Racism is real, and our position to it differs based on our lived experience. This position informs the way in which the world relates to us, the opportunities available to us, and the extent to which we encounter and must navigate barriers – or blockades – on our path to health, happiness, peace, or justice.

If you are in America, and you are white, there are ways in which you have benefitted from your position in overt and covert ways – ways that may be uncomfortable to recognize and perhaps even outside of your conscious awareness. This reality may be difficult to navigate, particularly as the country undergoes a critical reckoning on the impact of race and individual contributions to racism. (Raises hand: this is ongoing work for me, it’s rarely easy.) Experiences of pain and discomfort in this case, like all others, are opportunities for reflection, growth, and eventually, action. These experiences are also an opportunity for retreat - an action taken by far too many for far too long.

While race is just one in a long list of salient identities that informs the trajectory of our life, such as our economic social status, the place of our birth, our sex assigned at birth, sexual identity, gender identity, or apparent or non-apparent disability, if you are in America, and you are Black, Brown, and/or belong to other oppressed racial or ethnic groups, your identity has likely been contrasted against an outsized and unexamined influence of whiteness. There is pain here, too, but a prolonged pain compounded by systemic and interpersonal invalidation dating back to the very formation of this country.

There is no quick fix for what is entrenched, however contact with our position to racism must first be acknowledged. This is an entry to our work, but not the start; lasting examination of our position to racism begins with a willingness.