Healing the Hidden Wound: The Role of White Affinity Groups in Racial Justice

Abstract

It’s May, 2021, one year after Derick Chauvin murdered George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement became a worldwide phenomenon and a household name. The summer of 2020 saw white Americans protesting white supremacy, racism, and police violence in numbers previously unseen and those numbers have since significantly diminished. I contend that this slip back into a white supremacist status quo is ripe for disruption. Drawing on the work of Resmaa Menakem, James Baldwin, Robin DiAngelo, Janet Helms, Kelly Brown Douglas, Joe Feagin and others, I argue that, in order to dismantle white supremacy in the United States, we white Americans must face our history and heal our inherited trauma, our white racial frame and our white supremacist culture. I then argue that white racial justice affinity groups are a limited but crucial tool for keeping white Americans actively engaged in dismantling white supremacy—in our communities and in ourselves—by providing a space to work through and heal our internalized white supremacy in community with each other. The intended audience of this paper is willing white people.