“I am a safe person” is a false statement which is a product of shame, and prevents true healing and growth.

What Moms Against Racism says in response to this declaration of safety is the very reason that I feel a strong need to encourage us to challenge the shame attached to racism so that we can accept that we ALL have to dismantle the roots of White Supremacy/racism within us.

We tend to become very attached to the idea that we are safe people because of the pain that we have experienced when we have felt unsafe. Emotional pain is as palpable as physical pain. That pain connected to resentment and unforgiveness as life preservers creates a layer of shame which we throw on the person whom we feel has hurt us. That layer of shame marks them as bad people whom we should avoid so that we can survive.

The cognitive dissonance associated with racism creates deep emotional pain. Instead of looking inward to challenge and resolve the dissonance, we turn our resentment and unforgiveness outward towards the subject whom we are struggling to honour, and make them a bad person, because shame makes us feel that we must find a source of pain outside of ourselves in order to survive. Our pain then becomes the fault of the person against whom we are racist. If we acknowledge that our own dissonance is ultimately the source of our pain then we would have to acknowledge that we have been shaming ourselves. If we have been shaming ourselves then that would make us individually bad and unsafe for ourselves and if we are bad and unsafe for ourselves it is impossible to survive.

Until we face this truth we exist in the intense pain of survival mode using immense amounts of energy just to fight to stay alive.

What we truly mean in our hearts is that SOMETIMES we are safe people AND we continue to be open to dismantling racist/supremacist roots that exist in us from more than 500 years of conditioning.

That openness and compassion towards ourselves creates peace which gives us the energy that we need to wrestle to heal and soothe ourselves. We can then extend that compassion outside of us and we struggle less to survive. We become more able to turn our energy towards thriving in the chaos of the process of creating beautiful monuments of love together.

Regarding racism: recently I excitedly shared that I was challenging the whiteness in me – whiteness IS supremacy. No people are white. The designation of Whiteness caused some people to think it okay to take sexual power away from their enslaved people, and either breed them, rape them, or have a sexual or platonic relationship with an imbalance of power.

Anyone offended by the reality that as a descendant of enslaved people I have had to fight with the whiteness which was forced into me, AND also fight with external whiteness which seeks to keep me subordinate, is either unconsciously maintaining or consciously choosing to maintain the roots of supremacy.

That struggle to maintain supremacy comes through in relationships, and ignored it breeds resentment and supports a continued imbalance which means that people in such relationships may be neighbours and CANNOT be friends.

Friends are equals. Friends can freely live with equal power. Friends are heard. Friends are known. Friends understand the struggle and mutually support each other through it.

Everything else is at best neighbourly acquaintanceship and at least tentative untrusting toleration.

If we are to love our neighbours as we love ourselves then we need to listen as openly and as generously as we want others to listen to us.

Where there is an imbalance of power in a system of oppression, if those who are unjustly designated as dominant want to create a safe environment they need to create equity by centering those who are oppressed, consciously shifting a portion of their power on to the side of the oppressed.

The oppressive system of White Supremacy has conditioned those designated as White to believe that they naturally know more, and are naturally more competent than those who are not White.

Therefore until they persistently invest in eradicating the virus of supremacy so-called White people (WP) will always unconsciously struggle to relate as equals to so-called Coloured people (CP). When they are faced with competence in so-called CP’s, WP’s naturally unconsciously assume that such competence best serves to generate the WP’s profit. They cannot see the CP’s competence as equal, with the capability and the right to generate profit of its own. Therefore CP’s competence is seen as a gift to the WP’s system.

When there is a crack in the system which allows WP’s to be faced with the wounds which CP’s bear as a result of oppression under White Supremacy, White Saviour complex is activated. White Saviour complex distorts CP’s wounding and relays it as incompetence.

White Saviour complex is a function of cognitive dissonance where the reality of innate equality battles the fallacy of innate superiority, which results in WP’s needing to create a plan to save CP’s for clout, in order to preserve White sanity, which is White psychological profit at the expense of CP equity and agency.

That is not safety.

A person is always safe when they can consistently set aside defensiveness, and slow down to listen to AND believe a person’s lived experience without elevating their ideas and plan for success as the center of the relational experience. A person is always safe when they can always discuss and plan together with openness and flexibility. A person is always safe when they can hear the reality of another’s experience without feeling a crack in their identity.

Defensiveness or apathy from a person in a position of power who is perceived to have done harm is received as oppression.

Intention does not matter when experience is ignored.

No human being becomes unconsciously competent at being consistently safe without repeatedly consciously engaging in being challenged on the obstacle course of relationship in THIS world which is littered with mounds of supremacy.

Pushing away listening to the experience of microaggressions/unconscious racial abuse means that the White Saviour is repeatedly centering themselves and steamrolling over CP’s thereby maintaining the system of White Supremacy.

This holds true for all systems of supremacy: parental supremacy, religious supremacy, ableist supremacy, gender supremacy, educator supremacy etc. etc.
etc.

I had this very experience with a mother who was a client.

I intended to be safe, I was trying to be safe, AND because I felt a sense of urgency to achieve success to prove that my ideas around fixing the cracks in the child protection system were valid, I did not take the time to LISTEN to her continuously express that she was hurting deeply from being misunderstood and oppressed, and needed to heal.

So although I was successful in advocating for her to have much increased time with her children, and although her social worker accepted that some of the system’s concerns were not valid, and so moved forward with a plan to help mom transition to reunification, mom did not, and still does not feel safe with me.

Although the social worker extended mom’s grace period by two to three years before beginning permanency planning, mom still felt that I was a part of the system – and although I functionally was not, I essentially was no different to the system, because I failed to listen.

I learned a lot from that. As a parent, I’ve also learned a lot in that regard. Safety is not a reality unless there is freedom to be heard and shifts made in equitable discussion.

Living equitably does not mean living without boundaries. Finding boundaries with equity is a complementary challenge because we can only really know the difference between boundaries and controlling manipulatively when we truly feel personally unoffendably safe.