We Need to Look in the Mirror and Ask Ourselves What it Means to be White

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Marie Forleo put out an apology for how she violently silenced Black women in her B School who were calling attention to the police murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and too many others.

She admits that she was wrong to close commenting which silenced the Black women in the group and that she handled it horrendously. But she still got a key foundation of dismantling white supremacy wrong. She writes, “The fact is, Black people cannot separate their business from their race or any other aspect of their lives. Any business that has people of color as customers has a responsibility to acknowledge, respect, and embrace that.”

She’s missing it. She’s not wrong. But she’s missing where she fits in all of this.

She needs to look at herself. As white people, the fact is we cannot separate our business, or any aspect of our lives, from OUR race. As leaders, we have a responsibility to acknowledge, address, and challenge how our attachment to whiteness shows up.

“Attachment to whiteness” is a concept introduced to me from a racial justice educator named Kenya Budd in Portland, Oregon. But what is whiteness? I have come to learn about how whiteness operates…