Sangha Is All
An embodied awareness community
Born in 1960 in a small Illinois town with a population of about 6,700 people, my earliest experiences of racialization were similar to the vast majority of racialized as white (RAW) people at that time; they were based upon life in a community made up almost exclusively of other RAW people.
In 1968, my parents carefully sought out a racially integrated neighborhood in Chicago to relocate our family to, and they succeeded. For about a year. Two school photos from my elementary years have survived. During my first year in Chicago, my 3rd grade class photo includes 18 RAW, 2 Hispanic heritage, 1 Asian heritage, and 12 African American students. Just three years later, my 6th grade class photo reflects 1 RAW student (me), 1 Asian heritage student, 1 Hispanic heritage student, and 25 African American students. Redlining and white flight had rapidly changed neighborhood racial diversity and by 1972 I was effectively a racial minority in my community. These circumstances created my first conscious and explicit experience with racialization.
While communities across the US are changing, most RAW people have not had the kind of experiences with race my circumstances created. In 1973, my Iowa cousin took me to a Donny Osmond concert at the Iowa State Fair. That same year back at home, we were listening to Eddie Kendrick and the Chi-Lights. And in practicing with these experiences, I’ve come to understand that all people have distinct experiences with racialization, regardless of skin color.
I’ve come to understand that the structural racism we live with today evolved into being not because Black or any other people of color exist, but because laws were created in colonial America to enact privilege for a specific group of persons who were then, for the first time, described in law as “white.” Originally “white” meant a person of English heritage but, over time, “white” has simply come to mean person to whom privilege is conferred upon. The US Census Bureau currently defines “white” as “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa;” by this definition “white” includes, for instance, Iraqi, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Sudanese people. But this US Census Bureau definition of “white” flies in the face of the US Code definition of “racial group” as “a set of individuals whose identity as such is distinctive in terms of physical characteristics or biological descent.” Kimberle Crenshaw developed Intersectionality theory as a tool to help bring clarity to situations in which available frames are not adequate to accurately describe a problem, saying, “when facts do not fit with available frames, people have a hard time incorporating new facts into their way of thinking about a problem.” In this case, the “facts” of these two definitions do not fit each other, and the problem isn’t that the frame is inadequate; the frame is racism; in other words, we’re being bullshitted.
RAW people are accustomed to examining questions of race and racism in terms of the inequities imposed upon people of color. While that is a worthwhile and necessary activity, without self-examination by racialized a white people, the ways in which today’s structural racism hurts all people will never be understood…and self-examination by RAW people is significantly absent. Self-examination is not the same as self-flagellation. Many supportive ways for exploring whiteness are available today. Sangha Is All offers several ways to explore whiteness in a safe yet rigorous container. Click here for more information about our white caucus, small group series, Modern Abolition. Click here for more information about Personal Racialization Conversations.