Untamed - Glennon Doyle Page 0,62

white supremacy, I felt shaky, jumpy, and agitated as I slowly surrendered the privilege of not knowing. It was a painful unbecoming.

Eventually it became time to speak up. I started sharing the voices I was reading, and speaking out against the racism of America’s past and the bigotry and strategic divisiveness of the current administration. Every time I did this, people got pissed off. I felt okay about this because I seemed to be pissing off the right people.

Much later, I was asked to participate in an activist group led by women of color. One of the black leaders tasked another white woman and me with the job of planning an online webinar for other white women with the intention of calling them into the work of racial justice. Our mission was twofold: Begin educating other white women and solicit donations to fund bail and respite for black activists putting themselves on the line day after day.

The other white woman and I accepted the job. On our planning calls for the webinar, we decided that she would focus on the history of complicity of white women and I would focus on my personal experience as a white woman waking up to her place inside of white supremacy. I thought that if I explained to white women that the confusion, shame, and fear they would experience in their early days of racial sobriety were predictable parts of the process of unbecoming, they would be more likely to remain in the anti-racism effort. Also, they’d be better equipped to confront their racism privately, instead of mistakenly believing that their feelings should be shared publicly. This felt important, because black leaders were telling me that the ignorance and emotionality of well-intentioned white women was a major stumbling block toward justice.

I knew what they meant. I’d seen it happen again and again. If white women don’t learn that our experiences in early racial sobriety are predictable, we think our reactions are unique. So we enter race conversations far too early and we lead with our feelings and confusion and opinions. When we do this, we are centering ourselves, so we inevitably get put back where we belong, which is far from the center. This makes us even more agitated. We are used to people showing gratitude for our presence, so being unappreciated hurts our feelings. We double down. We say things like “At least I’m trying. No one is even grateful. All I do is get attacked.” People become upset, because saying “I am being attacked” doesn’t accurately describe what is happening. People are just telling us the truth for the first time. That truth feels like an attack because we have been protected by comfortable lies for so long.

We are dumbfounded. We feel like we are always saying the wrong things and that people are always getting upset about that. But I do not think people become upset just because we say the wrong things. I think people are upset—and we are defensive, hurt, and frustrated—because we have fallen into the trap of believing that becoming racially sober is about saying the right thing instead of becoming the right thing; that showing up is based in performing instead of transforming. The way we show up reveals that we haven’t yet done the studying and listening required to become the right thing before trying to say the right thing.

We are mugs filled to the brim, and we keep getting bumped. If we are filled with coffee, coffee will spill out. If we are filled with tea, tea will spill out. Getting bumped is inevitable. If we want to change what spills out of us, we have to work to change what’s inside of us.

“How do I enter the race conversation?” is the wrong question in the early days of racial sobriety. We are not talking about a conversation to enter publicly as much as a conversion to surrender to privately. Whether we are in it to perform or to transform becomes evident by the way we take up space. When a white woman who is unbecoming does show up publicly, she does so with humble respect, which is a way of being that is quiet, steady, and yielding. Not with hand-wringing shame, because self-flagellation is just another way to demand attention. She has feelings, but she interrogates them within instead of imposing them on others, because there is a deep understanding that how she feels is irrelevant when people are dying.

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