For too much of my life I have mistaken knowing for understanding. I thought that knowledge about the history of colonial racism made me understand a culture of racism. I thought studying the justice system, how it targets poorer people, communities of color and black children, disenfranchises them of legal or democratic representation and economically extorts them, made me understand a system of racism. By reading black writers, learning black history and listening to black friends, I fooled myself into thinking I understood their experience. Even beyond college I seemed to think that I could research and cite my way into wokeness like it was a final exam. Like so many white allies I’ve made the mistake of thinking I understood my own white privilege, and will almost certainly make the mistake again.
One sentence from one of the most important people in my life, a black person whom I love, made me realize my mistake and the gravity of it. It was Friday at the end of an exhausting, infuriating, frightening week. The world was reacting to the video of four white police officers murdering George Floyd, and the murder of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Eric Garner and a history of murder by the police. With the world we mourned for Floyd, raged at the police officers and system that killed him, and were fatigued by having to do it all over again. It was one of those long weeks that leave you depleted and speechless when it is most important to stand up and speak.
I sat down with this person, who had just come off a full work week of balancing reaction to the news, personal outrage, and having to do a regular week’s work. I had just finished researching the disproportionate mortality rate for black and Latinx patients of Covid-19, just another aspect of the mass black death tolerated by our country. I asked her if she would go to these protest even though just by being there she was being put at greater risk of infection, hospitalization or being targeted by police violence.
She replied “Why would any of that matter when they can come into my home and murder me for no reason?” She didn’t say out of frustration or anger, those feelings are too familiar, too draining. She said it with the deep sadness of truth, and a sense of the futility in stating it.
Those words stuck with me in the moment and I couldn’t quite figure out why. I sat with them for a long time, felt the weight of them. I tried to let them inform me of their truth. Of course I knew the words were true. There are so many cases of police entering homes, answering a call, serving a warrant or just walking by, and murdering black women. It happened to Breonna Taylor, it happened to Atatiana Jefferson and to Botham Jean. It is depressingly obvious how true the statement is. But her words communicated more than that. They stated pain that I had never felt. They stated the sadness of knowing you should have every right to self-care, to be concerned about your own health and safety before anything, but realizing that is not a privilege you have. They spoke the generational trauma of being told your life has no sanctity, and seeing that demonstrated every day on the streets, in media, in your community and throughout the country. Those words held the grief of seeing your family, your brother, cousin, mother or uncle in the many faces of many black victims of police violence. Even if I listen and read about all these things, I could never understand living with them the way she does.
I have had the privilege of never truly feeling that. And that privilege has withheld my empathy. Empathy takes a deep and constant emotional effort to put forward. It takes putting my own comfort, ego and even safety aside in order to build relationships and understanding with others. Without that constant effort I have extended sympathy and support and called it allyship. But those are all insufficient and complicit until I can truly put aside my privilege and grieve for black lives.
For most of my life I’ve also been reluctant to associate guilt or shame to my acknowledgement of white privilege. I thought that by admitting guilt about my privilege I was playing into a conservative narrative that all white allies are just trying to make themselves feel better, barely disguising their desire to call us race traitors. I also felt that guilt was unproductive, that it made systemic racism about me in a self-pitying way. At the very least I assured myself that guilt was non-conducive to amplifying the voice of black activists.
But now I’m realizing that guilt isn’t disingenuous or selfish. It is really a natural and necessary response to feeling grief for the suffering of others. That guilt and shame are forms of Survivor’s Guilt. Every black person in America struggles with survivor’s guilt when they see those videos, when they learn of their family member’s death or see the oppression of their community. Any black person who does dare to take care of themselves and their families feels the weight of that guilt and shame for being able to, and knowing it is a rare and precarious privilege for them. Every personal success black professionals, artists and activists have comes with some guilt, even if it is irrational or unhelpful.
White allies must experience this survivor’s guilt when we live in the safety and comfort of our privilege. If white people really let themselves feel that grief, a grief that comes from seeing victims of generational violence as brothers and sisters and humans deserving of love, then they must necessarily feel guilt and shame about their survival and prosperity in a system that is designed to protect and serve them while killing and controlling black communities. To not feel that would be either complete sociopathy, or a refusal to embrace the truth of that privilege.
But guilt is also not enough. It is not anything, other than a natural and necessary human emotion. Many white people who would call themselves allies do live with that guilt, but not with grief. They reject racism and recognize its institutional manifestations, but they do not fight it on a personal level. This is especially true for white liberals living in urban or suburban social bubbles, where everybody agrees racism is wrong but nobody experiences it personally. They do not understand it.
Part of this understanding must come from having close and important relationships with black people in everyday life. If you don’t have those people in your life, ask if yourself why. Ask yourself if you’ve allowed those relationships in your life . Without realizing it so many well-meaning white people deny themselves those relationships out of a convenience and comfort of white spaces, of white privilege. Without those close relationships, without loving somebody who can be terrorized for the color of their skin, we can never grieve for the pain of that person. That cannot be rectified by finding a token friend to talk to about racism. Black people don’t need white friends who only enter black spaces performatively, or out of necessity to learn.
As allies and as human beings, we must be called to enter those spaces and form those relationships out of love. To truly be an ally white people must actively fight against segregation of white spaces as well. This must go beyond harmful token diversity efforts. It means making professional and social spaces comfortable, accessible and safe for black people. That means white people must deal with their own discomfort with busing to desegregate schools, affordable housing in their white neighborhoods, and hiring practices that put people of color in leadership roles.
It is an extremely Eurocentric approach to activism for black communities to believe that facts, figures, patterns and critical thought can make you understand racism. I am guilty of that approach, believing that rationality and reason had to be the bedrock of combating racism. But that is a denial of a deeply emotional, visceral truth of life being devalued by a state. To truly be an activist and ally you must accept the pain, built and personal violence of racism, still knowing you will never fully understand it.
In recent days, when trying to comprehend and support the worldwide protests in support of justice and freedom for black lives, I’ve been thinking about activism as art. Specifically I’ve been thinking about how spaces in protests and activism reflect visual space in art. In paintings there is positive and negative space, space with things and actions and space with nothing. Activism must be in the positive space, where there is action, interaction and physical representation. But there also must be activist in work in the negative space, looking toward what goes unsaid, invisible but there as a backdrop providing stark relief and evoking powerful reaction for what we do see.
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