Institutional racism is hard to imagine, it’s so big and abstract and makes you feel so helpless. As a sex and relationship coach, I’ll help you personalize it with a relationship analogy.
I grew up in an immigrant household with domestic violence, with my dad beating up my mom. It was a traumatic childhood for my brother and I since the abuse trickled down to us too. In spite of that their marriage lasted 25 years.
So if racism were a house and the U.S. population were the family in that house, it would look nice on the outside to the neighbors with pretty flags of freedom and equality for everyone. But behind closed doors it’s a different story. The White patriarchy would be the man of the house who’s also the husband-abuser. Black people are symbolized by the battered wife. Brown people are like the kids of this family, an extension of the mother and deeply connected to her nervous system. They’re always trying to be good and not make waves to piss off the volatile dad, but they are helpless to stop him and helpless to comfort the mom.
Battered wife syndrome is a syndrome because wives, like my mom, mysteriously keep returning and don’t leave. When I ask my own mom why, she still doesn’t really know, but says things like, “Where would I go? I tried leaving before. This is still home. What about my poor kids? It’s not always bad like this and sometimes he can be really nice. Sure, I walk on eggshells and he hurts me and my kids sometimes and and I don’t know when he’ll explode or why, but at least I know how bad it is here. He hurts me but least I have a roof over my head. Out there, it’s out of the frying pan, into the fire.” I know now as an adult that for my mom to leave there would’ve been a new set of problems. Leaving is not simple.
Just like we want White patriarchy to cop to its impact, we want the man of the house to look in the mirror and suddenly see who he is, see the destructive impact he has on his family, acknowledge the hurt he’s caused and with human empathy, experience remorse, shame and compassion. In other words, we want him to be a way that’s opposite of who he is. But abusers rarely do. Why not?
The man of the house has a choice. He knows this. He can face his shame at his own actions, but shame for all of us is the dragon within, the toughest and most damning of emotions and takes great heroic courage to slay. If he doesn’t have the courage to own his actions, his only other option is to double down on the abuse and violence, convincing himself that “she deserves it, she’s asking for it, she made me do it” with greater desperation as the shame gets greater.
I believe we’re at this point in American history. Race is all about relationship dynamics scaled up to institutional sizes.