By Zaire Bidgel
Portland, Oregon. The epicenter of white dreads, white fragility, and colorblindness. I was living there, working at a non-profit whose goal was to serve the houseless community while also being a place where the most marginalized could go to feel their thoughts and needs mattered.
In actuality, it empowered angry white men at the expense of trans and queer people, women and families, and people of color—especially Black people. Black clients wouldn’t show for weeks on end and report back with the same thing: “I just needed a break from this place.”
Our white customers, however, would show up everyday, so happy they had found a place they felt welcome. They would tear down signs that said “Black Lives Matter” and replace them with shakily scribbled “ALL Lives Matter.” They’d leave feedback in the suggestion box that we “need to stop making things so political.” They would talk down to every single Black woman they got to interact with them, and turn red in the face if she dared tell them a thing or two about themselves. The white women would silently watch and hushedly whisper to me, wondering if I could talk to the now assaulted Black woman about not carrying so much anger into the space.
I would log into Facebook on my break as a way to mentally separate myself from the space, and there I would often see pleas for support from my Black Portland friends. One post finally made it clear to me: it was a Black person venting about their day, and how they had been assaulted on TriMet (Portland’s public transit) again, and were ready to exit this world.
And there it was, the third comment down, the first white person to even acknowledge the post, “Can you put a trigger warning on this?” That was all. No acknowledgement of their pain, their fear for their safety, their request for rides. No offer of support. Nothing.
It punched me so hard in the gut that I actually began to dry heave from the anxiety. In retrospect, I should’ve expected this, but progressive politics have a way of making you believe things about people that you should already know to be untrue. White people do not care about Black healing, especially when that healing interrupts their sense of comfort. And it was in that small interaction that I made my decision.
I would no longer be offering white people trigger warnings. I would not make space for or hold their pain in anyway. Their emotional safety became a non-entity to me.
It is so rare that Black people are given space to fully express their pain. There is always a label applied to it. It’s too loud, too violent, too painful, too much. So what is the deeper impact when we finally find a space that just might be safe for us and we’re interrupted by whiteness and forced to edit ourselves?
Pre-empting Black healing for the comfort or needs of whiteness is violence. We have lost so much of ourselves, our families, our communities, in (often forced) support of whiteness, regardless of if we see or acknowledge it. Interrupting expressions of Black pain and healing to think of the needs of white people, who have a direct hand in the pain we’ve been dealt is dehumanizing. It serves as a reminder that white needs must always be considered.
How can we, as Black people, heal with white needs at the center of our thoughts and processes? How can we truly support ourselves and emotional wellbeing while serving the needs of those who continue to actively oppress and enact violence against us?
It is my firm belief that white healing should never be a priority for any Black person anywhere. If you are white, it can almost be guaranteed that someone, somewhere is fighting for your voice, for your space to safely exist and heal. That promise does not exist for Black people; our healing is solely our responsibility. Far too often any efforts to create spaces for our healing are or will be met with intense, and violent, opposition. Black people live in a constant state of what white people would refer to as “triggering.” Our simple existence invites a level of violence upon us that is so far out of our control that some of us don’t even realize that we can be triggered, or even have triggers.
How do we, as a community and individuals with separate needs, create a framework of healing that centers our pain and traumas? Holding white people accountable for the ways they actively interrupt our healing is form of emotional reparations that can serve as a baseline. Shifting the ways that we navigate through our traumas from questions of “Is there space for this?” to assertions of “This is where I’m making space for this,” regardless of who is present, can put us on the road to radical Black healing.
Suggested Reading:
Kejhonti Neloms, “I could not grieve Las Vegas because I have run out of tears for white death“, RaceBaitR, 2017.
Hari Ziyad and Kevin Rigby, “White people have no place in Black liberation.” RaceBaitR, 2016.
Zaire is a Black queer on a mission to create more space for Black healing.
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