Stop saying you didn't mean to cause harm

Stop saying you didn’t mean to cause harm

White people hate to be judged... when it comes to race. When it comes to everything else, bring it on - see sports, grades, mainstream corporate culture and a gazillion reality tv shows where everyone gets judged.

It comes up in community agreements, surveys and conversations. White people want to be assumed to have good intentions, they want "non-judgmental" space (which actually means a space free of negative judgement - of them), they want to be treated with "respect" and with "kindness".

They want us to know they didn't mean to cause harm.

It comes up in apologies too.

Amy Cooper, the white woman who was famously captured on video calling the police on Black birder Christian Cooper in Central Park on the same day that George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis on May 25th, 2020 said in her apology:

"I’m not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way."

And yet there she is, on video that Christian Cooper himself took, calling the police on the man she deliberately identified as "African-American", saying she was afraid, and that he was threatening her life, when it is abundantly clear from the video that neither was true.

And by the way, she knew that she was being videoed.

She knew.

She wasn't afraid, she was angry.

And if she did not know that identifying her attacker as Black to the police would put him in a potentially life threatening situation, this could only be the result of being deliberately and intentionally in denial. Besides which, why mention his identity then?

I think about the mobs of white women yelling at 6 year old Black girl Ruby Bridges in 1960 and threatening her to the point where she had to be escorted to school by four federal marshals for a year.

Did they not mean to cause harm?

They weren't afraid either, they were angry.

How was that respectful? How was that kind? How does that deserve non-judgement or the benefit of the doubt?

When do Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) ever get to say they didn't mean to cause harm? When in 8 minutes and 46 seconds of a police officer's knee on his neck was George Floyd ever given the benefit of the doubt, or treated with "respect" and "kindness", even as he said he couldn't breathe?

White people are socialized to defend their privileges and entitlement and cause harm to Black, Indigenous and other people of color. It was deliberately and intentionally embedded into the concept of whiteness from the very beginning when race was invented as a way of justifying the African slave trade - it IS the very concept of whiteness.

As Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, Black professor says to the John Biewen, the white host of episode three of the podcast series Seeing White:

"In a way, the effort to get people to come together under the banner of whiteness has sort of always been about power and exploitation. So I don't know what that means about trying to salvage the idea of good whiteness. You know, that's something that you've got to wrestle with. You know, when was whiteness good? It’s kind of like, when was America great? I mean, it seems like the whole project was related to exploitation. And so, if you identify that way, yeah. I don't envy you in terms of having to try to think about what that means."

And yet, it's not enough for white people to automatically default to being aligned with "goodness" - what often happens is that they want to align themselves with being victims. How quickly do BIPOC get called "racist" by white people for often quite gently and respectfully calling out the racism of white people?

Amy Cooper didn't just put herself in a position of neutrality, she cast herself as the victim, even raising her voice and adding some trembling to her tone, presumably because she wasn't getting a fast or concerned enough reaction from the 911 dispatcher.

Equity means that people get the supports and resources that they need, and that those who have been systemically marginalized and deprived of resources may need to be given more in order to achieve equal outcomes - it's not about everyone getting the same.

But what this means is that equity feels like oppression to those who have always been given privileges, privileges that are quite often invisible to them.

We don't have to know about the obstacles, challenges, deprivations, degradations and abuse that we do not face.

Yet this too is a choice.

We choose not to know.

White people want to distance themselves from the violence of their culture. Indoctrinated into an ideological obsession with individualism, a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality, and the myth of meritocracy, they are so used to the privilege of being treated as individuals that they are outraged when they are not.

So when white people say “I didn’t mean to cause harm” it's like saying “I’m not racist” - it makes invisible the system of white supremacy that very specifically and intentionally seeks to cause harm to Black, Indigenous and other people of color.

We can't know your intentions, but you are accountable for the harm you cause.

We can't know your intentions, but the harm you cause is not accidental - it is the system working exactly as designed, whether you "meant" it or not, or were conscious in your socialized reactions or not.

We can't know your intentions, but your decision to remain unaware of the harm you have been socialized to cause IS in fact a choice.

Stop saying you didn't mean to cause harm.

Stop asking for the benefit of the doubt.

Stop asking not to be judged.

Listen. Learn. Process with other white people. Self-reflect. Heal your own trauma because although we are not all equally harmed, we are all harmed by white supremacy.

Nobody is perfect. We are all socialized into white supremacy and anti-Blackness, regardless of our racial identity, and it doesn't get unlearned and unpacked in a day. We will make mistakes. We will continue to cause harm.

But it has to start with confronting the truth, putting an end to the gaslighting, and acknowledging the hurt. No more excuses. No more defensiveness. No more deflecting blame.

Only then can we start to shift power, change systems, and transform our culture so that it is better for everybody.

Note: this blog post was brought to you by a discussion co-facilitator Malaika Aaron-Bishop and I had as we prepared for a workshop we are delivering next week on restorative justice. Restorative justice at its simplest can be described as a process that centers on the needs of those who have experienced harm and recognizes that those who perpetrated the harm have an obligation to “put right” the harm. Restorative justice considers that when members of a community are harmed, the harm is also experienced by the community, and that when harm is caused within the community, the community has a responsibility for the harm also.

Banner photo by Massimo Adami on Unsplash. Also published on LinkedIn.