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.