Overview: From 2019-2022, Roan Coughtry and Wren (Jen) Willsea served as the tenders of the “white branch of humanity” for the Decolonize Race Project. This writing is our effort to capture how this experience reshaped us and our relationship to our whiteness. We extend deep gratitude to all of our Decolonize Race colleague friends, and to all of the white people who participated in the cohorts we hosted in 2021 and 2024, where much of what we write about here came alive.

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Something amiss in our movements 

In 2019, we were yearning for something that neither of us could quite describe, and quite honestly we were hesitant to speak about it out loud. We had both been involved since the early ‘00s in activism, various forms of organizing, and justice work in movements, from prison abolition to wealth redistribution to sexual liberation. After years of training in antiracism workshops, and after leading many of these workshops ourselves, something big felt amiss.

The racial justice work we had been involved in thus far was often fueled by white guilt, shame, performance anxiety, somatic disassociation, and reactivity to Black and Brown peoples’ rage. We saw these patterns again and again in the groups we were part of, as well as in ourselves. White people, including ourselves, were repeatedly disavowing power while still wielding it in clumsy and harmful ways. There was a lot of dehumanization – white people dehumanizing BIPOC folks (a hallmark of white supremacy), dehumanizing ourselves, dehumanizing each other, and at times also being dehumanized by BIPOC folks. We felt ourselves and the movements we were a part of accepting all of this as natural, or even an acceptable and a right end-goal. 

What do we mean by white people dehumanizing ourselves and each other? 

For the first 20 years of my antiracism work, I related to my white settler lineage primarily with shame and guilt, and to whiteness as essential wrongness. My sense of who I was and who I came from was constrained to the last 400 years of settlers on the North American continent; everything that came before and after that was a big blank spot in my imagination and awareness. As if the before and after, the better times, the beautiful cultures before European colonialism and after the fall of white supremacy belonged to everyone else. Not to me, and not for those of us who are now considered white. I was relating to myself and other white people as wrong, and to BIPOC as right. I deserve nothing, they deserve everything. We’re bad, they’re good. A thoroughly either/or mindset. A dehumanizing stance toward myself and other white people is what it was, as painful and difficult as that was to admit to myself. Essentialist too! And dehumanizing toward BIPOC. No group of people is all right or all wrong. (Wren)

If we as white people are dehumanizing ourselves, treating each other (and the earth) with an underlying belief in the lie of separation, aren’t we just repeating the core myth of oppression (that there must be a natural order of better than/less than, superior/inferior), and the logics of colonialism? How does this get anyone freer? If we’re doing this to ourselves and each other as white people, how can we possibly engage with BIPOC people and BIPOC-led movements without replicating the same dynamics, even when they’re disguised as “accountability” or “following the lead of BIPOC”?

When white anti-racist action is primarily coming from a sense of worthlessness or emptiness – as is to be expected, because this is what whiteness does! – we risk doing more harm than good. White people joining and engaging in movements so often feels frantic, lacking roots in a spiritual or somatic ground, and undercurrents of meaningful change can feel small and sporadic. It feels more akin to acrobats making an elaborate display over a floor of sand – or spectators hiding frozen in a corner – than sustained or grounded action.

We began to identify and name patterns we had experienced in social justice movements and white antiracist culture – what we came to call “dominant social justice culture” – that we each found deeply troubling. And we began to formulate questions, like: How have we as white people been harming ourselves and each other in the name of “anti-racism” work? How are dominant movement cultures setting us up to fail at accountability, or recreating some of what we are trying to end in the world? How and when might anti-racism movement work simply be a weapon or expression of self-hate? 

And in contrast to this: how do we create a white anti-racist culture that is so life-giving that it’s inviting to all? What becomes possible when white anti-racist work is rooted in wholeness? 

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Trying something different: starting from a place of wholeness 

Our ability to articulate any of this today is largely due to the work we did together in the Decolonize Race Project, starting in 2019. 

Decolonize Race was founded by a small “multiracial group of race transformation practitioners dreaming of a different way, after decades of experiencing how our movement struggles, involving issues of race, often led to breakdowns in relationships and an exodus from the movements we love. What if the starting point and endgame of our work was to cultivate wholeness and repair relationships within and between the branches of humanity? Starting from a place of deep love, our goal was to tackle racism by centering healing and transformation at the individual, group and movement levels and to create tools that could be used by movement leaders locally and internationally.” 

This founding dream of Decolonize Race spoke directly to our yearning, so when we were invited to join the project, our yes was 1000%. At the same time, we held big questions about what cultivating wholeness might look like for – and require of – white people. Being invited into Decolonize Race, taking three-plus years to ask and explore its core questions alongside our Black/African American, Indigenous/Native American, Latinx, Asian American & Pacific Islander, SWANA (SouthWest Asian and North African), and Mixed Race colleagues and friends, opened up a pathway toward a radically more grounded approach to our antiracism work, and a radically more grounded relationship to our whiteness. 

Wholeness, for us, means that despite all the brokenness of whiteness and the violence of white supremacy, we are a valuable part of the interconnected web of beings on this planet. No matter how disconnected we may feel, or how complex or severed our connections to our humanity, to the land, and to our fellow human and more-than-human beings, those connections remain available for us to tune into. Wholeness is the belief and felt sense that I am part of something bigger than myself, that my existence is inherently valuable, and that my body holds wisdom. Wholeness is a fundamental rejection of all systems of ranking better than/less than. 

In the context of whiteness, wholeness is also about embracing all aspects of self and ancestral lineage: the horrific, the beautiful, and the mundane. Embracing does not mean accepting as right, and in no way relieves us from accountability for the legacies we’ve inherited. In many ways, we’ve witnessed white activists being very keen – for better or worse – to focus only on the horrific in their lineage, and to take accountability at all costs. When done without a sense of wholeness, though, this is little more than self-flaggelation (and in many cases, is simply perpetuating the mechanisms of shame and punishment we’ve inherited through these same lineages), and does little to create grounded, sustainable, society-wide change. Wholeness requires us to embrace the full picture: not only the harms many of our ancestors committed, but the medicine that’s hidden in our lineages prior to (and even throughout) their absorption into whiteness; the resistance fighters in our past; the average families who made hard choices for survival; the bystanders who did nothing; and the thousands of everyday, mundane human lives that came before us. 

Wholeness requires us to sit with the grey, the ambiguity, the both/and, with an embodied realization that the truth – and our path to liberation – is far more complex than a binary right vs. wrong. 

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Unflattening whiteness: a path to ancestral recovery 

A core indigenous worldview that Decolonize Race held sacred is that actions in the present can repair the harms of seven generations past and have the potential of healing seven generations into the future. Back in 2019, we wondered what acting from this worldview could be like for us, as it seemed crucial to cultivating wholeness. At that time, our spiritual practices, our work with ancestors, and our antiracism work had not yet been integrated in an intentional way: for Wren, ancestral reckoning was part of her anti-racism work, though still mostly separate from her spiritual practices; Roan had long-established practices of spiritually-based ancestral work, which they could not yet find a place for in dominant social justice spaces. 

I’ve always been quite private about my spiritual life; it’s something very personal to me, and not something I often engage with in groups. I also haven’t been drawn to many spiritual communities, because they often lack a social justice framework that to me is non-negotiable. I’d developed my own rich spiritual and ancestral practice over the decades, but it was something I kept very separate from movement spaces, and was not particularly “out” about. Even though this practice fundamentally informed my understanding of history and lineage, and collective trauma, and my own whiteness, and paths toward healing and liberation, I didn’t feel there was a place for it in dominant social justice culture. Partly because it necessitated a very nuanced, complex, and inherently humanizing framework. More often than not, my somatic shape in social justice spaces was one of anxiety and making myself small; which was the antithesis of what my spiritual and ancestral practices required of me. I was yearning for spaces where I could bring my full self and all of the complexities I knew to be true, to be in and grapple with that complexity with others, but I didn’t know how to bridge these worlds for myself. When Decolonize Race came along, it felt like an opportunity to do this: to practice embodying the thing I was yearning for and bringing these worlds together. (Roan)

Being part of DR opened up an opportunity for us individually and together to start practicing ancestral recovery in an antiracist and decolonial/anticolonial way. It has been refreshing, enlivening, and stretchy to be in this inquiry with each other, and to engage cohorts of white people along with us.

Ancestral recovery for white people means grappling with our histories, the multiple, overlapping and disparate ancestral lines that get erased within the monolith of U.S. whiteness, and tending toward what needs healing. Because our people colonized each other within Eurasia before they began colonizing peoples who became racialized as “non-white”. After all, “race is colonialism speaking,” as Patrick Wolfe said. Just between the two of us, we have English, Scottish and Irish ancestry, along with many others. While not knowing all the details of the individuals in our bloodlines, we know that the people we now call Scottish and Irish were colonized by the English, forced off their lands, severed from their languages. We also know that on the land we now call England, the Roman Empire forever altered ways of kinship and trade that had existed there for centuries – all long before the British Empire was conceived. These are just two examples of the tangle that is now whiteness. 

What does accountability between and among white people look like, feel like, make possible? This feels like an underdeveloped area of work; we are so accustomed to considering our accountability to BIPOC people, that we don’t often turn toward each other and grapple with the unhealed traumas we hold within and across our own lineages. What healing is needed among us, when it comes to the layered impacts of religion, ethnicity, class, and the myriad other ways in which hegemony, resource hoarding, and discrimination have played out over the centuries? What kind of reckoning and healing is needed within our individual bodies and what we hold in our bloodlines? How do these wounds continue to play out in the dominant social justice culture that many of us have been practicing today? 

This is why unflattening whiteness has become one of the core practices in our work. We can’t contribute toward a future beyond whiteness without re-membering more of the variety of relationships that people now racialized as white have had with colonialisms, empires, economies, languages, religions, lands, and waters. We come from vastly different cultures, despite the flattening effects of whiteness. These differences contain crucial ingredients for our work.

I’m sitting in a small, barely-heated room in the Dunkineely Community Center in Co. Donegal, Ireland, and about to log onto Zoom. Wren and I have spent so many hours over so many days prepping how we will hold this space, and it’s time to open the circle. I had not planned to be here, on this ancestral land, while doing this exact work, but it’s how life in the pandemic has unfolded. It is right, in a way I couldn’t have anticipated or planned. That morning I’d sat out by the coast, talking to the rocks. Listening to the ocean. Re-membering through the land. Now in this small room, I’ve set up a simple altar, and I feel the presence of several of my ancestors. Not just Irish ones, but English ones too, and ones I don’t yet know. The ones who are here with me, they are all grateful. This work doesn’t pick and choose who it heals. (Roan)     

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Prioritizing relationships, leading with vulnerability 

Starting in 2019, the two of us built (and continue to tend) a relationship beyond posturing, urgency, or perfectionism. Slowly and methodically, we built enough trust with each other to explore places where we disagreed, to share and hold each other’s insecurities, to name questions that felt taboo for white anti-racists to ask. We slowed down enough to truly open up, and allowed ourselves to experience a substantial level of vulnerability and intimacy in anti-racist work. 

We find it’s common for this kind of relational connection to be absent or skipped over for white people who are invested in the work: we often live in the “shoulds”, the rules of “good anti-racism”, wearing masks to hide our vulnerability from each other. These masks, from our experience, have held white people back from our capacity to do our most powerful work. They’re a distraction. Something changed when we invited and committed to intimacy from an intentional, grounded place – not as an abstract goal, but as something central and necessary to the work.

After two years of this kind of relational deepening, alongside ongoing work with the multiracial Decolonize Race team, we took these practices into our outward-facing work. 

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Experimenting in community

The Decolonize Race Project culminated in each “branch of humanity” creating its own external offering amongst their people. The experiment we took on at the end of the project was inviting a cohort of white people to gather. We brought together white-identified individuals from across North America (prioritizing a mix of healers, artists, organizers, and facilitators with years of experience in racial justice work) to do a deep-dive into the roots of colonization among our peoples, and what is needed to heal and transform patterns of harm and imagine a future of thriving for all.

Since then, we’ve held two gatherings: the first in 2021 (“Decolonize Race Gathering for White/European Americans”), and another in 2024 (“Decolonizing Whiteness: A Paradox Worth Diving Into”). Both took place over zoom, gathering a small cohort for six sessions over the course of six weeks. While the curriculum evolved, the core questions of our work remained the same.

Years after our first offering in 2021, we still remark to each other that it was the most loving, vulnerable, and intimate gathering of white people focused on whiteness, race, and racism that either of us had experienced up to that point. We remember being nervous to raise the questions we were holding with other “radical white people,” but when the group of 19 of us gathered that first time, the questions held a strong resonance. There was a shared desire and willingness to be open and to move, with love and rigor, consistently toward wholeness. The defensiveness, performativity, shame, guilt, comparison, and all the other things we were so used to experiencing within anti-racist groups of white people – these were simply not there, not to any meaningful level. There was a leaning in that occurred, a willingness to be real and authentic with ourselves and with each other. To be complicated and imperfect, to have nuanced thoughts and feelings about things. To not know the answers. To not crunch ourselves down into two-dimensionality, and to not two-dimensionalize each other, even in hard conversations. 

One of my go-to texts when the word “decolonize” is invoked is the 2012 essay “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. I hosted a “fireside chat” as one of the opt-in side gatherings to discuss it. I had read the piece many times, I had thorough notes, I had talking points ready. What surprised me when we got together was that intellectual discussion of the article wasn’t what was most needed. What surfaced in our small group was fear, and the vulnerability of facing the unknown. It was palpable and there weren’t many words available for it. Tuck and Yang describe decolonization as unsettling. This moment felt like a breakthroughfelt breakthrough to me. We, a group of white people far from new to multiracial movement work or radical theory, were able to be present to that unsettledness together – the felt sense of it, more than the idea of it. If this question doesn’t evoke some fear for us, then we have to wonder if we’re being honest with ourselves: Is there a future for European-descended settlers on North American lands? (Wren)

Although we chose to gather virtually, we made every effort to queer the space so that it wasn’t a workshop, retreat, training, seminar, or any similar structure. Borrowing from Roan’s experience with a Jam tradition, we both participated fully in everything we led participants through. We centered somatic body practices, time outdoors and offscreen in nature, relational building, and ritual alongside rich facilitated discussions. We spent time with the land listening to ancestors, and co-created spiritual practices together from our shared and differing lineages. 

Together, we tried stepping more fully into – and healing our relationship with – our power, in big and small ways. While white supremacy will teach us the most distorted, harmful, and exploitative ways of wielding power over others, dominant social justice culture can inadvertently lead us to disavowing our power as white people and getting small, which is also not helpful to our movements. What would it look like if we as white anti-racist activists were in right relationship to power, and showed up accordingly? 

This work taught us so much about what it means to love, humanize, and be embodied within ourselves as people who have been socialized as white, while strengthening authentic relationship and love with others who have been socialized the same. It felt grounding in a new way that our bodies hadn’t experienced before.

It’s our fourth gathering. There’s a gif on the screen of a crackling fire, with all of our names spread in a circle around it. It’s the closest we can get, virtually, to sitting around a fire together. We frame the session: this is a ritual for our grief, and our joy. Because these things are not binary, and liberation requires both. It is October; we are in a season of shedding and release, as well as gathering and preserving. What are we laying on the fire, and what can we gather from the ashes? 

A participant shares a song. It moves some of us to tears, makes some of us want to dance. Another participant tells a story, and we laugh. Someone else says something out loud they’ve been pondering and don’t have an answer to. We are thoughtful. Someone sings an ancestral song, and their voice seems to echo forward and back in time. This goes on for a while: sitting in each others’ company, listening, occasionally speaking, across coasts and continents and yet energetically present with each other on the deepest of levels, as the ritual holds us. As grief flows, it creates more space for joy; and as joy flows, it creates space for our grief. 

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What might cultivating wholeness make possible? 

We’re coming up on five years now since our first offering, and this work has set into motion so many transformations in our lives. We’ve answered some questions, and uncovered countless others along the way. For instance, how does this spiritual, somatic, and ancestral healing among white folks translate into multiracial spaces, in terms of both tangible reparations and rematriation, as well as more trusting and authentic relationships across race? At a time when everything feels increasingly urgent, is slowing down to do this root-level work the right move?

While we don’t yet know the answers, we know that our work with ourselves and with other white people is now able to reach a level of depth that it couldn’t when antiracism and ancestral repair were separate threads of inquiry and practice.

There is so much ancestral healing that is needed among white folks. In the shape of tending to the harms our ancestors caused; in the shape of tending to the harms that have been inflicted on and between our ancestors; in dispossession from land, separation from language, severing of indigeneity that happened through migration and displacement over centuries. There is profound spiritual healing that is needed, as whiteness has no spiritual feet, and actively tries to cut off the roots of any kind of spirituality outside of the worshipping of whiteness and power and money. There is somatic healing that is needed, in helping us to re-embody ourselves, these bodies we have been taught to distrust and disavow and constantly try not to feel. There is land-based healing that is needed, to learn and/or remember what some of our ancestors knew about how to live in reciprocal relationship with all living and (so-called) non-living beings around us. 

What might become possible for multiracial movements if more white people’s actions are rooted in a sense of wholeness – one that holds with care the complexity of lineage before whiteness, alongside the horrorful realities of whiteness as it operates now, while dreaming of a future beyond it?

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