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Internalized Racism & the “Sunken Place.”
Once, while I was conducting a workshop on racial justice for a mostly white Christian group of men, the group bifurcated into two subgroups:
· One that believed racism was a problem and . . .
· One that didn’t.
You won’t be surprised to hear that the groups were clearly divided along generational lines. The older men, mostly Boomers, were on the side of “racism isn’t a problem.” The GenXers and millennials (GenZ) were firmly on the side of “Yes, racism is a thing and it’s a problem.”
That didn’t surprise me. What did catch me off guard was the moment when one of the Black men in the room (we’ll call him Carl, who was thirty something) stood up and announced that he didn’t see the point of the entire exercise since “there is no such thing as racism among Christians.” Carl then proceeded to circle around the room in order to hug all the older white men who insisted that “racism is not a problem.” These men, in turn, aimed some very smug stares my way. They certainly felt as if they had just been granted their “get out of racist-jail free card.”
A mentor had once told me to always plan for a wild card, the unexpected, the “crazy Ivan,” in every workshop.
Well, Carl sure had provided it.
Honestly, I was pretty stuck. The optics of a white facilitator taking on a well-respected Black man (at least well respected by half the room after his announcement) were hopeless. Even trying to create space in the discussion at that moment for some of the other men of color in the room to challenge Carl would have been problematic. I didn’t want to place them in a position of attacking their brother in front of a mostly white crowd.
I took the least-worst option and tried to move the conversation forward without lingering on Carl’s comments.
Even if I chose not to engage Carl on the topic, you can believe his Black brothers definitely did at the break. They knew what was going on. When they confronted Carl during the coffee break the two terms they used with him were “internalized racism” and (the more colloquial) “the sunken place.”
