White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White

by Daniel Hill

Charles said that reconciliation conversations tend to focus on the historical trauma that communities of color have faced, and he affirmed that this must continue to be the case. The problem, he suggested, is that the conversation around trauma stops with them. But what about the white community? While the traumas experienced by victims and by oppressors are qualitatively different on every level and can therefore never be compared, it’s impossible to be complicit with centuries of traumatizing oppression without becoming traumatized oneself. This was a groundbreaking idea for me. While I had grown to recognize the ways our racial history has traumatized communities of color, I had never considered the ways white America had also been traumatized by this same history. I had a new appreciation for why denial is such an accessible temptation for every white person: it’s easy to turn a blind eye toward history at an individual level when our nation still does so at a corporate level.