Who Are You Outside of White Supremacy Culture?
For the Worldbuilders Ep. 053
why some people be mad at me sometimes they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and i keep on remembering mine. — Lucille Clifton
Dear Worldbuilder,
It’s Thursday, the day For the Worldbuilders and today we’re asking who are we outside of white supremacy culture1? Perhaps the simple answer is healers, holders, stewards. Perhaps the simple answer is the people that refuse, repair and restore. And perhaps we don’t have to go anywhere to learn these skills, perhaps the best teachers and stories are already embedded in our intuition, ancestry and local ecology. Perhaps the stories they’re whispering invite us into a culture with more bearable and breathe-able characteristics where perfectionism becomes improvisation, individualism becomes collectivism and “right to comfort” becomes “right to transformation”.
In Today’s Episode
We acknowledge patriarchal and colonial spaces of knowledge production often sever us from our intuition so thoroughly that our nervous system registers spiritual guidance as an existential threat.
With this in mind we ask and occasionally answer the following questions:
How do we start to bring our nervous system AND intuition in as trusted collaborators on our creative projects?
How do we remember our nervous system and intuition are spiritual interfaces we can trust with our lives?
How is our incessant search for new, different, better, bigger conditions to create what we’re being called to create — NOW, NOW, NOW with what we have, where we are — an inheritance of white supremacy culture?
How is waiting until we have x degree, or x qualification, or x apartment, or x contact, or x partner, or x equipment, or x on the resume compromising the spell that wants to unfold NOW?
What are our unacknowledged elders and ancestors here to teach us?
What can we learn from the land where we currently are?
How might our current living situations be invitations to practice previously unimaginable choreographies of relation and safety?
How does practicing outside of white supremacy ensure we’re right on time for each other?
In today’s episode we also remember, the wildness that we are so terrified will compromise our survival is often the spiritual guidance we need to surrender to in order to survive.
This Week’s Invitation
I share an excerpt in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk from Chapter 2 “Revolutions in Understanding Mind and Brain”. There’s a subsection called “Adaptation or Disease” on page 38 that reads:
“The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.
When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.”
This is what I’ve learned from personal experience and it’s what inspired the Treehouse. Writing and practicing in public toward collective liberation have been essential to trusting who I am outside of whiteness and essential to my healing journey in ways I’m still trying to find language for. What’s the Treehouse? The Treehouse is a black feminist creative club for practicing reading, writing and breathwork. Visioned as a direct reflection of the fundamental truths listed above.
Join us in this Tuesday’s Worldbuilding Workshop on July 16th at 12PM EST to learn how we seed a practice rooted in our Zone of Desire informed by our spirit vs. our Zone of Validation which is often informed by white supremacy culture.
Also! If you downloaded the 🌤️ Summer Syllabus 🌤️ you might have already noticed there’s a new workshop that’s been added to the July line up inside the Treehouse titled “Discover Your Weekly Dispatch” on July 25th at 12pm EST where we will locate your creative container for intuitive marketing, storytelling and “finding a common sense of meaning”. If you register for the first workshop, you’ll get an automatic invitation to the second in the series!
See you there?
So be it, see to it, breathe through it,
Ayana
“White Supremacy Culture” (PDF). From Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, ChangeWork, 2001. Shared inside “Queering Wealth” workshop facilitated by Jezz Chung and Mengwen Cao (
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Thank you so much for this 🥹