“Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief About Racism”

Posted April 1st, 2013 by James DeWolf Perry
Category: Living consequences, Repair and reparations Tags: legacy of slavery, Racial prejudice

This post is about Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief About Racism (2013), a new book we haven’t read yet at the Tracing Center, but which we learned about this weekend from author Sharon Morgan and which we’re eager to get our hands on.

(Sharon, for those who don’t know, is co-author, along with Tom DeWolf, of Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade.)

Combined Destinies, edited by Ann Todd Jealous and Caroline Haskell, is an anthology exploring the impact of racism on the lives of white people. The authors, both psychotherapists with experience facilitating dialogue on race, seek to begin a conversation about the impact on white people of the racist ideology created by their ancestors, in order to advance anti-oppression work and to contribute to individual and societal healing.

The book’s chapters focus on issues such as guilt, shame, and silence in the lives of white Americans, and are written for a wide audience, including lay people as well as counselors and mental health professionals. The chapters include the words of white people telling their own stories, often for the very first time.

The book’s premise, which dovetails closely with the approach of the Tracing Center, is that racism and unearned privilege have damage the psychology of white people and, in so doing, have impaired their ability to understand and resist racism. In other words, the book is not simply aimed at healing white people, but at changing hearts and minds in order to help bring about the change that racial justice and healing require.

Not everyone is comfortable with the idea that efforts to combat racism should include working with, and healing, the psychological grief felt by so many white people where race is involved. Yet this book, and the reviews below, stand as a testament to the idea that everyone has been harmed, albeit in different ways and to different degrees, by our national sin of racism.

More importantly, the task of understanding and repairing the hearts and minds of white people—of healing psyches and dispelling cherished myths—isn’t only, or even primarily, about helping white people. It’s about generating the collective will to finally bring about wide-ranging, lasting change to address the legacy of slavery and racism.

Praise for the book

Combined Destinies has assembled glowing testimonials from a wide range of respected voices in the field. Here are just a few:

With the stories in Combined Destinies Ann Jealous and Caroline Haskell take us another step forward towards understanding the legacy of racism’s impact on all children.

— Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children’s Defense Fund

Ann Jealous and Caroline Haskell have assembled a groundbreaking collection of stories by white Americans who recognize the pain and sorrow that racism has created in their lives. Everyone in society is hurt by racism, not just those who are its targets. What better way to teach this profound truth than to allow white people to share their epiphanies?

—Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

I picked cotton alongside blacks in the 1940s. It was our cotton and their sweat. We had a combined destiny that troubled me—mine to law school and theirs to grinding poverty. Racism pained me despite my white privilege. Combined Destinies puts that frustration into better focus. What a perceptive, well-written, and timely narrative.

—Morris Dees, Founder, Southern Poverty Law Center