Of course we have questions! There are always questions—and objections—especially when we’re being asked to question ourselves. Add to that a certain tendency to postpone seriously getting down to work on our spiritual practices, which you may have noticed if you’ve ever done spiritual practices in a group, especially deep and intense ones, because suddenly there’s just so much to talk about—there are so many questions! And that’s fine—sooner or later, we still get to dive in.

The first and most important question to ask before embarking on any healing is the one Ruby Sales has long been asking, and which I first heard from the educator and healer in her own right Dr. Fatima Hafiz-Muid:

“Where does it hurt?”

We know, or can know if we choose to, a great deal about how White racism hurts and harms people of color in general and Black people in particular: Black people in particular have been telling the world about it for four hundred years. We know a lot less about how White racism hurts White people because so much less has been said and written about it, and anyway, since White racism is the driver that keeps at least some White people at the tippy-top of the kyriarchy—that interlocking, intersectional, intertangled construction of hierarchies of abuse—what could be bad for White people? Why would we want to get over it?

There are big advantages to being White, and while many of those advantages are material and not equitably distributed, a lot of them have to do with what doesn’t happen to us, which is why we don’t even notice them. It is nice not to be subjected to the kind of micro- and macro-aggressions, general abuse, indignities, and violence that are routinely visited on people of color in general and Black people in particular—so nice, in fact, that we might sincerely wish for those of our “privileges” that are basic human rights to be universally applied.