White Supremacy, A Collective

A message for all white people getting involved in antiracism work and feeling overwhelmed and unsure how to deal with it. Before you give up out of frustration, please consider this. Our own whiteness is actually causing us to hear the message wrong. We're told that this is “our” problem to fix, “our” problem cuz we created it, and I don't know about you, but when I hear this, I hear: "This is entirely on you Summer, and if you don't resolve it, you're a failure, and a racist." That's possibly an unfair level of pressure to put on myself, but admit to yourself, you’ve thought this too, haven’t you? Why are we placing this level of pressure on ourselves to singlehandedly resolve a 400+ year old problem? It’s literally not possible for any one of us to resolve.

Allow me to offer an alternative idea. What do white people get to do that people of color don’t? There are so many things that could answer that question, so I’ll just go ahead and give you the answer for this particular instance: Be individuals. We aren't a collective or a community, right? Each of us white people is our own unique self, a special snowflake. We’ve always been individuals, never having to represent our people as a whole. So we hear that message, “It’s our problem, you fix it,” which is aimed at white people as a collective, but we hear it as an individual call to action. Even in our efforts to dismantle white supremacy, our own white supremacy causes us to not even hear the message right. It's not on me solely, or on you solely, it's on the white collective.

For any Star Trek fans out there, let me put it this way, we never realized it, but we white people were the Borg all along...the collective we feared, who chewed up other people and forcing them to assimilate to our ways. It’s actually time we started seeing ourselves as a part of this collective, and use it to dismantle white supremacy. Yes, we still need to work on it within ourselves, but we ultimately must work together, as a whole, to dismantle it on a national, systemic level. So, to all the racists and white supremacists who don’t want a world of equity, equality, and no supremacy of any sort, I say: Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated…