White supremacy. Racism. White privilege. These are powerful words. Triggering. Upsetting. Confronting. Loaded. Words attached to pain. Words that bring us straight to our ego, the center of our identity, and force us to look at ourselves.
Or not.
Because these are suitcase words—meaning that the baggage in your definition is different from the baggage in mine—everyone has a unique reaction. Racism, white, supremacy, and privilege are personal words. We carry their definitions in our bodies.
“We are brilliant at survival, but brutal at it. We tend to slip out of togetherness the way we slip out of the womb, bloody and messy and surprised to be alone.”
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy
Often these words trigger our ego. Whether we want to champion them or shoot them down, there is fire present—making it difficult to have conversations about them.
I remember the first time I learned about the concept of white privilege. In my cohort at film school, an outspoken woman of color about a decade my elder, didn’t hold back in her critiques.
She explained cultural appropriation to me and it all unfurled from there.
I remember the anger and shock I felt. I remember trying to explain it to my white friends, the advantages we have over people of color. I remember how they didn’t get it, and I remember the frustration I felt toward them.
As I explained white privilege, they felt as if something was being taken away from them—their autonomy or their inherent worth or the struggles they’d survived. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t get it. It was so obvious and so obviously not personal.
I recognized white supremacy as structural and embedded—a problem with the systems of power, not a commentary on any individual’s autonomy or lived experience.
When our ego is triggered, we rationalize, defend, and do intellectual gymnastics to maintain our ego’s stability. That’s how the ego works. It wants to remain static. It wants to be right, safe, and okay.
That’s why some people shut down when you try to talk to them about race or white privilege. Because their ego refuses to identify as someone who needs to talk about those things. Their ego will tell them stories like, “It’s not loving to talk about” or “I’m being attacked” or even “I know all this already so there’s no point discussing it further.”
These reactions make it difficult to have productive conversations. This means, to understand white supremacy, we have to start at the place of ego, specifically looking at what it means to be right, safe, and okay.
Comfort is not a privilege afforded to everyone in our society. So by looking at our own access to comfort and our own ability to be with our discomfort—even around a suitcase word—we can widen our perspective to include new frames of reference.
That’s why I say white supremacy is a collective, not an individual, issue.
While I do not wish to excuse any individual’s bad behavior, to have more productive conversations, I believe we must center, prioritize, and underline the systemic, environmental factors that shape us beyond our recognition.
Whiteness, white privilege, and white supremacy are about so much more than skin color. In fact, skin color, as a definition of identity, is part of white supremacy. That’s one reason why it’s so hard to talk about. Because whiteness is a frame of mind.
We have all been raised, to varying degrees, embedded in whiteness.
In Dear White People, the seminal essay by philosopher and “recovering psychologist” Bayo Akomolafe, Bayo writes about growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, believing that he was black—until one day, suddenly, he discovered, to his dismay, that underneath his cosmetic black skin was “an inner whiteness, a Trojan guest behind enemy lines.”
This is true for all of us. Regardless of our assumed identity and inherited cultural lineage, we have all been infected by whiteness as a paradigm of separation and domination. Bayo explains in his essay,
Long ago, some of your fathers divided the world into two realms – a realm of appearance and a realm of permanence. Echoes of this radical schism at the heart of things still resonate today. We live in binaries.
Us versus them. Language versus reality. Agent versus tool. Mind versus matter. Self versus environment. Free will versus determinism. Human versus nonhuman. Man versus woman. Public versus private. Consciousness versus world. Cogito ergo sum.
In the context of this bifurcation, some things came to be seen as ‘originary’ or superior and others, ‘derivative’ or inferior.
This division, this bifurcation, is what took us away from the morality of the collective and into the false morality of the individual—the human. Human supremacy is at the heart of white supremacy.
White supremacy privileges, above all else, a perspective that separates us from each other and from so-called “nature.” While it centralizes its privilege on white and white-passing people, able-bodied people, men, and land owners, the lynch pin below it all is a refusal to recognize the agency of the non-human. In other words, the very fact that the English language has a word for “nature” is itself a facet of white supremacy.
This may be difficult to conceptualize. Especially when there is so much pain and bias blocking our deep intuitive knowing that everything is interconnected—and so many easy ways to claim this knowledge of interconnectivity without actually embodying it.
We are all on a journey of unraveling and unlearning. It is not an easy path, but it is the path to collective liberation.
In these times that feel so urgent, I urge you to interrogate your whiteness and the beliefs you hold dear about yourself and the world. We have been blinded to more than we know.
Deeper frames of compassion and curiosity are called for. None of us know quite how deep the rabbit hole goes. But something shifts when we open our eyes beyond the frames of whiteness placed upon us.
It’s easier to turn away, no doubt, to remain comfortable and certain—until, one day, the fire comes to our door. Which it will. Someday there will be nothing left to burn but our egos.
Certainly it’s in our best interest to get a head start.
So eloquently stated! I’d love to know more about what your film school peer told you. A part that is sticking with me is how a word was created for “nature” - seeing possibilities for applications, even if metaphorical, in other spaces too…