A Call to Coalition: On Whiteness in Healing and Movement Spaces

The movement work to which I am called requires a multiracial, multigenerational coalition of organizers and advocates to shift policies and systems toward giving power and land back to Indigenous and Black people.

This work demands that Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, historically stripped of their power, cultural practices, and land, reconnect with these essential elements to build new systems and ways of being where all people can thrive and live with dignity. It also requires that White people show up fully as allies, putting their bodies on the line to protect and center Black and Brown bodies.

This is the work that I have been proud to learn from and lead.

White people are figuring out how to play a critical role in the movement for social justice with no real connection to those of us at the center of the fight.However, while this work invites Black, Brown, and Indigenous people to step into their fullness and integrate their past selves with the present, White people are figuring out how to play a critical role in the movement for social justice with no real connection to those of us at the center of the fight. This isn’t to say that Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are responsible for the status of White people in the movement. On the contrary, many Black political thought leaders call out White moderates and liberals, being skeptical of their commitment to the movement, from Malcolm X to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Nevertheless, to build the multiracial coalition, we need to begin to shift the political tide that will change the material conditions of the people in this country living on the margins. We need to figure out how we “be” together in a coalition.

My Personal History

Before continuing, I want to address my Blackness as a foundational preface. I anticipate some people will question my Blackness, so it’s important to share who I am: a dark-skinned, queer, cisgendered, Black woman raised in New Haven, CT, attending underfunded, diverse, but majority-Black, public schools.

I was raised as a Pentecostal Christian (COGIC) by a single, divorced mother. As a child, I received weekly phone calls from my mostly absent father, a man from Accra, Ghana, from whom I inherited my African features. I grew up learning the history of the violence of the Jim Crow South through the perspective of a grandmother born in the Deep South during a time when violence—physical, medical, educational, and otherwise—was the norm against Black bodies.

In all of my movement work post-college, I’ve consistently centered Black stories, experiences, and bodies, striving to decenter Whiteness in my life by learning from Black elders. And yet, I am deeply concerned about the current position of White people in movement spaces.

A Personal Encounter: The Challenge of Exclusion

In a recent training session that required vulnerability, I partnered with an older White woman who struggled to answer, “Where does dysregulation begin in your body?” She had never been asked this question. Having done this work before, I offered to help. Together, we identified that her dysregulation started as a knot in her throat that kept her from speaking and moved her to tears—a remnant, we learned, of growing up in a home with violence where she often felt silenced. In turn, during times of conflict, she showed up as silent, invisible, frustrated, and crying.

Healing and complete internal integration are necessary for those who want to engage fully in social movements.

This moment felt like a breakthrough, a move toward healing. Yet, in the next moment, a fellow Black woman called out the White woman for crying. She expressed that she had no tolerance for her tears, explaining how, during colonization, slavery, and the subsequent Jim Crow South, White women’s tears were used to manipulate White men to extreme violence against Black bodies, usually male. As my fellow Black workshop participant saw it, because of this history, there was no room for the White woman to understand her own dysregulation, and certainly no room for her actually to let tears flow.

While this reaction was understandable, given the history, it also felt off. I had to understand why.

The Need for Inclusive Healing Spaces

That night, I was haunted by nightmares of the violence I experienced as a child. When I woke up, I called my husband to process it since I was across the country for training. As I processed, two things became clear. First, healing and complete internal integration are necessary for those who want to engage fully in social movements. In her book All About Love, bell hooks writes that the first step in this integration work is to process one’s experiences with one’s family of origin. This is not an exclusive call to certain races. We must all undergo the first step to begin to break down the walls that colonization erected between our spiritual selves, our cultural selves, and each other.

Second, due to the potential harm to Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, we’ve created affinity groups to heal in silos, away from White people. This is understandable, given Whiteness’s history of conquering and objectifying. Since practices of full self-integration are sacred for most Black and Brown people, we hold deep fears that opening them up leaves them vulnerable to White people taking and morphing them into something so ugly and capitalistic that it will render them useless. We’ve seen this happen already—White people have made an entire industry out of the “wellness” movement. The propensity of Whiteness to corrupt makes us fearful of sharing our sacred practices.

These opposing forces create a struggle within the movement. While we see the need for spiritual reform and awakening as a path forward, we fear sharing that path with White people, even those we call allies, co-conspirators, and accomplices. How, then, do we move beyond this impasse and develop stronger, more intimate relationships with White allies while ensuring our own safety?

Moving toward Collective Healing

To move beyond this impasse, we must ask ourselves critical questions:

• How can White people do the work to prepare to be in sacred healing spaces with Black, Brown, and Indigenous people in respectful and responsible ways?
• How can Black people begin to discern their own capacity for making room in healing spaces with White people?
• What other factors must we consider as we embark on this sacred healing journey together?

These questions are not simple, nor do they have easy answers. But they are essential to peeling back layers of harm and moving toward collective healing so that we may engage in social justice movements fully and free up our imaginations to create something new together.

That something new would be a multiracial, multigenerational coalition of organizers and advocates to shift policies and systems toward giving power and land back to Indigenous and Black people.

This is not a dismissal of the harm, trauma, or fear Black, Brown, and Indigenous people may carry, nor is it to say that all White people are worth engaging in this way. Some people are settled in being contrarians, entrenched in debate about things that don’t impact the quality of their lives. I’m not speaking to those people. Instead, I am talking to those who are genuinely interested in engaging in the movement for social justice but who have not found their place.

Let this be an invitation to reflect on how we can responsibly build the multiracial coalition that I believe will get us to the new world toward which the movement for social justice works. Let this be an invitation to do that without compromising the sacredness of movement spaces. Let us continue this conversation with a commitment to collective healing and the creation of new possibilities.