Unpacking Your Responses to Conflict and Feedback

White silence is violence.

White folks avoid conversations. We don't speak up to name racism in the moment, and instead trade anti-racism for niceness and "keeping the peace." White silence maintains the white social contract behind closed doors, in board room meetings, and at the dinner table. White people avoid conflict. White women in particular are conflict avoidant people-pleasers.

White anxiety is violence.

White people want to reassert their feelings with "all lives matter," or "not all white people." White women will break down in tears when told (usually pretty gently) about their problematic behaviors. White people show up and expect praise and reassurance that they are one of "the good ones." White feelings become the most important thing when white fragility is activated.

Being a white accomplice requires conflict and discomfort.

As white folks, we confuse feeling uncomfortable with being unsafe. This recreates and revisits harm and violence upon BIPOC.

When delivering feedback, being called in or called out, or being put in our place when we show up at #BlackLivesMatter marches, we can easily and instinctually turn to a place of discomfort = unsafe and act in ways that run counter to our espoused values.

So: How do we get good with conflict?

What is attachment theory?

Attachment theory is a psychological theory of interpersonal relationships which goes a long way to explain your inner life, but also how you need to heal from trauma and build long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships. Attachment theory is not without its critics and need for decolonization and work outside the heteronormative lens, but precisely since it was developed within a white paradigm, we can use it to help white folks explain their behavior and make changes.

Most importantly for our work here, attachment theory can help us name and unpack why we avoid conflict, why our anxiety provokes us to center our feelings and sense of safety, and why we struggle to effectively accept feedback.

Our white fragility shows up as avoidance and anxiety.

First off, it's important to know that attachment theory is not deterministic: your attachment style is not who you will be forever and ever. You can and should work to actively rewrite your attachment style. Your attachment style is determined by the sum total of all of the relationships in your life and how you've been securely supported, or been left hanging by important care-givers and sources of emotional support in your life. We can also have different attachment styles in different situations.

What we propose is that the attachment styles are key for understanding how white folks show up in conflicts, conversations, and movements related to racial justice and anti-racism. Does this explain everything about how white folks show up and hinder racial justice work? Does this explain everything about how white folks perpetuate harm on BIPOC? No, but it explained some things. As with any framework, there are gaps and limitations, but we can do this work in order to recognize, name, and disrupt our instinctual reactions to feedback and conflict in order to better show up as anti-racist white people.

And, as discussed above, we desperately need to rewrite our narrative with conflict. We are conditioned by whiteness to be "nice" to a simpering degree, but no movement has made gains from the oppressor by being nice (contrary to all of our whitewashed narratives of the Civil Rights Movement). "Nice" is a convenient cover for continuing abuse and harm by oppressors. So instead, how do we actively disrupt that oppression, niceness be damned?

What's important is how we show up with these styles in racial justice spaces and how these behaviors help or hinder our anti-racist work. Secure attachment styles will deal well with feedback, but everyone else will struggle.

Anxious types will need reassurance and comforting, trying to get feedback that they are the "good white person," all the while re-centering whiteness and white feelings at the center of the work.

Avoidant types will stay silent in conversations about race and racism. They will avoid having to have difficult conversations with family and friends, thus maintaining white silence or be unreliable in committing to collective work.

Anxious-avoidant types will show both of these behaviors.

But we are each these types, at different times, and in different places. The goal of a white accountability partnership is to help you lean into a secure style with necessary personal work without harming BIPOC.