Social Justice Chronicles

When Dr Moore and I (Dr Rita) came together to talk about our reflections on 20-30 years of justice work, we agreed on one fundamental point. At the start, we underestimated the cost of what justice work would do to our bodies, our families, our pockets, and our careers.

One of the questions I am asked most often is, “Michelle, why do you do this work?” People ask it with genuine curiosity. Sometimes they wonder what could motivate a white woman to spend nearly two decades facilitating conversations about race and writing a book called, "Liabilities of Whiteness."

A number of years ago, while I was writing my book, Our Search for Belonging: How Our Need to Connect Is Tearing Us Apart, I started doing something uncomfortable: I began talking with people who had voted for Donald Trump.

When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, it attacked the machinery of disenfranchisement directly. The law prohibited literacy tests and poll taxes, while authorizing the federal government to intervene where Black voters had long been blocked from registering to vote and casting ballots.

Us simple folks have a deep-gut feeling that the lives of the rich and famous are not just out of reach, but that they have something, something profound and inaccessible that’s completely different from us. It’s a weird feeling that we could never truly mix with that world even if our skin color, wardrobe, and way of speaking didn’t set us apart.

What does a frequency of justice mean especially in relation to white supremacy and racial justice? When I was sitting in a ballroom of 1,900 people from around the world, I realized the significance of being with a different frequency related to our work in addressing white supremacy. A frequency that we, as individuals and a collective, can decide to engage with or not, as it travels through our emotional and physical bodies.

I’ve been sitting on how to write this article for days. I’m watching what’s happening in Minneapolis with horror, as most of us, wanting to do my best to channel my power, and my rage, and not become hopeless and stunned. For the system feeds off shock and hopelessness. As long as we live from fear, state violence wins; racism wins. As a scholar of history and social patterns …