WHITE WOMXN & ‘INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA’

JULY 2024 by RACHEL JANE LIEBERT

I wrote the piece below before July 29th, before the devastating stabbings in Southport, UK, before the sickening explosion of fascist riots that have continued ever since. I read it now – one week later –  and so much is swirling around my head and heart and gut that I feel dizzy, my shoulders, arms, hands, fingers so heavy they are struggling to type.

As thousands of fascists bus into cities, throw bricks at people, attack mosques, burn refuges for asylum-seekers, they smell of a familiar, White supremist pattern. They are largely White men, and they are ultimately out to protect White women – or, more accurately, White wombs.

This might sound far away – literally and conceptually – from our work in The Tīpuna Project, but it is frighteningly close to home. These riots are a violent reminder that the collision of whiteness and victimhood is nothing short of terrifying. And this collision, as I try to untangle below, is something we risk when turning to ancestral praxes with White womxn.

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Whiteness. It’s on my mind. It is my mind.

And it’s a mind-fuck.

The whole concept of a ‘mind’ is drenched in Descartes, separated from flesh, spirit, cosmos and, therefore, ancestors.

Disrupting this colonial separation is part of the radical and magical possibilities of The Tīpuna Project.

But can I, we really get away from our whiteness so easily?

I can’t just unzip my White skin, my layers upon layers of privilege and entitlement and violence. Layers that go far deeper, wider, tangled than ‘me’.

So what happens, then, when whiteness meets ancestral praxis?

Indigenous and Liberation psychologies have long recognised that the violence experienced by people’s colonised or enslaved ancestors is passed down through generations, creating ‘soul wounds’ that play a key role in not just the distress of individuals and communities but also coloniality itself. Both specialist mental health services and decolonising social movements have thus been innovating ancestral praxes for healing this intergenerational trauma in Indigenous and Black peoples.

Increasingly, practitioners and activists globally have also been calling for and experimenting with the potential of these praxes in White settler peoples. For a small handful of trauma practitioners this involves approaching whiteness as a ‘moral injury’ inherited from our ancestors’ perpetration of colonial violence – an approach that has emerged through the treatment of veterans. Many decolonial activists, however, are drawing on the work of Black therapist Resmaa Menakem or Nigerian post-activist Bayo Akomolafe to approach White settler peoples as ourselves victims of collective violence since the ‘Dark Ages’ of Western Europe, including internal colonisation and forced migration, which is thought to have created the conditions of possibility for our subsequent participation in colonial violence. As the saying goes, “Hurt people, hurt people”. 

Te Rōpū Pākehā has been energised by these happenings, which are quite rapidly gaining in popularity – and quite rapidly making us nervous. As a group of White femmes experimenting with the decolonial possibilities of ancestral praxes, the risks of this work have been circling.

In Aotearoa, people with our kinds of bodies make up the vast majority of non-Indigenous decolonial activists. However we also play a complex role in sustaining coloniality that, yes, can be traced back to 15th-18th-century Western Europe: in particular, when our femme ancestors were targeted en masse during the ‘witch-hunts’. This prolonged violence aimed to eradicate collective holdings of land that were used by communities for the day-to-day harvesting of food, firewood, medicine and other necessities and delights of living. Largely femme spaces, such ‘commons’ had also become a powerful site for cultivating relationships and, therefore, seeding revolutions that threatened the cis-male, land-owning elite. In the name of capitalist productivity, land was to be enclosed, and in the name of capitalist reproductivity, womxn effectively were also to be enclosed – cut off from the land, each other and, indeed, our own bodies.

Feminist Marxist Silvia Federici documents how the large-scale, state-led violence that followed eventually created The Good White Woman – detached and docile, pure and innocent – in support of first capitalist and then colonialist interests as similar tactics were then used to violently enclose land and Indigenous and Black bodies elsewhere, including Aotearoa. White womxn, then, became agents of the capitalist, colonialist state that both killed and created us. So much so that today we are arguably the figure of coloniality.

Figures, it turns out, with some pretty layered grief and rage and shame in our bones.

As my own ancestral praxis has been unfurling, I’ve been thrown by these affective encounters. Sometimes it feels as if my femme ancestors are screaming at me to listen to their pain. And yet I don’t want to. Why? What am I afraid of?

White womxn’s role in coloniality comes largely from a weaponising of the abovementioned ‘virtues’ literally beaten into us through the witch-hunts. From lynch mobs during US slavery to missionary schools in Aotearoa and current-day Karens, a now naturalised innocence and purity enables claims of vulnerability or victimhood that can be used to justify another’s racism or dismiss our own.

Amidst the smoke, White womxn are granted humanity and protection from White men, but only in exchange for our ongoing submission to White cis-hetero-patriarchy – with violent consequences for feeling, thinking or acting otherwise.

Our perpetration of coloniality is thus not, as some try to suggest, despite our historic and contemporary oppression as womxn but entwined with it – tightening a knot of racism and sexism that, in Aotearoa, has significant consequences for Māori womxn in particular.

And yet, (trans)misogynist violence is often used by White womxn to deflect, rather than deepen, our response/ability for racism.

So couldn’t engaging our ancestors’ experiences of (trans)misogyny just further serve this deflection?

Add to this that coloniality has been linked to a kind of chronic dissociation in White settler peoples – inherited from our ancestors’ role in racist violence and sustained by our own ongoing role in the same – that prevents us from feeling the painful truths of racism, further enabling our coloniality.

For White womxn, such a loop seems even more tangled as our feelings have long been treated as threatening within cis-hetero-patriarchy and also, of late, within anti-racist movements themselves, where ‘White tears’ or ‘White fragility’ are found to recentre if not reinscribe our supposed vulnerability or victimhood and therefore, once again, White supremacy.

Does this mean that both the absence and the presence of our feeling sustains coloniality? What do we do with our intergenerational grief, rage, shame within this seeming paradox?

I tried to draw all this below. 

White womxn’s intergenerational trauma

For so long, trying to articulate – let alone untangle – the knots of my White womxn-ness has just made me go blank, silent, once again repeating, weaponising the trauma of my femme ancestors: during the witch-hunts, womxn who spoke out were muzzled with an iron bridle that forced spikes into their/our tongues if they/we tried to speak, and paraded through the village. 

The Good White Woman: more White than womxn.

What might this mean for Te Rōpū Pākehā in The Tīpuna Project?

I don’t know. But I am wary of any analyses that seem to land us in paradox, immobility, silence. They suggest binary thinking, that my imagination is once again trapped within the colonial episteme. Surely something else is possible, something other-wise.

For example, what could open up if our ancestral praxes explicitly move not only from and to decolonisation but also from and to feminism? Not the White, transphobic kind that violently imposes its own narrow understandings of ‘woman’. But the kind that shows White womxn that there is more strength in being womxn than in being White, that refuses victimhood and its so-called ‘humanity’ and ‘protection’.

And/or what of the body? Mainstream trauma practitioners argue that healing requires somatic intervention, however this typically ignores the coloniality of our relationships with our bodies: the witch-hunts persecuted femmes whose collective strength came from our fleshed entanglement with an animated cosmos. In order to dominate earth-mama, capitalism required that she be disenchanted and that the body’s capacity to attune to her magic be exorcised - capacities embraced by witches. Separated and put into a hierarchy where ‘the mind’ ruled, the new Cartesian body was treated as brute matter disconnected from knowing, feeling, being the world. Alienated, it became what Federici called ‘the first machine’ of capitalism, both intelligible and controllable: two goals promoted in mainstream trauma studies.

Moreover, this mechanisation enabled a detached figure-cum-standard of humanity – what Black Philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls ‘Man’ – to be at the core of the colonial episteme, thereby ignoring, denigrating or exterminating all those who live in relationship with flesh, spirit and cosmos. Not just the witches within White womxn, but also Indigenous and Black peoples.

For five hundred years, then, our White femme bodies have been socialised – through violence and through seduction – to be robotic foot soldiers of colonisation. What if our ancestral praxes were a means to reconfigure them/us?

This is not a call for some kind of ancestral extension of ‘self-care’ – still too often wooed by whiteness into individualism. To have decolonial potential, ancestral praxes with White womxn must engage the body as common – that is, as something more-than-human, collective and counter-colonial.

For Pākehā womxn, this suggests firmly grounding our work in the land itself. Papatūānuku, our foster-earth-mama who has raised us for generations, holds close both the ongoing violence of colonisation and our ongoing more-than-human-ness. And she has the profound capacity to love us, her foster-children, throughout this painful, knotty work.

Maybe ancestral praxes for White womxn are ultimately about (re)learning how to receive and give this kind of deep, radical love?

It will require care, it will take time and it will be a mind-fuck. But/and surely something else is possible, something other than passing on our (ancestors’) violent grief, rage, shame. Something other-wise.