Once There Was an Us and a Them

The rooms always smelled like coffee.

Church basements. Library meeting rooms. Sanctuary spaces after Sunday service. Nonprofit offices with folding chairs stacked in the corner.

Fold-out tables pushed together to make long rectangles or big circles. Flip chart paper taped to the walls.

Across organizing spaces in my city, we gathered to talk about justice.

We talked about housing, transit, mental health, disability rights, education, mass incarceration. Systems that were failing people in deeply personal ways.

People with lived experience stood and testified about what those systems had done to them, how they had survived, and what needed to change.

Their voices were grounded. Specific. Lived.

And then, in strategy sessions and coalition meetings across different campaigns and organizations, something subtle would happen.

The language would shift.The depth would lessen.The demands would become more realistic.

No one said, “Let’s erase them.”

But testimony would be reframed. Edges would be sanded down. Hard truths would be translated into something more palatable.

Often those shifts happened outside the presence of the people most impacted.

I shared more identity ties with the institutional and community leaders in those rooms than with the people offering testimony. Many of those leaders were white men and white women. I looked up to them. They were earnest and well intentioned. They believed they were doing the right thing.

In many ways, I was them.

And somewhere in those spaces, I began to see how quickly “community” became “us helping them.”

Once there is an us and a them, there is no we.

That realization came with pain in one hand and clarity in the other. Although I did not know what was to come, I knew what I was no longer willing to keep building.

Clarity does not always arrive as vision. Sometimes it arrives as refusal.

At that time, I did not have anti-racism language. Something had simply cracked.

I thought I was a good person.

And maybe I was.

But through whose lens?

Can you be a good person and still benefit from systems that make someone else’s testimony, life, or experience negotiable?

That question did not land lightly.

There was sadness. Anger. Embarrassment. Especially because I could feel my proximity to power and my comfort inside those spaces.

Then there was guilt.

I carry a lineage shaped by European heritage and Christian history. I grew up aware of violence embedded in race and religion. When I began grappling more honestly with power and privilege, shame surfaced quickly.

What do you do with that?

For me, I tried to fix it.

I leaned into being the good white person, grasping onto any hashtag or safety pin I could. I overcorrected. I tried to outrun the discomfort.

But aspiring anti-racism is not about outrunning discomfort.

It is about learning to locate yourself honestly within it.

Self-location is the practice of honestly naming where I stand in proximity to power and within systems that benefit me before I decide what to say or do.

That definition became embodied one night in a living room.

A conversation about race turned harmful. A white woman began using her own experience of incarceration to argue that everyone has it hard, collapsing systemic racism into individual suffering.

It was subtle and familiar. The move where white pain is used to neutralize Black reality. The move where trauma becomes a competition instead of context.

I was present. I was quiet.

I was not the one speaking the harm, but I was protecting it with silence.

That moment clarified something the organizing rooms had only hinted at.

Silence is not neutral.

Aspiring anti-racism is not about purity. It is about refusal.

Aspiring means I refuse to let shame, guilt, defensiveness, or silence be the end of my growth. It means I stay in the work even when I would rather retreat.

It is about me. My conditioning. My proximity to power. My responsibility.

And it is not about me at all. It is about impact. It is about refusing to let “us and them” define the room.

I am a white woman.

I am flawed. I am biased. I am privileged.

I am constantly ingesting messages from a white supremacist system simply by living in this country.

And I am aspiring.

Not because I have arrived.

But because I refuse to let silence define me.

In the essays to follow, I will explore the commitments that continue to shape me. Self-location. Impact over intention. Defensiveness. Privilege. Accountability. The ongoing work of unlearning.

To my white siblings, I hope you join me.

I am not offering arrival.

I am offering honesty.

If something clicked for you here, stay.