Rooted Courage: An Arts-Based Inquiry into White Womanhood and our Relationship to Accountability
This container is for folks who identify as white women wanting a supportive space to grapple with our role in dismantling systems of oppression from the inside out. Taking a closer look at the white woman tropes - weaponized tears, fragility, unaccountable, choosing comfort over courage - we’ll uncover how this lives in us, what historical forces are at play, and how we alchemize these forces to arrive at our Rooted Courage.
This container is trauma-informed, compassion-based and Ancestrally-rooted. This is an embodied, personal and collective inquiry, held by song, rhythm, movement, and intention to free bound up energy that allow for new possibilities of personal truth and collective power.
This story is ultimately about transforming our relationship to power. Being honest about the ways we consciously or unconsciously out-source it, to carving pathways of in-sourcing it from our self-integrity as ‘Teachable, Abiding, Dignified, and Accountable” in what feel like confrontations to our security, comfort, and self-concept..
Grappling with white womanhood in these times
Sisters, I’m calling us in to grapple together. We hear the call of our Black and Brown family members to arrive ‘ten toes down’ in our accountability and courage now. We inhabit a dizzying position of having white privilege while also feeling oppressed in patriarchy. We ache to liberate and transform systemic distress within and around us. We want to be part of the healing not the harm!
In this container, we will shine a light with some precision on behaviors that our family in the Global Majority are pointing to in us, such as ‘weaponizing our tears’, fragility, being unaccountable, choosing comfort and convenience over our courage, conflict avoidant. Behaviors that they are ‘ancestrally exhausted’ at holding space for and being harmed by, while we plead innocent.
Women with Black and Brown skin journeys frequently report coming into our ‘safe spaces’ for healing in sisterhood, and then leaving hurt and betrayed, because of various microaggressions or impacts from oblivious white women. The ‘first arrow’ is that the harm occurred. The ‘second arrow’ is that then they do not feel safe to tell the truth and name it. Often times, naming it results in them being blamed or disregarded, and in some cases ostracized in community groups or losing their jobs, written off as the ‘angry Black Woman’. Women of Color report that white women don’t know how to be accountable, as if we just don’t have that setting in our nervous system. So they quietly walk away and tend to their emotional pain in isolation, and we are left wondering why our spaces aren’t ‘diverse’. These dynamics can play out in interpersonal spaces with friends and community groups, in workplaces, and in the judiciary system.
If we care about our sisterhood, we have to listen to what our sisters our saying to us. It is upon us to disrupt this VERY COMMON experience.
A first step is genuine curiosity: What is at play here? Why is this so common? What is playing out through us that is causing harm, while we think we are doing our best to be helpful good people?
This is OUR work.
AND! This is not about helping or saving our Sisters of Color!
This is about our Ancestral Herstories. Our relationship to power. Our bodies. Our integrity. Our devotional offering to Collective Liberation and Indomitable Sisterhood.
Esther Armah’s work in Emotional Justice identifies different pathways for various identity groups to contribute to true global justice, beginning with our behavior in interpersonal relationships, where systemic oppression is intimately perpetuated. For cis, femme white women she outlines a path of “intimate reckoning” with ‘emotional patriarchy” that happens in the relationships in our home and community life. She invites us to create ‘Circles of Willingness’ to look closely at the “3 C’s: Courage, Comfort, and Convenience”.
Bayo Akomolafe changes the language from ‘White Supremacy’ to "‘White Stability’.
‘I think the stability afforded us by whiteness – the social arrangement that stole not just Black bodies, but white bodies, brown bodies, mottled and fungal bodies – is hollowing out. White stability is flailing. Something is pulling the seams apart.…Here’s my invitation then to you bearers of the burdens of these thresholds: shush.
Seek out the cracks, for god is the crack….Our work must be to make sanctuary together – not for us to be safe, but for the crack to thrive, to grow, to become resilient. Because the crack – the generatively incapacitating place of our deepest failures… is the path to the exquisite.”
(CIIS graduation speech)
In this space, we will sit in ‘Collective Inquiry’ at this place where the seams are coming apart, to be honest about that, accepting how vulnerable this is, and letting this crack be approached with wonder. We’re not pressing for fix-it solutions. This process is linear and non-linear, it is analyzed, animated and danced.
Trauma-Informed, Compassion-Based,
Through a trauma-informed lens, we will investigate the four main conditioned responses that effectively allow us to avoid accountability. They arise from states of distress. We engage them in the form of archetypes:
- The Protector – defensiveness (fight)
- The Victim – weaponized tears (collapse)
- The Pleaser – Fixing (fawn)
- The Vacator – Confusion (flee)
We have compassionate understanding for the roots of these habituated responses. We have respect for their protection of us and our foremothers allowing us to survive chronically traumatizing, dehumanizing conditions.
and,
We have determination to reach for our fuller range of beingness, and greater capacity to feel in empowered choice in the face of adversity.
Re-Sourcing, Retrieving and Re-Stitching our Power
This is about our relationship to power. Each of the archetypes embodies a cheap, habituated power. ‘Cheap’ because they take from or are reliant upon ‘out-sourced power’. They are born out of our distress, not our agency. We express them by default, not through initiation. Each one represents only a distorted, fragment of authentic power. Their counterparts were tossed into the Underworld, so to speak. We don’t know how many generations ago.
We use this language while also bowing to the wisdom of the nervous system. So, we are not rejecting these survival instincts, instead, we are breathing space into their grip, and stitching them with these ‘counterparts’ to claim our Rooted, Earned Power.
We stitch together:
- Our Protector with being Teachable
- Our Victim with being Accountable
- Our Pleaser with Vertical Dignity
- Our Vacator with Abiding Presence
Like a tall tree, we stand, and an inner spring flows. The power we claim comes from our authentic, embodied capacity to be Teachable, Accountable, Dignified and Abiding while navigating confrontations to our security, our comfort and self-concept. We can be a mess and still be in our integrity. Over time we start to build trust in ourselves. This makes way for us to be more trustworthy in all of our relationships. This rooted power is ‘earned’ through our consistent efforts over time and is felt as a steadiness in our being.
Through this cultivation, we effectively Re-Source our power from our own Inner Spring, rather than dependency on an outside source. We rely less on others having to be and do certain things for us to feel okay, and we find sanctuary and strength from a well-tended temple within. Rather than, ‘tone-policing’ others when they express their distress to us, we can receive them as they are with Abiding Presence. We can see their expression as an investment in our relationship, a gift actually, not a threat to our selfhood. When I can rest secure that ‘I got me’, when I am that level of sanctuary for myself, then I can be that for others, just as they are.
Arts-Based
Each session will begin with a lesson and discussion on key concepts, and then we will engage the material through body-based awareness practices and movement games. Through gesturality, song, rhythm, and circle, we will draw out and animate what is within us and dance it into new possibility. Embodied circle practice offers relational teachings through gestural exchange, through expressing our individuality, while tending to the whole. It can help us liberate bound-up energy and re-arrange our relationship to our stories, as an alternative approach to verbal processing. And it can be joyful! Liberation work can and must include joy!
I am drawing on over a decade of engagement in community music traditions, including women’s healing and threshold-tending circles, and also from my ancestral roots in the community music traditions of Southern Italy and Sicily known as the Tarantellas. I will be weaving rhythm, movement, and song practices from both traditions together in this space.
Inquiry-Based
This is not a traditional Teacher - Student learning space. I do not have ‘learning outcomes’ that I am driving us toward. This is a Collective Inquiry process. I am bringing forth the questions, concerns, living tensions that I want to turn to face with you, alongside you. I am bringing tools and practices for us to do a deep dive with these concerns in our hearts-minds-bodies - as individuals and as a circle mirroring back to one another. After we engage the practices, we will reflect and harvest the living threads that emerge in our circle. The answers we seek are emergent and collectively arrived at. I want our process to be honest, and what’s honest is we’ve never been here before on the planet, and our work is to uncover transformative solutions!!
And my very specific topic of inquiry/concern that I am bringing to us: I have heard too many of our Sisters of Color (SOC) say ‘White women are not accountable and their weaponized tears are killing us!’ And, ‘We don’t need you to save us, we need you to save you!’
I believe Mother Earth is calling us, and I believe we need our whole sisterhood to come together. Therefore, I’m calling us in to get curious together about what our SOC are pointing to in us that needs more awareness. Trust and safety are issues at hand.
Community-Based
“Ci balli sulu nu te puei curare.” (“If you dance alone, you cannot heal yourself.”)
- adage from Salento, IT
This work of collective liberation is necessarily community-based.
Just as much as we are learning concepts and tools for our personal growth, we are also practicing how to be in community. We are learning how to take care of ourselves while tending collective space, we are learning how to stay differentiated while linking and relating with others. Ancestral community dances embody this timeless wisdom. We root in our individual expression, while in a dance with another, while we all hold ‘La Ronda’ (The Circle). The dances are embodied teachings in relationality - with self, other, and the community, synchronously.
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White Caucus Space
Some of our liberation work is in mixed spaces, and some of it is in caucused groups. As white folks, we cannot underestimate the momentum of our unconscious will to stay comfortable, and preserve business as usual to all of our detriment. We can’t expect or rely on our Black and Brown family members to labor to educate and hold us accountable. It’s not their job. They don’t owe us anything. Each individual can decide for themselves.
It’s upon us to build spaces of learning and holding each other with ‘uprightness’, calling forth our fuller range, and our Rooted Courage. And at the same time, white-caucused spaces need accountability from Friends of Color to be sure we are not spiraling and re-enforcing old systems with one another.
Over the long haul, to do this liberation work, we need steady supportive, accountable relationships. A community that names, witnesses, holds, and alchemizes is a true gift, and full of creative generativity! I hope in this container you can meet and deepen relationships with like-minded folks on the ‘white skin journey’ that you can continue to be in supportive accountable relationships with.
Resmaa Menakem, Cultural Somatics, has put out a call for white folks to cultivate a ‘living, embodied, generative, anti-racist culture.’
This offering is one of my efforts to answer his call.
Disclaimer: This is Education not Therapy
This is Arts-Based, Anti-Oppression Education. This is not therapeutic process work. I am an educator and community artist, not a therapist. I am offering analysis, frameworks, tools and movement-based practices rooted in my scholarship and practice, and my lived experience. While some of the discussions and practices offered here may support you in personal insight and capacity-building, we are not intending to fix or heal any long-term patterns you may struggle with in your family and community relationships. I encourage you to have spaces of trusted support to engage what may be stirred in this process, and for the long-term work of transformative change.
Some of what I offer here will resonate for you and some of it won’t. I invite you to keep and apply what works for you, and compost the rest.
So many Ancestors at our backs inviting us to pick up our Authentic, Rooted Power
This work is a living prayer for each of our lineage’s back, back, back and forwards. The work we do to claim and embody our Rooted Power - sourced from within and from supportive sisterhood- is a reclamation that heals generations of systemic desecration of our very beingness. We are the living prayer to our Ancestors’ unrest. Our Ancestors gave us many unhealed storylines and they also gave of pathways of alchemy and retrieval. We have the power to ‘turn to face’ long-held suffering and spells, to alchemize them, and to dream awake new futures of flourishing together. We have everything we need! In circle we sing, drum and weave remembrance of ancient knowing that lies within the libraries of our own blood and bones. We have reservoirs of wisdom within us.
Wherever there is a circle, there is a door. We can open doors of our own liberation in service to Life, and in service to what wants to be born anew in these times. We are so held and supported in so many ways by generations of Magical Women, Abolitionist Women, Warrior Women, Drumming, Dancing Medicine Women. We got this!
