the receipts of all eight of the Black customers who walked past—and none of the non-Black ones.
Understandably, my wife was not happy about this, and she told the store manager about it. The manager, who was white, was aghast. He immediately called over the employee—who was also white—and confronted her. She was surprised, apologetic, and a bit mortified. She insisted she was not deliberately targeting Black customers, but only checking people randomly. My wife told me, “She seemed completely sincere. I believe that’s what she genuinely thought she was doing.” The employee was not targeting Black customers deliberately; she was targeting them unconsciously and reflexively. But the pain that such actions create for Black Americans is felt quite consciously.
Relatively few white Americans consciously recognize, let alone embrace, this subtle variety of white-body supremacy. In fact, there is often no way to measure or recognize it. Imagine a real Lakisha Washington or Emily Walsh. She would have no way of knowing why any particular employer did not respond positively to her résumé. Nor would my wife have noticed anything odd about the Wal-Mart employee’s actions if she hadn’t stopped to relax and have a cold drink.
For most Americans, including most of us with dark skin, white-body supremacy has become part of our bodies. How could it not? It’s the equivalent of a toxic chemical we ingest on a daily basis. Eventually, it changes our brains and the chemistry of our bodies.
Which is why, in looking at white-body supremacy, we need to begin not with guilt or blame, but with our bodies.
1 DiAngelo describes herself this way: “My area of research is in Whiteness Studies . . . I have been a consultant and trainer for over twenty years on issues of racial and social justice . . . I grew up poor and white.”
2 As a cross-check, I had my research assistant search the names Emily Walsh and Lakisha Washington on Facebook. He found hundreds of Emily Walshes, of which zero were Black. All but two were white, and one was male. He also found many dozens of Lakisha Washingtons, all but one of whom were Black. I’d like to see a follow-up study using African names (e.g., Kojo Ofusu) instead of African American ones, to learn whether employers respond in the same way to Black job applicants who do not appear to be from America.
“No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.”
TONI MORRISON
“History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”
JAMES BALDWIN
“There is deep wisdom within our very flesh, if we can only come to our senses and feel it.”
ELIZABETH A. BEHNKE
“People don’t realize what’s really going on in this country. There are a lot of things that are going on that are unjust. People aren’t being held accountable . . . This country stands for freedom, liberty, and justice for all. And it’s not happening for all right now.”
COLIN KAEPERNICK
When I was a boy I used to watch television with my grandmother. I would sit in the middle of the sofa and she would stretch out over two seats, resting her legs in my lap. She often felt pain in her hands, and she’d ask me to rub them in mine. When I did, her fingers would relax, and she’d smile. Sometimes she’d start to hum melodically, and her voice would make a vibration that reminded me of a cat’s purr.
She wasn’t a large woman, but her hands were surprisingly stout, with broad fingers and thick pads below each thumb. One day I asked her, “Grandma, why are your hands like that? They ain’t the same as mine.”
My grandmother turned from the television and looked at me. “Boy,” she said slowly. “That’s from picking cotton. They been that way since long before I was your age. I started working in the fields sharecroppin’ when I was four.”
I didn’t understand. I’d helped plant things in the garden a few times, but my own hands were bony and my fingers were narrow. I held up my hands next to hers and stared at the difference.
“Umm hmm,” she said. “The cotton plant has pointed burrs in it. When you reach your hand in, the burrs rip it up. When I first started picking, my hands were all torn and bloody. When I got older, they got thicker and thicker, until I could reach in and pull out the cotton without them bleeding.”
My grandmother died last year. Sometimes I can still feel her warm, thick hands in mine.
For the past three decades, we’ve earnestly tried to address white-body supremacy in America with reason, principles, and ideas—using dialogue, forums, discussions, education, and mental training. But the widespread destruction of Black bodies continues. And some of the ugliest destruction originates with our police. Why is there such a chasm between our well-intentioned attempts to heal and the ever-growing number of dark-skinned bodies who are killed or injured, sometimes by police officers?
It’s not that we’ve been lazy or insincere. But we’ve focused our efforts in the wrong direction. We’ve tried to teach our brains to think better about race. But white-body supremacy doesn’t live in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies.
Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous. The body is where we fear, hope, and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee, or freeze. If we are to upend the status quo of white-body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies.
New advances in psychobiology reveal that our deepest emotions—love, fear, anger, dread, grief, sorrow, disgust, and hope—involve the activation of our bodily structures. These structures—a complex system of nerves—connect the brainstem, pharynx, heart, lungs, stomach, gut, and spine. Neuroscientists call this system the wandering nerve or our vagus nerve; a more apt name might be our soul nerve. The soul nerve is connected directly to a part of our brain that doesn’t use cognition or reasoning as its primary tool for navigating the world. Our soul nerve also helps mediate between our bodies’ activating energy and resting energy.
This part of our brain is similar to the brains of lizards, birds, and lower mammals. Our lizard brain only understands survival and protection. At any given moment,
