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Whiteness Culture Costs White Folks Our Resiliency
We’re swimming upstream against hyper-individualism, status, hierarchy, and dominance.
Do you ever just get fed up tired with all the push back against simple baseline values like the human right to equity? Why is this battle still raging? What the hell?
And if I’m tired, I can only imagine how exhausted Black folks feel with the endless manifestations of white supremacy they have to put up with. What about women? LGBTQI+ folks? Immigrants? Muslims? That people still get up every day and keep working for a better world is remarkable. Many would likely say, “We have no choice.” But it’s still a marker of amazing resilience.
Resilience is based in relationships and communities. Which is why such resiliency can be hard to come by for folks who look like I do. White folks like me are often isolated in politicized notions of individualism, gated community ideas of status, dominance culture, etc. Because its isolating, we don’t have access to the deeper reservoirs of resiliency found in rich diverse community.
The work for white folks like me is to infuse our lives with connection by reaching out across diversity of race, sexual identity, religion, immigration status, gender and all they ways in which human complexity intersects…
