The Empty Room
How Whiteness Severed Our Roots—And the Journey to Reclaim Them
I’ll never forget the time when I was reading My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem and I did one of the body practices on ancestry. The prompts asked me to close my eyes and imagine myself in a room. Then I was to call on an ancestor to appear in the room with me.
I was startled by the request. Thrown off.
I remember thinking: “Ancestor? What ancestor?”
I looked around.
The room was empty, and it remained so.
In so many ways, Menakem’s book changed my life. I read it during a time in my life when I was experiencing profound emptiness and shame due to my racial identity. Becoming “woke” filled me up with knowledge of racial injustice but absolutely depleted my dignity and worthiness levels.
And, to be honest, that felt right.
Considering all the horrible things my race has done and therefore, by extension, I have done, I SHOULD feel shitty about myself.
But Menakem’s book revealed two things that altered the course of my antiracist life forever: I am a victim of racial trauma and I have ancestral roots.
What this did for me was nothing short of liberating. The understanding that I was not only born into a system of oppression, but also victimized by it as well, freed me.
Not freed me in a way that I can claim no responsibility in addressing these systems and therefore I’m off the hook.
But freed me in a way that I had never considered before: it’s possible—and necessary—for me to fully engage in antiracism work without the burden of shame.
Specifically, shame about my racial identity.
There are many layers to this, but for the purpose of this entry, I’ll focus on ancestry.
When the room became—and remained—empty, I realized two things:
I feel very little or no connection to my ancestral roots
For whatever connection I do feel to my roots, it’s grounded in shame
When we became racialized as white, we lost a deep and profound type of resilience: the knowledge of and spiritual energy of being connected to something greater than us.
Purpose and connection.
Two of the most powerful forms of life-giving feelings.
But through the myth of whiteness and our rush to “get educated,” we unconsciously learned that for us—white folks—the sole purpose of our ancestors was to create and perpetuate racism.
So naturally, we choose to disconnect from our roots. Hide from our roots. Openly disparage our roots.
But these are our roots. They are the roots that are sprouting out from where you sit or stand right now; tendrils snaking into the ground beneath your feet.
And they are what makes us grounded—or not.
So when no ancestors came when I called, I realized that I had no roots in the ground.
No wonder I felt aimless, weak, and easily shaken.
Whiteness had pulled out the roots, chopped them up, or simply just fooled me into thinking I had none.
Being certified in the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), I’ve had countless conversations with white-identifying folks about their identity. As part of the debrief, I often ask them what they know about their culture and ethnic roots.
Most are able to say which countries of origin their ancestors came from, but usually that is the extent of the connection. As they talk, you can just hear the emptiness in their voices. You can sense the discomfort towards the topic, as if it’s wrong to even speak of our European ancestors. One person became visibly sad as she talked about the shame she felt about being white.
Through the fault of no one (other than it’s the system operating smoothly), we learn to—at best—ignore the topic of ancestry and —at worst—learn to loathe and abhor our ancestry. We are so disgusted at what our ancestors did (and didn’t do) that we steel ourselves to be better and do better.
But it’s no wonder that we stall out and burn out when we have no roots. When the room is empty.
Not only that, the shame and anger work against us.
The truth of our ancestral history is so much more nuanced and complex as “they all were bad because they were complicit in white supremacy” and “I don’t care how tough they had it, they had no excuses for allowing racism to persist.”
The truth is that—just like us—they did not choose to be racialized as white.
The truth is that—just like us—many of them did try to be antiracist.
The truth is that—just like us—many did not know what they did not know.
And I’m learning that much of our animosity and disassociation with our ancestry is projection. We are projecting our fear onto them.
The fear that we, too, will be judged as harshly by future generations. The deep fear that those who come after us will paint us as “bad” and that we had no excuses for falling so short in our antiracism work.
So instead, we put it on THEM. And we choose disconnection.
Us vs them. Dehumanization. Individualization.
Sound familiar?
All tools of white supremacy.
So, what’s the solution? Do we completely absolve our ancestors from all they were responsible for?
No, of course not.
We choose to be compassionate and relational instead.
Because they were us and we are them.
And I think that’s what scares us the most.
WE don’t want to be like THEM.
But we are. These are our roots.
So we are left with a choice: ignore and deny our roots, or ground ourselves in them.
I’m choosing the latter.
Because there is power, resilience, energy, and sustainment knowing that others have come before me AND others will come after me.
That it’s not all on me, in this lifetime, to figure it all out.
That there is actually much to be proud of that my ancestors did for me.
That it’s even an option for me to call on an ancestor when I am feeling hopeless.
But most of all, it’s the beautiful feeling that the room is not empty.
That I am not alone.