What can I do? What can any of us DO to make white supremacy go away?
My honest reply leaves many people unhappy. My answer is "very little that you will find satisfying."
Systemic racism--the deliberate and culture-wide implementation of white supremacy--won't go away because you're aware of it. Now that you're aware of it, it will haunt you. It will make you question the basic assumption of your goodness, your worth, your virtue. It will make you ask whether you deserve the things you have and the things you enjoy--a home, cars, a safe neighborhood, healthcare, insurance. Awareness of the ways that racism works leaves white people to question whether the assumed foundations of our social contract--functioning democracy, access to economic opportunity, equal protection under the law--were not ONLY AND EVER intended for white people to enjoy.
Honest reflection about those questions can make white people feel like crap.
A lot of folks don't want to feel like crap. We may feel like crap already, for different reasons (the world can beat us up even before we think about race). It's hard to walk around in a world--an often beautiful world, a world that may have nurtured you and blessed you, a world that may often love and enjoy--and know that it's not fair. A lot of white folks will not want to hold this cognitive dissonance. They will abandon their anti-racist lens, or, more likely--as I have often done, look for superficial ways to make ourselves feel better about this world and our place in it.
For more than 20 years, I have been living with the knowledge of my white privilege. It it not, on the whole, a way of thinking about the world that makes a white person feel good. But I have not abandoned this frame, because, while it does not feel good, it does feel "true." On a daily basis, I choose the harder truth of admitting racial injustice, even when that truth upsets my unconscious psychological need to self-justify, dismiss racism, or diminish its effects or my complicity with it.
Because I choose to acknowledge white supremacy, guilt is a regular part of my psychological and spiritual frame of mind. As a Christian, I believe that all guilt, confessed and repented for, is forgiven. I confess my white supremacy often in prayer. I have tried, in large and small ways, to work to nurture an anti-racist home, church, and community. I am committed, financially and through my volunteer work, to addressing housing and wealth inequality. And yes, I have made black friends. All of this helps the guilt. It' is "doing something." Some of it helps others and mitigates the effects of or even undermines the systems that buffer white supremacy. It all matters, I think. But the work doesn't make me "feel good." It doesn't make white supremacy go away.
That is true, in part, because I'm aware that I continue to participate in a white supremacist culture. I enjoy a home in a safe neighborhood with great public schools in a gentrifying community. I continue to invest prudently for retirement and live mostly insulated from Black people who have suffered grievously from racial injustice. I participate in or consent to--rather than challenge--structural racism in many significant parts of my life. The guilt doesn't go away because the way structural racism works is that it makes it easier and more profitable for white people to continue to choose the patterns of white supremacy than to interrupt them. The definition of structural sin is when there are built-in incentives for you to choose a way of life that benefits you even as that choice harms your neighbor.
I say this not to discourage anyone from choosing an antiracist path, but simply to caution that there are not readily-satisfying things we can do to end white supremacy. Ending white supremacy is one of the most important moral and spiritual commitments a person can make. But as I have come to understand that project, it is a fundamental re-weaving of our social fabric--patterns of life, institutional functions, economic values, theological assumptions. We will have turned a real corner when it's no longer profitable for a person to buy a home in a wealthy white neighborhood--either such neighborhoods will be extinct, or economic incentives will have changed the balance of the equation. It's going to take 50 years or more. Any many of those years, for white folks, will require you to live in a place of deep discomfort--tending to your grief and your guilt, while maintaining courageous hope that the sin of white supremacy will die--that you will help it die within you and around you--and that a more grace-filled racial consciousness will replace it.
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