Whitesplaining Reframed

conversations about Whiteness and owning our place in history

“Whitesplaining,” according to a CNN commentator is “an affliction that’s triggered when some White people hear a person of color complain about racism.”  A person engaged in Whitesplaining will respond to difficult truths about racial injustice with comments that suggest that they “know more about how racism operates than those who’ve struggled against it for much of their lives.” 

I am a basic White guy who most often encounters “Whitesplaining” in conversations around Whiteness and racial injustice with respect to this country’s history with Indigenous peoples. The conversation goes something like this: “Why are we talking about this now?  Isn’t that ancient history?” Or, even, “You don’t hear me talking about how my great-great grandmother was a Polish Jew!  We survived; and look how we thrived!”  These kinds of responses to conversations about ongoing, systematic oppression serves only to diminish the experiences of racial injustice by those on the margins of White power and privilege.  And, as a basic White guy, these kinds of comments are often directed to me, as if seeking affirmation.  And, more and more, I feel compelled to respond.

Through the Episcopal Indigenous Justice Roundtable, I have been part of organizing and coordinating local efforts at truth-telling and repair with leaders in the Episcopal Diocese of Wyoming.  I was invited to join them last week for their Diocesan Convention. While there I helped support an effort led by Rev. Roxanne Friday, an enrolled member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe of Wind River Reservation, to return sacred ceremonial items that have been warehoused in the basement of the diocesan offices for over 80 years.  Those items were “traded” by families to Edith May Adams, a deaconess at St. Michael’s Episcopal Mission, in exchange for food and supplies at the general store she ran during and after the Great Depression (note the irony, here: an Episcopal deaconess asked Indigenous families under her care to trade their sacred ceremonial items in exchange for food during the Great Depression!).  An Arapaho elder I met named Lyle, the Junior Warden of his congregation, told me his grandmother was asking when those ceremonial items would be returned to their family until the day she died at 108 years old.

As the conversation amongst the deputies at the Diocesan Convention turned to the impact of the Doctrine of Discovery amongst the Indigenous peoples of Wyoming, the Whitesplaining began.  My initial reaction was frustration, then rage, as I heard White voices drown out Indigenous voices with nothing to rein them in.  It suddenly occurred to me that, perhaps, there could be a place for Whitesplaining if it could explain my experiences of the power and privilege afforded to me by Whiteness.  In other words, rather than diminish someone else’s experiences of racial injustice from systems of oppression, how could I, as a basic White guy, instead, affirm those experiences by sharing how Whiteness has offered me unearned advantages at the expense of my non-White siblings?  So, after a prominent priest took his Whitesplaining to his fellow deputies at the microphone – “As Christians, we cannot be about shame and blame; we must move forward!” – I took a chance at reframing Whitesplaining for us all.

“Yes, my ancestors suffered the loss of their Welsh homelands because of colonial expansion,” I told the deputies gathered in that convention hall.  But, instead of being herded into internment camps, my ancestors boarded ships bound for North America, where they quickly turned their experience of land dispossession against a different group of Indigenous peoples.   The generational wealth my ancestors built on the backs of stolen people working stolen land provided me a top-tier education – from the premier segregation academy I attended from Kindergarten through high school in Montgomery, Alabama, to college, law school, and seminary, all at distinguished, private institutes of learning.  And I enjoyed these privileges at the expense of the Indigenous peoples my ancestors forcibly removed, whose descendants, today, boast the highest rates of teen suicide, incarceration, and infant mortality deaths of any other people group in the United States.  “So,” I Whitesplained to my fellow Whitesplainers, “the Doctrine of Discovery is not ancient history.  It is a statistically verifiable reality, here and now, that defines the very different ways the American experience is lived and survived by White and non-White people alike.  And we, the beneficiaries, must tell that truth.”   

As I returned to my seat, my face burned.  Not so much from the frustration and rage that compelled me to step up to that microphone.  Moreso, from the sense of shame and judgment I anticipated from the other White people in the room.  I thought about my grandmother, the daughter of a United States Senator, who taught me from a young age that I was “born and bred” to carry on the family name and legacy, a legacy I now know is funded by the ill-gotten gains of the Doctrine of Discovery.  I wondered if this is what she meant when she told me as a boy that I was born to be a leader.  I wondered what my father would say, who like me, carries the name of his grandfather, Senator Joseph Lister Hill.  And, I wondered if this is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer meant by the phrase “fidelity of betrayal.”  And, even as my face burned, so did my heart burn within me.

No, I wouldn’t say I “know more about how racism operates than those who’ve struggled against it for much of their lives.”  I would say, however, that I know every bit as much about how racism operates, as a beneficiary of Whiteness. And, as a basic White guy, it is my responsibility to ‘splain it to other basic White guys. It is my responsibility to invite them to join me dismantling those systems of oppression.   

So, join me!

To learn more about the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, check out the website, here, or follow my sister, Sarah Augustine on her Substack, here.