White Members' Conversation

By David Trimble

The White Members' Conversation met for reflective conversation about our actions and experiences of race. We focused on taking responsibility for ourselves and on addressing other white people, and found in the idea of compassion a common principle for both tasks.

This is the fifth year that a multiracial group met in the Racial Domination and Privilege Interest Group to talk honestly about racism in our organization, our relationships, and ourselves. It is the third year that white members met separately to explore our experiences and practices of race and racism. This year's White Members' Conversation built on previous years' work, and I left of the meeting with more hope than I have previously felt that this type of conversation can move its participants, and AFTA as an organization, in a positive direction. There were 17 participants in the White Members' Conversation. Most were people who had participated in earlier meetings. I found it noteworthy that only two participants were male; I hope that this gender distribution does not persist.

Jane Ariel and I facilitated the group together. Jane provided a framework for our discussion by inviting us to strive to learn something new as we explored our intentions and our actions, conscious and unconscious, with regard to race. We were asked to look at denial; to be vulnerable; and to treat each other with honesty, mutual respect, and mutual caring.

Several themes emerged early in the conversation: the challenge of addressing unconscious practices— "not knowing what you don't know," the need for embedding this work in an analysis of racism as a social phenomenon, feelings of safety and danger, and the influence of privilege on our understanding of the meanings of safety and danger. Participants expressed yearning for more engagement with people of color (including a desire to be in their meeting, not ours), discomfort with the difficulty of conducting a conversation about race solely among white people, and an aversion to the idea of "getting together around badness" (i.e., talking about our internalization of the oppressive ideology of racism). We recognized that we needed to find ways to develop a collective identity, culture, "groupness" in order to do the work. At the same time, we recognized that it is critical for us to "do the right thing," and that this particular conversation is necessary to move the process forward. We acknowledged that, in the struggle with race and racism, white people and people of color "have such different work to do." Perhaps the fact that our conversation maintained respectful listening both for our discomfort and for our commitment, with neither being silenced or marginalized, was evidence that we were building a safe and supportive context.

We came up with two tasks to challenge ourselves to move forward, which occupied the rest of the conversation: Examining our unconscious practices of racism and taking responsibility for our inner dialogues about race on the one hand, and confronting racist practices by other white people, on the other. Both tasks were difficult, but we made progress on both, and ended the meeting with a solid collective commitment to continue the conversation, not just at next year's Conference, but also electronically throughout the year.

The process of examining ourselves was facilitated particularly by one member's sharing that she had learned to give herself permission for the "messy" way she acts in the world; accepting that she is "not going to get it right." As we explored our uncomfortable internal experiences of racism, we were able to distinguish one of the temptations that can lead us into acting in patronizing ways: The desire to feel and consider oneself as "special." This temptation resonated with many of us, and led to our reflecting on the particular challenge of this human tendency in AFTA, which is organized by a culture of "specialness." We encouraged each other to find ways to move beyond "specialness," and resist the processes of exclusionary hierarchy. One member acknowledged that it is when she is feeling stuck in her self-doubts and fears that she is most likely to forget that she has privilege. We acknowledged the complexity of maintaining mindfulness about privilege, as all of us have more privilege in some contexts, and less in others. We examined one particular work situation relevant to many white AFTA members, that of supervising or training a person of color in a predominantly white work setting. One suggestion, drawing from Jane Lazarre (1997), was to be sure to acknowledge the person of color's authority regarding her experience of race in the setting, that is, not to abdicate authority as a teacher/supervisor, but not to assume that one knows more than the student/supervisee about race in the work setting.

We found that we had to work harder on the task of discussing our responses to practices of racism by other white people. As a white ally against racism, when does one speak up and when does one stay silent? How does one develop the radar which allows one to make this distinction? Our first step was to move beyond the terms, "confront" and "challenge." We noted that multicultural awareness can become its own form of "specialness," and that what we were seeking was a way to be compassionate with other whites, even while holding them accountable. Compassion became the bridge between the task of examining ourselves and the task of addressing others. We need to have compassion for ourselves as we examine our own performances of privilege, and as we painfully explore the inner dialogues which manifest our internalization of the dominant ideology of white supremacy. This compassion for ourselves is the key to our approaching racism in other white people. If we treat them with the same compassion, and are accountable for ourselves as we hold them accountable, we are most likely to be constructive. Compassionate attunement makes it possible for us to "stand with" the other, whether white or of color, as we address the dilemmas of race. "Standing with" becomes an antidote to the influence of "specialness."

As our conversation came to a close, we decided to apply these reflections to our practices through the rest of the Conference, and to share our journal entries from these reflections with each other, and with others who were not at this meeting, but have been participating in the electronic exchange about the White Members' Conversation.

References

Lazarre, J. (1997). Beyond the whiteness of whiteness: Memoir of a white

mother of Black sons. Durham: Duke University Press.

David Trimble has a private practice in Brookline, MA, and teaches family therapy at the Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology at Boston Medical Center. He is a Director on the Board of the Network for Multicultural Training in Psychology. He initiated the AFTA Interest Group on Racial Domination and Privilege in 1997.