One of the early lessons of most social justice work is that you need to learn how to be uncomfortable. White women coming to anti-racism work through feminism have a hard time with this, because in feminism we were the oppressed, and in anti-racist work we are the oppressor. Our introductions to feminism were in spaces where we were uniting in solidarity, not in spaces where we needed to unpack our own role in the system of oppression. In feminism, white women were the leaders (to the detriment of our own movement in many cases), and in anti-racist work we are the student.
The discourse demands that we lean in to being uncomfortable. We are complicit in structural, and very often individual, racism, which is far more than “uncomfortable” for people of color–we don’t need to be comfortable, we need to do the work.
But what does it mean to be uncomfortable, and what does it do to us?
The stereotypical activist is angry about everything, all the time. (My favorite T-shirt says “Shrieking Feminist Harpy.”) Once you start to see a problem, you see it everywhere. For a problem like racism or misogyny, you see it everywhere because it is everywhere. That can lead to a little bit of smugness. I am more enlightened, because I know why my neighbor shouldn’t dress her kid up in a Native American headdress, and she doesn’t. I am not a racist; my neighbor is a racist. At that stage, one can keep oneself pretty busy calling people out. Someone else, somewhere else, needs to do better. I can see that they need to do better, so I am fine. We displace our discomfort on to anyone else.
That displacement gets a lot of rewards, and it can be very, very mean. Not only do I know that you are a racist (I am fine, because I see that you are a racist), I am going to humiliate you for it (I am really not a racist, because I am taking down a racist.) Call out culture can be really toxic, really quickly. (I am speaking here specifically about white-to-white conversations.) Are you pointing out someone’s mistake because you want them to be better, or because you want to feel better? Are you inviting someone to the movement, or are you putting the movement on a pedestal so high that no one else can get on?
We can also turn our discomfort into a kind of self-loathing despair. “I’m always going to be white, so I’m always going to be guilty of racism. Black people are always going to be afraid of me, and they should be. I am a terrible person, and nothing I can ever do will be enough.” Which I would like to tell you, with great love, is not helpful. This can turn to a kind of attention seeking of its own, just like displacement does. It is extremely common for white women to post comments in anti-racist online spaces that are apologies dripping with this kind of masochistic self-pity. Depending on the space, you’ll see one of two comments–1) congratulations and hugs for being so self-aware or 2) a rather pointed question of “okay, so what are you doing about it?” The first few times I saw “so what are you going to do about it?” I was shocked. Like, can we not give this person some space to apologize? Then I realized how common this behavior is, and how it often means “Anything I do is always going to be wrong, so it’s safer not to do anything.”
The thing that both of these responses have in common is that they absolve responsibility for untangling our own internal racism. I don’t have to work on myself because I am fine and I am busy working on you / I don’t have to work on myself because I will never be fine no matter what I do.
Just like in any endeavor, discomfort is part of the process, and the edge of your comfort zone is where the best learning takes place. That doesn’t mean you let it define you as a person. Learn the lesson that’s there, get comfortable with that place, and then move forward.
Jessica Thinks 