The Burned Out White Activist: How Chronic Stress Harms People of Color

By now, you probably have been hearing about burnout ad nauseam. Chances are you may have even experienced burnout yourself. But there is no doubt that all of our stress levels have been at an all-time high lately. And it SUCKS. For sure 2020 was a year to forget, but just because we turned the page on the calendar doesn’t mean the stress of the world suddenly goes away.

So hopefully some of your 2021 goals are to manage your stress better: get more sleep, exercise, work fewer hours. You know the drill. If we take care of our well-being, the better off we’ll be. This is nothing new.

What you may not be aware of is how your stress impacts those around you, especially Black, Indigenous and People of Color. And clearly, as folks working for social and racial justice, we want to reduce harm towards BIPOC. That’s why we got into the work in the first place. But we may be causing more harm than we realize when we don’t manage our stress well.

So how does stress cause harm? Let’s explore four different — but interconnected — ways:

Stress reduces our capacity for empathy.

Stress in and of itself is not a bad thing. It’s essential for our survival. But chronic stress — stress that is prolonged and constant — is toxic. Specifically, it depletes our body; our muscles, our blood vessels, and immune system. And burnout happens as a result of this barrage of stress on our body and mind.

Another thing stress depletes is our capacity for empathy. Before we get into that, however, it’s important to differentiate between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is the act of expressing compassion towards another person. Empathy is the act of literally feeling what others are feeling, taking on their emotions as if they are our own. Sympathy says “I’m so sorry about your loss.” Empathy actually feels grief and sorrow.

You could argue that empathy may be one of the most important tools in anti-racism work. When we actually feel the pain, anger and sadness of other people, it moves us to action. Conversely, when we are numb to the pain of others, we feel uninspired to act.

But when we’re stressed, our ability to empathize with others is inhibited. We just have a much more difficult time putting ourselves in others’ shoes. This can cause harm on both micro- and macro-levels. On a smaller scale, it may mean that we may completely disregard the feelings needs of BIPOC in the moment. We may commit a microaggression or say something offensive, but because of a lack of empathy, we either completely overlook it or minimize their effect it had. If they call us out on it, we may think — or, god forbid, say out loud — that they are overreacting or that they shouldn’t feel that way. Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common occurrence for BIPOC. Not being heard or seen — and ultimately feeling dismissed — is incredibly harmful.

On a larger scale, lack of empathy can lead to inaction or, at best, very little urgency to tackle issues that harm BIPOC folks. If we — white folks — are feeling just fine about the way the world is, that’s a clear sign that we aren’t empathizing with BIPOC folks. If we were to actually put ourselves in their shoes…let’s just say it would light a fire underneath us. But if we feel that things “aren’t that bad,” then what’s the rush? We see this all the time with the indifference from people in power even when the injustice is right in their faces. But before you diffuse responsibility and think that is just a “people in power” thing, stop and ask yourself “When have I avoided the uncomfortable feeling of empathizing with BIPOC folks?” Maybe you have completely missed or overlooked an opportunity to empathize because you were feeling panicked. Or maybe a BIPOC individual brought up an issue and you just thought to yourself: “I can’t take it any longer. It’s too much!!” and just couldn’t give your full attention to them in the moment. Or when have you been doom-scrolling through Facebook, seeing all the injustice in the world and scream “It’s just too much, I can’t take it!” That’s what depleted empathy sounds like.

Stress makes us self-centered.

At the most basic level, we experience a stress response because we feel like we are in danger. So we go into self-protection mode. We batten down the hatches, lower the blinds and turn off the lights. Priorities #1–3 are me, myself and I. And now that we know that stress reduces our capacity for empathy, this is a double whammy. It results in us being completely self-centered. Here are a few examples.

Centering ourselves in a conversation is an attempt to protect our ego or save face — strategies to soothe the fear we’re experiencing — but has harmful effects. In discussions on race or injustice, centering might look like oppression olympics (“yeah, well, as a _______ I ALSO face inequities”) or listening to respond rather to understand. This completely dismisses the other person and may even derail the conversation away from making real change that would benefit them.

Whataboutism is also a common form of centering. The All Lives Matter retort is a clear example of that. But before you think “hah, that’s not me, I have a BLM sign in my front yard,” think about when you gave money to a cause that is more close to home to you or a family member instead of giving to an organization that works for racial equity. Now, of course I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to do the former, but it could be an example of centering ourselves. My job here isn’t to judge your intentions; it’s to encourage you to use discernment and actively seek what it means to decenter yourself. But part of that journey is learning to better manage our stress. As I said, stress is the result of feeling in danger. When we successfully heal from our stress, we feel safe to come out of our bunker and attend to the needs of others. It also means that we don’t bring our baggage into conversations about race or communities of color. Taking the time to care for ourselves and get in the right headspace beforehand gives us the capacity to decenter ourselves so that we can fully attend to the needs of BIPOC individuals.

Finally, white fragility is another form of centering that can be exacerbated by stress. Many times white fragility rears its ugly head when we feel under attack. And if we are already stressed — and feeling in danger — we will do whatever it takes to protect ourselves in the moment. The other thing important to understand here is that we essentially have two brains: the thinking brain and the feeling brain. And the feeling brain will overpower the thinking brain every time, no matter how sound our logic is. Let me give you an example. Let’s say a Black person calls you out on a racist thing you said. You may KNOW that the needs of the other person — and the harmful impact of the racist thing you said — is more important than your feelings. But in that moment, it will FEEL like the other way around. However, when we manage our stress and process our emotions in a healthy way, it will be much easier for the thinking brain to interrupt our feelings so that we respond appropriately in the moment. But if we don’t, our defensiveness — even if it’s subtle — does damage.

Stress makes it difficult to interrupt unconscious bias and racist beliefs.

The stress response is all about speed. And thank goodness for that. If we’re walking across the street and a car is coming at us, we’d better be quick to respond. We don’t have the time to stop and think about what the car looks like or make a prediction about how soon it will get to us. We have to run out of the way NOW. Clearly, in cases like this, a speedy stress response is helpful. But in most cases, we really don’t need the stress response to be that quick. And, in other cases, this speed actually can lead to harm.

In one study, researchers looked at whether or not stressors in the emergency department (ED) impacted racial bias. In other words, would stressed out ED employees have stronger racial biases? Turns out the answer is yes. They concluded that “cognitive stressors (overcrowding and patient load) were associated with increased implicit bias.”

What does that mean for you and me? Well, it means that — when we’re stressed — we’ll be quicker to assume that a Black doctor is less qualified than a white one and a Black woman who is passionately expressing her feelings about a microaggression she experienced is “angry.” This is because implicit biases are shortcuts that the brain creates to — again — speed things up. Of course, these are learned — and blatantly false — biases. So we can and should work to unlearn them. But for the time being, we need to become aware of them and learn to interrupt them so we don’t act upon them (avoid seeing the Black doctor or asking the Black woman to lower her voice).

Managing our stress helps us slow everything down. When we are more relaxed and soothed, we are less reactive and more mindful. This allows us to not only interrupt any racial bias that comes up, but it gives us the time and space to actively reject the false belief and replace it with a more true one (the Black doctor is just as qualified as any other doctor or this Black woman is expressing her feelings like anyone else would who has experience such hardships in life).

Stress can cause us to leave social justice work.

Perhaps the most harmful thing that stress can do is make us so miserable that we end up completely stepping away from the work. This happens more often than you may think. One study that interviewed social justice activists found that about half of them who experienced burnout left their movements for good. Sometimes, the feelings of exhaustion, hopelessness and cynicism are just so strong that people can’t take it anymore. And who can blame them, I guess? Who would continue to subject themselves to something that makes them miserable?

But for most of us (white-identifying individuals), it is a privilege to leave the work — especially racial justice work for obvious reasons. We have the ability to choose whether or not we engage in working for justice. Heck, we even have the ability to choose whether or not we care. For BIPOC folks, it’s a much different story. Even if a person of color works for a bank, they are still fighting for racial justice every day. They carry this burden every second of their lives. When they advocate for a raise because they were coerced into doing DEI work for free, they aren’t doing it just because it’s the right thing to do, they’re doing it because it was a direct affront to their identity. As white folks, sometimes our passion for justice fades over time due to prolonged stress. And since many of us aren’t directly affected by oppression, there leaves little motivation to stay in the game (see paragraph on empathy above).

For better or for worse, we need more white folks to engage — and stay engaged — in activism. Our racial identity gives us inherent power due to systemic racism and white supremacy. By leaving the work altogether, we give up that opportunity to disrupt and dismantle systems. Not only does this put a greater burden on BIPOC folks, but it erodes trust. What does it say about white folks’ commitment to justice if we come and go so frequently? How could we expect people of color to completely trust us when we say “I’m here to do the work” or “I’m committed to racial justice”? Of course, all of us should be judged by our own actions, not the actions of others who have come before us. But you could certainly understand the wariness.

By no means am I minimizing or dismissing the burnout that many white activists experiences, Those feelings are REAL. I can personally attest to that. But burnout cannot cause us to leave the work altogether. We need to invest in our health and stress management in order to stay engaged. And not in zombie-like way, but with sustained passion and energy.

Is there any good news?

Yeesh. That was a lot of gloom and doom. But unfortunately, there just isn’t a lot of good stuff to say about chronic stress and burnout. We vastly underestimate its impact on our mental, emotional and physical well-being. And, for many of us, we’re completely unaware of how it harms others.

But there is good news. Burnout is preventable and stress is manageable. Proactivism is about taking a proactive approach to social justice work so that stress doesn’t hinder progress or harm others. It’s about taking control of our stress; using it when we need it and mindfully responding to it when it hinders us or others.

Many people think — or at least act like — you should be miserable while doing social justice work. If you’re not frazzled, enraged, exhausted or overwhelmed, then you’re doing something wrong. You’re “not paying attention.” I wholeheartedly disagree. Not only is this just not a sustainable approach, but it also means that we will simply do poor quality work.

Adrienne Maree Brown says it best in her book, Pleasure Activism: “Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.”

Does this mean that we get angry sometimes? Absolutely. Does it mean that we work until 3 AM some nights? Sure. Does it mean that we have moments when we just want to throw our hands in the air and yell “I give up!”? You bet. But this should not be the status quo. We cannot let stress be in control. We cannot let it steal our freedom. There is no good outcome when that happens.