Preparing to Launch White Racial Healing with “Uncut Caucasian Joy”
By: Jill E. Thomas
We are just a week away from launching our 4th year of our Racial Healing Affinity Groups. As we prepare to welcome over 70 participants from 6 race-alike groups from across the country, each of our facilitators is cooking up something special for their particular affinity groups.
Over here in the white racial healing group, which Tim and I don’t refer to as an affinity space, we are always looking for ways to be real about the work we need to do as white people to dismantle white supremacy culture (WSC) while still cultivating hope and joy. I’m not going to lie, in the early days of my racial justice work, I thought it was noble to suffer. White ancestors created the harm that is the foundation of all we stand on today. Our BIPOC colleagues, friends, and neighbors have suffered through the generations as a result. It seemed to me that part of the healing work white folks need to do is to feel that pain and suffering as well. While I still believe white people have a lot of work to do to better understand the pain and suffering we have been complicit in creating, the work of healing requires us to acknowledge the trauma caused by being oppressors, but not to do this through the exclusion of experiencing hope and joy.
Without hope and joy, we sulk. We fall into depression. We feel there is nothing we can do to change the current situation so why bother. Without hope and joy, there is apathy. Apathy does not create change.
The very idea of “white joy” was gifted to me by one of my BIPOC colleagues as she casually shared about a Trevor Noah clip in which he jokes that all white people love Neil Diamond. Not just Neil Diamond, but one particular Neil Diamond tune. If you already know which one it is without seeing his comedy special, there’s a good chance you are white. It was, of course, “Sweet Caroline.” He said, “There is nothing that brings more joy to the soul of a white person than the sounds of that Neil Diamond song….when that song plays, you see white peoples’ eyes light up like sleeper agents who’ve just been activated….when that song kicks in, it taps into the very DNA of whiteness.”
When she shared this punchline with me, I initially felt it as a light punch, something akin to, “Oh yeah, white people are so uncool.” I felt a moment of shame about loving this song and considering it one of “my songs” with my big brother, a song we will literally stop in our tracks and belt out at the top of our lungs when we hear it. Not just the words, but also the “bum bum bum.” That’s right, we sing the instruments too. I felt exposed and foolish.
For a moment.
And then I watched the Trevor Noah clip in which he makes this joke, and I saw the glee on his own face. He wasn’t saying he hated white people. To the contrary, he was acknowledging how fun it is to see white people uniting around something benign, something communal, something “adorable.” When I saw the audience sing out loud to the song, I saw that this experience was not just mine as I thought it had been. It was actually a strange marker of culture that I had never realized. And what a white moment that was, thinking that my experience was unique – the very nature of whiteness! Like most of my realizations of being white, they have been pointed out to me directly or indirectly through BIPOC folks.
What I see more clearly now is that part of racial healing is fully owning and recognizing our racial identity, both the parts we don’t like and the parts we do. We have to hold both. What could be more healing to the world than white people who have access to their joy? This allows us to do the work of sitting in the pain and shame, the guilt, the confusion, knowing that it doesn’t have to keep us from action, knowing that joy is available to us too as we do the work. Trevor Noah says, “Don’t ever lose that joy. None of you white people, you hold on to it. It is a treasure.”
So as we launch RHAG next week, I stay committed to supporting the group of white educators in healing communally but acknowledging the whole story: the pain, the joy and the path between.