On Supporting White Folks Around Racial Justice

I had a coaching client come to me recently because they wanted really specific support. As a white person working in a multiracial setting, they wanted to work with a white coach who they knew shared their commitment to racial justice.

They were struggling with a BIPOC coworker, and were looking for a space to unpack their complex experience with tons of care and empathy, and confidentiality. 

They didn’t want to do that in a way that invited more labor of BIPOC folks, but they did want someone walking with them who they could trust had a shared analysis of racism and white supremacy. They wanted to be invited in with rigor to see what they couldn’t yet see, to grow their compassion for the other, to have insight around their racialized blindspots.

They also wanted to keep leaning into trust that their needs as a white person got to matter and that being a “good white person” didn’t require them to shrink small or override their own boundaries. 

Instead, they wanted to grow their capacity to hold space for themself and the other, including the very hard work of doing so in interracial relationships - all with the inheritance of racialized capitalism and the resulting trauma we are all swimming in.

It was truly a joy and an honor to be trusted and invited into this accompaniment work. 

I saw this client wake up to new awarenesses of their BIPOC colleague’s experience, which opened space for more compassion and understanding. 

I also saw their analysis sharpen, as did their clarity around their own role, capacity and boundaries. They even walked away with a bunch of new tools they could continue to use and practice on their ongoing journey!

In our work together, we got to tune into the wisdom of the body through guided meditation, breath, movement, song and role playing conversations. We got to slow things way down and make space for feeling and acknowledgment.

The work this client was moving through was so inspiring - not only because I got to witness their personal transformation (which btw was badass and powerful and I trust will support them to show up even more fully in their commitment to racial justice for the long haul!), but also because their journey resonates so much with my own (like, SO much!), and, is so deeply where I think white folks need to be working right now.

As white folks committed to racial justice, we need to call in support to be able hold a wider view. 

And we need to bring in our bodies, since part of what white supremacy culture has stolen is our connection to our bodies, to our intuition, to our aliveness. 

My own white somatics coach recently shared with me the concept that as we white folks are socialized into dominance, the first place we start is with dominating ourselves. Undoing domination then means re-accessing our ability to feel and know in embodied ways.

White supremacy culture (in its emphasis on individualism and so on) also feeds our sense of isolation and aloneness. All the more important, then, that we find ways to do this work in community with other white folks.

This kind of work is a gift to all of us, a gift towards collective liberation, towards showing up more in our fullness and our wholeness and our feeling as white people committed to racial justice.