“To Be or Not to Be: white Adjacent”

This week has been a powerful one for many of us. As a therapist of color, whose patients are mostly people of color, I have witnessed in both myself and my patients an internal shift as our subjective reality seems to finally be validated now that it is coinciding with white “objective” reality. White people have been awakened, and now, apparently, so shall we. I am not convinced it is necessarily because of George Floyd's death, but that the white delusion has finally been punctured by a reality that is no longer plausibly deniable. Protests and rioting have coursed through our cities. Trump has threatened to bring in the military, and we are all of us feeling the restriction of freedom as our mayor enforces a curfew on the city that never sleeps. The constant din of helicopters and distant chimes of sirens begins at 8 and continues through the night, making life in quarantine feel like a distant if not pleasant memory, comparatively speaking.

Now that white people feel scared, they stand at attention. In response to their fear, they have mounted a manic defense of mass mobilization. Social media has been taken over by the ominous black box, anti-racist reading lists flood our emails, and efforts to process this trauma are externalized into the urgency to take action. But people are confused. They are implored to do something—anything—to fight racism, yet everything they do seems wrong. Posting memes and action plans on social media is called out as self-serving and trite, but not posting anything is seen as being complicit. Intentions are questioned, judged, and criticized, and white people throw their hands in the air in exasperation, as if to say, “I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't.”

That's exactly right, we say. People in power, and in this case whites, have for too long felt they can hide behind good intentions, as if it hurts any less to be slapped across the face whether it is accidental or intentional. The conscious good intention of whites always see