I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by people who look like me, share similar struggles, live in similar neighborhoods, share similar cultural values, and created a sense of cultural unity. This felt safe to me. I moved through these environments feeling supported and accepted.

However, I have stepped outside of that cultural bubble and been intimately exposed to the vastly different world of whiteness at very critical points in my life: childhood and my late twenties. I’ve experienced being an outsider in the white world and a palatable insider (a category that quickly returned me to an outsider when I deviated from the expected performance).

As racial tensions flare in our American society, one major shadow being illuminated right now is the hypocrisy of racial dynamics. Glaringly obvious contrasts of narratives on who deserves empathy, acknowledgement, safety, and second-chances…and who doesn’t. 

I’ve come across many videos lately online fo white people highlighting their own anecdotes on how other white people regard non-white people. They detail how over-identifying with whiteness restricts empathy and true allyship because there is no active effort to unlearn the philosophies of white supremacy.

This is not just conservatives either. Unless you are actively - I repeat ACTIVELY - investigating and reprogramming your biases and conditioning it is very likely you’re running on autopilot with white supremacist rooted beliefs. We have been sold white supremacy as a solitary point of character when in reality, like everything else in life, white supremacy is a spectrum. I have experienced the spectrum of white supremacy first hand professionally and socially.

The Collective Impact

As a lawyer I felt it from my law school days well into the courtroom. There was still the stereotypical racism but I experienced a new, arguably more nefarious, flavor of white supremacy from those claiming they want positive change for marginalized people.

This kind of white supremacy is perpetuated by people who sincerely think they aren’t racist. Maybe it’s because they love hip hop. Maybe it’s because they have a Black friend. Maybe it’s because they have some non-white heritage themselves (think white Latinx). Maybe it's because they work in public service. Whatever the reason, they think because they aren’t KKK coded they are exempt from doing the internal decolonial work or looking any more closely at themselves. Instead what I've observed is the infinite need to externalize. Shifting blame to the right-leaning desires of their more conservative counterparts while ignoring the harms of the status quo. Opting for nihilism or pessimism (calling it realism) ignoring the spirit of hope that sits at the core of true liberation movements. Preaching anti-violence while ignoring the inherent violence of captialism and colonialism. Most frustratingly, a seeming inability to understand intersectionality.

They talk the talk but don't walk the walk. When confronted with people who are living true liberation philosphies that is when this flavor of white supremacy rears its ugly head. It's so subtle but the harmful impact is exponential.

• It's shunning people from marginzalized groups for not working within oppressive systems to pursue justice - asking them to keep investing time, energy, and faith into leadership who label themselves the party of progress but who very obviously seek to maintain a status quo that harms us.

• It's ridiculing non-western belief systems and healing practices because of the belief that western perspectives are inherently more "civilized" or credible.

• It's paternalism in public service work. Assuming you know best for other's lives simply because of your traditional education or whiteness.

• It's putting white people at the head of liberation movements or public service work they have never been affected by rather than people who live these harms everyday.

• It's tone policing, respectability politics, and pathology when we as BIPOC have every right to our human rage and grief. Distracting from the cause to demand we be palatable in demanding justice.

• It's coopting non-western traditions without including the lineage holders of those traditions or while exploiting them.

• It's expecting BIPOC to exist as a monolith because that is what is digestible.

We are very conditioned in this country into this white supremacy spectrum heavily. All of us.

For BIPOC it shows up as seeking safety through assimilation and approval through self-abandonment. That’s why representation isn’t all that matters. There’s plenty of brown people with seats at the table reinforcing systems that hate and hurt them. It appears as preference for light skin, encouragement to date white people (the ever icky "cleansing the bloodline), superiority status to those with mixed racial identities, and assuming the worst of your own peers.

For white people it frequently shows up as double standards, hypocrisy, savior complex, and superiority complex. They are the people who tell you not to be a single issue voter for genocide or police brutality but will be single issue voters for issues that could affect them as white people. They want to go back to brunch and the status quo. And they don’t see how any of that is a problem. It creates delays in progress and eliminates a sense of safety for BIPOC in the space.

“The white conservatives aren't friends of the Negro either, but they at least don't try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling." - Malcolm X

The Personal Impact

I vividly remember racial dynamics growing up in elementary school being sent to schools outside of my community because they had more resources. They also had way less people who look like me. These schools were in affluent and conservative neighborhoods unlike my own. These playgrounds and classrooms provided the forums for more blatant forms of racism, colorism, and classism. I recall being made to celebrate stories of violent colonizers on stolen land while learning my ancestors to be the savages. The disdain in the eyes of white staff at school for being allowed in with a permit and their shock at my intellectual capabilities. Conversely, I also learned the function of my own privilege under white supremacy - being mixed, having light skin, having a white-passing mom. This shielded me compared to the treatment my sisters got for darker skin and tighter curls.

Time propelled me into the other side of the spectrum more recently in life. Starting with law school and peaking as I began dating my husband who is half white and had a lot of white peers. It was the way classmates embraced me until I began speaking out about police violence against Black people. I was met with invalidation, being unfollowed online, and being excluded from events I was usually invited to. It was the assumptions in the courtroom that I must be a defendant, never the attorney no matter how dressed to the nines I was.

Socially, I found myself suddenly surrounded by white liberals. Politics dominating conversations in the abstract - the way someone would critique a movie. Discussions on current events a space to inflate your own ego - who knows more on a subject and who has the hottest take. It was everything I hated about academia as a Black and Mexican woman…except it was happening in a gentrified neighborhood with transplants alongside over-priced beers. It was isolating to be the only person in the conversation who actually LIVED the impacts of these political systems yet my perspective the least regarded. I thought maybe the universe was handing me a healing opportunity. A chance to build a cultural bridge by letting me have a more intimate glimpse into this world. I definitely learned a lot but not in the ways I imagined.

It didn't take very long for the bullshit to start. I was almost always the only person near my skin tone at any given event. They made sure I knew it too. It manifested as being called intimidating when I was simply existing in a predominantly white space. Being called aggressive when expressing my feelings or setting a boundary. Being called dramatic when I was honest about not wanting to be around someone who made me uncomfortable. It was touching my hair when I had it braided or big and curly. Assuming I knew how to braid hair (I don't). Assuming I was from the hood (that part is true, but still). It was being shoved in white nightclubs like I didn't even exist and when confronting someone about it being told "there's a way to speak." Watching the way my beautiful brown skinned friends were treated as secondary to be let into these same clubs while white women were allowed to skip the line in droves. White women constantly pulling me aside to trauma dump on me or ask my advice with no regard for my own capacity and never returning the support.

On the more extreme end it manifested as being accused of brain washing my husband like some evil witch temptress when he began calling out covert racism, misogyny and setting boundaries with white peers. Even when acting on his own values he could be the innocent and I was the problem. I could go on with examples for days. The consequences were heavy on my mental health. I found myself leaning on substances to cope with my discomfort and lashing out at my partner before I was able to work out what I was experiencing. It was hard to discern white supremacy beneath the veneer of faux friendliness and polite tones. I realized I was beneficial as long as I could play the spicy Latina friend or wise Black sage. The second I took on more dimension as a human being with feelings, opinions, and needs I was greeted with shadow lurking beneath white liberalism. The feelings of superiority toward me and the resentment for me daring to speak up and take up space. My partner eventually met the same ostracization for advocating for and supporting me giving up the benefits of his whiteness and complicity in that space.

In any community space it is very challenging as a BIPOC who actually wants liberation, transformation, and right relationship to be in spaces with people like this. You will be invalidated, silenced, demonized and ridiculed - until as always 6 months to a year later they realize what you were talking about all along because someone white finally deems it to be credible. See people finally condemning a very publicized genocide thats been going on for years because some white academics finally said it meets a definition also crafted by white academics.

It takes immense courage to speak truth to power for your people, especially as so many of us carry the generational trauma of genocide, whippings, and other tortures in our blood. We carry the trauma but also the resilience. However change will require more than just our communities.

We cannot do the inner work for white people nor do we want to. If white people truly want to be advocates for progress what would really help this is for them to start getting really honest with themselves. Not to judge themselves, engage in self hatred or white guilt. For them to get sincerely curious about their beliefs and behaviors. To ask where it’s rooted. To talk to people who don’t share their background and who also aren’t going to be an echo chamber out of fear or a desire for white proximity. Listening to the people they deem too aggressive or too radical or too loud or using the wrong tone.

Everything doesn’t have to be a blind agreement but the exposure is what will help us to jointly start dismantling white supremacy in the first place it really matters - within. Internally is where all outward transformation begins. Where white people have to really contemplate their willingness to give up the benefits that white supremacy affords them. The façade of protection that silence to injustice affords. The upward, capitalistic mobility that the status quo offers. Until those with the most privilege in these systems start taking a close look at how they are contributing to the state of the world, their allyship will only be a roadblock in disguise. Their friendship a ticking time bomb.

Resources for Deprogramming White Supremacy:

Decolonize Your Mind Program by Dra. Rosales Meza

Harmony in Wellness by Dra. Rosales Meza

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

White Fragility by Robin Diangelo

This Book is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell & Aurelia Durand

“I will never say that progress is being made. If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that's below, that the blow made. And they haven't even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound…they won’t even admit the knife is there.” - Malcolm X