Unpacking Internalized Racism While Managing My Mental Health
Last week I was scrolling through Facebook, something I have been doing a little more often lately, and my feed was full of posts from people who were expressing anger, sadness, and disgust at the treatment of Black people by the police and other institutions like our health care system and government. These feelings are important. They are sources of information for us to work though, and they energize us in becoming anti-racist. But becoming anti-racist doesn’t just happen. And in order to do the work you must start by building a container to hold your feelings, or else they will overtake you and you will likely feel overwhelmed, hopeless, or numb. You build your capacity to help dismantle racism by moving between activities that provide emotional regulation (the sorts of things I often write about ) and learning about all the ways you have unwittingly internalized racism. I know these may be hard words to read, even writing them is hard, but I write them from a place of compassion.
Before 2014 I considered myself to be not racist. My voting record shows me to be liberal. I was shocked and outraged by blatant acts of racism such as people using slurs and committing hate crimes. I acknowledged that I had white privilege and that my feminism had to be intersectional—accounting for racism, homophobia, ableism, and agism. And then, in 2014 when Black Lives Matter organized demonstrations following the killing of Eric Garner and Mike Brown around the country and near my home in New York, I became acutely aware that racism had insidiously worked its way into my thoughts and actions, so much so that today I am still doing the work of becoming anti-racist. I have been educating myself and unpacking my own racism since then. Undoing racism is a process, not something that happens in one great awakening. It happens over years. But I remember how overwhelming it initially felt to be confronted with the ways I had been unwittingly complicit in institutional racism and all of the subtle ways I had engaged in racist acts. My heart goes out to folks who are where I was six years ago.
At the time, I couldn’t partake in much public activism because I was deep in my own trauma and living with post traumatic stress disorder. I was easily triggered just walking down the street to get groceries, seeing people, or by consuming previously considered benign videos and television in my own home. In person, any kind of conflict terrified me, and I don’t use “terrified” hyperbolically. But I saw one post that advised white people to diversify their news sources in order to more fully understand the black experience. That I could handle without being pulled into a rip current of a trauma response, so I started there. If this sounds like you dear reader, then start here, too.
I diversified my news and pop culture sources. I read articles from black media I was familiar with, Essence and The Root, and I followed black influencers, activists, and organizations. I read the articles they shared. I sought out black authors. I started to learn all the ways in which I, a loving and liberal person, had engaged in white supremacy. I learned that by participating in diet and beauty culture, spending and investing without doing research, and even the ways I spoke about or neglected to speak about race, I had contributed to racism in America. It was a hard pill to swallow. It took time to process because I felt so bad. I had to find self-compassion to tolerate it but not let that compassion delay future action. And I reminded myself to continue to do what I can, because while feeling awful won’t kill me—racism kills people everyday.
But I wouldn’t just sit there reading, learning, and sharing. I would also take care of my body. I spent 2015 healing from post traumatic stress disorder and a subsequent back injury that stemmed from an acute trauma I experienced in 2014. Both of these concerns required that I spend a lot of time rebuilding my capacity for emotional and physical stress. My process became the foundation of my professional practice, and what I usually write about on my blog. Today I simply wanted to share with you that it was this same self-care that made it possible for me to educate myself, which in turn allowed me to begin to fight for social change. Getting into my body helps me manage all those big overwhelming feelings that threaten to paralyze me and get in the way of critical thought. It helps me build a big and sturdy emotional container.
Pardon my use of cliche here, but change—personal and institutional—starts with each of us. Institutions are run and supported by people. We cannot be anti-racist until we understand how we each are racist and contribute to institutions that are. Tolerating that information means making sure you have a sturdy emotional container, or else you run the risk of letting everyone know how you feel but never taking action on those feelings. A big, strong emotional container comes from care for your body, mind, and spirit. It is a lot of work, but the payoff is twofold: you will be more empowered in your personal life and have the capacity to foster the change you want to see in the world.