Moving beyond the "nothingness and awfulness" trap

Historian Nell Irvin Painter describes a phenomenon that she’s observed when white people think about race. She describes it as a “toggle between nothingness and awfulness”. Either we think the conversation about race is only about people of color and not about us (nothingness). Or, when the conversation is about us, it’s only about how racist we are (awfulness).

Does this resonate?

For example, about a decade ago, when the organization I worked for decided it was going to “put race at the center” of our work, I felt like the organization was saying that I, as a white person, was no longer relevant. It was as if I somehow didn’t have a race (ha!), and therefore putting race at the center meant I was now on the margins.

This is not surprising. Because whiteness has been the background norm in society, most white people have never had to think about their race. It’s just a given.

​The good news is that this has changed a great deal since I was first confronted with this a decade ago. Many white people today are being encouraged to see and understand their whiteness.

The bad news is that most white people are still only being encouraged to look at whiteness through the other side of the toggle: awfulness.

In my experiences, when whiteness is talked about, it is almost always talked about negatively. There is no doubt a good reason for this - white people have done some horrendous things in the name of defending the superiority of whiteness. But if we only ever equate whiteness with its worst elements, then where’s the hope? 

Public theologian Ruby Sales describes this so eloquently in a 2016 interview:

“There’s a spiritual crisis in white America. It’s a crisis of meaning. We talk a lot about black theologies, but I want a liberating white theology. I want a theology that begins to deepen people’s understanding about their capacity to live fully human lives and to touch the goodness inside of them, rather than call upon the part of themselves that’s not relational. Because there’s nothing wrong with being European-American. That’s not the problem. It’s how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality. It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed.”

Well, I do believe that white people are worthy of being redeemed, as we all are regardless of our skin color or any other social identity. 

I also believe that the road to redemption lies not in staying in this toggle between nothingness and awfulness. We’ve gotta get out of this binary trap, and into a new way of thinking about our position in the larger race conversation. 

Here’s how I see it now.

• We have a race. It’s called white. When we talk about race, we’re talking about us too.
• It’s an identity that we’ve been socialized into. That is, we’ve been taught that “we are white” and “they are not” by simply living in the world. It’s something we’ve absorbed from our environment.
• Whiteness has certain characteristics that define it. But like any social category, attempts to then use this definition to make blanket definitions about people (i.e. “all white people are like X”) at best fails to capture our inherent complexity and multi-facetedness, and at worst can be dehumanizing and dangerous. 
• We are white. And yet it’s also not who we really are. On the one hand, race is a social category that is assigned to us by society. We can’t just “give up” our whiteness. And yet on the other hand, race is a completely made-up category, an idea concocted hundreds of years ago to serve the purpose of dividing us from each other and from our true selves. Hell, there was no such thing as “white people” or “black people” before its invention 400 years ago. We have to learn how to hold both of these truths at once. We are white. And yet it’s not who we really are.
• Whiteness is more than a skin color - it’s also a consciousness. While we can’t do anything about how we appear to the world, we can do something about how we think and show up in the world. This is entirely in our control, and is the source of our liberatory power.
• Finally, whiteness comes with both privileges and costs. There’s a lot of talk about the privilege side of things. But there’s still very little examination or public discourse about the costs of whiteness (spiritually, emotionally, mentally, materially). We’ve got to get better at talking about both the upsides, but also the downsides, of internalizing a false set of beliefs about who we are and where our value comes from. 

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I’ll dig more into some of these bullet points in subsequent posts. Thanks for reading and stay tuned!