Me and White Supremacy: Day 26 Journal Questions
I’m leading a group discussion circle on “Me and White Supremacy” by Layla F. Saad. I’m taking the journaling challenge daily throughout February even though I’m not white. If you happen to be white, why not take the challenge? If I can do it, you can do it too.
Day 26 Questions (from the text):
1. To what extent have your values helped your ability to practice antiracism?
2. What contradictory values do you hold that hinder your ability to practice antiracism?
3. What new core values and beliefs do you feel you need to integrate after doing this work in order to better practice lifelong antiracism?
4. How has your desire to be seen as a good person with white privilege prevented you from actually being “good”?
In the final week, it would seem the author is giving us a bit of a reprieve. Perhaps that’s because we did a lot of the heavier lifting early on. If the first three weeks were about going deep, this one is about spreading wide what we’ve learned, and making sure our impact in our anti-racism journey resonates as far as possible.
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You’ve spent your entire life defining and redefining your values, and in turn they continue to define and redefine you. There are very few things that speak to who we are at our core than what we value.
Personally, one of my primary values is the necessary, continual reassessment of what it is that I value vs. what I say and believe I value. What we risk when we fail to do this effectively, is paying what we know we should value and claim we value lip service while continuing to act (or not act) in dissonance with our claims.
In this chapter the author touches on the ego — as in, our need to feel at our core we are “good” people. Remember that sometimes the ego can actually get in the way of accurate self assessment in this arena. Most of us know the values that we want to embody — that part is easy. What is less easy is the continual self-examination necessary to make sure you are living up to those values from day to day. It’s less easy to work to try and discover any blind spots or unconscious bias that might be hiding away deep (or not so deep) in your psyche. And it’s far less easy to have the self-awareness and presence of mind to adopt the position that no, you don’t know everything, even about yourself, and get curious enough to question whether your reflection is measuring up to your self-image.
There’s a world of difference between “I don’t have bias” and “I don’t know if I have bias” and “Do I have bias?” and “How do I have bias?”. If you’ve been following along, you are mindful that the author has provided ample evidence in the book that reminds us we were reared in a culture rife with it. If I have bias, chances are you do as well.
That’s why they are called “blind spots”. And you won’t see them until you adjust your mirror.
Here’s the trick: the more you do it, the easier it gets. Just like anything else.
Values are also where commitment comes into play. “Commitment” is a big scary word for most that seems intimidating and hard to swallow. But it doesn’t have to be. The way I see it, commitment is merely well-defined values + continual self assessment to make sure you are on course. Like a continual check-in between the self and the ego. And that can be ingested in bite-size pieces, repeatedly, like medicine.
