reflections on reckoning & healing for white-bodied people

The intensity white bodied people feel when confronted with the horrors of racism can feel overwhelming - like bracing, like sorrow and even like grief. And while it is intense, it is not grief (perhaps grief over the loss of ignorance) and so requires a different approach to the processing and meaning-making of it. And, perhaps more importantly, it requires a more intentional approach to how we create multi-racial spaces that do less harm. All too often the intensity of those unprocessed emotions spill over in multiracial spaces (the phenomena of white tears) and without careful intention ends up centering the emotions of white bodied people, instead of the centering the racialized harm that is often the reason for gathering in the first place. This weakens the foundation of the multiracial coalitions we aspire to build: narrowing the spaces for processing the trauma of anti-Black racism or - worse - equating it to the pain that white bodied people feel about that trauma. How might we create higher integrity anti-racist spaces that center those who have been harmed by racism by better understanding - and thus building more appropriate and adjacent support systems - for white bodied people to process their role in racism? 

How might we understand what white bodied people are experiencing? Playing off of Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 idea of “unpacking the invisible knapsack,” Resmaa Menakem advances our collective thinking by writing of the “embodied plantation backpack.” Like McIntosh, he suggests that once we understand the contents and weight of that backpack, we are also able to put it down. But first we must understand the weight of centuries of behavior and conditioning that white bodied Americans carry. Menakem describes:

“On American plantations in the 1600s through the 1800s, there was little rule of law as we know it today. With few limitations, each plantation owner was the sole local authority who did whatever he pleased. If you were an enslaved person on a plantation, its owner could torture you, kill you, or sell you at any time. He controlled your body and your choices. He could rape you for pleasure, production, or profit. He and others had unfettered access to black bodies. On his land, which had earlier been stolen from its Indigenous inhabitants, he was a despot and, effectively, a god.

Plantation ethics were not built on justice or morality. They were built on violence, raw power, and racial domination, and there was a feralness to them [...]. This was the plantation owner's creed: I do whatever I want, to any Black body I want, whenever I want, using every tool at my disposal: fear, humiliation, scripture, incarceration, violence, murder.”

From Jim Crow to the Capitol Riots, from the prison industrial complex to the extra-judicial state-sanctioned killings of Black people by the police, this deeply entrenched conditioning towards dominance and violence is carried within white-bodied Americans today. It manifests from the subtle to the atrocious: a belief the safety and comfort of white bodies is more important than the safety, needs or survival of all other bodies; a lifting up of the white body as a neutral standard against which others are compared against; and a belief that whiteness entitles white bodies to privileges that others do not have (often wrapped up in narratives of meritocracy). A pawn to economic systems, white bodies - and the violence they perpetuate - are the foot soldiers of an economic order dehumanizes even themselves for the sake of capital. The weight of the “embodied plantation backpack” leaves white-bodied people without culture or a sense of ancestry, dehumanized and themselves owned by myths of separation and scarcity. Once this is realized, how might we go about both putting down the backpack while also healing from the harm carrying it has done?

New research emerging from the psychological study of military veterans introduces frameworks that might be helpful, specifically the concept of moral injury. Moral injury is a term described by Brett Litz of Boston University and his colleagues in 2009 as the psychic fallout of “morally injurious events, such as perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress [one’s own] deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” Two years later in 2011, psychologist Jonathan Shay describes it slightly differently: “moral injury is present when 1) there has been a betrayal of what’s right [in the soldier’s eyes] 2) by someone who holds legitimate authority 3) in a high- stakes situation.” A key distinction between these two definitions is where the origin of the injury resides -- one is located in the individual who fights (Litz) and the other locates it within the system that asks them to fight (Shay). In the case of racism, both sources of moral injury are appropriate to consider for white-bodied people. To enhance our understanding, the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab adds that, regardless of the source, there are three overlapping features of how it manifests: in our bodies, in our institutions and within our country. Moral injury in the body might manifest in the following symptoms:

As the research on moral injury increases and improves, so does the treatment for it. The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab suggests we understand moral injury “less as a disorder and more as a response that calls for shared responsibility.” One innovation that is showing positive outcomes was pioneered by a VA chaplain and a psychologist at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia. This innovation involves the co-facilitation of a 12-week Moral Injury Group (MIG) for military veterans that aims to: provide education about moral injury, cultivate the collective responsibility for the consequences of warfare, and hold a brave space to co-process the symptoms of moral injury. A recent study of this approach shows its impacts are promising - noting decreases in suicidality, religious struggles, and depression, along with increases in posttraumatic growth, self-compassion, and life functioning. 

A few features of this program that could be applied to white-bodied people recovering from racism-related moral injury include: a close knit small cohort, education about moral injury, the development of personal testimony, tactics to identify and release shame, and the adaptation of the program’s Community Ceremony --  a hallmark ceremony in the VA chapel, immediately following Week 10, that brings together VA staff, family, and friends of MIG Veterans as well as the wider society. The ceremony is critical in shifting the locus of healing from the individual body to the collective. 

Today, and in our lifetimes, in our bodies and in our communities, through Black-led multi-racial coalitions, we have an opportunity to break the conditioning left by centuries of anti-Black racialized violence and oppression. For white-bodied people to be able to show up in those coalitions with presence and grace, we need to carefully imagine and create the containers for our collective transformation.