White Flammability
Who are we accountable to for calming down our systems?
I. Recovery
The last time I was drunk was not even a month after September 11, 2001. By twilight I was so wobbly, I couldn’t discern the moon from the sun setting behind a bank of fog. The night turned darker then, exacerbated by drinking too much alcohol—even though I never thought alcohol was my problem. I was in fact quite sure the government was my problem; George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in particular, the wars they were already talking about starting as dust from 9/11 still hung in the Manhattan air. Their cruelty was my problem, the suffering of innocent people under our American-made weapons, our U.S. addiction to oil, our constant greed for global power and control.
The next morning, after I’d cleared my own fog enough to see to the wreckage I’d created, all I could say was, “It had to happen. It had to happen. It had to happen.” I had to experience my own incomprehensible self-sabotaging warfare in order to see how my internal suffering affected not only me, but other people I cared about. I hit bottom, I guess and it had to happen. Getting sober helped me realize, as Taylor Swift (whose childless cat lady endorsement, like Cheney’s, did not solve anything in our last election) says, “It’s me, I’m the problem, it’s me.” And who I was (and am) is a white, straight-passing, mostly able-bodied, formally-educated, cisgendered female U.S. citizen who had— and still has—much recovery to do.
My body was born into a country that told me six ways from Sunday two important founding fictions: 1.) white people are superior and 2.) women are inferior. I’m not going to debate whether or not those fictions exist, I’ve already written about them many times, here most recently. And, yes, I get they are indeed fictions we could choose to ignore or “transcend,” except for the fact these fictions are so deeply ingrained into the fabric of these United States, they have influenced domestic and foreign laws, policy, institutions, trade, and our country’s overall zeitgeist since the founding of this nation. If you are having a knee-jerk reaction to my theory, just for starters, see Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution and the fact that the Equal Rights Amendment has still not been ratified. The fictions are based in hierarchy; “better than,” and “less than.” The hierarchies are supported by social power. And while our instinct for power may be natural, we—as the Black women will sing out—no longer have time for that shit.
Please know, I don’t think I am inherently problematic just because I am white and born into a female body; I think I’m a child of stardust just like you. But the body and mind I live in struggles with concepts of superiority and inferiority every single day. After getting sober, I felt a lot like what Anne Lamott said recovery was, realizing I had stinking thinking, which is to say, “I’m the piece of shit the world revolves around.” I cannot override these better than and less than fictions by pretending they don’t exist (i.e., spiritual bypassing, saying “we’re all human,” positive thinking, etc.), because then I do more harm to myself and others.
Recovery teaches me to pay attention to the million intricate thoughts, feelings, zings and pings inside me that want to dominate or submit, that want to see another as opponent or authority, who wants to obliterate the self in order to not be self-responsible. For my money (and why this post is free!), alcohol, drugs, shopping, doomscrolling, or any other addictions, are symptoms of these two founding fictions no matter your sex, race, class, or gender, because hierarchies are designed to separate and isolate us and make us question our inherent belonging. Recovery for me is every day paying attention to white supremacy culture while examining deeply ingrained gender roles and behaviors. Recovery is dismantling the master’s house and listening to my community, especially women of color, about what tools we need for rebuilding our society.
II. White Supremacy Culture
If you don’t know, the characteristics of White Supremacy Culture (WSC) is an important public access book, conceived and written out (for free) by Tema Okun, “with support by and from many genius colleagues and friends,” on one of my all-time favorite websites. The website is voluminous, gorgeous, and deep. Okun expresses in many ways how WSC is internalized by all people in our culture, but affects each person differently. WSC and white supremacy specifically has the potential to, “target(s) and violate(s) white people with a persistent invitation to collude that [could] inevitably destroy [our] humanity.” Our task is to refuse this invitation over and over and over again.
I don’t remember exactly when I found Tema’s work and original article, published in 1999, but it was probably around the time of my new sobriety, when everything was watery and sensitive and scary. Getting sober woke me up to my own self-hatred I had wanted desperately to not feel as well as my suppressed rage at the lies and omissions America told me (or never told me) about Black, brown, Indigenous folks, and women’s roles in general. Before sobriety, I had been struggling so hard as a middle-class Gen X white woman to “have it all.” I wanted to be successful, important, and noticed. I was pretty unconscious of how I often I participated in a culture that perpetuated hierarchies of “better than” and “less than” even as I taught the Wheel of Power and Control to volunteers and students for my job.
So, take some time in that WSC website if you haven’t been before.
Like, a lot of time. Really ponder the characteristics and how they show up in your life. I can think of so many ways, for example, perfectionism shows up in my life: hello, writer’s block; or my sense of urgency, “we must have equality now or I will kill you!;” or fear, which shows up almost every second with the purpose of stopping me from action.
I breathe while reading, because these characteristics can bring up deep shame and memories and invasive thoughts of the many times I have blown it as a white person. The time as an adolescent I compared my tan to a Black friend’s arm; as a young adult when I asked a new friend who is brown, “where’s your family from?” and when she said “America,” I said, “No like, really;” the time a friend brought her Black boyfriend for a hike at the coast and I told that poor man every single Black author, athlete, and thing I could think of so he would know I was a “good white person.” Ugh. So many examples, I feel heat rising in my neck just typing them out. But shame and blame are not useful and I do not point out this amazing resource to weaponize it. I share it to call in more white people into the work of community-building and collective liberation. I share this resource in the spirit of what the website says,
“Use the list to better understand your own conditioning. Use the list collaboratively and collectively to support your vision for the liberatory culture that you want to build. Use the list to better understand how we unintentionally and unconsciously reproduce white supremacy culture when the constraints of that culture keep us boxed in.”
III. Patriarchy
My husband likes to say to me, “The patriarchy is really ruling your life isn’t it?” I answer in a yell, “Yes, it really fucking is!” And then we laugh. Both of us are correct and the laughter comes from him knowing (and often saying), “it’s good to be a white man,” and me knowing I always have a choice about how much energy I give to my frustration and sadness living under patriarchy.
Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold authority and responsibility, and, as noted above, is how this country and our laws started. So many written and unwritten gender norms were built under the founding belief men are superior. For example, women, children, enslaved people, and farm animals were considered property men were allowed to control: the Mississippi Supreme Court first ruled a husband was allowed to administer “moderate chastisement in cases of emergency” to a wife; white women did not have a vote until 1920 (Black folks did not get a vote in free and fair elections truly until the 1965 Voting Right Act); and a woman could not get a house loan or a credit card until the 1970’s (c.f., Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) of 1974). Many women—via second wave feminism—have tried to act like men under man-made laws and rules in order to fit into society, which is how we got to that “having it all problem” in the first place. We are now into the third-wave of feminism, which rightly is led by Black, Indigenous, and women of color. Each evolution of our collective consciousness was preceded by some difficult, bloody, pitiful, incomprehensible, “had to happen” moments and movements in order to move us forward.
So, while the belief in men’s superiority may have been imbued in me from the moment I was born, and while my family, friends, popular culture, commercials, etc., may have reinforced that belief in a myriad of ways, whether or not I believe men are superior is always up to me. This part is always quite hard for me to articulate, to find the words for; what it’s like to be born with a skin-cloak of “less than” constantly steeped into the bloodstream and formed from so early on my neuropathways, how painful it is to peel off that skin, how much labor it takes to redirect my negative thoughts, how much effort it takes to reconnect with my humanity and inherent stardusticalness so I may see the same in another human being who wants to be free inside and out.
IV. No Conclusions
So, for my money (and again, why this post is free!) white supremacy/culture and patriarchy are two sides of the same coin that drives the global systems of capitalism and colonialism. Ultimately, those systems are what we need to break down because the unsustainable and overpowering use of natural resources is causing the climate to collapse, which will and is affecting us all. But until we admit these realities in our collective consciousness, in order to keep capitalism profitable, those in power and with control must limit and crack down on behaviors that might unite and awake us and they will do so with exponentially harmful tools such as surveillance, militarization, incarceration, drugs infiltration, artificial intelligence, splashy advertising campaigns, and intentional media disinformation (i.e., eating dogs and cats, the story that may have tipped the election).1
I feel deeply the fear of fascism rising, and grieve almost daily about how that affects not so much me, but all of us, children and elderly especially. I feel enormous fear simply writing and speaking up in public and yet, I work to not draw conclusions. I don’t know what will happen. None of us really do. Some days I feel we are getting more conscious as a species, particularly us white women, and we are working in the dark, underground, rooting around, to find each other and take care of each other. I will keep resourcing myself with that better, more sober thinking.
Recovery is active self-responsibility work and a constant effort to balance action and reflection, what Paulo Freire named “praxis.” Though have been sober for over 20 years and therefore create far, far less wreckage, I still get to reflect daily on my part in creating and being in spaces that rely on superiority or inferiority, power and control and then act as if I am here to create the world I’ve always wanted to live in, one where all humans and earthly things are treated equally, fairly, and equitably.2
The other day, I read a piece here on Substack (which at the moment I cannot find, so if you know what piece I am talking about, please send it my way and I’ll edit this note), which asserted we need to blame the election results on the incredible rise of right-wing media. The article’s author said right-wing media successfully trumpeted and exploited people’s “grievances,” influencing conservative voters to turn out the way they did. The article never really named the grievances. Yet, everything the right-wing (and mainstream media) focused on had to do with either white supremacy/culture or patriarchy. Transgender people’s bathrooms? A threat to controlling women’s bodies and reproduction. Immigration reform? For the purpose of keeping out primarily Black and brown people primarily from the “shithole” countries. The economy? It’s doing great, because the market reflects the 1%, of men using outrageous amounts of fossil fuels on space exploration, private jets, who also mine for precious minerals to upgrade our self-destructing phones every two years rather than feed and house people. Anyhow, the footnote really has to do with hearing Malcolm Gladwell speak on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast…
I called this post “White Flammability” and I almost called it “White Flaminity” (my new made-up word, please share but © by me) to articulate how the troubles we are seeing and will see are from the fires started by white supremacy and patriarchy. For my white straight-passing, cisgendered women who are still out there riding the power coattails of white men, who are trying to fit into the collapsing man-made systems of superiority, who are doing too much yoga and buying too much product, who are unsure what to do about any of it, let me say: please get active in your community. There is a Black and brown-led food bank, shelter, literary center, care home, LGBTQIA+ activist group, or nonprofit out there just waiting for you to show up.
Yep. You are on fire and you put the world’s BS through a refiner’s fire and distill it. Great piece, Nance👏🏼☮️➕💜