I asked for belonging... they gave me power

Pain, privilege, and the possibility of liberation

Autumn colors in Lithia Park, a short walk from my house

It’s election season. Six years after Trump and Brexit, with the stakes higher than ever—no exaggeration in the U.S. to say that democracy itself is on the ballot—and it feels like we’re stuck in the same false choices. Macron vs Le Pen in France. Bolsonaro vs Lula in Brazil. Netanyahu is back in Israel. A Marcos has returned to power in the Philippines, while Putin, Xi, Modi, Orban, Erdogan, Maduro, Ortega, and others still cling to power. We may yet have a Biden/Trump reprise in 2024.

I fear part of our ineffectiveness in responding to authoritarianism is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is animating it. Yes it’s about power. Yes it’s about belonging. But I think those two things are related, for those of us with privileged identities, in ways that we haven’t acknowledged as a culture. For me, it was this realization: I wanted belonging, and instead I got power: power as domination.

I think I’ve always known this, at some level. I’ve felt it in my body, going back to my earliest memories of childhood. But only recently did I give myself permission to acknowledge this truth. I felt two things at the same time: profound relief at finally being honest with myself… and embarrassment at the prospect of sharing it with someone else. Embarrassment because who can complain about being given power? Who wants to hear someone with all the privileges I have been given… lament the weight of that privilege?

But to me this insight is the missing piece in how we stem the rising tide of authoritarianism, and invite more people—particularly those now on the fence or even opposed to us—into our movements for justice.

TL;DR: If we are serious about justice, we have to be committed to transforming those contributing to injustice. This means understanding how people with privileged identities are also harmed by systems of oppression, and supporting them in navigating that trauma and grief. It means our movements for justice must invite people to join us on the basis of solidarity, not allyship: we must invite people to work for their own liberation. We have to be honest about the depth of transformation this moment requires, and offer a vision sufficiently attractive for people to take the risk of embarking on that journey with us. Belonging is the antidote to authoritarianism.

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Beyond narrative scarcity: space for all of us

Let me be clear: I am not saying that the suffering of people with “privileged” identities is more important than the suffering of those targeted by systems of oppression. I don’t want to center the pain of the privileged and further marginalize those who have already been subjugated. I do want to create space to hold their (our) suffering in addition to our rightful focus on those most marginalized: we can (and must) do both.

This is the fear of narrative scarcity: that if I listen to your story, there won’t be room for mine. White people are afraid that giving space (figurative and actual) to marginalized people will crowd us out: this is the zero-sum mentality animating fears of replacement. And people of color fear (justifiably!) that if white people are allowed to take up space in movements that we’ll dominate it, and crowd them out. In his new book, Anand Giridharadas quotes Linda Sarsour on the invitation here:

I’m not asking you to give up anything about yourself. I just want you to know that you have to figure out how to exist with my story.

Yes. In general social justice spaces have not grappled seriously with the crisis of masculinity, nor the distress of waking up to whiteness. This is understandable: in the very moment when historically marginalized people are finally being heard… to give the mic once again to people with privileged identities is a bitter pill. And yet create space we must, if we are serious about transformation and justice. As Mia Birdsong notes:

Truly preventing harm means that we have to support the transformation of those who perpetrate it.

If we want to respond to authoritarianism, we need to understand the “why”: it’s too facile to simply say people are afraid of losing power. This is the potential of what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “narrative plenitude”: telling diverse stories that can hold all of us in our pluralism.

Power vs belonging: a deal with the devil

This is the deal patriarchy makes with men; that white supremacy makes with white people; that colonialism makes with colonizers. Because these systems are set up as domination hierarchies, no one can have belonging: genuine relationship isn’t possible under oppression. But some can be elevated over others.

Instead of belonging, we (people who hold identities privileged by dominant cultures) are given power. Not the healthy expression of power-with, but the toxic expression of power-over: we can take a place in the hierarchy, but only by stepping on others. Terry Real said it well:

Under patriarchy, you can be connected, or you can be powerful, but you can't be both at the same time because power is power over, not power with, it’s dominance. So, if you move into power, you lose connection.

I would quibble with Real’s use of the conditional “if” here, because it implies that men (or people in privilege) are born into choice. We aren’t: like everyone born into oppressive systems, we are conscripted before we have an opportunity to consent. This doesn’t deprive us of agency or choice, but the choice we have is not whether to join… it’s whether to leave. We have the power to defect; what bell hooks called The Will to Change.

Cedar Barstow distinguishes between three types of power: Personal Power (which all of us have by birthright, a claim to dignity and significance); Role Power (dynamic and mutable, conferred by and tethered to a specific role — like teacher, police officer, etc.); and Status Power (which she defines as “personal power and influence that is culturally conferred,” nearly always connected to a group identity or culturally-valued attribute). People with identities privileged by our systems of oppression are given status power (unearned)… which serves as a sort of compensation for the deprivation of belonging.

This is the power and privilege we must let go of; this is what Peggy McIntosh had in mind when she observed “Privilege simply confers dominance.” But it doesn’t address the underlying suffering. As Wendell Berry notes:

If we removed the status and compensation from the destructive exploits we classify as “manly,” men would be found to be suffering as much as women. They would be found to be suffering for the same reason: they are in exile from the communion of men and women, which is their deepest connection with the communion of all creatures.

Beyond allyship: rethinking privilege

Something always rubbed me the wrong way about the discourse around “being an ally.” It wasn’t until I came across a line attributed to Australian indigenous activist Lilla Watson that it clicked:

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

It’s difficult to over-emphasize this point. Most of us well-intentioned white folks who get into social justice work do so because of our commitment to equity, and our desire to help others. That’s a great start, but it allows us not to situate ourselves in the struggle. It allows us to maintain the dangerous belief that these systems only harm “others.” It misunderstands how systems of oppression operate, and therefore how they can be dismantled.

By focusing on our privilege we mask our pain, and lose an important opportunity to work for our own liberation in solidarity, not mere allyship. This was the core insight of the Combahee River Collective, writing in 1977:

We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.

bell hooks remains best-in-class in her writings on patriarchy, where she is characteristically blunt about how men are impacted:

Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation… As long as men are brainwashed to equate violent domination and abuse of women with privilege, they will have no understanding of the damage done to themselves or to others, and no motivation to change.

This is how patriarchy gaslights men: it packages our pain (and the pain we cause others) as privilege; it renders us unable to acknowledge our wounds. I love Quanita Roberson’s work in this space. She explains:

We need to stop talking about white men as privileged…. that’s one of the things that’s most wounding for white men. They don’t know that they’re wounded… this idea that they’re privileged actually prevents them from healing.

I believe this insight can be the source of our collective liberation: it is the shared suffering of not-belonging that provides a universal basis for solidarity. I love Rev. angel Kyodo williams’ essay exploring this theme, where she invites us all to defect from the hierarchical logic of supremacy:

We get stuck on this notion of white privilege, or dominant privilege, as if the marginalized people want what the people with privilege have. But I want no part of it. I want no part of any illness that renders people unable to see the beauty of all of our differences, the beauty of my own mixed raced-ness, blackness, queerness, all of the things I am. I want no part of an illness that renders me unable to connect to love. That is not a privilege. So we have to begin by recognizing that the construct of white supremacy is an illness.

No one is free in a hierarchy: three sources of pain

I want to complicate our understanding of what is driving the authoritarian backlash today, by naming three distinct sources of suffering affecting people with privileged identities, none of which our mainstream discourse acknowledges. I like Rodney Evans’ reminder here: “no one is free in a hierarchy.”

1. Direct pain: this is about how patriarchy harms men (cutting us off from our emotions, from our capacity for vulnerability, for intimacy in relationship). It prevents the possibility of belonging. The primary emotion here is sadness.

2. Moral injury: this is the suffering we feel as a consequence of our awareness (often pushed into our subconscious) of how we harm others. I wrote a post on this phenomenon: it hurts people… to hurt other people. This is also about our relationship to non-human beings, and the anguish associated with recognizing our complicity in the mass extinction of biodiversity. The primary feeling (not quite an emotion?) here is guilt. (I think it is this feeling that is activated when we talk about “white tears” and “white fragility”).

3. Unnecessary pain: this probably isn’t the right term for it, but it’s the recognition that it doesn’t have to be this way, that our suffering (both that we experience and that we inflict on others) is gratuitous. We grudgingly live under the Faustian bargain because we didn’t know we had a choice. As we awake to the possibility that things could be different, as we cultivate the Will to Change… we must first feel this pain. The primary emotion here is grief.

Men aren’t socialized to express emotions, or really even to identify how we feel. And when we don’t see our pain named by dominant culture, it feels somehow unreal. The one thing we are allowed to feel is anger (which is nearly always a secondary emotion, masking the deeper truth that we don’t allow ourselves to feel).

My favorite exploration of the depth of nuance here is this incredible podcast episode with Nanci Luna Jimenez. She acknowledges the need for white people to express their pain… without unloading that pain on people of color or expecting them (BIPOC) to support our (white people) healing. And yet that pain must be acknowledged, and that healing must be supported. She explains:

There is a very legitimate real pain that white people have, that absolutely needs to be expressed, that needs to be felt that needs to be discharged. If it doesn’t get discharged or healed… it leads to things like Charlottesville.

As the saying goes: hurt people… hurt people. James Baldwin said it best:

If you ever want to get a glimpse of how men feel (without wandering into the dark chat rooms of 8chan), there is a truly beautiful sub-community that gathers in the YouTube comments sections of music and films that grapple seriously with the complexities and pain of masculinity under patriarchy. My favorites by far are the comments accompanying the climactic final scene in the pain-of-patriarchy film (cleverly disguised as an MMA movie) The Warrior. As one insightful anonymous man commented: “like Titanic, but for men.”

The late Chester Bennington, lead singer for Linkin Park, was the best in my generation at channeling this zeitgeist… because he was the embodiment of it (as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, struggling with addiction and depression; he committed suicide in 2017). The lyrics for Somewhere I Belong still feel like the anthem for what I’m trying to express here.

I wanna heal, I wanna feel,

What I thought was never real

I wanna let go of the pain I've held so long…

I will never feel anything else, until my wounds are healed

I wanna find something I've wanted all along

Somewhere I belong

A collective container for grief…

One of the things that feels so powerful about BIPOC-centered movements for justice in the last decade is the clarion call for us—those of us with privileged identities—to bear witness to the suffering our “privilege” has allowed us to ignore. To their great credit, these movements recognize that the challenges are systemic. At their best, these movements are seeking to transform systems, not blame isolated individuals. They are asking, rightly, for those of us who have been conferred “status power” to give up that power: to re-distribute it. And they are insisting—rightly—that we attend to their pain, and commit to repair. Apology is necessary but insufficient: the goal must be to change systems.

They’re also doing something else important: the movements themselves are providing a container for grief and trauma healing. The grief in BIPOC communities is doubly painful by virtue of being unacknowledged. This is the unique pain of “disenfranchised grief,” defined as “grief that is not acknowledged or accepted by society at large.”

This to me is one of the most significant differences between the movements of the last ten years and the last big wave of social movements in the late 1960s: we are recognizing the inner dimensions of transformation, and the need for healing at an individual and interpersonal level. The need to acknowledge grief in order that we can collectively process it, and heal. Here again Quanita’s work is revelatory. She reminds us that “grief is not an event, it’s a relationship.” She explains:

Grief requires community because you will never go to the bottom of your grief alone, because you fear you might drown in it.

And leaders of color are rising to that challenge, creating intentional community containers and cultivating capacity to hold and express grief and heal trauma. I’m inspired for example by Malkia Devich Cyril’s work to build a “radical loss” movement, recognizing the transformative potential of grief in service of justice. I also resonate with Valarie Kaur’s work around “revolutionary love” where she devotes an entire module to reckoning with grief. She reminds us:

We come to know people when we grieve with them… It is how we can build real solidarity.

Those of us with privileged identities have been slower on the uptake: we’re lagging when it comes to creating community containers for our grief, in part because—per above— we haven’t collectively acknowledged our suffering. Our grief remains disenfranchised.

Here’s the thing. People with privileged identities are in crisis, and their (our) inability to process and express their suffering in healthy ways is destroying the body politic. It is both self-destructive (as Jonathan Metzl evocatively describes in “Dying of Whiteness”) and the primary impediment to our movements for justice. As Quanita reminds us:

Anger is unfelt personal grief; rage is unfelt collective grief.

Our disenfranchised grief has been weaponized into a politics of grievance that targets minoritized identities for violence (no accident that mass shootings are nearly always perpetrated by men, and usually white men) and increasingly is willing to embrace authoritarianism.

…and belonging: The Will to Change

Transformation is necessary… but uncomfortable. It means our invitation to transformation must be compelling. As Michele Lisenbury Christenson notes:

The potential payoff for transformation has to exceed the cost, or we will do everything we can to avoid the discomfort.

It’s difficult to overstate how significant this transformation is. I loved the two-part interview recently with Anand Giridharadas on Brené Brown’s podcast, where he said what I’ve long felt:

If we’re honest with ourselves, we are really asking tens of millions of people to have a different life conception of themselves, to sever themselves from certain sources of esteem that were really meaningful to them… we need a lot of people to come to different understandings of themselves.

(I would argue that we all have to go through this transformation, not only those of us with privileged identities). We have to honor how significant this shift truly is. And I would go farther. I was struck by Sherri Mitchell’s comment recently:

[People] are experiencing a dismantling of their ways of being, which is calling into question their ways of knowing.

This is what I was trying to get at in my last post about the need for roots. This moment is demanding a fundamental transformation of our identities, our ways of behaving, and our ways of making sense of the world. It’s a seismic shift, and many people are left feeling unmoored, and rudderless.

This is the key point: in this state, people HAVE to grab onto something. Studies of authoritarianism have consistently found that one of the strongest predictors of what Karen Stenner has called an “authoritarian predisposition” is intolerance of ambiguity: a need for certainty, control, and predictability. Which means that people susceptible to authoritarianism are uniquely ill-suited to this moment, which is characterized by rapid change, complexity, and uncertainty.

We therefore HAVE to offer them something. Or, as Tim Hollo reminds us:

If we aren’t actively building the new institutions to replace the old ones, the answer is ready and waiting for us: authoritarianism.

This is the invitation to transformation. Sometimes I fear we’re so focused on what we’re asking people to give up (unjust power and privilege, rightfully) that we forget to invite them into the liberation of what we’re offering: belonging. Malkia recognizes that grief can be a source of radicalization: toward rage and resentment, or toward justice. What makes the difference, Malkia argues, is belonging.

If we can understand that everyone is experiencing grief, a type of loss, real and perceived, then that changes how we think about justice… it requires that we place more emphasis in our movements on belonging… If [unacknowledged] grief is the root cause of resentment and radicalization, then belonging is the medicine.

Belonging is what stabilizes us on turbulent seas; it provides both moorage (roots) and rudder (direction). It is how we navigate this moment together.

Building belonging amid uncertainty

Practically, what does this mean? On the eve of the midterms here in the U.S., how do we translate this understanding into action?

I think there are three areas where we need to do better:

1. We have to be honest about the magnitude of the transformation. Let’s be real about what the climate crisis demands: a wholesale transformation of the entire global economy. Anand calls the need in this moment “one of the great revolutions of consciousness in human history”…. and I think he’s right. I think most people understand this, at some deep level: it is our job to support them in their sense-making.

2. We have to make the invitation to transformation irresistible, to embolden people to confront their discomfort. We need to have a compelling vision… one that can help chart a course toward the transformation we so urgently need.

3. We have to create containers to support transformation: the caterpillar cannot become a butterfly without entering the chrysalis. We have to support people in their grief: the grief that comes with acknowledging the pain they feel and the pain they have caused, as well as the grief that accompanies letting go of certainty and old ways of being.

The good news is, we are doing all of these things. Increasingly our movements are calling the question, and even inching into mainstream discourse: Anand was saying those things on Brené Brown’s podcast, reaching millions of listeners.

We are finally reckoning with the need for bigger and bolder visions, ones that are inviting. Anand profiles the work of communications strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio, who reminds us to “paint the dream,” to “sell the brownie, not the recipe.” Yes! For a powerful example of what this looks like practically in the electoral context, I love this new ad she produced with Way to Win for the midterms (I have my critiques of the Democratic Party, but at least it believes in democracy):

The point of this post is to highlight the need for more work in the third category: containers for belonging and transformation, particularly for people struggling to shed privilege. There is a lot of progress: the emergence of men’s groups, of groups to support white people in reckoning with whiteness, but we haven’t yet managed to carve out sufficient cultural space for this need, particularly in our movements. And many of the containers that do exist still make the mistake of offering allyship instead of inviting us into solidarity.

I’m curious if readers outside the U.S. are aware of similar work in different contexts: are there groups emerging to support Hindu men in letting go of Hindu nationalism and embracing a pluralist multi-religious India? What is the antidote to someone like Modi? Who is building belonging at the scale necessary?

Beyond victim vs oppressor: the promise of belonging

This is how we defeat authoritarianism: we can offer people belonging.

Here’s the thing: we all like to see ourselves as “good.” We like to be the heroes of our own stories. Yet as we reckon with the uncomfortable reality that our identities are shaped through oppression (those of us born into a “privileged” position in domination hierarchies), it becomes harder to see ourselves as heroes, or even as “good.” To me this is at the heart of the rise of authoritarianism, and explains the popularity of people like Joe Rogan. A profile in the Atlantic explains:

Like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic.

The dominant discourse in social justice spaces, unfortunately, has tended to paint people of privilege as oppressors. This stance makes individuals responsible for systems (blaming men for patriarchy, e.g.), and prompts defensiveness and resistance. Anand writes, channeling work emerging from the field of cult-deprogramming:

To make people feel stupid [or evil] is to play back to them a version of themselves they don’t recognize.

Meanwhile, far-right movements paint people with privileged identities as victims. This is the false binary in dominant discourse: oppressor (your role is to get out of the way or join as an ally) or victim. Here’s the problem: if the choice is victim or oppressor, most people will choose victim. I laughed out loud at this brilliant skewering of this dilemma for social-justice-minded white men… it went viral because we recognize the uncomfortable truth it satirizes (thank to Amy Henes for the share).

verygayclown

A post shared by Nicholas Scheppard (@verygayclown)

There is of course another option that declines to accept the binary of victim or oppressor. It’s the possibility of solidarity, and a recognition that we have agency, that we are capable of transformation. That it doesn’t have to be this way. Emily Nagoski names the possibility here:

We have been lied to all our lives, and when you reckon with that it creates a lot of grief, but also a lot of space for celebration because that means we can be different.

Preparing for the future: asserting agency

The answer, of course, is belonging. I like Shannan Martin’s answer here (quoted by Courtney Martin, no relation):

When we make the switch and reorient our identities around community, all of us in this together, we realize there’s enough for everyone.

This to me is the key difference for how we are preparing for the future. Communities of color and those historically marginalized are tending to turn toward each other: to practice solidarity to survive—and hopefully flourish—in the coming storms. I loved this podcast interview with Chris Begley aptly titled “Prepping for the Apocalypse Means Building Community,” where Kelly Hayes reminds us:

Our mutual investment in one another’s survival is our greatest resource, and our greatest hope.

It’s a beautiful reflection on what this moment asks of us, what is possible inside of it, and how we can create the world we long for even amid great uncertainty. I like James Clear’s line here:

The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario, but a mindset that can handle uncertainty.

White people, men, and those with historically privileged identities are doubling down on the same worldviews that have driven us to the brink: a narrow reliance on individualism, buying guns, and building bunkers. Jeremy Adam Smith explains:

Stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

The problem with victimhood and allyship (the dominant identities on offer on the far-right and social justice left, respectively) is that neither involve real agency. And we need to act: belonging alone isn’t enough, we also need significance. This to me is the most compelling explanation for the emergence of conspiracy theories like QAnon, and even some of the anti-abortion fervor: they offer ordinary people a chance to be heroes. To defend children from (imagined) sex-trafficking rings, to defend the “unborn.” Much more psychologically appealing than dealing with a far more complex reality. Nicolas Guilhot’s essay remains insightful on this phenomenon:

The proliferation of conspiracy theories reflects the dismal poverty of a political culture that fails millions of individuals confronted with the loss of their world… We need to recover a political capacity to throw bridges across a cataclysmic present. This can only start with reconstructing the vision of a common world and an inclusive future for all those who are losing theirs.

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I will close here with a reminder of how far we’ve come. In ten years millions of Americans have cultivated for the first time an understanding of white supremacy, and whiteness. Fatherhood has transformed: my generation is engaged in child-rearing in a way that’s unrecognizable to previous generations. In fewer than ten years we’ve largely normalized therapy. We are capable of transformation.

I’ll give the last word here to the folks at Race Forward, reminding us of our task:

We must move a majority of people to imagine and act to create a world that does not yet exist. In order to make this world a reality, we need to orient ourselves toward the world we want to win, and make this future tangible and irresistible to a majority.

As always, I’m curious what resonates, what doesn’t, and what resources you’re finding inspiring as you navigate this moment.