3

Intimate Reckoning

Definition and Action to Be Taken

For white women and men to engage, challenge, and change their emotional relationship to power and race by doing the emotional labor of unlearning the language of whiteness. That means ending the practice of emotional patriarchy. This unlearning is both a process and a practice for white women and men that can make them game changers and change agents within communities of white people. It helps create a world where all people’s humanity is centered.

Breakdown

Intimate reckoning is the specific emotional labor of white women and white men. It is an emotional labor they have not done before, and it is a particularly gendered labor. This work is about white men’s emotional relationship to power and race and white women’s role in sustaining that relationship, which profits and punishes them. White women are the designated worriers about the state of white masculinity. Through their own behaviors and engagement with race, they play a pivotal role in sustaining white men’s emotional relationship to power and race. Dismantling the language of whiteness requires different work from different people. This work, white women’s and white men’s work, is about intimacy.

Intimacy as Institution

Intimacy is the place—precious, crucial, and powerful—where the whiteness narrative is nurtured. It is the single most supportive, unchallenged relationship when it comes to sustaining the language of whiteness in the bodies and breath of white men by white women. The whiteness narrative is part of how we develop a sense of ourselves and our place. Change it, and we change worlds. Challenge it, and we choose justice. Leave it as it is, and we are key change agents in protecting murderers of justice. Intimacy is where the language of whiteness is most fluent. Our emotional relationship to power manifests because of this fluency in whiteness via intimacy, and that is why it is crucial that this Emotional Justice love language is an “intimate reckoning.”

There are two types of intimacy: private and public. Private intimacy is about relationships and community—family, church, extended family. Public intimacy is about the professional and the political: professional intimacy as in our places of work and education; political intimacy as in our places of governance, and our vote. It is through intimacy that emotional patriarchy flourishes and the language of whiteness is sustained. And it is here that substantive emotional labor takes place to uphold whiteness. That substantive emotional labor manifests in entrenched inequity.

Intimacy is an institution and system within Emotional Justice. It is built and maintained by an emotional ecosystem that protects and provides for the language of whiteness and white masculinity. White women protect the narrative and provide the dedicated, consistent, unwavering emotional labor to sustain it.

So it is through intimacy that unlearning the language of whiteness—ending emotional patriarchy—is pivotal, because it is through intimacy that the language of whiteness is most powerfully protected. Because of this specific power, an intimate reckoning is crucial for any real racial healing to occur and to be sustained. That’s because intimacy is not a one and done. It is a way of being with each other; it is an ongoing relationship that emerges and evolves; it has strength because it has stakes; it is where our sense of self is affirmed, sustained, and upheld. These aspects of intimacy demand that the language of whiteness, which manifests as emotional patriarchy, must be replaced with intimate reckoning. It is in this space that emotional work is specifically required.

Whiteness: The Narrative

But first . . . white people will need to breathe. Because when white people hear the phrase the language of whiteness and about the need to unlearn it, they immediately get defensive, uncomfortable, and pissed. It feels like an attack. The defense mechanisms kick in, and the explaining, excusing, and negating go into full effect. That’s because white people conflate “white people” with “the language of whiteness.”

They are not the same thing.

The language of whiteness is a narrative. It’s a narrative we are all taught, about how the world came to be, and our place in it as white, Black, Brown people—women, men, children. It is a story of who you are to whiteness, and what whiteness is to you.

Languages are made up of words and phrases; we learn how to pronounce them, how they go together in order for us to communicate. Did you learn French at school?

Teacher: Class, repeat after me: Bonjour.

Class: Bonjour.

Teacher: Good job! That means “Good day” in French.

The language of whiteness ain’t French. It’s not made up of words that we translate and that mean the same thing to any French-speaking person. No. It is spoken through how we see ourselves as global Black, Brown, Indigenous, and white people, and its meanings are fractured through the lens of how we see one another and how we are seen. The language of whiteness is about how we live and engage. It is the story of who we have been told we are, who we can and cannot be. It is a story that is a lethal, deadly fiction—treated as fact.

You can choose not to learn French. You can’t choose not to learn the language of whiteness. The language of whiteness is not simply taught; it is enforced. It was birthed in sure, swift, brutal, and deadly historical systems: enslavement, colonialism, and apartheid. Each was violent. These systems were about separation and superiority; they produced narratives of struggle, salvation, survival, and surrender. They were about Black and white.

These systems have contemporary consequences that manifest in our world to this very day. They carry a lingering legacy of untreated trauma that manifests in each of us, in all of us. And we all live with and deal with that legacy and its manifestations.

Winners and Losers

This language of whiteness is about winning and winners, conquering and conquerors, saving and saviors. In White Fragility, white American author Robin DiAngelo writes about “navigating white people’s internalized assumption of racial superiority”—that assumption is born of these historical systems. They nurtured an addiction to false notions of white superiority and Black inferiority. Black people shape-shifted to navigate that system in order to survive. That shape-shifting continues into the present.

The language of whiteness rewrites worlds and recasts people in those worlds. It reduces Black and Brown people’s reality to a nonexistence—or more specifically, a noncivilized existence. Africa, Asia—they were not there in any civilized way until whiteness came, and said they were. What that teaches all of us is that our existence isn’t real until whiteness names it. That makes whiteness the center, only and always, with no space for anyone else.

The language of whiteness puts anybody who is not white—men first, then women and children—on the periphery, and the periphery is the world of Blackness. Society teaches us our place. There is the periphery and the center, and the center is the goal. Being there means peace, prosperity, power, and profit. The center is whiteness, all alone, offering no room for anyone else. What that centering does is create, maintain, and sustain a rejection of your value as Black or Brown. Because who wants to be, live, love on the periphery? That’s not where you thrive; it’s where you rot.

White Masculinity

This language functions to create a narrative about a white masculinity, one that is win or die, rule or ruin, conquer and destroy or be conquered and destroyed. This masculinity is the benchmark for all peoples. It translates into white men ruling, white men building, and Black men ruled, Black men breaking. It is about white men who save and Black men who struggle and need to be saved. It is about white men standing tallest, strongest, most superior and pure. I say men intentionally, because the language of whiteness creates a white masculinity that centers white men, who they are, what they need, how they feel, that they lead, and that the rest of us are led. The white men save. Everyone else is saved. And all women serve the saviors. And it is in connection to this that emotional patriarchy exists—and must be unlearned.

That “save the world” narrative means that white men develop an emotional relationship to power and race, whereby how they feel about the world is the world—that’s the cancer of emotional patriarchy—centering themselves to the exclusion of everyone else. That relationship is about dominion, subjugation, and exploitation. It is about how they see themselves in relation to the world. This narrative says that you, as a white man in relationship to others—all women, all Black and Brown folks—are their leader, not their brother; you are their teacher, never a student.

In other words, it is an almighty shit show—one with lethal consequences.

We’re all living with the consequences of that show that manifests within systems. The consequences are front and center as we embark on and engage the work of unlearning emotional patriarchy as part of racial repair and leading toward racial healing. Here’s the good news!

We Uphold Systems; We Can Dismantle Them

Systems are built by people, sustained by people, and dismantled by people. That is our work—the dismantling. That dismantling is where the racial reckoning, racial repair, and racial healing happen. We are the dismantlers we have been waiting for. That’s the good news.

We too often think of systems as outside us, as a place we travel to, work at, and then leave. But systems work through us; they show up in relationships, be they professional, educational, financial, political, or religious. This means that our emotional work can contribute to structural change. Thinking that systems are outside us makes us believe we are powerless to dismantle them, but systems are upheld by us, and because they are, we do have power to dismantle them. This is where individual action connects to institutional change, to this dismantling, and it is how our emotional work can contribute.

Professional Intimacy: How Does Emotional Patriarchy Manifest?

Lena Dunham shows how a woman upholds, through intimacy, this narrative of whiteness manifest in white masculinity. Dunham is an award-winning American woman writer, actress, and creator of the HBO show Girls, a series about a group of white women navigating their twenties.

Murray Miller was a white male writer on the show. Dunham describes him as a dear, supportive friend, who had affirmed her, her work, and the show. Aurora Perrineau was a Black actress on the show. She alleges that Murray Miller raped her when she was seventeen. The accusation became public in 2017, during the height of the #MeToo movement founded by Tarana Burke. Women from the world of entertainment were stepping out, coming forward, and courageously naming powerful white men in the entertainment and media industry who had abused, exploited, sexually assaulted, and raped them—and faced no consequences. Dunham was one of those women. She is a survivor of sexual assault by a powerful white man in the entertainment industry. She describes herself as a fierce feminist.

Dunham intimated that Aurora was a liar and released a public statement defending Miller on Twitter. She wrote, “I believe in a lot of things, but the first tenet of my politics is to hold up the people who have held me up, who have filled my world with love, and in this case, this accusation belongs to the 3% who make false accusations.”

Dunham was then subjected to fierce critique across social media for her defense of an alleged rapist—this white man in power. In response, Dunham went on to pen an apology in the Hollywood Reporter. She wrote, “It’s painful to realize that, while I thought I was self-aware, I had actually internalized the dominant white male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what. Something in me still feels compelled to do that job; to please, to tidy up, to shop-keep.”

What Dunham describes is how intimacy allows the language of whiteness to flourish. This is what it looks like to live it and manifest it. Lena is upholding that white masculinity narrative that requires white women to believe, bolster, and be there. Her words: “internalized the white male agenda.” Her work:

• To defend

• To please

• To tidy up

• To shop-keep

The person with whom she was doing that work is in her professional and personal world. She demonstrates how she rides for this language of whiteness in these two places that intersect, at the expense of a young Black woman who, like her, is a survivor, and who, like her, is navigating the particular power dynamic of a shared industry.

It’s about Your Relationships, Not Your Politics

Lena’s progressive politics of believing women and of feminism is no refuge for, or protection from, the emotional weight of the language of whiteness on how you navigate the world. It is a crucial reminder that your ideology is no match for your emotionality, and that doing the political work is not the same as doing the emotional work. That’s why learning an Emotional Justice love language invites us to privilege the emotional, not center the political. Learning an Emotional Justice love language is about doing emotional labor.

In Arlie Hochschild’s 1983 book, The Managed Heart, emotional labor is defined as managing your own emotions as required by certain professions. In the more recent 2018 Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward, white American author Gemma Hartley writes, “Emotional labor is rooted in our relationships in a way that seems unshakable.”

And yet shake up those relationships you must. Not shake up just your relationship with one white man but your role in upholding this white masculinity, as millions of white women must. This has always been your work to do, particularly as white women progressives who claim a commitment to justice and antiracism.

Looking into the eyes of the white men in your life and choosing intimate reckoning will, of course, be hard. Your relationships are places of comfort and care, of protection and provision, of upholding and being upheld. Learning this Emotional Justice love language will feel like loss—namely, the loss of a particular love for and by the white men in your life. What you gain, however, is humanity, an antiracist practice, and a more equitable world.

The real mistake is to believe that you access any of this without sacrifice or serious challenge. It will feel like trauma; it may not feel transformative at all. Not at first. “We are in each other’s lives. We are dependent on each other emotionally and economically. We are in intimate, emotional, familial, sexual connection with each other. Asking women to identify as our oppressors the men we love and need is an incredibly hard ask,” said Rebecca Traister, a New York Times best-selling white feminist author speaking about the relationship between white women and white men.

And yet ask we must. Ask we do.

An additional challenge white women face is one of incentive. So many women—especially white progressives—expect to be incentivized to show up and do their emotional work to build the world that their politics suggest they believe should exist. The issue of incentive is about white women not wanting to feel personally maligned or indicted about racism, and requiring Black people to reassure them accordingly, but that stops white women from doing their emotional work. It is manipulative, and cannot be allowed to stand.

You might think that if you believe in this world, then you fight for it, fight for what you believe. What too many are asking—and often demanding—is that Black people do the emotional labor of affirming, applauding, and appreciating out loud and in myriad ways white women’s efforts to make change, and offering their gratitude that white progressives are showing up at all. This is the legacy of a racial healing model that centers whiteness, white folks’ feelings, and white folks’ emotional connection to race. This is not racial healing. It is historical inequity manifest as the emotional masquerading as healing.

Proximity Is Your Power: Private Intimacy

Bryan Stevenson is the author of the award-winning Just Mercy and whose TED talk is “The Power of Proximity.” He says, “We need to position ourselves in the places where there is despair.” For white women, it is the white men they are in intimate relationship with who are the cause of so much despair, but who are rarely challenged by—or even seen by—white women as the “despair creators” and maintainers, especially those who are progressive.

Intimate reckoning means that you as white women need to recognize your proximity and realize that the despair causer is sipping his morning coffee sitting across from you at the kitchen table. It is your proximity to that masculinity that provides you with conditional protection—you preserve the narrative of masculinity and evade the consequences of harm you cause Black and Brown people. It also provides a certain power over Black and Brown peoples that can be abusive and has been historically lethal. It also punishes you because this narrative is about control—not just of Black and Brown bodies but of your bodies as white women too.

For so long—for too long—you’ve weighed the power and the punishment, and continued to choose the power no matter the cost and consequence. Your emotional relationship to that power and how it is wrapped in whiteness offers both a sense of self in connection to white men and authority in connection with Black people. Because this is where it manifests, it is where the scrutiny, the work, the change must happen. It is here that your private intimacy rules and reigns—and ruins.

Making That Change—Practicing Intimate Reckoning

What might unlearning emotional patriarchy and replacing it with intimate reckoning look like? Lena Dunham wrote, “My job now is to excavate that part of myself—the part compelled to please, tidy up, to shop-keep—and to create a new cavern inside of me.”

And this is what intimate reckoning is about: undoing white women’s emotional connection to whiteness and white masculinity, and undoing the profit and power they derive from that connection. What does that undoing look like?

Stop defending

Stop pleasing

Stop tidying up

Stop shop-keeping

Those are the key practices in unlearning this narrative of whiteness and beginning to practice intimate reckoning. These practices are the as yet undone emotional labor for white women with white men.

Redefine Emotional Labor

Gemma Hartley defines emotional labor as a “time consuming, mentally challenging, practiced skill that manifests as caring, problem solving, and emotion regulation—often all at the same time. We do it at home, at work and out in the world.” Those who do it “never get a break from their role of catering to the needs of those around them.”

Defining and doing emotional labor differently is what intimate reckoning requires, and what Emotional Justice and racial repair demand, and do. This is what that looks like in practice:

• Engage time to develop the unpracticed skill of letting go of tidying up, defending, and shop-keeping to affirm and please toxic white masculinity.

• Share that practice with your white sisters.

• Emotionally challenge yourselves and them.

• Step in, step up, speak out when defending, tidying up, and shop-keeping the language of whiteness manifest as white masculinity.

The Challenge

• That you will stumble and fall down

• That you will grieve

• That you will struggle

• That it will be hard (at first)

The Result

• Engaging in life-changing effort

• Changing your intimate personal and professional worlds

• Creating a well-being practice that centers humanity, not toxic white masculinity

• Practicing Emotional Justice accountability

• Contributing to creating a more equitable world

To learn this Emotional Justice love language and practice intimate reckoning, you’ll need tools. The primary tool is a circle of willingness. This is a private space for a group of white women to share, vent, exchange, get inspired, and gather fuel to return to doing intimate reckoning. Return you must. This is long-game work.

White Men: A Challenge, a Change, and a Chance

Here’s what white women face: Why would white men unlearn the language of whiteness? It privileges them. It profits them. Here’s what white women must confront: white men wouldn’t do this unlearning without challenge or incentive. Here’s the simple truth, and what white women must realize: you need to own and exercise your emotional power. White men cannot continue to dominate unless white women continue to join them in speaking the language of whiteness. They need your compliance to maintain their dominance.

In white men’s emotional relationship to power and race, they are “the boss.” The boss is always to be given the benefit of the doubt, always to be applauded and affirmed. “Boss” is way more than a title; it is how you see yourself in a world built by a narrative that has taught you that this is your sole position. Always missionary, only—and forever—on top. Who would white men become if they were not “the boss”? Their humanity lies in authority, in being the boss. For progressives particularly, not brutal authority, not violent dominance. No. Nice authority and nice dominance.

Let’s be clear. This is not about a political understanding of power sharing. Lots of white men—especially progressives—get that, want that, articulate and ideologically believe that. Power sharing, which is what our humanity requires, is not about political positions with white men. So, any political or ideological argument—however well constructed, data informed, historically sound, or morally righteous and rigorous—will have little sway. That is because the language of whiteness shapes an emotional relationship to power and race. And when it comes to that emotional relationship, it is not about politics—it’s about essence. It is who you are, your manhood, your idea of yourself, how you see yourself in the world and how you are seen. Emotionality is not dismantled with ideology.

Toxic Masculinity

Gemma Hartley writes that doing emotional labor would allow men to “lean into their humanity in new ways. They can step into roles that break free from toxic masculinity, live in a place of deep connection, and feel truly unafraid as they help us fight for a more equal world.”

Now, to be clear, there may be elements of toxic white masculinity that many men would like to shed: the parts that ridicule displays of emotion, that treat vulnerability as weakness, that shame and punish boys and men when those emotions show up. Each of these are burdens that stifle humanity and murder much-needed empathy. The truth, though—and it is not one we have been willing to wrestle with—is that shedding that toxic masculinity doesn’t necessarily include relinquishing their emotional relationship to power and race, which is about being dominant, superior, and the single authority. I mean, if you’re asking white men to tweak a li’l, that’s one thing. We have a multimillion-dollar industry of tweaking; it’s called “diversity.” But if you’re asking them to transform—which is what racial repair and healing require—that’s world changing, for all of us. For white men, that is soul changing.

Too many white men are willing to make change as long as that change doesn’t change them. The language of whiteness teaches and enshrines that they—white men—are by default the solution, and therefore never the problem, never the issue. So they’re not the ones who need changing.

Except, they are.

Emotional Patriarchy: White Men’s Emotional Relationship to Power and Race

White men’s emotional relationship to power is what entrenches and sustains inequity. That’s because white men hold so many positions in leadership and because white women fail to challenge that relationship. White men hold hiring and firing power—the financial purse strings—and they wield that power when threatened. Power allows the consequences of feeling challenged to manifest in the professional, institutional, political, criminal, and personal worlds. White men, through this white masculinity, can play emotional power politics if their position feels threatened. That’s what makes emotional patriarchy lethal—it’s a weaponizing of the emotional using the power a person wields.

To create a more equal world, to do effective racial repair work, requires white men to change their emotional relationship to power and race. Fighting for a more equal world will feel to them like losing their leadership, which feels like losing their essence, losing themselves. Lost white men—without position or power—that’s how they will feel. And that will feel like threat. It will feel as though war has been declared on their person. As though something has been taken. It will feel personal and will be taken personally. So they will fight back. Hard.

They already have.

The 2016 election, and then the 2020 election that brought an end to the forty-fifth US presidency, is a specific example. That presidency was upheld by millions of white people, and specifically white women—all protecting the language of whiteness. And as Lena Dunham reminds us, it is the emotional connection to that language that is especially powerful. This means there is no place for progressive white women to point and kiki at those who voted for the forty-fifth president.

The—predominantly—white men who scaled the US Capitol walls on January 6, 2021, in scenes of violence, lawlessness, and the whitest of white rage, were first dismissed as “knuckleheads” by Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the George Washington University program on extremism. “Knuckleheads”—a word you might use to chastise a fourteen-year-old boy who is misbehaving. Research by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats from the University of Chicago revealed that they were not. They were “regular white men”—lawyers, architects, doctors, business owners.

Adult white men, middle-aged, middle class, employers, business owners with families, stormed the site of America’s political center—and were dismissed as knuckleheads. The language of whiteness infantilizes white men, and in so doing diminishes the harm they’ve caused, and excuses them from the tables of accountability. We teach children that there are consequences for hurtful, harming actions. White masculinity is taught—and then manifests—in white men who teach and expect that there are incessant rewards for their actions, and zero penalties. That is powerfully laid out in Ijeoma Oluo’s important work Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America.

Regular white men. Regular dudes. Confronted by the narrative of not being winners, but of having lost, of being the losers. The implication of that loss on who they are as white men ignited fear that manifested as fury, in scenes that horrified and traumatized.

This issue of loss, threat to identity, and repercussions also manifests in the critical race theory furor all across America. Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic theory that applies to the world of law, and is a call to put that world in the context of race and gender. It has become the lightning rod that has created what’s being described as culture wars, with calls for book bans that drag us all back to scenes from a 1930s black-and-white movie.

I have seen TV segments where critics of CRT are challenged about their objection to it. My friend Marc Lamont Hill, host on the Black News Channel (BNC), has eviscerated guests who are opponents of CRT revealing that they basically have no idea what it is. What strikes me in all these interviews is that the guests are not making arguments about CRT. They’re revealing how CRT threatens their identity, the narrative of whiteness that makes them world savers, builders, and conquerors. Context cripples this delusion. And white men weaponize their emotions and mechanize institutions of power in support of their feeling threatened—this is emotional patriarchy on fleek.

I do not suggest that the weakness of their arguments should not be called out; that is a crucial part of demonstrating that their objections to CRT are about something else. I do think that their poorly formed arguments and their objections to CRT suggest that this is about reckoning with the emotional connection to whiteness and the delusional notion of world-conquering white people that shapes their identity. Violence is the love language of whiteness, so a threatened identity is treated with a marshaling of the troops to go to war against that threat.

And this does not apply only to the US. Brexit in the UK is another example. Brexit was about the withdrawal by the UK from the European Union. The UK was a part of the European Union for forty-seven years and is the only nation in Europe to leave it, doing so in January 2020. Brexit was described as a political choice for the UK either to remain as part of the European Union or to become a single, separate entity. In a world that is increasingly interdependent, the choice seemed stark and political, with economic consequences. It was not.

The pro-Brexit campaign was cast as a fight to protect Britishness, your white manhood, your value as a white working man in Britain, threatened by foreign entities. Your vulnerability as a man was at stake, and those stakes were the result of the presence of people who didn’t look like you. Brexit’s campaign was drowning in emotional patriarchy. It was deeply personal, about a white masculinity born of this language of whiteness and a story of a status that only stands if it stands alone. Brexit, via white masculinity, won. Britain—everyone else—lost.

Political Intimacy

Emotional patriarchy in the world of governance flourishes through political intimacy. Political intimacy manifests in how white women use their vote. It is weapon and shield. White women do not necessarily vote according to policy position, persuasive argument, or problematic stance. All three exist, and pundits articulate how confused and confounded they are that such-and-such issue didn’t matter in the polls. Political intimacy is a weapon wielded with emotional clarity.

The language of whiteness flourishes via this political intimacy that consistently sides with sustaining the white masculinity that emerges from this narrative of whiteness in which white masculinity is, and saves, the world. Because of that, white women are not voting against their interests; rather, they are declaring that their interest is in sustaining the language of whiteness that enables their men to not simply function but flourish. That’s where the emotional connection to power and whiteness is sustained in the political world—and that’s where it must be severed.

The binary of the language of whiteness is a cancer that teaches a masculinity that says if you don’t win, you’re a loser, and if you’re a loser you’re not a man, and if you’re not a man—what use are you? The language of whiteness goes to the heart of identity, and that is why the reckoning is intimate for white women. So the way millions of white women use their vote reveals the consistently misunderstood power of the emotional wrapped in the political. White women choose proximity to power, not progress for people—people including themselves, and their own bodies. The 2020 local elections in the US reveal that, and the white women who voted for Brexit reveal that too.

Political intimacy is the means by which white women protect the emotional patriarchy in governance. It is where the political manifests as the emotional, and it is a space of power wrapped in politics, but working through emotionality. Political intimacy is not about policy position; it is about protecting the emotional patriarchy. And it works. Our failure to understand this leads us to use the wrong tools to reckon with it. Part of the national reckoning with the West’s patriarchal roots requires recognition of the emotional.

Women vote at higher rates than men, and have done in every presidential election since 1980. The high-profile Virginia gubernatorial election in 2021 reveals how political intimacy protects emotional patriarchy, as the results came in and the expectation of a Democratic win dissipated, dwindling the gains of the Biden-Harris administration to a sobering loss.

Intellectually, power sharing through fairer governance that includes more people is deeply appealing. The emotional connection to whiteness means that it cannot be entertained. Of course, more women are running for political office. That is important, and wonderful. Also, white women have always wanted more power when it comes to white men, but the emotional connection to whiteness in white masculinity means that white men have to rule over somebody, otherwise they are not men—and if they do not feel like men, they become dangerous. Their possessing unfettered power also makes them dangerous.

Emotional labor is part of what sustains unfair structures; and a politics of cycles of progress and regress is a place where the emotional and political combine and collide to fight the language of whiteness and to protect it. It is a holy shit show. But it can be changed.

Bryan Stevenson believes that proximity is a bright guiding light for how to make change. When it comes to intimate reckoning, it is white women’s proximity to white men that must be their guiding light.

Black Challenge to a Whiteness Narrative

The language of whiteness has been challenged, again and again, by Black people, and especially by Black women. Black people—so often led, supported, enabled, and organized by Black women—move worlds. From enslavement to freedom, we have challenged—and continue to challenge—the language of whiteness. We have built worlds, fought for representative power to steer our own path as Black beings, to be human in the world. All this entails unlearning the language of whiteness, and challenging this narrative of who Black people, Black women, are, and are not. All of our movements are the manifestation of a challenge to this language of whiteness.

Intimate reckoning is not a prosecution or condemnation of our work as Black people, as Black women—it is a call to white women: it is time to do yours. Progressive or otherwise, red or blue, ideologically impressive or politically problematic—these are your men, those you work with, live with, engage with, rely on, and love. Yes, the shit is messy. Hella messy. And hard. And totally fixable. White women, you can absolutely do this.

An Exchange with Dr. Robin DiAngelo

I am talking here with Dr. Robin DiAngelo, New York Times best-selling author of White Fragility: Why White People Are Afraid to Talk about Race and Nice Racism: How White People Perpetuate Racial Harm and Racism, to explore intimate reckoning, what that means for her personally, how she is challenged by it, but also how she recognizes its power.

Robin DiAngelo is RDA. Esther Armah is EA.

EA: Where in your own world can you see intimate reckoning that you could do? What does that look like?

RDA: When I think about the question, what comes to mind is the reality that I am very intimidated by white men. I have a deep history around white men, as a white woman, as a white girl raised by a white male father. While I can see that the intimidation comes from a place of feeling victimized, it functions in practice to have me collude with white supremacy and patriarchy. That makes sense, right, because if I am afraid to challenge white men for my own fear, my own need to feel safe, that means I’m not going to challenge patriarchy and white supremacy. And I haven’t thought about it in this context. I mean I’ve long known that I do have to address particularly white male anger. When I picture an angry Black man, I don’t have the same response to it. Perhaps I don’t have the same history around it, and it’s easier for me to see the bigger context when I think about Black male anger. Most of the direct oppression I have experienced has been at the hands of white men.

The values of silence, suffering, subservience, service, sacrifice—those were so deeply instilled in me. And I see the closeness to white male power is about “Here’s this place we don’t have to struggle . . . Here’s this place where there’s a current we can move in, and not against”—and so it’s going to be really seductive to have that relief of attaching to that power, and soothing that power which both keeps us safe and then benefits us because then we also have an internalized sense of superiority over someone else. We’re still conditioned within a hierarchy. As I thought about your questions, for me the way we talk about white women, I think the default assumption is white middle class. Because I’m working class, I think there are some class takes here. I don’t think I have less racism because I was born poor, but I just learned my place in the racial hierarchy from a different class position. One of the ways I learned it was to project our class shame on to Black people . . . our dirt, literally. I was dirty. My mother was a single mom, she was sick, we lived in our car for periods of time, she couldn’t really bathe us, feed us, or take care of us, and so we were physically dirty—but we were constantly told not to touch things or go places where Black people went because they would be dirty. I can look back now and see how we used Black people to realign ourselves to the dominant white culture that our poverty separated us from. So in those moments I wasn’t poor anymore—I was white.

EA: What are your thoughts on white women’s protection and upholding of white masculinity? Is that true for you—and how does it manifest?

RDA: When I think about the ways I was conditioned to take care of white men, the lessons come in a few different ways. One is, your value is in your value to men. Your ability to access value or resources is through white men—and your safety is in pleasing white men. And those are pretty high-level emotional investments that you’re gonna have. And that maybe one of those is how you mediate your own less-than, by being more than somebody else. That you align with that power, and it gives you a lot. It gives you status, it gives you safety, it gives you value, it gives you resource. The consequences for challenging patriarchy are intense—and that means I am going to sell you out.

EA: “Sell you out” as in sell Black people out?

RDA: Yes.

EA: Safety and intimacy—talk about how the term safety and racism interconnect, how that term is weaponized by white women. And how has that manifest for you, and within the work you do?

RDA: What does it really come down to when white people say they need to feel safe? It’s such a perversion of the true direction of historical harm. I think it’s a completely invalid, illegitimate term to come out of a white person’s mouth—the need to feel safe in talking about racism. Racial justice has to weigh more than your feelings of discomfort. While I was taught to see the humanity of white men, I was not taught to see your humanity. White people are not conditioned to care about, to love Black people. But white women are conditioned to love and care about white men. That’s the key crux of it.

EA: Emotional Justice is such a crucial element of transforming emotional labor. Because intimacy is the institution that upholds this relationship between white women and white men, what, for you, in leaning in and doing that labor with white men—what happens afterwards with white men?

RDA: I think of one situation. There were no real consequences for me—he wasn’t my employer, I wasn’t gonna lose my livelihood—but I didn’t wanna deal with him so I just closed off. It was a neighbor, and there was an opportunity to keep working with him; I chose not to for my own comfort. I can’t say that I went back. To be honest, that would be me giving up, for my own discomfort, my own conflict avoidance, my own fear of conflict.

EA: Let’s stay with that feeling of “you gave up.” For millions of white women, that’s true. But it’s exactly here that this is the new racial healing language of intimate reckoning, of doing this emotional labor is so necessary. Inequity is held up by not doing this labor. As you move forward and you’ve come away from that situation—what does that look like?

RDA: I get an image of myself in a ball—like a little rounded-up ball, stewing, feeling that there was an injustice towards me, and yet it’s a kind of impotent injustice. That’s actually a very old feeling for me around white men, that there is something that is not just, and you are powerless to do anything about it. That’s an old feeling because I am not powerless now. But that’s a great example of not addressing your own issues and patterns—and that’s not going to serve you in issues of racial justice.

This was about five or six years ago and I still to this day lay in bed and feel anger about this interaction and the sense of injustice. I see you are challenging me to see the part I played in it, and it was not something that was just perpetrated on me, and I chose not to do the work of allyship, by withdrawing when it got uncomfortable or difficult for me personally.

I’m pretty direct, and considered fairly confrontational, but within myself I know there are lines that I could step over that I’m not stepping over—there are lines that I avoid. It’s driven by my own fear of the anger of white men. There is the reality that patriarchy is real, and white men control the institutions, and there are very real consequences also for white women. And white women are in this really interesting position—because we are both absolutely really privileged by white supremacy, but we’re also oppressed by patriarchy. It gives us an incredible way in to understanding white supremacy if we use it that way. But so often our resentment about patriarchy causes us not to be able to center someone else’s oppression. So I see a lot of white women centering themselves in terms of sexism, white feminism. They can’t move past their own resentment about what they haven’t gotten, to even imagine centering what someone else hasn’t gotten if they have to give something up—at least in their minds.

EA: For you, when you think of the emotional labor you have to do with white men, what does that mean?

RDA: For me it means staying in, it’s not just saying that thing or challenging that behavior—it means staying close while the recipient of that challenge struggles with that response. It means not withdrawing, not moving away, not soothing in those moments. So it’s building the capacity and the stamina to stay, to do both of those things—speaking truth to power and staying connected. So often we stay connected by not speaking truth to power. Or we speak truth to power and then we run away. I’ll be honest: I recognize that in myself—speaking truth to power then running away—to be safe. I do think it’s the integration of both those things.

The Emotional Justice Template

Work through your feelings: Frustration, sadness, resentment, anger, indignation, powerful, grief, rewarding

Reimagine your focus: How do I speak the language of whiteness when it comes to white masculinity? Answer this question individually.

Build the future: Create a circle of willingness whose focus is accountability and decentering whiteness, and that resists what can be self-congratulatory book club–type discussion. There should be at least three of you. Express your relationship to whiteness, and explore what decentering white masculinity’s power might look like in your places of work and learning.

Discussion Points

What would intimate reckoning look like for me?

Whom would I invite to create a circle of willingness?

Where have I tidied up, defended, and did shop-keeping of white masculinity? What change can I make by not doing that labor?