Exposure Therapy for Allies
One of my favorite rituals at Beloved Community is starting each meeting with a warm welcome. It’s a way to connect with one another in a virtual space and sometimes to connect with yourself as you share personal anecdotes or fond memories. Our team’s latest warm welcome question sure put me in a nostalgic mood:
“Who is a TV character that you identified with at a young age?”
While some great characters were named, one colleague’s answer stood out in particular to me: Laura Winslow, co-star of the hit sitcom Family Matters.
Premiering in 1989, Family Matters ran until 1998 and centered on the life of a Black family from Chicago, and of course their quirky neighbor Steve Urkel. Merely mentioning the name took me back to the joy, the laughter, the lessons this show brought me every Friday night for years. As a white woman, I now understand that as a child, Family Matters showed me a window into Black family life and decentered the classic white sitcoms of the time, like Growing Pains, Full House, Step by Step, Blossom, Home Improvement, and so many more. This decentering was a critical foundation to help me conceptually and personally understand the concepts of bias and othering, and to sharpen my lens to interrogate the times whiteness tried to take center stage..
Whiteness, America’s Favorite Character
Not too long after sharing our sentiments on fictional characters, one of America’s many infamous white supremacists was the main character (more appropriately, main villain) of his own trial. As I absorbed the images of Kyle Rittenhouse in court and in Kenosha, the only thing I saw in his face was hate. Hate that drives fear. Hate that drives violence. And underneath that hate was personal bias and prejudice coupled with a policing and judicial system focused on protecting the delusion of whiteness instead of holding a murderer accountable.
The tricky thing about implicit bias is that you don’t always know you have it so it’s difficult to recognize how it’s manifesting in your behaviors. For a majority of us, it shows up in less violent, less obvious ways. We saw in the Rittenhouse trial, for example: the judge deciding the term “victims” could not be used but “looters'' and rioters” was permitted and the way Rittenhouse’s testimony was believed at face value (that he feared for his life despite wielding an assault rifle).
Most of the people in my life, including self-identified liberals, hear “white supremacy” and think about extremists like Rittenhouse or the Ku Klux Klan. We didn’t learn about white supremacy in school, how we internalize it, how it affects our everyday behaviors and how subsequently our behaviors inadvertently uphold systems of inequity. The danger of letting whiteness hide behind blatant violence is that we keep finding ourselves here; feeling “shocked” by the way everyday racist behaviors escalate into violent insurrections and white vigilantism in the mythical “post racial” America.
Shifting Behaviors
When white supremacy manifests as deadly attacks like in Kenosha, white people who want to see a different world need to stop asking, “How could this happen?” The better question, and an interrogation of ourselves and the systems around us, is, “How am I perpetuating white supremacy and what am I doing to disrupt it?”
Tema Okun talks us through the characteristics of white supremacy and it’s extremely important for white people to reflect on these tenets to consider what we’ve internalized about ourselves and others. A powerful strategy for disrupting our internalized white supremacy is changing the narratives we absorb. Decentering whiteness is something you can start today. Head to your bookshelf and/or your Netflix queue and remove anything that doesn’t center the life of a Black or Brown person (and - ope! - don’t forget to eliminate anything not written, produced, and directed by a Black or brown person about Black and brown people - because white people aren’t here to tell someone else’s story). After you’ve taken every book off the shelf and un-favorited those shows, what are you left with? For most white Americans, likely very little. Challenge yourself to fill that space with counter narratives you’re less familiar with. A narrative that you relate to a little less, maybe even a narrative that makes you a little uncomfortable. The goal is for you to recognize that what you absorb and what you intake can shape your beliefs about yourself and others.
This active decentering of whiteness in our lives is a critical step in truly building self awareness of our identities and in understanding how bias shows up in our behaviors. Only then can we interrupt bias and discrimination in ourselves, in our interactions, and in the systems around us.
De-biasing The Narrative
Following the verdict, I am still thinking about Laura Winslow. About how the narratives I absorbed from her relationships and the life of her family taught me from a young age that Black people in America are more than the narrative we are fed every single day on the news, on social media, and from other white people we love and trust, one embedded in fear and steeped in stereotypes. Black people are full of joy and success, passion and dreams, genius and love, and this is the narrative that white people need to absorb, believe, and share if we are to disrupt the white supremacy within ourselves. This is the narrative we need to absorb when we step out and protest alongside others saying, “Black Lives Matter,” this is the narrative we need to absorb if we believe that justice, economic prosperity, healthy communities, and quality schools, belong to all of us, and this is the narrative we need to absorb to ensure we are raising an anti racist generation - not one of vigilantes backed by a culture of fear-fueled white supremacy.
The point is reading, learning, and developing our muscles to BE anti-racist everyday is PART of the work (in fact there are whole professional experiences devoted to it). We must also continuously interrogate the culture we choose to expose ourselves to, and ask ourselves what narratives we choose to believe, fictional or not. Only then can we truly act as allies and accomplices to Black, Indigenous and People of Color in our personal, interpersonal and professional lives, as well as, dismantle white supremacy when we see it whether it’s encountering overt racism in the workplace or covert racism in casual dinner conversation. This work includes interrogating the culture we absorb that appears or attempts to be diverse and inclusive. Take for example, the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That…which recently gained praise for bringing diversity in casting and dialogue about race to a notoriously white-centered series. Unfortunately, their approach was extremely problematic as it presented a quintessential interaction between a white woman and a Black woman. In the first episode, hard hitting attorney Miranda Hobbes insults her own professor on account of her “Black hairstyle” and proceeds to make excuses, only to ultimately apologize to the class for “taking everyone’s time.” Throughout this episode the character never apologizes to the professor, chooses to center her intent in the situation, and blames her behavior on being afraid to “say all the wrong things'' because of “the climate” we are in. What’s worse is, her best friend and the protagonist, Carrie even affirms Miranda, “I’m sure you didn’t say all the wrong things.” White-centered shows (and this most certainly still is one) continue to perpetuate the very behaviors we must disrupt in order to mitigate cycles of harm. As white people we shouldn’t become defensive like Miranda nor should we be complicit like Carrie, we must practice humility and change our behaviors, and also maybe change what we see as entertainment (for example, we can choose Issa Rae’s Insecure over And Just Like That).
Resources
The purpose of exposure therapy is to help someone to confront their fears. Most stereotypes and false narratives about BIPOC in general (and specifically Black people) are foundationally about fear, misunderstanding, and mistrust. This winter break, however long you have, I compel you to do a bit of self-imposed exposure therapy to challenge any lingering biases you may have by checking out the following media and books that center Black joy, Black love, Black humanity: