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Resistance Negotiation
Definition and Action to Be Taken
For white women and white men committed to action in pursuit of racial justice to work through the discomfort of the feelings of being maligned and indicted, of your insides that squirm, protest, deny, and defend as you are challenged about race, harm, and change. You want to flee. Don’t. Your instinct is to deny. Stop. Your trauma is triggered. Pause.
Your historical reaction to manufacture danger, fear, and tears is at 100. Stare each of these in the face and tell yourself to stand down. You are in negotiation with your resistance. Inequity stays when you leave; this is about learning to stay when you’re struggling, as a major part of unlearning the language of whiteness. You are replacing the emotional economy with resistance negotiation—learning a love language to navigate through white fragility.
Breakdown
Resistance negotiation is about identifying the difference between being attacked and needing to defend yourself versus feeling attacked because you’re being challenged about an issue of race and racism. The difference matters. The former may be about life or death. The latter is about the work required to effectively practice healing as you navigate through what you feel is a racial reckoning, but is actually the act of unlearning the language of whiteness. What you are doing is setting aside the emotional economy and stepping into your emotional work.
Resistance negotiation is about dealing with a history of manufactured attack. I say “manufactured” because, of course, being challenged is not being attacked. Having your power challenged, behaviors challenged, accountability challenged are all part of what must happen for us to develop a racial healing practice. It’s not magic. It’s the 3 Ps of Emotional Justice—path, process, practice.
The language of whiteness has created a false narrative of whiteness as the best and anything not white as a problem needing fixing. We must all deal with that narrative. For white women and white men, one way it manifests is as feeling attacked when you are being challenged about issues of race and racism. That’s rooted in a history where to be challenged by someone who is Black is heinous, illegal, and a total disrespect for what is delusional white superiority. It comes with consequences that would often be violent for the Black person. That may involve losing something that is crucial to that person’s well-being or livelihood; it may even result in death. That is history. That history has legacy. That legacy has consequences. That legacy manifests in contemporary exchanges about race and racism.
Let’s move through this. Historically, the consequences of challenging white people were life threatening for Black people. Today, the consequences can manifest in an abuse of power by white people toward those doing the challenging.
Your Emotional Connection to Whiteness
We are now at the heart of messiness for white women and white men committed to justice. That is because your progressive ideology probably agrees intellectually with system dismantling, power being challenged, and even power sharing. But it is your emotional connection to whiteness and power that is being challenged and that requires dismantling. This is the crux. Resistance negotiation is actually an unlearning of your emotional connection to whiteness, power, and race. It’s not about Black and Brown people and racial justice.
What you are wrestling with is your relationship to resistance. It’s a negotiation that you must learn to engage in. There are two steps to name and recognize.
The first step is to name resistance as manufactured fragility. Dr. Robin DiAngelo’s New York Times best-selling book White Fragility explores how being challenged about race is triggering. We’ve created feel-good-ology vocabulary that once again centers the discomfort of whiteness. What we need is honesty. Truthfully, there isn’t a way to feel good about being challenged when it comes to severing a relationship between power and whiteness, but we can absolutely feel better about doing our particular part to make change, and in so doing, redefine how systems work through us.
I challenge the notion that there is a fragility to whiteness. There is a focus to whiteness, one that engages the emotional to evade being accountable, one that weaponizes emotions to do that work. White progressives would like antiracism work to be joyful. Is that possible? I have no idea. I do know that I reject doing the emotional work required to figure out how to make trauma somehow joyful—frankly, it’s a weird ask. Frankly, it’s a whiteness-centering ask. So we should all reject it.
The second step is to pay attention to what emotions are triggered due to the challenge, to pay attention to what you do about that challenge, to wrestle with those feelings and choose a different action.
These are the two specific steps and stages in resistance negotiation. They are about moving away from manufacturing attack and therefore defending yourself by resorting to historical tactics that have repercussions for Black people. You negotiate with your resistance to do this differently, to recognize that history has you tripping, that what racial healing requires is for you to be challenged over and over again; ideas about who you have been taught you are will disappear, and what emerges is a humanity that no longer resorts to historical triggers to avoid contemporary consequences of problematic behavior.
Pause. Yup, the shit is hard. Or rather, you have no sustainable relationship to being challenged on issues of race and racism, so when you’re confronted, you emotionally scurry into spaces and corners where progress has never lived, but stalling flourishes. You can no longer do that. This is what must happen instead: you learn to negotiate with your resistance. This learning is transformative for exchanges, engagements, and work toward racial healing, toward a fuller humanity.
Become the Change You Claim
When you actively negotiate with your resistance, you, and indeed your organization, stop saying things like “We are committed to an inclusive and diverse environment” when neither of those things is true. Not in practice. Not in your leadership spaces, those spaces of power where hiring and firing happens and where sustainable, transformative change that could center equity is possible, but often neglected. This is not about public statements that have too often descended into “statementism”—whereby organizations use words to convey a change that, too often, they do not make. When you defer to such statements when being challenged about harm done on issues of race and racism, you are not doing the Emotional Justice love language work of being honest about your resistance.
Because this is about an Emotional Justice love language, it is about the living culture, the practice within the spaces where you lead, live, learn, and work, and the hidden values that drive behavior. We are not starting over; we are starting with where we are, to do what we have not done: make big, hard change when it comes to whiteness.
Resist performance, resist cheering for pebble-sized steps in the eye of a tsunami and high-fiving nonexistent action as a way of sidestepping hard change. That time is gone. We no longer have the luxury of setting our racial justice clocks according to white discomfort’s time zone. It has been this way for so, so long. Change cannot happen in this time zone. It is not designed to happen here. What gets done is tweak-o-nomics. Your discomfort emerges because your power is being challenged, and your instinct is to fight what you perceive as your corner being threatened. That instinct is at 100. Stare down the trauma that will be triggered as you unlearn centering whiteness, stare the discomfort dead in its face, stand down, and then stay.
Negotiate with yourself not to seek out Black women to deflect what is your labor, your legacy, and your work to do. This is what it means to choose Emotional Justice over privilege and comfort. This is naming your oppression as manufactured fear and emotional manipulation, and instead walking through each step: resist deflection, resist denial, resist defending, resist blaming, resist tears, and wrestle with what has been learned, tried, and tested and has functioned to stifle progress and stimulate hostile exchanges that paralyze possibility and kill progress. This is how you stay; this is how you sever the connection to whiteness and power, and stay on a road of sustainable racial healing.
An Exchange with Courtney Martin
I am talking here with Courtney Martin, a New York Times best-selling author and white feminist.
Courtney Martin is CM. Esther Armah is EA.
EA: Let’s talk about resistance for you personally and how that has shown up for you. How has hard change shown up when you are challenged—or feel challenged—about race? What behaviors have you engaged in the past or have learned to do differently now? We’re going to take a bit of a journey.
CM: The first thing that comes to mind is, in white culture, particularly America, a disconnection with your body. There’s a disconnect that families breed in their kids’ bodies. One of my learning curves as an adult has been learning to notice my body, and that’s the first place to pay attention. Let’s say I’m having a conversation with a friend. I was thinking about a conversation with a Black woman friend of mine; it was right after Trump got elected. A group of my college friends had started an organization to challenge his leadership. It was a multiracial group, but mostly white. I was mentioning it and excited about it. And she said how frustrated she was that people like my friends were getting all this funding in this moment. And in my body—because I’m starting to pay attention to my body—there was this flare-up. There was this defensiveness. And I wanted to tell her—and I think in the moment I did tell her—that this is a multiracial group, there are people of color here—and really giving her all the reasons why this is not what it looks like.
It did not go well. We got into a conflict, parted ways, and then I had to do the work of thinking through it and reflecting on my reaction and figuring out what does it look like to go back to her, and try to repair and talk to her about what happened for me, apologize, and hope for her grace. This gets back to the relationship thing—have we fed the relationship enough that she’s up for giving me that grace, and hanging in there with me, and hearing my apology and doing all the things? Thankfully she is, and she was.
And so for me—the thing I’m trying to get better at is being embodied, particularly when that flare-up happens—and then ask myself about it before I have some kind of response. So for me it’s body first. As a white person, learn how to be back in your body, and notice when you’re getting defensive flare-up.
In the best-case scenario, I would never have said anything to her that was defending white structures of power and privilege, but sadly I didn’t. So then it’s how do you reflect, depersonalize, and develop your own muscles of repair and apology?
EA: Speaking about becoming embodied, one of the tools of resistance negotiation—for white women in particular—but also for white men, is what I call “discomfort muscles.” Discomfort muscles are about unlearning a history where your body has always been the one that’s been worshiped in different ways. When you say that white people are not in their body—I think that it’s not that they are not in their body; it’s that the way that they’re in their body is, whatever feeling occurs is the right feeling and should not be challenged. It’s the absence of expecting a human interaction—in other words, somebody’s responding to how you show up in your body in a way that is a problem for them is actually an alien response for white people because the history of oppressive systems has always been that Black and Brown people have to navigate around the way white people show up in their body, for safety. It’s literally been a safety mechanism. So I want to talk through this exchange with your friend and the steps of it—because there’s something really instructive.
CM: The defensiveness, the explanation—I think it’s rooted in the metanarrative that as a white person I want to be part of—which is, of course racism is bad, and me and my friends aren’t a part of it, or me and my family aren’t a part of it. This is the subconscious of white progressives—we’re happy to point the finger all day at other white people, but when it’s reflected back that our people—or we—are personally benefiting from these structures, there’s a bit of a backlash. Because the response is “Oh no, I walk around all day with this narrative about myself,” and so the defensiveness is “Oh no, you must have it wrong,” because that would shatter my narrative—that I’m one of the good ones, one of the good white people.
EA: And that narrative is about your politics, your ideology. With Emotional Justice, I always say it’s not about your political sophistication or your ideological conviction; it’s really about an emotional connection to whiteness and power about race that is rooted in a history that really needs to be healed—that hasn’t been healed. White progressives use political arguments to engage what is actually emotional. The reason there will always be a disconnect is that they have nothing to do with each other. You can be as ideologically sound, philosophically pure, and as politically progressive as a person can be, but that has nothing to do with who you are in the world as a human being when it comes to your connection to race and whiteness, because that has to do with soul and essence and fear—and how much white supremacy is rooted in ideas of subjugation and exploitation and dominion. So you may know politically and philosophically that this is wrong, but that doesn’t mean the emotional connection to that is automatically unlearned. And so the instinct, the flare-up, is the emotional connection to whiteness manifesting, making itself heard in very specific ways.
Walk through that differently, step back, and look at that again—what would be the walkthrough? What would be the response to your emotional flare-up—which is literally what resistance negotiation asks you to wrestle with? You’re navigating that internal bodily response when somebody is challenging you about a particular issue.
CM: I think the more that I put myself into situations, whether that’s interracial friendship or multiracial organizing, or getting feedback from Black writer friends, or anywhere the flare-up happens[, the stronger this muscle gets]. It’s a muscle for me of noticing and talking with my body at that moment, and the more that I have those experiences with being challenged—having my worldview challenged or having my identity challenged in some way, the more practice I have of being “Oh, there’s that feeling.” And this gets back to discomfort and my ability to sit with it. Because of the way I’ve structured my life and the kinds of people that I have been attracted to, and the communities I’m a part of, now I have plenty of opportunities for this kind of discomfort—and that’s great, because that just means I get better and better and better at noticing. Either it lowers because the flare-ups get less intense, or I can say I’m feeling this, “Ah, okay, I know what this is”—and I just keep moving. Or I just get better and better at talking to it and hanging in there. I think for me it’s about a pause. If I were to have that conversation over again with that friend where I’m feeling “Oooh, that hurt,” and I feel bad.
EA: Part of how whiteness is protected is by segregating itself—and that segregation manifests in policies and every part of politics that seeks to maintain division in order to create a cocoon—a false cocoon of this purity space. And so what makes the love languages really important is that they are about communities sharing the language with each other in order to make change within their own communities. And so while, for example, white people segregate from people of color, they’re not segregated from other white people. And a really specific part of the resistance negotiation—particularly for white progressives—is about doing the work with other white people specifically about this . . . and engaging different kinds of conversations because they do have proximity. And the question is, how are they using their proximity to whiteness?
I know Bryan Stevenson talks a lot about proximity to vulnerability, and in the Emotional Justice love languages, we say that the proximity that white women have is to other white women and white men. So that’s where the work has to happen. The mistake is to imagine that it happens by having more proximity to Black people, because that’s not where the change needs to happen, and that’s not where the challenge needs to happen, it’s not where the unlearning needs to happen.
CM: What strikes me about what you just said is with my friend the discomfort is spontaneous, it’s in the moment, it’s not something I chose—it’s we’re having this relationship and we’re having this conversation—and then all of a sudden this happened. In whiteness, if I’m talking to my husband, or if I’m talking to another white mother, I have to choose the discomfort. The comfort is there—if a white mom says something about the chaotic, rough school in our neighborhood, I can very much choose the comfort of nodding my head and sipping my coffee and saying nothing. Or saying something really bland that doesn’t truly address the issue, and is probably not going to offend her, like “Oh, you know—you should take another look at that school”—or I could choose the discomfort of saying something direct like “I see that as coded, racist language.” And so, in the interracial scenario, you have the discomfort as a white person, and in the white scenario you have to choose the discomfort, which is a pretty high bar. I choose it a lot because that’s who I’m being in the world. But it strikes me that no wonder we don’t do the work more because it strikes me that you have to pursue the discomfort.
EA: This notion of choice—of what you choose and what you don’t—it is at the heart of resistance negotiation. Because you’re also really negotiating with your own comfort, you’re negotiating with your own instinct to choose safety rather than struggle. And you’re negotiating with your instinct to stay silent. And in Black communities when people are navigating particular issues, the difference is because the world is racist and there is white supremacy—they will meet it all the time whether they like it or not. That is why resistance negotiation is such an important love language; it really is about inviting white progressives to put their politics where their humanity is, to have their politics show up in the emotional by doing this work that has often never been done. Because so often with a progressive politics, people leave their space and go somewhere and do something and then come back. And in that going, there’s a certain satisfaction, a certain euphoria, a sense of achievement in the leaving and in the doing. And then there’s a certain cushion and safety in coming back. But the reality of systemic change—which is what the whole reckoning is about—is that systems change is about unlearning whiteness, and unlearning whiteness for white progressives is saying that “I’m going to make a different choice when faced with options and the choice I’m going to make is to move somebody else from their place of comfort as I have been moved from my place of comfort.”
It’s really about saying systems don’t work outside of us, systems work through us. Emotional Justice is always about systemic change, but it understands and defines systemic change when it comes to emotionality as the system is maintained through our bodies, our engagement, our relationships—and so we are the dismantlers we’ve been waiting for. It’s about how white progressives who claim a commitment to racial justice engage the work of being the system that shows up to do the dismantling, which means having different conversations, harder ones. Showing up to have those conversations and do that dismantling is doing resistance negotiation and unlearning whiteness in real time. And it might not be every conversation. But the reality has been that there has been practically no conversation, which is why we maintain the voting blocs we maintain. There’s really not been that kind of challenge with other white women. We lean back deep into our political comfort of not sharing our political position, who votes differently than we do—but you’re actually both being silent—emotionally silent about the work that needs to be done where your body is the system, and the system is working through you. Part of systemic change is about reimagining relationships with white people to unlearn whiteness.
CM: I love the phrasing; it’s so evocative and beautiful. In white progressive culture, there’s a way in which we are trained to think structurally about race. So we think reading the books and watching the documentaries and maybe donating to XYZ organization is the work, and if we have an emotional connection to racial justice, it’s mostly from the position of pitying, feeling sad for—maybe feeling guilty to some extent—say, watching an Ava DuVernay film, feeling the catharsis that I feel bad that this happened to these people—that’s mostly our emotional relationship to the whole thing.
It is pity, sadness, confusion versus the emotions coming home to roost between our own friends, between our own family. That kind of emotional engagement is quite rare, and in part I know this because I do it, and I’ve lost friends. It’s very jarring to other people when a white person in a theoretically neutral setting problematizes what’s going on, because we do it so rarely. Even in Oakland—and I’m in the progressive of the progressives—and it’s still “We’re all about racial justice,” so we would never question each other’s choices or language—because that’s really uncouth. You’re helping me tap into something. We make fun of the book clubs; there the intellectualization for white people is very compelling. It doesn’t ask much of you. You learn about all these systems—and then you feel smarter. And you’re still convinced that you have nothing to do with it. Or you have something to do with it, but you’re powerless within it. We use that as an excuse for not being personally engaged in your framework of “You are the system”—there is no opting out of it. You are intrinsically a part of it.
EA: Whiteness is framed as always about a superiority. Let’s talk about the emotional connection to whiteness, and what that looks like and feels like for you.
CM: I have a paradoxical relationship to whiteness. On the one hand, I know consciously that it benefits me in all these ways that trains me to react emotionally. Another part of me would like to run in the other direction from whiteness, and disassociate from it. I grew up listening to hip hop nonstop, and part of that was because it was awesome, but also part of that was a disassociation with whiteness; dating boys of color as a way of disassociating from whiteness, a lot of trying to be as less-white as I can! Ultimately it doesn’t work, it isn’t genuine—so trying to unpack the subconscious benefiting from whiteness, and the more on the surface trying to run away from it is interesting for me.
EA: In Emotional Justice, the emotional connection to whiteness is both repulsion and attraction—superiority and insecurity. All of us have to unlearn emotional relationships to whiteness—all of us do, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and white.
CM: To your point about history, I’ve been thinking a lot about white families’ inability to acknowledge the pain and violence within our own family histories. We don’t have the emotional muscle to say what’s the truth about what’s happening in this family. We don’t do that within our own families; we’re certainly not going to be able to do it on any kind of national level—so I’ve been thinking a lot about that. So I’ve been thinking a lot about personal emotional history and emotional national history, and how we’re pretty bad at all of it. We have not developed the spiritual muscles that probably if we were doing it more in our emotional and personal lives, we would do it more in our political and national lives.
EA: I would challenge that to say that it is not that there is not the spiritual muscle to tell the truth; it’s that the consequences of speaking that truth would be to unravel what whiteness has built. And whiteness has built this very specific world in which it moves to protect itself when it feels in any way threatened. But it has incredible spiritual muscle to manufacture threat where there is none—which is how it treats Black bodies—and to weaponize violence at any hint that whiteness may not be the superior space and state that it has named itself and that it has imposed on the world. But what Emotional Justice is saying is that when it comes to whiteness, part of the challenge is that a narrative is created. There is nothing fragile about whiteness. But there is manufactured threat and manufactured fear—just no fragility. You cannot build a system of supremacy through fragility; you cannot protect it with politics, state violence, and every single weapon that you have from any kind of place of fragility. And so fragility is a manufactured emotion to enable you to not be the dismantler that unraveling and unlearning the language of whiteness would require you to be—
CM: Fragility is a weapon of innocence, of manufacturing this notion of innocence—
EA: Absolutely. And what whiteness does better than anything is weaponize. The emotional connection to whiteness protects itself whenever it feels threatened. And that protection can manifest in multiple ways—it can be a person who is asking challenging questions about the space and the environment in which we live, and why we’re making the choices that we make, and it doesn’t represent a threat, but because of the whiteness narrative, it’s treated as a threat because that’s what whiteness has taught everybody. Anything that challenges it must be treated as threat, exterminated, destroyed, and ground into dust. So it’s not an absence of spiritual muscle; it’s the willingness to marshal everything to protect whiteness.
As we close, going back to your younger self, thinking through what we’ve talked about. Resistance negotiation—what would you tell your younger self about resistance and whiteness when it comes to engaging your own community of white people and how history has taught you, and how you want to change what living history has taught you about your community?
CM: Honor your outrage; don’t honor your superiority, but honor your instincts for wanting to just do things differently than is socially part of your world and your instinct about the wound at the center of whiteness.
EA: And finally, what does unlearning the language of whiteness mean for and to you?
CM: It means moving from a defensive, competitive delusion to be more collective, more joyful, more humble, and hopefully less harmful.
The Emotional Justice Template
Work through your feelings: Flee, deny, being defensive, white tears, anger. Wanting to run, being triggered, manufacturing threat, resorting to white tears. Uncertainty, insecurity, frustration, resentment, reward, change.
Reimagine your focus: How do I speak the language of whiteness when it comes to being challenged about issues of race and racism? What are the feelings that come up for me?
Build the future: Develop and strengthen your discomfort muscles as a crucial element for racial healing, for unlearning, and for decentering whiteness. Resist your instinct to require Black people—particularly Black women—to incentivize you as white people—particularly white women—to stay and do for you what is your emotional labor toward racial healing. Resisting this instinct represents decentering whiteness and centering the emotional labor Black, Brown, and Indigenous people often do—and have historically done—to reassure whiteness.
Discussion Points
Using Courtney’s example of in-body response—what have been your “flare-ups,” and how have you managed, navigated, and engaged when a flare-up has happened?
Describe an incidence of your own defense. Now recount the story using the resistance negotiation model to create a different outcome.