Finding My Key:

Untangling White Supremacy From My Body

For most of my life, my body carried this gross, sticky tension. I didn't have the words for it then, but now I know it was the weight of white supremacy culture.

I was born into a family of contradictions. My aunt went to Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral. My uncle was a deputy sheriff in a Sundown town in Wisconsin. I learned from Sesame Street that racism was a lie, and then I’d hear the people I loved tell those same lies at the dinner table. I loved them, but I never felt safe.

It makes sense to me now. I was an undiagnosed autistic, ADHD, non-binary kid. My nervous system was a live wire, picking up on every bit of hypocrisy around me. My meltdowns were a language none of us understood—me, my parents, my grandparents… a whole chain of undiagnosed people who had given up their own culture to “become white.”

The proof of that privilege is in our history. My people were owning land within a generation or two of getting here. I’m a “homeowner” today, which really means the bank owns it, and I just pay them for the right to follow their rules and keep up the property value.

I’ve known hard times, too. I was a single mom on assistance at 20, moved 19 times in 20 years, and I’m a recovering addict—which is really just a symptom of deep, unhealed trauma. I’ve been afraid. But for my family, poverty was always just a place we visited. We always had a map out.

Then, in 2022, I fell. Hard.

The traumatic brain injury that followed shattered me. I spent the first nine months crying in the dark of my basement, 90% of the time alone. Light, noise, any complex connection was too much; the slightest conflict would short-circuit my system. I was a mess. My physical therapist said my brain was a library in a tornado.

Healing began when I started to let go, to process the feelings stored in my body over decades—sometimes even epigenetically. In acupuncture, I could sometimes feel it, even see it: the tangled, knotted shit pouring out. I remember one time, processing my relationship with my mother, I had a vision of 1950s hurt little girls and the phrase "boys will be boys" repeating in my head. The next time I had similar experience, the same girls as young women (raped, pregnant, married, dead) with "I never had a choice” repeating. It ended with me sobbing on the floor, feeling generations of that weight leave my body.

In that shattered state, I found my guides: Pro-Humanity educators like Kokayi Nosakhere, Te Ataarangi, and Desiree B. Stephens. I often wonder—if I hadn't found them, if I hadn't connected white supremacy culture to the pain in my body, I know exactly where I'd be: angry, bitter, and isolated. I saw that path clearly, and I saw how easily people get trapped there. Their teaching was my lifeline away from it. And as a European American, I know my part isn't to just consume their labor. Every time I pay an educator, donate to tuition, buy a book, or even repost a video, I am shifting resources. I'm helping fund the space for the next person's "a-ha" moment, for their own healing away from that bitterness.

That clarity led me to my co-founder, Vix, and to building EAGER. It's our virtual gathering space. It's where I go when I'm confused or triggered. It's where we hold space for each other and put that principle of mutual support into practice. This community held me while I was healing, and together, we're slowly untangling the knots we inherited.

Photo by Kristina Paukshtite

I don't have a grand plan. But I'm finding my part, deconstructing my own beliefs in small, daily ways. And I believe that as each of us finds our own key—one of the many needed to unlock a better way—we can start to reweave something new from all we've untangled.

You are not alone in seeing that these systems weren't built for all of us.

It's time we built something that is. Let's find our keys, together.