Commentary: Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad
Lauralei’s Instagram @rebelmouthedbooks: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-ccnCKgXBi/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
I read (or, rather, participated in) Layla F. Saad's Me and White Supremacy-- a month-long journaling journey-- with the Decolonize This Book Club and it wasn't at all what I expected.
Honestly, as I wrote this post, I found myself wanting to delete it all and start over. I hate focusing on myself-- I'm notoriously bad at it. Anything I write about my own life, my experiences, and my feelings rubs me the wrong way. Like I'm corny. I flee from that feeling by focusing on everything else around me. But, after this book, I'm realizing that that's part of the problem. I'm avoiding myself. So... I'm not going to delete everything I've written and start over from a new angle. I'm going to talk about myself and it's going to suck, but I think it needs to happen.
What began as an Instagram challenge became a published book as of this February. Layla F. Saad's 28-day journaling exploration in Me and White Supremacy takes a different topic each day and then poses reflective journaling prompts, holding up a mirror in front of each of us, asking "How are you complicit in White Supremacy?" It's this mirror I want to consider more in this post.
With Day 1, we are introduced to White Privilege. The basics, as it were. We are asked questions about how our privilege shows up in daily life. When I looked back on my Day 1 journal, I found that, while I believed I was taking the time and energy and focus to dig deep, I was skating across the surface. I feel that I am a fairly introspective person; I reflect on my decisions and actions and words every day. I am not a big journal-er, but I do enjoy it. More importantly, I'm a writer; I relish in the experience of diving headlong into a thought, picking it apart, inspecting its origins, and discovering angles that reveal something shiny underneath-- something unknown. And yet. When it came to looking at my own Whiteness, even though I was trying deliberately NOT to, I floated above it all, fearful of what I was staring at-- so fearful that instead of picking it apart like I normally do, I fumbled it around awkwardly in my hands. What's wild here is that I didn't even realize it then.
I didn't see it until probably Week 2, when some truths started falling through the cracks in my grip-- in my stranglehold on my own harmfulness.
On Days 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and even 10, I couldn't actually look at the mirror being held up in front of me. On Day 11, I took a quick peek. I braved a glance. I saw myself-- a relief. But, then I looked again, a little longer and I noticed for the first time a few cracks. I brushed them off. "I know I'm not perfect," I rationalized. "I've known that for a long time." But, if I really knew that to be true, then why couldn't I face the possibility of imperfection?
On Days 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, I fought the mirror. Feelings of resentment popped up. I already hate so many parts of myself; why would you want me to hate even more? Though I actively avoided defensiveness, my journaling revealed something worse-- stubbornness. Though none of the terms I was reading about were new, though I had contemplated the things I was journaling about many times before and even took action on, I was holding back. I was pretending. I was acting as if the mirror was watching me, judging me.
It wasn't until closer to Days 15, 16, and 17 that I realized the mirror was me. I was alone in that journal. No one was reading it but me. No one was demanding that I share my reflections. No one was there to judge me. It was just me. That's when I finally started looking at the mirror, closer and closer each day, until my breath fogged up the glass.
Days 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 were full of meaningful excavations. I revealed parts of myself that I didn't like and that I hadn't known were there. But it didn't make me hate myself. It made me hungry for more excavating-- more to pick apart, to inspect, to understand. To grow from.
By Day 28, I saw a different Lauralei in the mirror. Not changed or "better", but real and honest and full of mistakes. On Day 1, I had an image of myself in my mind. By Day 28, that image was gone and replaced with something much more genuine.
The reason I share all of this is to be real about our sense of self vs our actual self. Reading always challenges what we know of ourselves, but this specific book challenged it until that "self" became someone else.
I'll be sending a copy of this book to a lot of my friends and family over the next few months. I'm sure I won't be liked for that. It's not fun or easy. Especially at times like right now, when all we want to do is find comfort and pleasure to keep us going through the pandemic. I found myself lagging behind on the prompts because of that exact thing. But it's important.
What I want to say here is that for all of my White family and friends who don't think they would need to do something like this because they aren't racist, or because they "get it", you do need to do this. You (just like me) need to take antiracism and make it personal-- to question and challenge the version of yourself in your mind because I can guarantee there is someone else underneath. It doesn't make you a bad person or less deserving of love. But we have to reckon with the other self we hold inside or else we can't be fully invested in antiracism work-- or else we can't do much good.
Running from ourselves is normal-- we all do it. I do it all the time. But we have to stop doing that. We are running from imperfections, from mistakes, and from parts of ourselves we really dislike. But the question should be, what are we running towards? We are running towards facades, fakeness, and, ultimately, the continuation of systems like White Supremacy. By running away from ourselves, we are perpetuating harm for ourselves and for everyone else too.