What Does Antiracism Work Look Like in 2024?

Reflecting on how my understanding of antiracism has evolved in the last five years.

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In January 2020, my good friend Jennifer and I started a peer consultation group for the nonprofit that I founded, the New England Association for Family and Systemic Therapy.

Robin Deangelo had just published White Fragility a year earlier. Black Lives Matter was bringing attention to police brutality against unarmed Black people, a movement that exploded with the June 2020 death of George Floyd. Ibram Kendi had just released How to Be an Antiracist, which was a combination of memoir and macro-systemic evaluation of racism.

The growing movement of antiracism was especially important to me and Jennifer; while we both operate as White people, Jennifer has adopted two Black boys, and I am a Brown person who was adopted by a White couple and raised almost exclusively in White spaces. The experiences of discrimination against people of color live incredibly close to both of our households.

Neither of us like White Fragility. From our perspectives, it relied too much on the worst parts of psychoanalysis—the parts that shame people for their emotional responses through the process of diagnosis, rather than acknowledging the systemic influences to our behaviors and communication. We discovered Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad, which describes relational processes that reinforce anti-Black communication and systems, such as cultural stereotypes and optical allyship, and included a series of reflection questions for folks to explore.

Every year between 2020 and 2023, Jennifer and I hosted a group of family therapists every month to work through Me and White Supremacy, evaluating the systems that taught and reinforced messages of anti-Blackness, and how we might cognitively and relationally extricate ourselves from these systems and build different, more diverse relationship patterns.

Early 2020s antiracism writings seemed to evaluate how we make stereotypes against others and behave accordingly, with the hope of creating greater amounts of safety, understanding, and celebration for cultures and people that are different from the middle/upper-class White population that primarily populate the profession of psychotherapy (and many other liberal arts related professions).

While the four groups that we led were meaningful, five year later, I’m wondering if our work toward antiracism was barking up the wrong tree.