After I got home it occurred to me that perhaps I was off base, thinking there was something exceptional about raising the subject of whiteness on San Juan Island. After all, is what I am describing so different from dynamics that might occur in a small rural town that is largely white? Or in an affluent white neighborhood in a city, cordoned off from its working-class neighbors by its price? An island has particular needs for its community to function, so everyone can survive. But there are conceptual islands everywhere.
At the end of the day, no matter where we live, don’t we all depend on a small group of people for our survival? What happens if that small group is largely white and we identify as white? Don’t many of us feel a curl of fear rise up when we prepare to raise the subject of white power to other white people; wonder if we’ll be socially shunned for making people uncomfortable?
What is insidious, I think, is the idea that having conversations about white identity and whiteness in a therapy session will inexorably lead a client and a therapist to engage in public resistance to those structures that maintain self-segregating environments, especially among white people.
Therapy is designed to help a person remove, or at least contest, the emotional blocks that impede change. It is a space in which avoidance, denial, anger, terror, repression, and anxiety are welcomed and made visible. It’s a place to practice allowing the energy and the heat and the sweat of fear show up and crest and then drop back. It’s a place to figure out what risks need to happen to support growth.
Because therapists are experts at welcoming these emotions, and because these are the very emotions that keep white people from raising the subject of white identity and whiteness with their friends, their bosses, their neighbors, it would seem that therapists are uniquely positioned to be able to help our clients, and ourselves, name the forbidden so that we can move into action to collectively resist structural violence and oppression.
But here’s the thing: I’ve been thinking about the fact that therapy, itself, is part of white culture. We all know that the majority of therapists are white women; the majority of counseling and social work professors are white women; the psych research subjects are mostly white university students; the majority of therapy clients are white women; the licensing exam is written so that white candidates will pass it at far greater rates than Black candidates.
In white culture, therapy can perform the role of mitigation: it can save a community from facing discomfort, the very discomfort that it is essential it face, in order to repudiate power and privilege. When white people’s friends get too obsessed with their ex, or come to parties and get wasted, week after week, or can’t get out of bed in the morning, someone will likely ask them if they’ve gone to therapy yet. Though many people still see therapy as the place you go to deal with your personal problems, and don’t yet see white supremacy as a “personal problem,” I wonder if, as white supremacy does start to be recognized as a problem for white people as well as everyone else, if that, too, will be something that therapists deal with in private.
