A Divine Being in a White Body… the contradictions and awakenings
Acknowledging privilege sucks. It just does. It doesn’t feel good and it brings up some deep questions about self-worth. It has forced me to question what in my life I have because of the time and energy and work I put in, or what I have received based on the societal privileges I have benefitted from. When I started writing my blog on white privilege, I thought I was pretty aware and conscious of privilege. I thought it would be easy. I thought I was doing it because my awareness would be helpful to other’s who might be new to this conversation. What came out was a dive into my life and our society that is much more layered and heavy than I had expected. My own emotions have been churned, awakening more humility, more compassion, more awareness than I had previously had.
It also opened up a profound sadness, similar to how I felt when I took my first racial justice training program more than 15 years ago. I had begun to learn the untold history of the United States. The history I was never taught in school. The history that has been purposefully kept out of my common discourse. Stories of oppression and resilience, of cultural genocide and dehumanization, of uprisings and defeats. Historical details about this country’s economic and social system that has benefitted my people at the expense of so many others. At the time I was in my early 20’s and my sadness was mostly for the people, both current and ancestral, who are impacted the heaviest by white supremacy. I was angry at the people who had lied to me and kept so much truth tucked under rugs, hidden in family secrets and conveniently forgotten so they didn’t have to acknowledge their responsibility in it. A feeling of shame for my own people joined with the sadness and the anger and these feelings began to churn with an internal turmoil.
My sadness has now broadened to include myself, my family, my ancestors, and white people as a whole. We have been deeply harmed by white supremacy as well, in ways I can see and in ways I’m still uncovering. My heart aches for all of humanity as the historical legacy of racism has built chasms of distance between people. We are humans, meant to connect with each other, to form relationships and learn from each other. Our minds expand as we learn new things, experience new environments, hear different perspectives on life. Racism has caused a stunted growth pattern. We are all walking around in layers of unhealed grief and trauma, without realizing it.
The discomfort, sadness and painful emotions that come from acknowledging privilege is often what keeps people away from it. It’s understandable. And, because I know there is infinitely more possibilities in life when we are living from a healed place, there is a higher purpose in feeling the difficult emotions. There is purpose in facing into our privilege, because the growth and healing that can come out of it, is worth the pain it feels to go through it.
One of the techniques I have learned to use to help sit in this pain is the acknowledgement of contradiction. My training with an organization called, Generative Somatics, helped me to have more awareness of the forever existing contradictions in life. For example, in my spiritual beliefs, everything is energy. I believe we are all divine substance and the expansive power of God is in us and using us to express itself to its highest potential. I am here to do amazing things, because I am allowing the divine to work in me and through me to express its greatness. I believe each of us is made of this same divine substance, with the ability to be guided to greater and greater expressions of ourselves. This would mean I should be big and amazing and powerful and brilliant!!
The other side of my contradiction is that I have been born into a white supremacist society as a white woman and this comes with privileges that I never asked for. Privileges that everyone should have. The privilege to live without being hated or harassed or hurt or killed because of my shell, my skin, the body I was born into. Every step along my path, I have been given access to spaces and places, given opportunities for advancement not afforded to everyone, been free of the daily stresses of micro aggressions that impact people of color on a regular basis. I have taken up space and believed stereotypes and assumptions that were instilled in me from my family and generations of people who didn’t seem to know any better. My father’s family has been in the U.S. for many generations, so any of the wealth he has, is saturated in historical privilege. It’s unlikely that I would be where I am today, or have what I have today if I didn’t benefit from generational and current lifetime of economic and social privilege. What does that mean for me? What does it mean about me?
These two different ways of looking at the world feel contradictory to me. How do I continue to let myself be the greatness of divine energy, if my greatness exists because of privilege? It would be one thing if everyone had the privileges of being treated with respect and dignity, but white privilege is often in direct assault to people without white skin. For a long time, I didn’t know how to be a responsible white person, while at the same time being powerful and amazing and big.
Many years I silenced myself out of shame for the privileges I had. I held myself back in everything, in order to make space for other people to shine. I stopped pushing myself to be a good dancer, because I didn’t want to be another white woman, AGAIN, in the spotlight. I stopped writing poetry, because I didn’t think anybody wanted another white woman poet processing publicly about life’s dramas. I became excessively humble. Nothing I did felt like there was space for me to shine. The only time I allowed myself to shine was in racial justice work with white people. This was where I felt like it was my place to be big, to reach into my fullness. In everything else, I shrank. It was what I thought I needed to do in order to balance out the privileges I had.
My spirit was starving, yearning for wholeness, yearning for greatness, but my mind wouldn’t let it be. I became the white person that people of color were comfortable around, because I didn’t take up too much space. I didn’t try to out-do anyone, or prove that I knew more than they did. I listened to stories and believed their experiences. I learned about life from perspectives I had not grown up around and I loved the people who told them. I was humbled by my ignorance, taken back by how little I really knew. I encouraged my friends to be their best, to expand into their greatness no matter what the racist world brought forth. I wanted them to fly and soar above all the hate, all the unfairness, all of the pain. My focus was outwards because if I looked within, I would confront my contradiction again. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know how to move in greatness and humility at the same time.
For a long time, I felt like I had to reconcile these contradictory experiences. They have shifted over time, warped into slightly different versions, but ultimately I still hold them in my awareness. As time has gone on, I’ve become more comfortable with contradiction and have learned a lot from them. The humility that came with acknowledging my privilege was pivotal in my ability to connect across racial and cultural lines. Privilege has a way of inflating our ego, creating blinders around us so that we don’t even see the fullness of the world, or notice our own behavior towards other people. The internalized superiority that subconsciously inflates our sense of self, creates behaviors that are unpleasant to be around, causing challenges in our ability to connect across cultural lines. Behaviors such as taking up a lot of verbal and physical space, denying people’s personal, lived experiences by saying things like, “you’re being too sensitive” or “that couldn’t have really happened, you’re being overdramatic” and physically not having respectful boundaries. An example of this would be how often white people want to touch the hair of Black people without consent, something so frustrating that Beyonce’s sister, Solange, made a song about it; Don’t Touch My Hair. My awareness, my humility, my choice to pull back allowed me to see more, to hear more, to learn more. It allowed me to notice behaviors that I wasn’t aware of before and consciously make changes.
I still hold the contradictions, but I don’t have as much need to find reconciliation. They are both true. I am a spiritual being with infinite possibility, allowing divine light to unfold from my being. I am also existing in a human body. This human experience includes the social construction of race and all the historical legacy this has had. I was born into and have lived my whole life in a white body. That gives me social and economic privileges in the material world. And, on the other side, my spirit is timeless and has the infinite potential to be anything. I am here to be great and do amazing things. My awareness of living in this particular body with the historical and social legacy it holds, helps guide me to make choices and act in a way that is respectful to others and aware of my privilege. It guides me to act differently than my ancestors who didn’t know any better, or who chose not to care. It guides me to do what I can to heal the generational trauma in my family line so it is not reproduced in the next generation. I recognize now that my light, when expressed without superiority, is not dimming anyone else’s light. It is clean energy. It allows me to be in mutual encouragement with others so there is enough room for us all to shine as brightly as we can. Energetically, we need brighter lights coming from every person, no matter the race or culture they find themselves in. Our society as a whole will benefit when we are all shining more brightly, and making sure our light doesn’t dim the light of others.