Years ago, maybe in 2016 or 2017, a young white man who wrote to me, in response to letters I’d been writing on Facebook on the #DearWhiteMen hashtag. He wrote:
"But what about all of the innocent white men? The white men who fight relentlessly for the rights of others? My whole point is that we should not lump each other into predetermined groups. In doing so, we undermine all of our collective effort in moving forward towards a more equitable future. Blame does not help what we are all working towards. Blaming others is what put us where we are today."
The following was my reply, published as an open letter. I don’t know if I’d say it all the same way today but, I think much of it still stands.
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First of all, I hear you.
This will be a long letter to you.
I hope you might read it.
The feeling of being lumped into a group can be painful. The feeling of being stereotyped is terrible. The feeling of being blamed for something you legitimately didn't do is awful. There are few humans alive who don't know that feeling.
Secondly, white men have played powerful and incredible roles in the movements for social justice. For as long as there were white men enslaving black people in the USA there have been white male abolitionists. In fact some, like John Newton who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace, were both – first a slave trader and then a fierce critic of it. These white men are to be admired. I wish their stories were taught in American schools rather than those of genocidal maniacs like Columbus or George Washington.
And, of course, that's just as true today.
There's much to say in response to what you have written but there is one thread that, for the moment, I'd like to follow. It's your use of the word 'we'.
Who is the 'we' you keep referring to?
Your response is likely 'everyone' or 'humans'. It's the 'all' in #alllivesmatter.
And, of course, the situation in the world is dire. Those in charge of the world's economic and political systems thrive on the divisions. Divide and conquer is a real thing. They actively work to pit us against each other. So, it would seem that the response to these attempts at fracturing our connections is to make the move from 'me' to 'we' – to refuse to let them divide us.
And I know this is what you're trying to do. It's a noble goal. And so my feedback here is not about your goal but about your strategy.
'We' is an achieved thing. 'We' is not a given. 'We' is earned from time in together. 'We' means I could speak on behalf of a group and have all of their heads nodding. 'We' is a shared understanding. And white men, it seems, often move too quickly to 'we'.
Let's unpack your use of it.
"we should not lump each other into predetermined groups."
Of course, the heart of this for you, the issue you are responding to here, is that I seem to be lumping white men into a predetermined group. So let's start with that and look at some of the implications of it by saying it differently.
"Women and people of colour should not lump white people into a predetermined group"
What is being said here is that, no matter what traumatic life experiences they have had with white men, they should see us as an individual, totally blank slate. They shouldn't bring any of that 'baggage' into their interactions with us.
Consider the words of Muhammed Ali,
"There are many white people who mean right and in their hearts wanna do right. If 10,000 snakes were coming down that aisle now, and I had a door that I could shut, and in that 10,000, 1,000 meant right, 1,000 rattlesnakes didn’t want to bite me, I knew they were good... Should I let all these rattlesnakes come down, hoping that that thousand get together and form a shield? Or should I just close the door and stay safe?"
This is what we're asking them to do – to trust that we are different.
To take the enormous risk of opening themselves to us despite generations of proof that people who look like us can't always be trusted. When we tell women and people of colour that 'they should trust us' we are doing an incredible act of violence to them.
We are removing their right to engage with us or not as they choose.
We are forcing ourselves on them.
Of course, as you read this, there is every chance that all you will see is that white people are being compared to snakes and that this simply proves your point. Underwriting that response is your notion that they are exaggerating. That it hasn't been that bad for them. That 'poisonous snakes' is an over-the-top analogy.
Stated differently, we can't trust what they say.
Stated differently, our response to their trauma is to dismiss their trauma in such a way that more trauma is created.
Stated another way still, we are owed their love and forgiveness.
Looked at from another angle, women and people of colour can't withhold their love and other white men must not corroborate these fears.
"In doing so, WE undermine all of OUR COLLECTIVE effort in moving forward towards a more equitable future."
Your thought that the 'more equitable future' you imagine is the same as the one that women and people of colour imagine is at the heart of the issue. Your assumptions that you understand the nature and causes of their oppression, that you share a core worldview of how that oppression should be dealt with and what it might mean to work together are at the heart of the issue.
The implication of what you are saying is that, 'we are all being screwed over in the same way by the same people and it looks the same everywhere and so our response should look the same everywhere' – that's what makes it a collective effort that WE are all working on. Racism and misogyny do harm white men. Yes. But it's in a very different way that it harms women and people of colour.
"Blame does not help what we are all working towards."
Part of the challenge here is that white men seem to have a very difficult time in hearing about historical and current patterns of behaviour about themselves. These are patterns of behaviour that are intimately familiar to most women and people of colour but, when a white man is confronted with these or they hear these dynamics discussed by others the response is not curiosity but a brittle and bristling sort of defensiveness that says, in essence, 'you are exaggerating'.
You can name and not blame.
You can name the issues and not have that be an indictment of who you are.
And again, "what we are all working towards".
Your assumption that you are working for the same goal, and that you have the same map and route on how to get there, without asking or checking in, is a large part of the issue.
So where is this 'we' coming from?
"Blaming others is what put us where we are today"
Again who is 'we' and where is it that you are referencing that we are? The implication of this is that we are all in the same place but many women and people of colour will assure you that they don't live in the same world as you.
This is a tale of two cities and there you are, having grown up on the privileged side of the river, running for Mayor and claiming fellowship with the very people on whose backs your side of the city was built, and claiming fraternity with them. And, when they raise their eyebrows at your pronouncements you tell them that they are the problem for not trusting you. You become angry and petulant and wave the flag of victimhood.
Of course, this isn’t to say that all white men are ‘privileged’. There are poor white men. Ones who grew up infirm and unloved. One privilege doesn’t protect one from the sufferings of life. This world is a hard go.
It’s also not to say that being ‘privileged’ is all its cracked up to be. That it’s good for us at the end of the day.
Ayiyi. There’s so much to say.
But the central thing to underscore is that, for so many reasons, most of us live at different intersections of the world these days. There’s so little shared anything amongst those of us in the dominant societies of the world.
'We' is an achievement that is worked towards not something to which we are entitled. 'We' is the result of an immense amount of work. 'We' is not a given – even if we work hard.
As the good Lillie P Allen suggests, "The only way we get a fresh moment with each other is if we create it".
But don’t we tend to want it all immediately.
And the roots of the word immediately come down to 'no medium' meaning 'nothing in between' or 'nothing separating' as if the way to intimacy was to remove the distance between us but the first casualty of this approach to intimacy is the one we claim to admire and support.
Is there distance between men and women and white people and people of colour? Indigenous and settlers? Often.
So what's your solution? To claim it shouldn't be there? To shame them for being suspicious? To force the removal of it?
To utterly disrespect boundaries as you did with me when I asked you to stop posting on my wall and message me directly with if you wanted to talk? Or when I told you I would reply when I could and offered to go for beers but you had to keep pushing it so you could get satisfaction immediately?
How about honouring the medium of space between us as a sacred thing?
'We' is an achievement. 'We' can't be imposed. 'We' doesn't exist because you think it should. 'We' is something tangible and real. 'We' is something to be courted with diligence and effort. 'We' can't be achieved if the other is not respected. 'We' can't be achieved without the space in between us being maintained and honoured. That space is the place in which our relationship happens. No space between us, no ‘we’ because there are no longer two of us here.
That space is the medium through which our love flows. Stalking and worse is what can happen when that space is not respected. This is the tragedy of it. Being starved for love, we grasp for it but consequence of our grasping is to destroy the one we grasp. The attempt to force a ‘we’ destroys the possibility of it from every emerging.
“We should be together,” said by a man who can’t seem to take ‘no’ for an answer or read the clear discomfort signals she’s giving can be terrifying words to a woman.
Many of our attempts to build a ‘we’ as white men end up hurting the ones with whom we want to enjoy this ‘we’. And one of the major ways we cause harm in building a ‘we’ is by assuming the ‘we’ is already there.
I recall speaking with a friend who was driven to ‘unite the youth movements of the world’. I listened to him for a good long while and finally asked permission to share something I was seeing.
“You know those connect the dot games we played as a kid?”
He nodded.
“The whole picture was there already. You just had to find the right connections between the dots and draw them in. You weren’t really making up a picture you were discovering what it was. Each dot was in its proper place. You just had to connect them. What you’re trying to do is to push all of those dots together into one big super dot.”
He sat there stunned for a bit. His eyes widened. He took a deep breath. He understood.
How many times, over the years, have I heard of people wanting to create an umbrella organization that would bring all the organizations in a certain field together. Unspoken in all of this was that they would be the one to hold the umbrella.
So, creating a ‘we’ in a complicated thing that is something more akin to an honouring of the diversity of experiences than the attempt to amalgamate them. It’s more of a mosaic than a melting pot. It’s an understanding the big picture and our roles within it.
There’s a difference between divisiveness and honouring differences.
There’s a difference between inclusiveness and not acknowledging people’s autonomy. If someone values connection over separation as a rule, what happens to the respect for the independence of others?
We can have empathy for others and still be discerning about when, where and how to connect with them. And that choice must be left up to them.
I’m noticing that whenever someone, especially someone in a position of power, says, “We should _______” about our culture at large it is a conjuring that seems to vanish the diversity of who is being discussed and the imposition of a monolithic sense of strategy when it may be much more nuanced. It might be that white men should do one thing and white women another and that black men might do another thing and black women might be drawn to something else. And diversity within all of that too. There may be so many different roles for different people. Some people may need to work inside the system and some out. And some might have different understandings about how to encourage and engage people.
All of that is, it seems to me, made invisible with, ‘we should ______’.
The creation of a fresh moment with each other is more work than we can imagine.
And so there you go.
The hour is late. It is growing dark. And we have a long way to walk before we get home to a place where good relations might be established again. You look up at the sky and there it is. The stars beginning to come out held, as they are, in the cool medium of space in between them, the universe’s way of loving them as they are and giving them a chance to shine for a while and, from where we stand, full of constellations - lines drawn between them.
Do you want a 'we'?
Start by noticing why there isn't one. Learn that well.
Learn the resistance to the 'we' you yearn for instead of making it wrong.
Learn why we, as white men, are spoken of in the ways that we are without defending or seeking to change it.
Ask others about the present they live in, what it's like to be them and what they think causes the struggles they face. Ask other about the future they want and what they imagine it might take to create it.
‘We’ is our only hope but it will take more than hope to get there.
"We are the products of the children of a dominant North American culture. Now, ask yourself, when was the last time you were able to use the word 'we' and you know who you meant. Is 'we' you and your family? Is we you and a couple of close buddies? Who is we? Because in cultures that are alive, we is an enormous proposition. Deeply inclusive. A ramshackling event and many other things. It's not a monolith but it's certainly recognizable. And you recognize yourself as someone who was claimed and conjured and delivered unto this world by that 'we'. I use 'we' very, very rarely and the reason for that is that I don't know what that refers to. So that's what we have instead of a culture in the dominant culture of North America. We have a kind of religion of individualism that's a default consequence of the mass migration that spawned the white America that we know about and we're still living the consequences, unwilling to learn them, we still live them as if history is over. As Nick Cave put it, 'The past is the past and it's here to stay.' 'We' is not a racial identity. It's something much akin to a shared understanding of what life is, what's asked of us, about what we're willing to live and die for and three or four other high end items... a shared ancestry that's not all DNA ancestry. It's an ancestry that's somehow soulful and recognizable across the barriers of DNA." - Stephen Jenkinson
Tad, this is THE best explanation I've heard on this topic. EVER. Thanks so much. I'll be reading and re-reading, and considering this in every facet of my life. 🙏🏻❤️
Yes.
We can often sound just like “The Royal We.”