Author’s note: This essay is for everyone, but many of my recommendations are specifically aimed at white people. Because I am white, I make use of “us” and “we” in recognition of my own complicity and accountability in this work. I also want to acknowledge the work of Lutze Segu, Holly Whitaker, Layla F. Saad, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Rachel Cargle, without whom I would not have the language to talk about the issues in this post.

You may already know that I struggled with alcohol abuse for many years and finally got sober in 2018. If you didn’t, now you know. I’ve spoken on the show about addiction and why I believe it is political. You can hear more about that here.

Why am I bringing this up now, at a moment when people are in the streets in every state in our country, marching in defense of Black lives? When communities are in collective mourning—for the most recent victims of police brutality and for the daily injustices of being Black in America?

I bring it up because the chorus of voices calling for change is so strong right now, and white supremacy is plotting new ways to silence it. We need every tool at our disposal to prevent that from happening—and few people have more “keep going” tools in their belts than recovering addicts.

I recently had a conversation with a woman whose feminism and social justice work I deeply respect named Lutze Segu (the Social Justice Doula). Over the course of our conversation, I told her I was sober and that, to me, addiction and social justice are intertwined. Lutze thanked me for telling her about my experience. Then she said, “You know, white supremacy is an addiction.”

I haven’t been able to get this statement out of my head.

My conversation with Lutze happened five days before a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd and a week after Louisville police shot Breonna Taylor in her bed. In the midst of the outrage, pain, and conflict sparked by these terrible deaths, her observation gnawed at me. And as more and more people desperately asked the question, “How can we rid ourselves of the evil of white supremacy?” I realized why.

If white supremacy is an addiction, we can recover from it. A recovery framework offers us a way to think about white supremacy as something that can be identified, resisted, and—with daily work—overcome.

While it’s accurate to say, “White supremacy harms everyone,” the harm done to white people and the harm done to people of color—and Black and Indigenous people in particular—is incomparable. The material benefits white supremacy offers to those who are willing to carry its water cannot be overestimated. All people of color are oppressed by the personal and systemic manifestations of white supremacy, even those who internalize its fallacies. The harm done to white people is spiritual—hidden so deep most of us won’t even feel it until we begin to experience the effects of its withdrawal.

What are these effects? To understand them, we have to understand why we (the big “we”) cling to white supremacy so ferociously, just as I clung to my nightly bottle of wine for years even when I knew it was making me miserable and diminishing my spirit.

Being constantly reassured of your power, entitlement, and inherent rightness is intoxicating. Who doesn’t want to be seen as the default for “normal” and “good” and enjoy the material benefits that come with that? But when you start to question why you have these benefits when others don’t, or when a person of color points out errors in your thinking, other white people will quickly gather around you and impress upon you that you are totally fine and absolutely not racist—just like addicts will discourage a fellow drunk from going to rehab.

Because if we remove the reassurance of our power and our rightness, what is left? Without the narrative of our own superiority running in the backs of our minds, we don’t know how to function. We are terrified of who and what we would really be without white supremacy. And that is the definition of addiction.

Like addiction, white supremacy is a toxic void that exists only to take our humanity and make us dangerous to others. The mental gymnastics required to justify them are eerily similar. This realization might seem like it would cause sinking despair. But, for me, it was the opposite—because I have been here before.

I know what it’s like to have a monster living inside me whose actions don’t accord with who I believe myself to be. I am intimately familiar with the cycle of committing to do better and then fucking up over and over and over again. I accept that I’m wired to act in ways that hurt me and other people, but I know that I have the capacity to rewire myself for love. I know I can apply the tools and beliefs I have learned through getting sober to this antiracism work. And so can you.

Everyone’s journey is different, but here are some recovery truths I have found myself reaching for over the last few weeks as I’ve been taking stock of my own dependency on white supremacy.

Connect with other people who are ridding themselves of the addiction.
Recognize that no one else can do this work for you.
Be honest about what your addiction makes you do.
Recognize that what it makes you do does not align with—or equate to—who you really are.
Acknowledge and apologize for the harm you cause.
Believe in your divinity.
Embrace quiet and stillness, but don’t be quiet about your recovery.
Recognize that you will be doing this work, day in and day out, for the rest of your life.

And because this metaphor must also be antiracist, I will also add:

Commit to fighting the violent, deceitful, capitalist systems that cause and perpetuate the addiction.

For white folks, ridding ourselves of white supremacy requires us to yield the material and systemic power we knowingly and unknowingly hoard. However, I do not believe that any of us is powerless over white supremacy. (This is where I depart from traditional addiction recovery models when it comes to drugs and alcohol, too.) Whether we can ever earn or deserve the trust of people of color is not for us to speculate about nor is it within our control. But as we slowly regain our humanity, we can learn to trust ourselves again, even if we relapse (and we will). And as we, day by day, take back power over our minds and our hearts, the power white supremacy once yielded will slowly diminish. It will hang around and look for footholds, but if we remain vigilant, I believe we can deliver ourselves of its void.

Post script: For those wondering where to begin, I highly recommend purchasing Layla F. Saad’s book Me and White Supremacy. It is not a book that you read; it is a book that you do—preferably in a small, trusted community.