Friday, June 5, 2020

White Supremacy: Time to cure the disease


White supremacy.

I look at those two words and breathe deep.

Can I find healing in those words and what they represent?

Here goes.

Two initial thoughts to help frame this conversation.

As a physician, I know the importance of distinguishing diseases from symptoms. For example, pneumonia is the disease that causes symptoms of cough, fever, and shortness of breath. We know in medicine that treating the downstream symptoms without addressing the disease causing those symptoms is not effective. We don’t treat the cough, we treat the pneumonia causing the cough. 

White supremacy is the disease, racism is the symptom of the disease.

Second, a concept from systems theory: Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. This reminds us that moments like this week are not about who is “racist” and who is not. It isn’t about the police officers that brutally murdered George Floyd (RIP) or the deranged duo that attacked and killed Ahmaud Arbery (RIP). It is about the system that is perfectly designed for events like these to happen over and over in a systemic way.

Back to white supremacy.

White supremacy is the disease we still do not talk about. Especially as white people.

Racism is a symptom of this disease. It pervades our societies and globe where white supremacy thrives.

Allow me to define white supremacy. It is not goons in white hooded robes burning crosses and terrorizing communities of color as most of us have been led to believe, a convenient way of letting the rest of us white folks off the hook. White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races and should therefore dominate society. It is behind such concepts as manifest destiny and the genocide inflicted on brown and black populations of the globe as white Europeans decided in some pseudo-religious hallucination that the world was theirs for the taking. 

They didn’t need to state as they pillaged and raped people and their lands that this quest was “in the name of white supremacy.” Look at the results, so clearly divided along the lines of skin color and it becomes crystal clear that the system here is white supremacy, perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

White supremacy, through its symptom of racism, leads blacks being killed by police at a rate three times that of whites. It is why the shootings of black men and cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women, in a repeated and predictable way, seem less important to investigate.

In this pandemic, white supremacy is behind communities of color bearing the biggest burden of death during COVID. American Indians make up 11% of New Mexico but account for an astounding 57% of our COVID cases. When we look at factors leading to this high rate, white people seem suddenly appalled to learn about sub-standard housing and rampant poverty and unemployment in our Indigenous Nations. They feign shock and dismay at hearing that 30% of houses on the Navajo Nation lack running water.

White supremacy places these communities, these brown lives as less important. As a white person, I am responsible for these conditions that lead to a very predictable outcome when a pandemic or other natural disaster hits.

Look at our prisons, look at our communities with the worst schools and least job prospects, look at our communities who live sickest and die youngest, look at places where the toxic waste dumps are put. We all know too well the color of those populations and it ain’t white.

As a white person, I must own my complicity in this being our current reality.

My healing begins here, in owning white supremacy as something that has gotten me into doors and places I didn’t deserve and as something I inflict through my whiteness and through my actions on people of color around me. As a person whose whiteness has given me un-earned privilege each day of my life, this moment gives me and people like me a chance to truly work for a cure to white supremacy. Forget support groups and self-help books about how to be less racist – I want to be a part in curing the white supremacy disease that causes racism.

I challenge my white colleagues to join me in having tough conversations with ourselves and our inner circle of family and friends. RobinDiAngelo, a scholar who coined a term white fragility proposes that whites are “socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement that we are either not consciously aware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race.” Let’s break out of that paralyzing place and start thinking and talking about white supremacy.

But that improved insight will change exactly nothing. Turning that into actions that over-turn white supremacy in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods, in our systems. This needs to be our commitment. No more asking people of color to cure the disease that whites created and need to fix.

White supremacy.

I am still trying to get comfortable with saying it and acknowledging my part in its devilish, racist plot.

But if we, white people, begin there, it is a great start.

If we start to understand, we can begin to act.

And in understanding and acting, that is where, my brothers and sisters, healing begins.


Note: I want to credit and thank one of my mentors in all things social justice, Tonya Covington, who gave me needed insight on white supremacy that led to this piece. Thank you Tonya!


10 comments:

  1. Anthony, thank you for taking the time to write this and to call out the reality as it is. I firmly believe that the question we as white people should ask ourselves every day is "How am I contributing to racism and hurting the BIPOC around me?" Only when we start from a place of accepting that we ARE contributing and ARE racist, regardless of whether we want to be or not, can we start to actively become anti-racist and work to dismantle the system. This needs to be a daily conversation we have with ourselves and with other white folks around us rather than asking BIPOC to bear the emotional labor of educating us. I'm on this journey with you and fully accept your challenge!

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  2. You better say that. Blacks are growing up in the “picked out neighborhoods” called the projects so they could keep us all together, even going through extent to threaten to arrest us if we didn’t turn in the census 2020 because they need to know how many blacks resides in New Mexico. Me as an African American, for once I’m so proud that we are finally coming together without killing one another and the Nation is shocked!. Every white person do not deserve to be called a racist just like every African American is not mad all the time or a thief etc.

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  3. Ooo...i have to catch my breath.
    Insight
    Clarity
    I feel your anguish about whiteness and share it. But our hearts and how we express it is colorless. We are mindful of this in all our actions to the best of our ability.
    When we look in the mirror we see a symbol of privilege, but as a symbol it only has the power over us we permit.
    Our actions speak louder than our whiteness. Our mindful intentions expressed in 4 dimensions, the 4th being our connection to creation.
    So let us see THAT when we look in the mirror.
    Love & Light

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  4. It is very difficult for white people to accept the fact they they live a life of privilege because of their skin color. They become defensive because they do not want to appear to be racist or responsible for any injustice. Nevertheless, white people need to recognize that their lives are easier to live no matter what their circumstances are and, whenever possible, they need to speak up for those who do not share their status.

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  5. This is a tough topic, that I have been privileged enough to talk with many people about. I am white, born to a poor family. My mother was in five mental institutions with a history of drug use. Her first husband, my brother’s father committed suicide by hanging himself. My first stepfather was a sergeant in the Army and did two tours in Vietnam.
    My mother would mentally abuse me, my brother would sexually abuse me, and my stepfather would physically abuse me. My brother was taken by the state when I was around ten years old. The landlord we rented our trailer from approached my mother to inform her of the abuse that would take place at night when she was at work. He told her that one of three things needed to occur. My stepfather had to leave, I, her son had to leave, or we as a family needed to leave. The landlord believed I was getter bigger and would not take the beatings much longer. At twelve my mother divorced my first stepfather and instructed me to get a job or I would be placed in a foster home. At that age I started washing dishes in a restaurant that was a four mile bike ride from our home.
    My mother started visiting inmates at the prison my first stepfather worked at. She then brought home what would be my second stepfather from that prison. My family continued to be very dysfunctional, with drugs and abuse. At the age of sixteen I moved out. The blessing was working for that restaurant at such a young age. I saw all families aren’t like mine.
    In culinary school a class mate had said in class that my people oppressed his people. I deflected the conversation because at the time I was sleeping in my Ford Escort, I was homeless. I would go to school in the morning and drive to the four diamond resort I worked at in the evening. I simply said he must have me confused with another person because I am in no position to oppress anyone.
    Fast forward to New Mexico, I’m having a conversation about white privilege with a friend that is Mexican. She shared with me that while I have an exceptional story of perseverance, I still have benefited from white privilege. I have moved approximately twenty five times in my life in three different states and three different sections of the United States. I as a white person get to continue to evolve and recreate myself into new versions. She shared with me that no matter where she moved she is and will always be Mexican.
    I didn’t fully except this premise at first, but did ponder over the events of my life and have concluded that I have been given some breaks I may have not deserved. My ability to be a chameleon, and blend in in multiple environments has benefited me. While I have done nothing to hurt another person I haven’t done anything to break the system that is in place either.
    I think this is why the topic is so difficult and complicated. Many people feel they have struggled. While we all have struggled, I have never had to fear for my life during an interaction with a law enforcement officer. To be honest I don’t know what to do to fix this systemic issue. I’ve not been followed in stores and harassed. I’ve not been called names. I have been hated because of the color of my skin. I lived in minority areas because of situation I was born into. My whiteness represented who was the enemy. I’ve had to earn respect through words and actions my whole life.
    I don’t know how to end this piece other than I hurt for all those that are treated poorly and feel as unseen or unheard. I’ve been there, and because of my whiteness have gotten out of the cycle, but I don’t know how to fix it.

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  6. Like, Maya, I appreciate you calling out reality as it is. Conversations surrounding race and systemic racism are difficult, but that doesn't mean it should be toned down or made more palatable for white people. Racism is pervasive and anti-black sentiments have leeched into Asian American ideals. It's been a reckoning in my own family trying to get them to understand that as immigrants, we struggled, but not in the same way caused by centuries of oppression and dehumanization. In addition to having these conversations, it's imperative that I continue my own education - black lives depend on it. I'm dedicating this summer to reading more books on prison abolition as well as race/ism in medicine.

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  7. Thank you, Anthony, for your writing. I can hear your kind teaching voice in it as I read.
    I think a sense of White superiority is the most prevalent in the world, but I think the supremacy problem is also broader. In some cultures, there are rigid caste systems, where people are considered to be of one value because of the family they were born into. Irish people were sold as slaves in the American colonies, and people of higher SES in Subsaharan Africa were actively involved in and profited from sale of African men, women and children as property.I don't say this to minimize the problem of. Which you write, but to say it is a heart problem that is not only seen in people with lighter skin, but there does seem to be a disturbing prevalence.

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  8. It's time for action and I will not and can not sit idly by when my sister is in crisis.
    I will take all precautions to stay safe, but as we are seeing safety is an illusive concept both in health and society, and the most vulnerable among us are anything but safe. I can no longer rest on the white privilege that enables suffering.

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  9. Thank you, Anthony for your thoughtful, brave and beautiful sharing! Yvette

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  10. Thank you, Anthony. And thank you everyone who added comments. I've been thinking about what you wrote for 4 weeks now almost every day. This is such a vital issue that calls for daily reflection, self-examination, and action. Keep the conversation going!
    I wrote a response after reading your post and running up the foothill trails, but it's 1,500 words and won't fit in the box.

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