FAQ
Q: What is the difference between anti-racism work and anti-whiteness work?
A: Black, brown and Indigenous people are the only folks that can operate as experts/facilitators and elders of anti-racism work. However, it is white peoples’ critical responsibility to own anti-whiteness responsibilities, which nonnegotiable-y includes committing to abolition and therefore anti-racism work, following the teachings of Black, brown and Indigenous people.
Q: Who is Better Elders for?
A: As of 2023, Better Elders is for people who are both white and who identify as progressives or liberals but who have not yet found themselves destructing white supremacy or ‘whiteness’ in themselves. Eventually, we hope to create programming that supports white nationalists and white conservatives to deconstruct and deprogram from their cult-like understandings of their own ‘whiteness’.
Q: Why would a white person lead on this work?
A: While Black, brown and Indigenous people are experts in structural racism and leaders in anti-racism, any 'whiteness deprogramming' work would need to be led by community members who have experienced the depths of cultish and addictive practice of whiteness. Non-white people absolutely could lead on this work, although it is hard to say whether it would be healthy for non-white people to be exposed to individuals who are just beginning the 'whiteness deprogramming' process (ie still in active "addiction"). This work is not white saviorism. This work is about reflecting back on the inner workings of a conspiratorial community that needs to be confronted from the inside out.
Q: How is Better Elders different from other groups organizing white people?
A: Better Elders is grateful to organizations like SURJ who activated white progressives to mobilize around anti-racism organizing. Better Elders begins the process of systemic shift in a different place than SURJ. We engage white people at a deeply internal level—it is a healing and recovery program that, once completed, launches healthy white-bodied people into nonnegotiable action around liberation, abolition and mutual aid, including activities like organizing with SURJ. Better Elders holds the importance of both learning from elders in the civil rights movement, our Black and brown elders who have written and taken action around peoples’ liberation, and also in doing, taking action, and being accountable to non-white communities. What makes us the most unique is that we believe that this work is impossible to hold without also centering healing, joy and abundance, and friendship—Better Elders is about white people doing deep, vulnerable healing work in order to make them warriors of abolition, abundance and liberation.
Q: Is Better Elders anti-white?
A: Actually, Better Elders is one of the first organizations to center actual deep care and recovery for white people, through radical honesty about how much is wrong with whiteness. We are one of the first organizations to acknowledge how deeply unhappy and lonely white people are as a product of their unexamined commitment to whiteness, and how this unhappiness and suffering cascades into every corner of humanity. As opposed to what capitalism teaches, which is that only a very select few of ultra-wealthy people deserve happiness and peace, we believe all people are deserving of lightness, abundance and happiness. Better Elders loves white people, in addition to loving Black, brown and Indigenous people, which is why it will no longer tolerate white peoples’ dependence on an artificial identity that not only physically and spiritually tortures and destroys non-white communities, but eviscerates our own lives.
Q: Why does Better Elders avoid putting white participants in direct relationship with BIPOC anti-racism educators before they've been through the "Deprogramming Whiteness" stage?
A: Frankly, white peoples' dehumanization capacity is extremely high. Whiteness is so effective at training people to dehumanize others, that we even turn that dehumanization back onto ourselves. If we are being honest with ourselves, we can admit that white peoples' unchallenged subscription to whiteness makes us dangerous to Black, brown and Indigenous people. Dr. Barnor Hesse's "8 White Identities" outline the stages of deprogramming whiteness--we believe that when white people demonstrate "White Critical" behavior, they are then capable of engaging with Black, brown and Indigenous people safely.
Q: We hear this all the time; white people don’t have culture. Is it true?
A: People always have culture. The problem with white people is that they have internalized supremacist propaganda that ‘whiteness’ is a culture, and then fight fiercely to protect it. Growing up in a geography, with a history, in a family, in a society and in a body give every individual culture, very much including white people. We believe, however, that the preservation of ‘whiteness’, as we define it in our curriculum, eliminates the relevance of the other divine ways that an individual can center an identity (geography, history, family, society, body). This is why the Better Elders’ strategy is first to sever a white person’s non-symbiotic relationship to whiteness and then to support them in the joyful and challenging discovery of an authentic identity. What this means is that white people first need to deprogram from whiteness, which requires a breaking with carceral and supremacy-thinking....this is why we tie "abolitionist identity" as one of the outcomes to whiteness deprogramming.
Q: What's to stop this from being a "safe white space" centering fear of cancellation?
A: Better Elders believes that healed white people are anti-whiteness, and therefore abolitionists. There is no medium step to the healing process. Our goal is to be a safe space for white-bodied people to break free of an ugly maladaptive ideology; this will include making mistakes, continuing to be harmful, and processing how much harm they have caused in a lifetime of centering whiteness.
Q: What do you say to people who think this approach is too aggressive? (ie. "you attract more flies with honey....")
A: It is important to be honest that the process of abandoning whiteness is painful. Any white person who is promised that the experience of deprogramming whiteness will be like “honey” is being lied to. Divesting from white supremacy means internalizing the costs of white supremacy, it means disrupting your masturbatory relationship with capitalism, it strips away the cushions you’ve build through hoarding wealth. Better E=Elders believes that what makes this painful deprogramming process possible is a nurturing and nourishing community, which is why our cohort structure is so critical.
Q: So, what do we mean by 'elder'?
A: We are intentionally referencing a long tradition of honoring experienced members of a community who have worked towards liberation and freedom. The phrase 'elder' is often used now to honor the experienced freedom fighters of the social justice movements during the 50's, 60's and 70's. In this context, we acknowledge that white supremacy is particularly effective in that it eviscerates the tradition of honoring experience and wisdom around building towards freedom. Without 'elders', each community is convinced that they are starting the fight for liberation from scratch without a history of knowledge and love. This is a fallacy. Generations of elders have paved our way. 'Elder' doesn't necessarily mean you're older---wisdom, empathy, and experience are ageless---but generations of Black, brown and Indigenous community members have been building a foundation for freedom for hundreds of years, and it is central to Better Elders' mission to locate itself as a grateful inheritor of these generations of laboring freedom-fighters, like those veterans in the movement in the National Council of Elders. Better Elders, an organization convening white people to commit to the dismantling of white supremacy, also considers young and contemporary Black, brown and Indigenous organizers and educators to be our Elders.
Q: What is your accountability structure for BE? Who are you accountable to?
A: We are not trying to take the place of the thousands of Black and brown educators and organizers who teach anti-racism, like Tik Tok influencer @AshaniMfuko. We are committed to devoting 25% of our annual budget to pay Black, brown and Indigenous anti-racism educators and organizers for their labor that we utilize. As an organization, we have created an Accountability Board of Black, brown and Indigenous community members, to whom we pay a stipend for their emotional labor. Ultimately, the white people who join Better Elders are accountable to Black and brown educators, organizers, academics and community leaders, through their participation in local abolitionist and mutual aid organizing, which is the third stage of the Better Elders process.
Q: How it 'whiteness' connected to transphobia, prisons, or disability?
A: Transphobia: The gender binary can only exist in a social system that is built by binaries, like how whiteness is a binary system. Deviation from the binary is seen as anti-white.
Prisons: Whiteness uses strategies of both self-incarceration and incarceration via policing and prisons to limit critical resistance against the many negative impacts of whiteness.
Disability: The eugenics movement was generated hand-in-hand with the creation of whiteness. Any kind of disability, physical, medical, neuro-cognitive is seem as a deviation from acceptable whiteness.