White people just elected Donald Trump and a majority of Republicans in the House and Senate and soon sitting on the Supreme Court. We white people have a lot of power. But some of us, especially in rural areas and in the working class "rust belt" and the south haven't felt very powerful for a while. A lot of white working class jobs have disappeared and unions have lost their power, incomes have gone down. There's been a feeling of frustration and helplessness, which has led to anger and wanting retribution, if not revenge.
Is it White Power vs. Black/Brown/Native American/Asian Power?
Often, when we feel we're losing out, we want to find who's responsible. We tend to lash out at whomever we're led to believe is at fault. As white people, we could begin to think that people of color are to blame for our declining incomes and decreasing opportunities and we start to feel that it's "us against them," that if "they" have more opportunities, we lose out. Where before our identities were based on our careers, our family backgrounds, our communities and our country, we now identify as "white" and we want "white power." But is it really people of color that are to blame? It could be the changes in governmental policies over time: the policies weakening unions, the lack of retraining for new jobs when specific industries (such as the coal industry) are in decline, tax loopholes and tax structures that increasingly move income from the middle and working class to the rich. None of this has anything to do with people of color taking anything away from white people.
What Is Really Important to Us?
It's important now to think about how we as white people want to use the power that we have, whether we're just little guys trying to make a living or legislators, court justices, attorneys, people in the upper income bracket or the poorest among us. Although it might feel good to want to huddle together as white people and to take away from people of color, it turns out that's probably not going to get us what we want for our own lives and our own families. If tax codes benefit the super rich and the consequences land on our backs, they're landing on black and brown and Asian and Indian American backs exactly the same way. If manufacturing jobs are disappearing and middle class jobs are being outsourced to India and South America, it's happening to all of us. So what do we want to do now that those of us who have been feeling so frustrated have all this power?
How Do We Use Our White Power
We can use our white power to bring down others; we can yell at them to "go back to Mexico, go back to Africa, go back to the Middle East-even though they're American citizens. We can scrawl swastikas on store fronts, we can spit in the faces of Latinos, we can beat up Muslims. Sure, we can do that. But what do we actually gain? Is that going to bring us more jobs? Is that going to help income equality? Is that going to bring jobs back to the United States from India and South America? I hope you can see that the answer is no.
Maybe we, as white people, can do more constructive things to help ourselves. Maybe, first, we can re-identify ourselves as Americans first and remember that America is a land of all kinds of people from all kinds of places. That's what we're built on; that's what makes us strong. That's how we've always been different from everywhere else in the world. That's one of the things that's always made us special. Maybe we can remember that all of us want most of all to have our families be safe, healthy, able to get an education if we want to, able to get ahead in our jobs and careers. All of us want that. And we can all have it if we all work together. As white people, if we really know that, we can begin to use our white power to make sure our Senate, Congress, President and Supreme Court truly work to help us all have good health care, good jobs, make laws that help more than the top 1% of the population, make sure corporations pay their fair share of taxes, and give government agencies enough power so that we don't die of infectious diseases, get sickened by poisonous water, that we have enough water, that we don't have outbreaks of Ecoli bacteria, and that our air doesn't get as bad as China's.
Zoe Zimmermann is a licensed psychotherapist living and working
in Boulder, CO. She would like to help create a more humane and caring
country where everyone feels they belong.
