How the Language of Self-Care Is Used to Uphold White Supremacy
I’ve recently had the experience of being in white-majority wellness and social justice spaces, particularly a trauma-informed yoga training that I completed last week. As a queer black woman living through this moment, I feel very vulnerable and sensitive, and upon entering the training knew that I needed a lot of care and attention in the space. It was necessary for us to spend time unpacking racism as a group, and on the surface, our discussions seemed to prioritize the safety and wellness of all group members. But later on in the training, I noticed a tendency for some white people to use the language of wellness and self-care culture to uphold white supremacy within the space.
This has also happened to me with white friends in my personal life. As anti-racism and other forms of social justice work have become more widespread, so have the cultures of self-care and wellness, and the two intersect in ways that are sometimes helpful and sometimes problematic. Because self-care and wellness culture have become so popularized—which for the most part is a good thing—I think there’s a tendency to use terms that originate in these spaces without engaging with their complexity. Without seriously examining when and why we’re using terms like “self-care” and “boundary setting,” particularly in social justice spaces, it is easy to use them to bypass serious engagement in the work of equity and to harm people of color.
For instance, if a white person finds themselves “setting a boundary” the minute a person of color expresses anger or hurt, this is not setting a boundary—this is tone policing, a white supremacist tool that has been used to silence and dehumanize people of color, black people in particular, for centuries. This centers white people in the space and normalizes their experience of fragility while pathologizing the person of color’s experience of emotional expression. Similarly, if a white person finds themselves retreating into “self-care” or “triggered” the minute a conversation enters the (for them) uncomfortable topics of white supremacy and racist violence, this is not self-care, but avoidance. Caring for oneself is not the same as caring for one’s fragile ego, which is threatened by engaging with the harm perpetuated by white supremacy.
Engaging in this conversation is tricky, because the language of self-care culture is set up to be indisputable. Everyone is supposed to practice self-care; critiquing someone’s misuse of the term or concept can easily be viewed as harmful. But it is exactly the indisputable quality of this language that makes it so amenable to gaslighting and other forms of manipulation. White supremacy has a long history of misusing and changing language to disguise its true intentions. Politicians stopped talking about race in the late 20th century and started talking about crime. It’s much easier for the mainstream to accept criticism of an openly racist administration than one that is “tough on crime.” “Crime” in the public imagination is indisputably bad. Similarly “self-care” and “boundaries” are things that, within certain subsets of our culture, people are indisputably entitled to, on the terms that only they individually can name. It’s much harder to criticize someone for, in their words, “setting a boundary” than it is to criticize them for tone-policing that they haven’t strategically re-branded as a form of self-care.
I believe fundamentally that everyone has the right to self-care and that it is an incredibly important part in all of our work to build a world that is more just and safer for everyone. But I think that under the current systems of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy, it is hard for white people in particular—and other people with privilege—to discern the difference between discomfort and an actual threat of harm. Discomfort is a natural part of engaging with conversations in which people are made aware of their privilege, and accepting discomfort is actually a part of self-care, because it is through this discomfort that they can access their role in anti-oppression work. Self-care is community care. That fact is often absent from conversations in wellness spaces. But because there’s a tendency among people with privilege to perceive discomfort as unsafe, claiming self-care can become a mechanism by which they are able to avoid engaging with uncomfortable conversations.
This avoidance is justified by the idea that each person must take care of herself in order to then be able to take care of community. A metaphor that I’ve heard facilitators overuse when speaking about self-care is the idea of the oxygen mask on the airplane: fasten your own before helping someone else. But that metaphor is an inaccurate comparison: it presupposes an environment in which each person initially has equal access to oxygen, as they’re all in the same plane. In such a situation, if someone has to wait a couple seconds for someone else to care for themselves, it’s (hopefully) not such a big deal. In reality, though, white people and other privileged people have much more access to resources and care than marginalized people—and, consequentially, need them less. When white people overuse “self-care” as a reason not to engage, or to delay engaging with the difficult conversations and actions necessary to anti-oppression work, they are not fastening their own oxygen mask. They are perpetuating a system in which marginalized people must do more of the work with fewer of the resources.
If there’s one thing I’d want us, collectively, to remember, it’s that self-care re-emerged in popular culture recently due to the work of activists, particularly black femme activists. Audre Lorde re-popularized the concept of self-care when she wrote in her 1988 book A Burst of Light and Other Essays that“caring for [her]self is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." The self-care that is envisioned by activists, for activists, justifiably might look a little like self-indulgence, as people deeply engaged in activist work—especially those with marginalized identities—are shouldering, with little support, all of the responsibilities of our society, often with few resources to meeting their goals. I genuinely believe that for such a person taking a bubble bath is radical, and is an act of political warfare. But for those with more privilege who are less active in political movements, self-care should have nothing to do with self-indulgence, or with comfort.
My hope is that with everything that’s happening, white people and people across different types of privileges can embrace discomfort more. Reframing discomfort not just as necessary, but as a form of self-care, is a huge step in working towards all of our liberation.
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