Overview: Framed within the context of my own journey toward healing my relationship to whiteness, this piece briefly explores the historical construction of “whiteness” as a racialized category, the experience of European ancestors (pre and post immigration), the costs of assimilation, and the necessity of ancestral healing to the work of racial justice and social transformation.

The piece is excerpted and adapted from Soul Medicine for a Fractured World, Orbis Books (2026).

---

My relationship to my own whiteness has, for most of my life, been an uneasy one. As the product of an interfaith marriage between a Jewish father and Christian mother, at times growing up I was ostracized and excluded from friendship groups for having Jewish heritage, and at others times for not being Jewish enough. I was repelled by the cruelty and arrogance in the behavior of many of my white peers toward anyone perceived as “other,” echoing the dynamics of the larger society. In my 30s I dove into anti-racism work, critical race theory, and critical whiteness studies. I developed the political analysis, but my heart remained closed toward white people. And you can’t truly understand something, let alone heal or transform it, from a place of disdain. In January 1996 I wrote to a friend: 

Despite understanding the necessity to claim and address my own ancestry, I am ashamed of these kinfolk because of their whiteness. It’s hard to write these words, to acknowledge my hypocrisy and all its implications. . . . Yet knowing that until I can embrace my white relations with an open heart, I will always reject an essential and inescapable part of self, and my capacity to work for change will be hampered. 

It took another 15 years before I intentionally began to do the work that I had tried for so long to avoid—to heal my relationship to whiteness and soften my heart. But I held so many questions: What was it that caused white people to behave in ways so contradictory to Life? What allowed so many of us to be abusive toward other human beings, toward Nature and all creation? How did we get that way? Inquiry into what’s behind someone’s behavior—whether an individual or a group—can open the door to insight and even empathy. So often we cause harm out of unhealed wounds we may not even be aware of. Recognizing this does not excuse the harm, but it allows us to approach it in a different way, one more likely to facilitate change.

I began to explore my own ancestral lineage more intently than I had before; not just where each of my grandparents came from, but why they came and what their lives may have been like both in their home countries and as immigrants to the US. Their experiences were a lens into the lives of others. Many Europeans came to North America escaping something—religious or ethnic persecution, hunger, poverty, war, displacement. The journey over land and then by sea was long, dangerous, and costly. Like so many of today’s immigrants, it was often a courageous choice of extremity made when the unknown dangers of the trip seemed preferable to the certain dangers of staying in place. Their stories included assimilation into whiteness and the insidious costs of that—a loss of connection to culture, language, and place and, for many, an existential feeling of unbelonging.¹ 

Then I went back further in time, to look at the traumas experienced by the masses of European peasantry at the hands of empires seeking absolute domination over people and land. Especially ruthless was the persecution, extermination, and forced conversion of peoples on the European continent who practiced a Nature-based spirituality. Learning about the barbarity of the Inquisition, the witch burnings, and the Crusades helped me to view the consciousness we now call “whiteness” as a spiritual malformation, a dangerous malady in need of soul healing. 

Resmaa Menakem, a psychotherapist and expert on racial trauma, points out that every torturous and horrific thing white-bodied people did (and do) to Black, Indigenous and other people of color (who he refers to as “bodies of culture”) we first did to other white people. He notes, 

During the Middle Ages in Europe, torture, mutilation, and other forms of savagery particularly on women were seen as normal aspects of life. Public executions were literally a spectator sport. As a result, when European ‘settlers’ first came to this country centuries ago, they brought a millennium of inter-generational and historical trauma with them . . . stored in the cells of their bodies.^⁠2 

One of the ways human beings survive trauma is through numbing and disassociation. Is this what has so inured white people to the suffering of others, and allowed us to override our humanity to enact centuries of unimaginable cruelty? What began as the abuses of empire elites against the populous has been normalized in white culture as socially acceptable violence, persecution, and punishment. There is a lineage of ancestral trauma among people of European descent that must be addressed for racial justice and social transformation to be possible, and a reclamation of belonging to Earth and ancestors needed for the souls of white-identified people to heal.

Prior to the late 1600’s there were no “white people.” Europeans were identified by their national ethnicities—English and French, Irish, German, or Dutch—and before that as Gaul, Saxon, Celtic, Norse, and so forth. Their lives were largely defined by the rigid categories of gender, religion, and position in the hierarchy of economic status and pedigree. 

A legal contrivance of colonial capitalism, whiteness was used to consolidate wealth and power among one small subset of the population at the expense of others. It was strategically deployed to drive a wedge between white-bodied indentured servants and the Africans and Native Americans they lived and labored alongside, to prevent their joint uprising against the owning class minority. The token elevation of white workers was used to justify the permanent heritable enslavement of Africans, and create a perpetual source of unpaid labor. 

A series of 15^th century papal bulls, known as the Doctrine of Discovery, provided religious and legal sanction for enslavement, colonization, and the extermination of the Indigenous population. The Doctrine permitted Christian Europeans to “discover” and lay claim to any lands not already inhabited by Christians, and to kill or enslave its “pagan” inhabitants.³ 

Pause for a moment here, take a breath and let that sink in. The impacts are devastating.  

*

As immigrants arrived to what is now the US, becoming “white” meant not only surrender of ethnic culture, but the surrender of ancestral traditions and the Indigenous spiritual lifeways of their homelands. All of us come from people who at one time lived in a primary relationship with the land. Some of us are further separated from that ancestral connection than others, but our relationship with beyond-human life doesn’t cease just because we have forgotten. The land-based spirituality of pre-Christian Europe holds many similarities to that of Indigenous peoples everywhere. All are rooted in Nature and honor the sacred wholeness of Life.^4⁠ 

The suppression of Indigenous European spirituality is a violent erasure on its own, pre-dating trans-Atlantic immigration. Assimilation into Christian whiteness (whether by force or by choice) meant severing the power and belonging inherent in being grounded in a lineage of people and place. Perhaps this feeling of disconnection is part of what drives the callousness of white supremacy. Belonging confers a feeling of responsibility, accountability, and even love for who or what we belong to. It provides a sense of context and meaning. 

It’s helpful for white-bodied people to remember that the majority of our ancestors lived before white supremacy, before fracture from the Earth. We can reclaim our lost connections, call on those ancestors to guide and partner with us in the work of healing and liberation. I believe they are calling on us, in these times, to be the agents of repair, transforming the lineage of harm so that it will not continue to be perpetuated.  

Footnotes:

1. Not all Europeans were accepted into whiteness in the beginning—Irish, Italians, and Jews were among those excluded and each regarded as a separate inferior race. But over time they, too, were brought into the fold as a way to build the numbers and increase the power base of whiteness, and to pre-empt their making common cause with Black and other people of color in movements for social and economic justice. ↩︎
2. Resmaa Mekakem, “Healing Your Thousand-Year-Old Trauma,” posted 6.7.18 at https://medium.com/@rmenakem/healing-our-thousand-year-old-trauma-d815009ae93 ↩︎
3. The legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery continues to impose devastating impacts around the world. Learn more: https://aila.ngo/issues/doctrine-of-discovery ↩︎
4. For more on this see:  Lyla June Johnston, “The Story of How Humanity Fell in Love with Itself Once Again,” https://whiteawakearchive.org/2018/01/31/the-vast-and-beautiful-world-of-indigenous-europe ; John Philip Newel, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World (HarperOne/ HarperCollins Publishers, 2021); Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (HarperCollins Publishers, 1987). Also of interest: https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/european-paganism-and-christianization 
   ↩︎

---