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White Supremacy is an Emergency
Most of us did not need last week’s domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol to know that white supremacy is an emergency. What is perhaps less considered more of the time is the fact that white supremacy is an emergency for all of us, especially white people. White supremacy is obviously directly damaging and hurtful to BIPOC because it attempts to erase us and render our lives inferior and insignificant. But what most white people and pundits miss is that white supremacy is especially damaging to white people because it prevents them from seeing themselves, the past, our collective context and therefore, the present, with real clarity.
It should be enough that murder and mayhem are costs much too high for any of us. But even if we put aside the white women who have died on either side of the racism wound in our country — Heather Heyer in Charlottesville and now Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran wearing a Trump flag draped around her neck like a cape shot in the chest at the Capitol — just for a moment, perhaps we could begin to see, too, how the racism that undergirds white supremacy is also traumatic. That this injury that we all live with day in and day out is not without deep emotional, psychic and physical manifestations.
Racism is traumatic. I have spoken to other Black women and friends about the impact of 2021 so far, the events of…
