Using tapping to clear out White racism is a two-part task, and not skipping the second part is key. Since White people are trained up to be afraid of Black people, that seems like the obvious issue to address, and starting with it has worked well so far, at least for White people. But then I’m not the only White person who doesn’t really trust White people—and that can include myself sometimes. In fact, Charles Kreiner has pointed out that White people’s fear of Black people is really our fear of other White people, stuffed, denied, and projected outward. Instead of saying, “I’m scared,” we say to Black people, “You’re scary.”
Dealing with our fear of White people is also tricky because it’s unquestionably what we call a well-founded fear. Shunning is the least of what we fear from other White people: we all know just how violent White people can be. In 1964, three young civil-rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. After their bodies were found, FBI agents reported that while James Chaney had been beaten even more ferociously than the two young White men—no surprise there—in all three cases, they had not seen such injuries except in high-speed plane crashes. That is how dangerous White people can be, not only to Black people, but also to other White people. I was in my teens then and read about it in real time, and it haunts me to this day. As Thulani Davis noted with regard to “the true tenets of white supremacy,” “whiteness does not include disloyalty to whiteness.”
In addition, and as James Baldwin pointed out, neither categorization of human beings in this dyad can exist without the other. It’s fine to start with people who don’t look like us, but starting with our fear of Black people gets both internalized White racism (for Black people and other people of color) and the fear of other White people projected onto Black people (for White people) out of the way first, so we can go on from there to the people we’re most frightened of: the people who hold the power and the position of oppressors-in-chief.
As we extricate ourselves from the strangling grip of Whiteness on our way to becoming fully human, we can still be aware that there are many White people prepared to defend Whiteness to the death—and therefore it is indeed an act of courage to stand up against White racism. Once we’ve cleared out our outright phobias about other White people, we can make an all-the-time practice of being clear about the difference between social discomfort and credible threats of violence, and of not giving in to our fear. Even when we’re in directly violent situations, we need to be able to keep our wits about us, which is difficult to do in a panic of accumulated conditioned fear. We need alertness, not agitation.
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