White Shame Is Killing Us All

Project 2045 with Dr. Ryan Seidlitz

One of the lessons that our culture quietly teaches white people from childhood is that we need to be separate from each other. Not every culture is raised with the model of individualism that often results in an us versus them mentality. The lie of separateness creates an underlying shame that so many of us are unaware of. It is a recipe for cultural, communal, and racial disaster. I find it fascinating that no one is born with shame, but each of us carry it within us on a profound level.

This quite cultural teaching shows up in our inner dialogue and storylines we have of ourselves, the world, and the people in it. It impacts how we perceive race and the way we approach discussions about it.

“Judgment is a tool of the inner critic,” writes Caverly Morgan in her brilliant book, The Heart of Who We Are: Realizing Freedom Together and states, “In other words, the collective inner critic acts like a glue for our collective conditioning.” Morgan writes, “For many white people, shame pervades most, if not all, aspects of learning about race and the history of oppression. I am clear there can be no learning, and therefore no transformation, in a group that has been seasoned with guilt and shame. And that these two ingredients are by-products of judgment.

Judgment poisons the heart.

The pain of shame prevents clear seeing.

Lack of clear seeing prevents change.”

Shame in many forms often leads to hiding and keeps one unconscious from its impacts.

Shame and guilt are different. Morgan differentiates, “When one feels guilty, there is judgment that something you’ve done is wrong. When you feel shame, you believe that your whole self is wrong… While the experience of shame may be followed by growth, the growth doesn’t happen inside the shame.” It is this inability to grow that will keep us from becoming who we need to be in a world of increasing diversity.

One of the results of a creative, mindful, mature, examined, and aware whiteness is a person that is compassionate and practices lament. There is power in lament, and part of the problem we have with lament is that it is deeply felt. It is not only in our minds, but it must also be an emotion to be experienced and felt within the body. Much like shame, it cannot be avoided and must be faced. As Soong-Chan Rah writes in Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times, “there is power in bringing untold stories to light.” Real, raw, and authentic lament Rah states, “the story of suffering is often swept under the rug in order not to create discomfort or bad feelings. Lament is denied because the dead body in front of us is being denied.” Lament is expressing deep sorrow.

We would be wise to lament what is harming white people right now in the rising levels of overt racism becoming normal, calls for our nation to become more homogenous, young white men finding identity in grievances, rising racial violence being instigated by white people, the obvious racial makeup of the Epstein list, etc. Identifying this despite not being socialized with the language to deal with it we can still learn to develop our cultural literacy. We need to admit that we need better models of whiteness and seek mentors and elders.

This type of lament is an invitation that can coexist with tenderness and strength. Lament does not stop with only expressing emotion but leads to change and action risking in conversation and relationships with one another, like mentoring younger people, being intentional about building emotionally safe and nurturing friendships, supporting mental health initiatives, learning from differences, experiments in reparations, etc.

Francis Weller writes in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, “Grief is a powerful solvent, capable of softening the hardest of places in our hearts. When we can truly weep for ourselves and those places of shame, we have invited the first soothing waters of healing to wash through our souls. Grieving, by its very nature, confirms worth.” Could this be the work of white people to address our shame? All white people carry a collective guilt that I believe is appropriate and can be deeply helpful and meaningful; a source of change. If white people look deep enough, there may be wisdom in the sorrow and in our guilt deep in our soul.

White shame on the other hand, needs to be grieved and named, the rupture of the soul and closing of the heart must be lamented to confirm worth because our whole self is not wrong. White people have and continue to do wrong and with it we face and address the appropriate guilt with confession, humility, curiosity, and behavioral change. May we grieve our shame so that the hardest places in our hearts can be softened and opened so we dance with compassion for all people and with all of humanity instead of the conditioned patterns and socialization of separateness.