Whiteness Is Not an Ancestor: Essays on Life and Lineage by white Women

Foreword to Whiteness Is Not an Ancestor: Essays on Life and Lineage by white Women

It is important to clarify the differences between white (a category of race which has no biological/scientific foundation) and whiteness as a powerful social construction with very real, tangible, violent effects. This distinction is described well by author and activist Paul Kivel in his book Uprooting Racism, first published in 1996: Racism is based on the concept of whiteness—a powerful fiction enforced by power and violence. Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.

The seeds for this book were planted over two decades ago.

I was in the seventh year of my psychotherapy practice when I was introduced to the concept of family constellations in 1998. Also referred to as systemic constellations, this experiential learning-based group modality was developed by German philosopher, former Catholic priest, and psychotherapist, Bert Hellinger. The constellation process reveals the influence of generational histories in ways that our Western-trained minds find challenging to access. This approach promotes visibility and consciousness of our shared humanity, including our tendencies to be constricted by unhealed loss and trauma experienced by our ancestors, as well as the resilience and brilliance of our species as evidenced by the fact that, despite all that we have experienced, our human family is still walking on the earth.

Born in 1925, Hellinger developed family constellations with an acute awareness of the Holocaust’s traumatic, generational effects in individuals, families, and society. Hellinger was attuned in his observations of the human inclination to reject or align with those whose family histories include ancestors who have perpetrated harm or been victimized in circumstances of injustice. When these ancestors and the larger contexts of their lives are hidden, or the weight of the history is minimized, descendants sense these effects as an imbalance in the family soul. As one of my teachers, Dietrich Weth, put it, What we don’t face, faces us.

Principles of the constellation approach are rooted in remembering our human nature’s wisdom around belonging, order, and balance in generational family systems. In the collective field of the soul, everyone and everything belongs. This knowingness provides a necessary resource when there are experiences of injustice. When an individual or a population takes from another what there is no right to take, and the injustice is not reconciled at the time it is inflicted, this creates an unpaid debt in the soul. Since life is the biggest thing that can be taken from anyone, robbing an individual or a people of life creates the biggest debt. Bringing visibility to both perpetrators and victims of injustice, whether past or present, is necessary to heal inheritances of collective trauma. This healing allows those who have caused harm to bear the weight of that responsibility, and it allows those who have been harmed to be recognized. Ancestral resource and strength is available for all.

Becoming a constellations facilitator came naturally to me. As a psychotherapist I specialized in trauma, loss, and grief, with backgrounds in psychology, sociology, and social work. My work with individuals, families, and groups intersected with interests in social justice, history, and politics. I was well-grounded by my own generational roots in farming and nurtured by lifelong spiritual practices and explorations.

It didn’t take long for this approach to lead me to deeper engagement with and prioritizing of my own family and ancestors. Daily practices of ancestral meditations and prayers stewarded consciousness of my own generational history. Gratitude for a life made possible by my parents, grandparents, and all the generations before them who passed it on promoted humility. My Western-trained mind, inclined toward ruminating and trying to solve the problems of the past, evolved into greater ease and acceptance including of myself and others as we are. My family, ancestors, and life itself became both resource and teacher. Constellations provided a path to realizing how truth lives in the body. These daily practices have promoted living in a more embodied, connected-to-my-whole-self way that includes the landscape of the soul of my family and ancestors, past, present, and future generations.

In 2001, I was one of 90 participants from 17 countries at the first international training of this work at a residential learning program in Germany, an experience that reaffirmed our shared humanity. I saw that it is universally true, in places around the globe, that the histories of earlier generations continue to affect those who are alive today. I felt hopeful about the perspective this offered Americans regarding our country’s complicated, often problematic history.

Since then, I’ve had roles in nearly all of the national constellation conferences. The first was in Portland, OR, in 2005. Dr. Joy DeGruy, one of the keynote speakers, had just published her book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and she spoke about the generational effects of chattel slavery. The term post-traumatic alave ayndrome (PTSS) describes the adaptive survival behaviors and strategies of African Americans in response to trauma, both generational and occurring in today’s society. While working on her doctoral studies in social work research and considering the examples of trauma that are typically recognized to result in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), she asked, What about slavery? Slavery’s traumatic.

In her keynote, she described the minefield of traumas in navigating daily life that are inescapable for most Black Americans. As Dr. DeGruy talked about the need for systemic changes in the US, I recognized the degree to which systemic constellations had offered me a portal into the American landscape of colonialism, slavery, and immigration. I noticed the influence of these histories in my psyche and spirit almost daily. Yet the idea of sharing my own systemic perspectives about them filled me with ambivalence. My gut knew the value in how I viewed the interplay between individual and collective trauma, but I also maintained habits of mind that supported keeping these thoughts primarily to myself. This irresolution continued within me for about three years.

Learning about PTSS clarified my inner dilemma. I let myself acknowledge what I wasn’t seeing in American society: that not only were white people not talking about the generational effects of slavery and colonialism, there seemed to be an assumption that there were no ill effects of these histories in white descendants of those who perpetrated them. I then saw how the impulse to suppress my inner dialogue about these collective traumas mirrored complicity with the violence, denial, and numbness sourced in the silence of whiteness. I realized how deeply my indoctrination in the innocence of white womanhood meant relying on white men to be solely responsible for the perpetrator roles of humanity in the American experience, namely slaveholder and colonizer.

As Dr. DeGruy continued to talk about the over 400-year-old global business trade profit originating from enslavement of African people, I realized that we were sitting in the auditorium of Portland’s World Trade Center (WTC)—literally, another center of the trade. I imagined that today’s WTCs wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the global slave trade that she was speaking of. Aligning my inner dialogue with action toward visibility and repair of historic harms replaced ambivalence with this embodied recognition. In that moment I committed to writing my book Ancestral Blueprints: Revealing Invisible Truths in America’s Soul.

I came home from Portland a few days later to an email from a woman named Suzanne Jeffers in Atlanta. She wrote that her friend Natalie Chavez, who had benefited from the constellation work with me, had encouraged her to ask if I would offer these same groups where she lives. I knew that her invitation was connected to the same field of consciousness I’d just experienced in Portland. I said yes, beginning a seven-year chapter of offering constellation groups in Atlanta. The inherited consequences of the legacies of slavery and colonialism were alive in every workshop. With each plane trip between the Pacific Northwest and the Deep South, my perspectives on whiteness, ancestors, and the generational effects of historic trauma in American families continued to develop. By the seventh year of traveling back and forth my intuition was well developed in sensing the generational histories of white women whose ancestors had enslaved people. I came to feel as if there was an invisible shingle outside my office that said works with white women in the Northwest escaping Southern ancestral guilt.

On either my first or second trip to Atlanta, radio hosts Ade Anifowose and Ombassa Sophera asked me to join them in creating a radio program. Together we hosted Life Conversations Radio Presents Ancestral Blueprints, for about seven years. The full transcript of the following episode is included in the book Ancestral Blueprints. Here’s an excerpt from Post-Colonial and Post-Slavery Ties That Bind, which aired on August 18, 2008:

Caller 1: Yes, I want to ask you a question. And I want to ask a lot of Black people this question: have you ever thought about how white women felt when they saw Brown babies running around in their yard?

Ade: What do you mean by that?

Caller 1: Just think about how a white woman felt when she saw Brown babies, little Brown babies. They weren’t Black, they were Brown, and she could see immediately that there was a mixture, and she felt betrayed.

Ade: Yes, yes, yes.

Caller 1: There’s a lot of anger that we don’t deal with...we don’t even think about this anger, you know?

Ade: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, besides that, many, many Black women were raped. But, these women were held accountable for being raped by the white women whose husbands were cheating on them!

Caller 1: Do we think about that? Because, don’t forget: that white woman is related to that child, you know?.... So for the last 400 years in this country, people have been living lies about their lineage.

Ade: It’s not just that they don’t know, but hiding it.

Lisa: Yes, absolutely.

Caller 1: We need to come out of the closet about who we are!

Lisa: In the soul, it’s really clear that all those babies, women, mothers, fathers, each have a place of belonging that’s uniquely theirs...secrecy, lies, denials, cover-ups, are part of the human experience, and the soul knows that there is no confusion about who the fathers and mothers are.

The term whiteness is not an ancestor came to me during these years. I began using this phrase in most of the circles and workshops I facilitated, each time noticing that when a listener would first hear the words, there would be a visible reaction in their body. Eyes would open wider, backs stand straighter, tiredness would be released and alertness and curiosity activated. They might ask, What does that mean? but that question came from the head, the place where whiteness was born. However, their body already knew the truth of the statement and needed no explanation. Truth acknowledged frees up energy. Suppression of truth, trapped in the mind with unanswerable questions, reinforces whiteness. There is no life in it. Sometimes people get irritated at the statement, or disturbed by not being able to figure it out, as if this is somehow possible or required. It’s just a fact. A statement of what is, I would answer. Depending on the person, group, timing, context, I may let the statement be a springboard to teaching about these collective histories. I listened to the cues from embodiment for direction of where to lead the dialogue.

While doing research for Ancestral Blueprints, I learned about what’s often described as the largest one-day mass execution in US history. It took place during the US–Dakota Wars. In December of 1862, 38 Dakota men were publicly hung in Mankato, Minnesota, witnessed by a crowd of 4,000 white onlookers. This is the region where I grew up. It is a collective trauma experienced on this land in the generations before me that is just beginning to be openly acknowledged. The Homestead Act was signed by Lincoln earlier that same year. The effects of this law can’t be overstated in how it supported European immigrants and their families starting their lives on new soil. As a descendant of ancestors who benefited from settler colonialism, I feel the inheritance of gratitude, grief, and guilt in these histories. I have benefited from this group lynching.

Over the last fifteen years, I have developed residential retreats, programs, and presentations on the influence of slavery, colonialism, and immigration with titles including White People Don’t Know They Have Ancestors, An Embodied Dialogue with the Internalized Colonizer, Shared Roots in the Family Soul, and Truth and Reconciliation: It Begins in the Family.

In 2015 I gave a TedxTalk entitled "Receiving Life in Ancestral Blueprints’’ about these topics, offering the idea that the US was formed out of disconnection from family. The collective movements of immigration, slavery, and colonialism are all filled with experience of separation from family, by choice or by force. We like to talk about the choice ones, but the ones by force? Not so much. Unexpressed grief, unhealed trauma, and unmasking shame and guilt are still very much in process in our country.

Afterwards, I had a brief encounter with a white woman in the audience that stayed with me. I just have to thank you so much. It just makes so much sense. I just never thought about it that way. Her words were kind, heartfelt. She had taken my hands into hers while expressing her gratitude; she didn’t want to let go of them when she was done talking. It was a blessing for me to stand with her, too. We looked at each other for what seemed like quite a long time, holding hands, while the audience of over 400 people exited the auditorium. No more words were necessary. It was like she’d been thrown a lifeline without realizing that she’d been drowning. It’s the same "fish can’t describe the water they are swimming in’’ experience of trying to describe whiteness that you’ll encounter in the essays in this book.

My orientation regarding the programs I offer are rooted in response to sensed or expressed community needs. Since the 2016 American election, I’ve done my best to be responsive to the growing requests I receive to develop more offerings specific to these themes. Trusting that collaboration with others is required to do so in a sustainable way, I began redirecting these requests to expand these themed offerings especially in the Northwest, letting people know that I was available to be invited to their regions to offer programs in partnership. In the spring of 2019, when Sonya Lea invited me to hers in Banff, Alberta, Canada to do so, it was an easy yes.

The retreat was named Whiteness Is Not an Ancestor: An Embodied Dialogue with the Internalized Colonizer. We held it from October 31 to November 2, a period encompassing All Souls and All Saints Day, Samhain, Day of the Dead. We intentionally selected these dates with respect for knowing that the veil is thin between the spirit and material worlds during this time. I deepened my own practices of spiritual and energetic preparation for this gathering for about five months beforehand, sensing the depth of ancestral resourced work that the group would be doing together.

The idea for this collection of essays emerged from my nighttime dreams while leading this retreat.

I woke up with a detailed project description, timeline, and specific list of the women I needed to invite. It took just a few minutes to sketch out the idea: to steward a collection of essays written by white women who are cultivating consciousness regarding whiteness and its role in collective movements of immigration, colonialism, slavery, and war in their families and ancestries—essays that would disentangle themes of innocence, historic trauma, perpetrator/victim bonds, privilege, gender, race, money, boundaries, and belonging.

I knew that the idea had emerged from the ancestral realms and noticed that it did so in a group made up of Canadian and American citizens in Canada, not the US. This was not a surprise to me. Canada had chosen, as part of their country’s legacy of trauma with the Indian Residential Schools, to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I’ve had many conversations with Canadians over the years about this process, and while I understand that of