for deep kinship with black women. I am thankful for the few I have in my life, but sad for how few I have, and aware of the separation/segregation between our cultures that is still so big, like what I experienced at the karaoke dinner party.

I am still absorbing all I learned, and grateful once again for The White Privilege Conference for giving me the opportunity to be in a multi-cultural learning environment with wonderful humanist, intersectional, anti-racists.

For more information about The Privilege Institute and the White Privilege conference: https://www.theprivilegeinstitute.com

Written by Dinah Bachrach