By Katherine Leshchiner, grant writer

In one of my previous workplaces, a funder was planning a site visit and requested that we provide an opportunity for them to speak with program participants as well as frontline staff. I met with the program leadership team — all Black and Latina women — to make a plan. They were understandably concerned about the timing of the site visit, which was set to coincide with a major reopening of in-person services after months of the pandemic. The team was already working overtime under immense pressure from our two white senior leaders. 

As the main point of contact with the funder, I offered to request postponing the site visit by a week or two. I drafted an email explaining the circumstances and ran it past my supervisor (one of the senior managers) for her approval. 

This was her response:

“My suggestion is not to send the email. The site visit has been scheduled and I wouldn’t put it off — it will just be harder once we’ve reopened. Management should be able to speak for those they supervise. Please proceed as scheduled with the four original attendees.”

My boss not only dismissed the concerns of the program team, but she also wanted to exclude the coordinator of the program that was being funded along with the staff who worked directly with our program participants — not to mention the participants themselves.

Reading between the lines, I know that the organization’s senior leadership didn’t trust the BIPOC staff and participants to deliver their talking points in a “professional” (read: white) manner. Aside from our Black program director, the rest of us attending the meeting were white and not involved in any direct way with the daily activities of the program — including me as the grant writer. 

Although I passionately disagreed with my bosses in my own mind, I did not challenge them on their decision. Instead, I let fear prevent me from acting in alignment with my values and chose to prioritize my own comfort over the rights of my BIPOC colleagues. 

I have learned since that it is our responsibility as white folks to develop the courage and resilience we need to bravely disrupt racism — and that often means caring for our own mental wellbeing.

White supremacy culture and mental health

I have had to recognize that struggling with a mental illness does not excuse me from being accountable for my actions — or my inaction.

The incident I just described was a clear example of white supremacy culture in action — one of many that I am complicit in perpetuating in the white-led organizations where I have worked. 

White supremacy culture is the set of norms, values, and beliefs that uphold a system where white people are rewarded and protected while Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color experience dehumanizing behavior and violence. White supremacy is reinforced by all our institutions — including nonprofit organizations — when particular attributes of the dominant (white middle-class and owning class) culture are accepted and reproduced as “normal” and desirable. These intersecting characteristics include perfectionism, denial and defensiveness, right to comfort and fear of conflict, individualism, urgency, and quantity over quality.

As someone with Social Anxiety Disorder, my internalized perfectionism and fear of conflict are both problematic tendencies when it comes to confronting white supremacy culture. That means I have to continue to do the necessary healing so that I can overcome the impulse to avoid situations where I fear failure and judgment — such as calling in my supervisors about their racist comments and behaviors.

I never disclosed my diagnosis at work because it was clear that mental health was grossly misunderstood by my supervisors, who made numerous disparaging remarks in my presence about donors, board members, former staff, beneficiaries, and others who lived with mental illness. In that toxic environment, public humiliation was a favorite tactic to keep employees in line, and any voicing of a contrary opinion was viewed as “insubordination.”

Yet as a white woman, the repercussions I might have faced for speaking up would not have been as severe as those experienced by my Latina colleagues who were forced out for daring to disagree with the power structure. I have had to recognize that struggling with a mental illness does not excuse me from being accountable for my actions — or my inaction.

On top of that, racism has never been a factor in my experience navigating social anxiety. BIPOC people — and especially trans people of color — with mental health concerns are often misdiagnosed, have less access to culturally appropriate care, face greater stigma, and are criminalized or institutionalized at higher rates than white people. In addition, the news of frequent police killings of Black people and the daily racial traumas experienced by BIPOC communities adds up to even more significant disparities in mental health outcomes.

What therapy can teach us about challenging white supremacy culture

…it wasn’t until participating in a program to unlearn my racist conditioning — Healing from Internalized Whiteness (HIW) — that I began to view mental wellness beyond a lens of individualized self-care for my own benefit. I now understand the importance of mental health as a foundation for collective antiracism work.

Several years ago, I was fortunate to benefit from five months of weekly group therapy sessions that were life-changing. Through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), I learned new tools to recognize my distorted thoughts and feelings and then reframe them in more realistic and helpful ways. With the support of my fellow group members and our therapist, I also engaged in real-life “experiments” where I tested out new behaviors to reduce the anxiety that certain situations provoked. 

However, it wasn’t until participating in a program to unlearn my racist conditioning — Healing from Internalized Whiteness (HIW) — that I began to view mental wellness beyond a lens of individualized self-care for my own benefit. I now understand the importance of mental health as a foundation for collective antiracism work.

There are valuable parallels between CBT and the skills white people need to develop in order to challenge white supremacy in our lives: 

1. As with anxiety or any other mental health concern, the first step to healing is awareness. Once we recognize a harmful or unhelpful pattern in our thoughts or behaviors, we have the opportunity to learn from it and change. 
2. Finding support from others who are equipped to hold us through the process is crucial. Just like a therapist or peers in group therapy can provide compassionate accountability while we struggle to change, we need to turn to other white folks who have been through it and who will not be triggered by the emotions that will inevitably arise when we confront our lifelong conditioning in white supremacy.
3. Practice, practice, practice! I only lessened the grip that social anxiety had on my life by striking up conversations with strangers at a party or sharing my opinion at a work meeting (along with the structure of CBT tools to manage my feelings before, during, and after). I put myself in situations that made me uncomfortable and built up resilience by seeing evidence that my worst fears actually did not come true. In other words, we as white people need to expand our capacity for feelings of discomfort so that we can do the necessary work of challenging white supremacy culture in our nonprofits, families, communities, and any other spaces we inhabit.
4. Continue on the spiral. Healing is not a linear process and many of the challenges we face will come up again and again. The key is to keep engaging in the practice.

Therapy, mindfulness, coaching, and other healing practices have taught me that my anxiety is not something that will ever disappear but it is possible to minimize its negative impacts and learn to manage it in a healthy way. I cannot excise the unwanted thoughts and feelings from my body and mind but I can acknowledge them without judgment and choose how I behave in response. 

In the same way, I can never stop being white but it is possible for me to mitigate the harm I cause while unlearning some of the white superiority that I have been conditioned into internalizing. In both cases, the only thing that I can control is my actions, and I have the agency to make a conscious choice about them.

Healing for white people is an essential step to ending white supremacy

By shifting our patterns of thinking and acting, white folks will be better able to show up — and keep on showing up — in the ways that we are needed to act in solidarity against white supremacy. To put it bluntly, we’ve gotta handle our own sh*t so that we can get out of the way and be effective at antiracism.

While in group therapy, it was a revelation to learn that most people I encountered were not criticizing and judging me nearly as much as I was of myself. During conversations, I would typically put so much energy into scrutinizing every minute detail of how the other person might be perceiving me that I could not actually listen to what they were saying. It has been freeing to discover that I can have stronger and more fulfilling relationships when I relax more and stop focusing so much attention on myself. 

Similarly, we white people have so much to gain from decentering ourselves and letting go of our shame and fragility. Healing — whether through therapy or another practice — is one necessary step toward repairing the harm that whiteness has inflicted in our relationships with BIPOC people. By shifting our patterns of thinking and acting, white folks will be better able to show up — and keep on showing up — in the ways that we are needed to act in solidarity against white supremacy. To put it bluntly, we’ve gotta handle our own sh*t so that we can get out of the way and be effective at antiracism.

The incredible thing is that in the process of creating the conditions for our collective liberation, we white people also get to free ourselves from the patterns that harm us. We get to reclaim our own humanity and experience true belonging and human connection while building genuine, thriving relationships with BIPOC folks.

Reflecting back on my past job, I could see that even my bosses were negatively impacted by the white supremacy culture they clung to; their glorifying of overwork and martyrdom, being consumed by constant urgency, taking pride in never taking a sick day despite poor health, and damaging relationships by putting work above all else — these were harming them along with the entire organization. Imagine how much better our work and lives could have been for everyone — them included — if the senior leadership had begun their own process of healing and built an affirmative work culture by modeling how to prioritize true wellbeing.

If we white people hope to “re-become human,” as the creator of HIW, Sandra Kim, puts it, we cannot tear down other white people in the process. We need to invite them in with empathy and bring them along on their own healing journeys. This is our job as antiracist white people. We have to be the ones to show other white people what they have to gain from changing their hearts and minds so that we all — every person in our racialized society — can be together as our whole and fully human selves.