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Hey there everyone –
I had a lovely time on my vacation and got back last night. I have a whole “what I did on my summer vacation” style reflection for you, but for now it’s in note form, so it will have to wait ‘til it’s fully cooked.
This week, I want to provide some specific strategies you can use to introduce in a therapy session the subject of whiteness—by which I mean the organizing system of the dominant culture and its power structures—or white identity, the way a person comes to recognize themselves as racialized as “white.” In today’s post I am going to operate from the position that the clinician doing the introducing of the topic is also white.
If you’re reading this post and you’re not a therapist, I think you can still borrow a lot from these strategies in a work setting, or in an organizing project, or in your local community gathering space. If you’re a client who is scared to bring up the topic of whiteness or white identity in your sessions because you’re not sure how your therapist might respond, you can experiment with these strategies as a way to initiate a conversation.
These strategies are on the “beginner” end of the spectrum. If you’re already talking about white supremacy and structural violence with regularly in your sessions, you might find these ways of talking to be too simple. But I’m reminded of the Zen term beginner’s mind: returning again and again to a subject as if we knew nothing about it, because when we know something well, we are likely to be entrenched in our patterns, and thus less available to accepting new knowledge.
I found when I wrote this post that I noticed how much I default to one of the strategies and neglect the others, because I am very practiced at one, and more vulnerable with the others because I don’t engage them very much. If I’m feeling vulnerable, then how must the other person feel, when I bring up a subject that I talk about all the time, and maybe they’re just getting their feet wet?
It’s so easy to forget how much I could be learning if I would only slow down and take each of these conversations as if I’ve never had it before, as if I don’t anticipate it following a specific pattern or path. One thing I’ve been thinking about is that each one of these conversations is not only a vulnerable interaction between two people, and should be treated with great care, but is also a snapshot of our culture at this particular moment in time.
So much is happening in the mainstream media and in the dominant culture in the United States around white supremacy and white identity that even having the “exact same conversation” every week would yield a completely different end result, because the terrain is shifting and being actively contested in new ways all the time. I’m reminded of the way people do daily projects for a year, like taking a picture of themselves, or a particular tree, every day and recording it, and each day, they perceive their countenance, or the tree as wildly different. I would love to have a map of not only how this conversation is changing nationally, but also in every state and community. In some places even having these conversations is against the law. In others, people are actively asking questions about how they can have these conversations more frequently. I wonder what I’ll be writing about this subject in a year from now.
The individual, “identity-based” approach
Clients who do not have a strong self-concept that they are racialized as white—by which I mean they do not have a regular practice of seeing themselves as a white person, moving around in a world that is coded by race—may unconsciously see themselves as “not racialized” and by contrast see people who are coded as non-white as having to cope with “having a racial identity.”
In this way of seeing the world, to be racialized is to be subject to discrimination, prejudice, or difficulty in the encounter with people who are racist, or who harbor racial biases. They may also perceive people who are non-white as having a “culture” that white people don’t have, because white culture is just “American culture,” which everybody shares. In this framework, racial culture is adjacent to, or even in dissent from American culture.
By contrast, white people may not have to think about race because they are not impacted by it, unless they see evidence of racism or bias in their workplace or in their community and then decide to work with others, especially those in power, to eliminate these problems.
If a person without a strong sense of white identity is in therapy, they are unlikely to bring up the topic of whiteness, white supremacy, or their own racial identity in session. They may also associate the term “white identity” with “white identity politics” that is, white nationalism and white separatism.
In this context, the social work professor Lisa V. Blitz writes in “Owning Whiteness: The Reinvention of Self and Practice,” it is likely the therapist who will have to open the conversation about white identity with the client, signaling that it is part of the context that shapes the client’s life, as much as other elements of identity, family, relationship and personal interests. Blitz writes that she uses Janet E. Helms’ model of white racial identity development as a lens through which to interpret both her own and her client’s awareness of white identity, to better understand the therapeutic dynamic and how white identity is being enacted in the session.
Blitz states that she tries to introduce white identity as a subject of conversation in the first few sessions, normalizing talking about white identity as an element of self. If it doesn’t come up, she writes, she’ll say something like this:
“In order to really be of help to you, I need to get to know the full scope of who you are, not just the problem that brought you here. So we’ve already talked a bit about your family, your parents, your spouse, your job. I’m getting a good sense of who you are in the world in a lot of ways, the quality of those relationships and what they mean to you. But we haven’t yet talked about race, how you identify yourself racially and ethnically, what it means for you to be a White person in our world, in our city.”
Blitz acknowledges that many white clients will not know how to respond to the question, or will respond with a superficial answer and move on. But by raising the subject of white identity early on, she makes it clear that she is comfortable talking about white identity and race—however the client defines these terms—and if the client becomes more curious about his own identity, there is a touchstone he can return to.
Somatic Practice
If you’re a therapist who is trained in somatics, or who uses body scans or embodied attunement in your sessions as a form of grounding, or if you are a therapist who raises transference and countertransference in sessions, you can use a somatically-rooted approach to bring up the subject of whiteness or white identity in a session.
Often, when a white person even names the fact that she is white to another white person, a hum of tension can show up in the room. A person can feel wary: how will the other white person respond? Will she be offended? Will she feel accused of some nameless, vague offense? Is she being tested? There can be a sense that the therapeutic alliance is being threatened with a rupture.
The anticipation of a break in consensus, or in the interpersonal alliance, or a sudden sharp disavowal–—“I am not that”—can appear with such suddenness and intensity that it can push either the therapist or the client into a state of semi-dissociation from which they may struggle to recover. I’ve often had clients blank out, or abruptly change the subject, mid-stream, when we’re talking about a racially charged incident.
I’ve experienced a kind of buzzing in my head that is a harbinger of my own dissociative tendencies, even as both the client and I are fully consenting to have a conversation about white power, privilege, and racial identity. I’ve found myself pushing forward, breathing, or staying fixated on the content of the topic at hand, trying to “get to the other side” of the discomfort. Even though I’m used to the ways the social taboo against naming whiteness shows up in my body, I still have a default of refusing to acknowledge my somatic responses and letting my frustration drive me, evermore determined to have the conversation, dammit, steadying my voice while my heart is hammering in my chest. What’s more effective than my forced, stubborn desire to engage in the conversation at all costs is to actually name the somatic responses and explore my body’s “no”; it’s survival response, in real time.
Resmaa Menakem, who designed an entire somatic framework to aid people as they engage the “charge” that occurs when race and racial violence are named, sees the survival response as automatically triggered in the body, regardless of the level of political or intellectual sophistication and practice of the person, because these subjects are embedded in generational and historical violence that pervades not only the culture, but the epigenetic transfer of embodied knowing, even at the cellular level. From this perspective, it is only sensible, if not kind, to proceed at a pace that allows the body to metabolize the charge, to not rush “past” but rather stay “in” the body’s signals to fight, flee, or fawn in response to a perceived threat.
Whereas in a classroom a student might be forced to “sit on” their somatic responses, in order to learn, or discuss subjects like brutality, enslavement, and genocide, in a therapy session a client can be encouraged to practice both slowing down a conversation and attuning to their embodied responses, in real time. (Don’t get me started about the fact that we could be doing this equally well in classrooms.) By noticing each somatic response as it arises, the power of the cultural taboo against naming whiteness can be made visible in the room, rather than talked about as if it is happening elsewhere, or “outside” the session, in the wider culture.
A white clinician can bring up the subject of white identity and, before she asks the client for her response, take her own somatic temperature. She can describe what she’s feeling in her body, and she can also name her own countertransference in the moment, opening a space for both herself and her client to explore their embodied responses and the survival-based narratives that appear when the subject of white power is brought into the room.
Structural Analysis
A third approach to talking about whiteness and white identity is to start with the larger structures that work together to attach the idea—and even at times the “ideal” of—“American” identity to white identity, and how the dominant culture teaches all people who live in the United States to see white culture not as a specific, racialized way of being, but rather as the “norm” to which all Americans consent to live by in order to participate in society.
When a norm is seen as inevitable, as agreed upon by the citizenry, as unchanging and timeless, and as the ideal against which difference can be seen and evaluated, it can seem impossible to act as if that norm can be altered, let alone fully destabilized. In order to make change appear possible, it can be useful to take something that appears like a “duh” and to make it strange.
If you’ve ever been in a situation where your being put you in dissonance to an ideological norm, you’ll know what I mean by strangeness. If you have an identity, or an “invisible” disability, or another aspect of your self-conception that is at odds with the dominant culture, and that if you were exposed could threaten you with violence, you will experience a strange kind of attunement to that norm. The safety that “everyone else” takes for granted, for you will not be assured.
It’s easier to see an ideology when we are threatened by it than when we benefit from it. Because structures are often vast in scope and power, and because American culture is rooted in individualism, it can be difficult to see the dominant culture as a process rather than a stable thing. One way to begin to make structures of whiteness visible is to ask how it is that the dominant culture represents whiteness, and to whom the dominant culture is speaking.
The therapist and the client can share together how they learned to be white, and what “white” meant, in their elementary schools, in their community spaces, in their families, in the history books they read, in the holidays and rituals in which they participated, and if there were ever conversations about whiteness as a system, rather than an identity, in their friend groups, or around the family dinner table.
By talking about how systems work together—where they reinforce certain stories about what it means to be a white person, or what it means to be an American, and where those stories are challenged—the client and the therapist can distinguish between whiteness as a structure and white identity as an aspect of self. The field of psychology will often label an aspect of self a “personality trait” that is available to be changed. In contrast, an identity position, like “being white,” pre-exists the individual, and impacts the way the individual is perceived and read by others who are steeped in the same dominant culture. The individual does not “choose” their whiteness; they do not consent to the meanings that whiteness carries, but they must nevertheless live with those meanings and what those meanings confer in their material world.
When the client and therapist can separate the arenas of individual selfhood from the cultural and ideological meanings that are generated by structures and systems, it can help each of them to avoid falling into the defensive formations that have been grouped together under the term “white fragility”—behaviors that indicate that a person is receiving a culturally constructed meaning as instead a personality trait for which she is being blamed and shamed.
What’s your approach to talking about whiteness?
If you’ve tried any of these approaches to talking about white identity, whiteness, and power in your sessions, or in your work or community, please let us know in the comments section. If there’s an issue that you’d like to be able to address that would benefit from being seen within a framework of whiteness, please let us know, so we can crowdsource a way of thinking it through.
Thanks, and stay safe out there this week—
xo
Rebecca
Three ways to introduce the topic of whiteness or white identity in a therapy session