InsaneJournal

IBARW: On Making Mistakes
So here’s a secret: Nobody is perfect. Perfect, in fact, doesn’t exist.

I know this is hard for some of you to hear. White culture in this country relies pretty heavily on feeding us all the myth that perfection is out there, it is in your grasp and you are a failure when you fall short. (Note: saying something is part of white culture does not mean that only white people have/value/are afflicted with something. I’m not saying only white folks are perfectionists. As Tema Okun says “Because we all live in a white supremacy culture, these characteristics show up in the attitudes and behaviors of all of us -- people of color and white people.” For an overview of white culture try this article by Sharon Martinas and for more specifics on how it manifests (including specifics about perfectionism) try this article by Tema Okun)

We all grow up with this myth of perfection, that it’s out there, that it’s within our grasp and that myth is incredibly destructive to nearly all aspects of our lives. For white folks, one of the places that it is particularly destructive is in our attempts to do anti-racist work.


The only way to completely avoid saying or doing anything racist is to completely avoid interacting with or talking about folks of color. Which, ps, is a pretty fucked up racist thing to do.

Most white folks don’t like to think about the fact that we are racist and we don’t like to admit it when we do racist things. Part of that is because we care about other people and we don’t want to hurt them and it’s not fun to realize that you have been doing so for quite some time. Part of it is because it doesn’t fit our self-concept to be so fundamentally flawed.

But we are flawed. We’re really flawed. And other people can see it and are impacted by it.

If we are spending all of our time trying to avoid mistakes, trying to achieve perfection, we will be completely paralyzed. You can’t act, you can’t work for change if you are so terrified of saying or doing something wrong.

Also, if you are so terrified of fucking up, when you inevitably do fuck up and are called on it you are a million times more likely to be super defensive and crappy about it. And that defensive crappiness is incredibly hurtful to the folks who have called you on your shit (which isn’t easy to do).

If you hit someone in the face you should apologize. Don’t tell them they were imagining it or tell them you didn’t do it. Even if hitting someone in the face is something you do so often and have done for so long you aren’t consciously aware of it you are still responsible for the action. If you hit someone you should apologize. And if you don’t notice you hit them until they say ouch you should apologize and then think about why it is you could hit someone without noticing you were doing it.

Many people of color have a lot of very justifiable anger at white folks. That anger is often present when a POC calls a white person on their shit. As white folks, it’s our job to figure out how to take it gracefully. I’m not saying let someone treat you badly. If someone is abusive to you of course you should walk away. But if someone is angry, let them be angry. Part of owning your mistakes is taking responsibility for the consequences of those mistakes.

Anger can be very uncomfortable to be around, especially for white women who are generally raised to avoid anger at all costs. It doesn’t matter if it’s uncomfortable for us, because when someone is calling us on our racist shit our comfort isn’t what’s important. We have made an error. That’s okay, we are still good people, but we have made an error and now we need to try to make it better. That means we need to listen to them and we need to let them feel however they feel and we need to do the things that they ask us to do.

I think part of the problem we often have in taking responsibility for our mistakes is our conflation of making a mistake and being a mistake. Screwing up does not make you a bad person (it doesn’t even make you a bad anti-racist white). Despite what you were raised believing, your actions and your being are different. You are still a good person, you don’t have to be perfect.


This is all a process. Making mistakes, being imperfect, isn’t going to magically become comfortable for you. I still spend a good chunk of my time terrified of saying or doing or being the wrong thing and then somehow being tagged as a bad anti-racist white person. It’s important to try. It’s important to lurch messily toward graceful mistake making and owning. It’s important to try to let go of your perfectionism.

You and the people around you will be much happier.