Overview: This article offers white-identified people an applied and cyclical list of practices for reckoning with our colonial lineage and healing the internalized patterns that sustain white supremacy. This piece highlights that white people’s internal healing is essential, not separate from, collective liberation and solidarity with BIPOC communities. Be gentle with yourself as you apply the list in your own life and find friends and family to partner with on many of the activities listed.

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For over 15 years, I was in the anti-racism, DEI space, fighting for justice and equity, in efforts to right the wrongs of our past and present ancestors and systems. But over time I found myself acting like the people I condemned, upholding the very things I wished would dissolve. I’ve spent many years educating myself, intellectualizing it, designing ways to compost the systems…and it’s all led back to me. To the internal ways in which I’ve held up colonialism and white supremacy inside myself.

It was in learning that we, as a racial group and ancestral lineage, have centuries of enacting violence against other European people – before we went out and stole and oppressed other groups – that I began to understand: “hurt people hurt people”. Generations of violence and oppression, separation from earth honoring practices, and a lack of culture point to a sickness deep inside the psyches and souls of “white people” that needs healing.  Since then, I’ve been doing internal and ancestral work — connecting with my emotions, tending the earth in generative ways, visiting the lands of my grandparents, listening for guidance from my ancestors, and gathering with community that holds me accountable along the way.

This list poured out of me a few years after I loosened my grip on ‘fighting racism and oppression,’ and turned inward instead. It is not a retreat from solidarity but rather the tap root that can feed it. I’ve come to believe healing my own disconnection, from myself, from my earth-honoring ancestors, and others is a part of how I stop causing harm and how I show up for our collective liberation. This list is my north star for healing. Each of us will have to repeat many of these steps, again and again, as the spiral of healing takes us deeper inward and toward a more regenerative future for us all.

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How We Heal From White Supremacy – from the inside out. 

Acknowledge its existence, study how it began and how it operates – on all levels – within yourself, your family structure, your work culture, in politics and colonial world cultures.  

Personally reflect on how You have been influenced by white supremacy. Ask yourself: How does it show up in my actions, my words, my behaviors, my patterns, my self talk, my relationships with others?  What do I believe about white people? What do I believe about People of the Global Majority? What do I feel entitled to?

Educate yourself on how it impacts People of the Global Majority and white people in different and similar ways. 

Reckon with your specific colonial lineage. Ask yourself, What lands were taken? Who, people and planet, were harmed? Which systems did your ancestors build or benefit from? This will help you understand what your own reparations work is being called to heal.

Move your body, drink water, spend time outside, read a book/listen to a podcast/watch a movie by a BIPOC creator. 

Gather with other white people to process your emotions around all of this and make commitments to change our patterns and hold ourselves and each other accountable.

Change your behaviors. Notice when you are perpetuating white supremacy and stop yourself in real time. When you notice how you have changed, acknowledge it – to yourself and with your white community only. (This is a life long loop, these patterns took centuries to build, they won’t be undone overnight)

Practice compassion for yourself and others, release judgments, and move from love. 

Restore your relationship with the Earth, study with teachers who help you remember that you are the earth, and therefore must treat this life giving planet with respect, not as a commodity to sell or buy, but as a cherished family member. 

Connect with your own Indigenous European roots – the land-based ancestors your family had before assimilating into whiteness. Educate and immerse yourself in those ancestral, land-based cultural and community practices around food, art, and land.

Engage in meaningful relationships with all kinds of people – coming from a place of respect, dignity, love and reciprocity. 

Look for ways to consensually make amends and reparations to people and groups, who suffer/ed because of our mistakes and the wrong doings of our ancestors. (Not all people wish to receive reparations from white people. Ask first, and offer what’s actually needed – not what you assume is wanted.)

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Thank you to those who have guided this work – the BIPOC people generous enough to teach me, and the fellow people of European descent who have supported my emotional growth and held me accountable. 

May we heal, and may that healing be of service to us all.

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