May 2025: Feeling the Feelings

As a White person committed to anti-racism, you may have heard the phrase "do the work." Often, we interpret this as reading books, attending trainings, or engaging in dialogue—and those are all crucial. But there’s a less-talked-about part of the work that’s just as essential–something that happens to be the next Element of Antiracism Practice that we are developing for CWC: feeling the feelings.

Last year, we talked about the four elements of being human: intellectual, spiritual, emotional and physical. Although it’s easy to get stuck in our heads, we’ve found that dismantling white supremacy isn’t just intellectual—it’s emotional. Grief, shame, guilt, confusion, fear, anger, even numbness—all of these are part of waking up to the violence and harm that racism inflicts on others and the ways White people have been shaped and limited by it, too.

It's tempting to bypass these feelings. To rush to action. To center "being a good ally" over being real. But our experience has shown us that skipping over our emotional truths keeps white supremacy intact. It reinforces the idea that some feelings are “too much,” and that vulnerability equals weakness—beliefs rooted in the same systems we're trying to undo.

As activist and somatic healer Prentis Hemphill says:

"We cannot think our way into a new way of being. We have to feel our way there."

We're going to use Hemphill’s quote as the jumping off point this month to reflect on our own relationship with feelings. Below are some questions to help focus our thoughts:

1. What feelings come up for me when I hear the words “White supremacy”? Where do I notice them in my body?

2. When have I shut down or numbed out in conversations about race—and what was I trying to avoid?

3. How was I taught (explicitly or not) to express or suppress emotion growing up? How does that still shape me?

4. What would happen—for myself and others—if I allowed more space to feel?

   
   

Feeling our feelings is not about centering White guilt. It's about decentering control. Letting our full humanity be part of what drives us towards liberation for all makes our actions more honest, more sustainable, and ultimately, more transformative.

As always, if this month’s prompt doesn’t inspire you, or even frustrates you or scares you, join a conversation anyway and share what’s coming up for you. As we say at the beginning of each gathering, all perspectives are welcome, always.

P.S. Here is a short clip from Brene Brown talking about the consequences of avoiding feelings in a work environment. Although specific to the workplace, we feel like what she says can easily translate to anti-racism work and the relationships we are trying to build.

“Feeling the feelings – which are an appropriate human response to racism and oppression – is an important part of the process. When you allow yourself to feel those feelings, you wake up. You rehumanize yourself. You start to realize that you weren’t feeling these feelings before because you had shut down a part of your humanity in order to participate in white supremacy. White supremacy purposely numbs you to the pain that your racism causes.” – Layla Saad, author, speaker and teacher