My daughter graduated from college this past weekend (celebrating virtually, of course).  As a proud parent I’m so impressed with how hard she worked, how much she gained in both academic and personal knowledge, and how much more worldly she is at her age than I was.   Her education was so important in not only building a foundation of knowledge, but in challenging her thought processes and exposing her to new ideas.  It got me thinking about how at the tender age of 21 our formal education generally stops, but how our need for learning is actually lifelong.  Unfortunately as so many of us become comfortable with what we know and enjoy the confidence that  familiarity gives us, we may overlook the potential cost in becoming increasingly closed off to new ideas and inflexible to change.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of experience!  I use it every day in my work and sometimes feel a  bit like a fraud when my interns ask how I know something, thinking I’m so talented,  when it’s just that I’ve seen similar patterns or presentations so many times before.  But I do notice that as I get older I can become a bit complacent and set in my ways.  (Which, ironically, is actually part of why older people are happier according to research).  When I listen to young people challenge the status quo and question why things are as they have been, it’s a wake up call.  When I go to a protest organized by young people, it shakes up my acceptance of how things have to be. Inexperience has its advantages.  There is a freshness of opinion and a willingness to try something new.   There is definitely a trade off in having to tolerate discomfort when you are open to change, and I ask myself about this unease.  Change is scary.  Change brings uncertainty, and with change is the very good chance that you may be left behind or, worse yet, dismissed, or rejected.  

This last month has been a big lesson for me in the downsides of comfort, as I wonder how much my own comfort with how things have been stands in the way of someone else’s need for change.  As I look at so many of our leaders in Congress holding on to their seats well into their 80’s (but not you RBG!!), it does give me concern for how hard it is to change things when our leaders are so comfortable in their power and the style and leadership that keeps them there.  If ever there was a time to embrace the youthful vision of possibility and marry it with the wisdom of experience, it is now.  But in order to do so we must ask ourselves what are we afraid of?  Rather than shutting down the hope of change, we must support its energy and guide its direction.  We must look fear in the face and be willing to give up some of our certainty and with it, some of our authority.  As a society, we must start to share the load of vulnerability.  Equality doesn’t mean all of us being the same, it means a shared ownership of power and its flip side, a leveling of the burdens that must be carried.

As I lift my glass to toast this year’s graduates and see the beauty of their visions for how they would like the world to be, I am pained with its contrast to the world we have handed them.  But I am also inspired with their ingenuity and passion.  With the climate changing, with the country divided, with inequality rising steadily, they are not comfortable, thank God.  Now, if the rest of us can allow ourselves to give up a bit of control, us old dogs may just learn a few new desperately needed tricks that might make our world a better place, despite us..

To be honest, I’ve been speechless this week.  Despite thinking for days about what I might have to say in the midst of what is happening in our country, I sat at my computer with a complete loss for words.  The same thing happened in my work meetings when we tried to support each other.  All I could find to say was “how very awful” it was and “how sorry I am” and how “profound the grief is.” At first I thought it was just about the pain.  What does one say in witnessing George Floyd on the ground, grasping for his last breath. Or in imagining being hunted and shot like an animal, as was Ahmaud Arbery, the last words he heard being a racial slur?  The pain of these truths of injustice is so deep and so difficult to tolerate.  Yet I am a psychologist, and one who works with trauma, no less.  I am trained to talk about emotional pain.  The meaning I find in my work is in this very act of putting words to the darkness one feels from traumatic pain in a process that promotes personal agency and awareness.  So why was this pain any different?  Why was I struggling to find anything of use to say?

In thinking about how to work with this, I went to another therapy technique.  When someone is so overwhelmed by a trauma that they cannot talk about it, we address this by first  “talking about the talking about.”  We explore with them what feelings come up in just the idea of talking about the trauma.  What fears do they have, shame they might be carrying, or guilt?  What must be worked through before they can move forward?  There are many layers to what can silence someone from opening a lid on a box filled with pain.  So I sat with this.  For a while.  And what emerged for me was a real sense of anxiety in not knowing the right thing to say.  As a person with white privilege I am afraid of saying or doing something that will be seen as wrong, hurtful, or even worse, assuming I know something I don’t know.  I am keenly aware of being caught in a dilemma between speaking as if I can understand something I cannot possibly understand and the fear of being silent, which is even worse.  So I say little, try to listen a lot, all the while feeling badly because I know that I am not doing enough.

Fortunately, in trying to understand what is going on for me, I came across an interview with a woman named Robin D’Angelo who is a diversity trainer and author of a book called White Fragility:  Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.  Her words rang true for me, even if it was humbling.  She states “Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware or can never admit to ourselves, we (white people) become highly fragile in conversations around race.  We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good moral people.  Thus we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense.  The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable.”

Yup.  That about sums it up.  I try not to be a racist, I try to be aware of my biases, knowing, however, I can’t help being racist as a white person raised in a culture and society that is racist.  But it hurts to think that I am a part of the system that continues to oppress.  That I and my family benefit from the effects of one race dominating over all the others.  For the truth of it is, the very white privilege I have has allowed me to avoid the racial stress, thinking my empathy and good intentions at trying to be kind to everyone are enough.  Or that expressing outrage every time there is a victim or an incident that is brought to my attention is enough, all the while having the privilege to move on and go about my life until the next news cycle.

The good news?  The book by Robin D’Angelo is back ordered; enough of us white people want to understand and are willing to read a book entitled White Fragility, or a novel The Vanishing Half by black author Brit Bennett, or How to Be An Antiracist by IbramX Kendi, and the picture book I am Enough. As of last Wednesday (today is Friday as I write this) 15 of the top 20 best selling books on Amazon are about race, racism, and white supremacy in the US.  

We are a traumatized nation.  In grieving both a viral pandemic and a racial pandemic, openings are being created to become aware of injustice and to express it.  There will be a backlash, as we see, not just politically, but within ourselves.  It is up to each of us to take the steps to not only read the books, but to follow through on supporting change in our societal structures.  But for me personally, this week has been a sorrowed recognition of my own discomfort and avoidance.  I’ve awakened to the fact that I can’t do anything until I can first tolerate the awareness of racial inequality (and how I benefit from it) and find the language to talk about it.  I will need to be vulnerable enough to take ownership of it rather than thinking it’s about other people. For me, this will be a needed first step and one that I no longer want the luxury of not taking.