I Take My Whiteness Upon Myself as a Condition of My Own Liberation

Changing the Race Dance in Roxbury, Massachusettes

Mar 16, 2025

I’m working on a series of stories related to my vow, “I take my whiteness upon myself as a condition of my own liberation.” The vow and the feeling of the words inside me is hard won, mysterious, and born of numerous initiations I’ve navigated since my twenties. I will be 70 in May. By writing I hope to explain to myself and others why a dancer in the twenty-first century would care to say such a thing. And, why I can’t stop saying it.

Timing. March 23rd, 1638, is the date of the excommunication of my ancestor, Anne Hutchinson, who’d been under house arrest, tried, and cast out of Massachusetts for her convictions about Grace and Freedom.

I hope you will comment and add your thoughts as I journey over the next few weeks on themes of whiteness in an environment determined to erase diversity, equity, inclusion, and healthy environments. I am sure I will need your support.

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." –Audre Lorde

When I first learned that Anne Hutchinson was one of my ancestors, her name sounded familiar, but I couldn't recall why. I went into an old bookstore in Cambridge and asked if they had any books on her. The woman behind the counter didn't know much about her and said no. I found it curious that a founding mother of the United States seems little more than a ghost story in our collective memory.

Anne was a controversial leader who fled England with her huge extended family to the eastern shores of Massachusetts. Discounted as a jezebel, whatever that means, a seed of the devil, I began reading everything I could about the controversies that erupted around her. As I did, I resonated more and more with this intellectually strong, reluctant troublemaker from the 1600s. Here was a fully actualized midwife-healer, mother, loving partner, theologian, teacher, and mystic with a gift for articulation who cared about two things I do: grace and freedom.

It was in the Roxbury Church in Massachusetts, where her agonizing choices ravished me in a single download. It happened while reading a bronze plaque beneath the pulpit. Four hundred years back, my cousin suffered mightily under the dominion of white male clergy and governors. In response she berated them and the whole sorry state of patriarchal authority in the new colony. Little did Anne know I would find the plaque dedicated to her enemy, a founder of a church where I was to lead a workshop on racism.

Once you see a thing, you can't unsee it. You must dance with it.

The poorly and barely told story of Anne and my ancestors is inextricably entangled with the roots of patriarchy, white supremacy, and "whiteness." Whiteness is the constructed idea of a white race, white culture, and through it, the system of privileges and advantages afforded to white people. The demise of Anne and the broader Hutchinsonian movement still festers and eats at the roots of the U.S., a country that still lauds its forefathers for bringing us a divinely inspired nation.

What happened to my family burns alongside the horrors brought by colonizers to Indigenous people. Because my body is aligned to my ancestry, it is impossible to distance myself. So I made a vow.

I take my whiteness upon myself as a condition of my own liberation.

Truth doesn't die. Grace calls. The early disturbances that live in the underbelly of the American story reared up in 2025. It is my prayer that what is great in and around us will guide us quickly to be alert and return love to our Mother and the entirety of her creation.

Fall in New England!

On a bright Autumn Day, Soyinka Rahim and I were headed for Roxbury, Massachusetts. We were excited and nervous about leading the "Changing the Race Dance" workshop, having led it in Virginia, Oakland, Cleveland, Raleigh, and Washington, D.C. Still, we had no illusions when our host drove us into the Center for Urban Ministries, a beacon for social change in Boston's predominantly African American area. The workshop required all our courage.

I'd been struggling to excavate my racist biases and behaviors for years on my own. It wasn’t until I was gifted to work alongside Soyinka and other colleagues of color that I found myself in a more promising mutual dance where a shared worldview emerged. It was a huge relief. In each workshop, I counted on relief as one potential outcome.

Soyinka encouraged me to support the idea of a Changing the Race Dance workshop. She brought the clarity that we needed to invite others to share their personal understandings and misunderstandings of systemic racism in an embodied way. As artists and healers, we both experienced racism as an insidious and pervasive chronic social disease that needs treatment in body, heart, and soul.[1] Fortunately, InterPlay, an active, creative improv approach I cofounded, offered us the confidence, skeletal support, tools, and proven practices to open conversations and build enduring connections. [2}

We brought hope. But I didn't know how hard it would be to til the soil in the rock-hard landscape of racism. We called on spiritual support and picked up our trowels of love, affirmation, movement, storytelling, and song in an effort to break up the old scar tissue. Most attendees were white folk who could barely see the horror that courageous people of color kept lying at our feet.

Soyinka and I navigated different styles and histories that required a lot of breathing in and out. Given my lack of understanding and constant need to defend myself, we both worked hard. It helped to sing Soyinka's BIBOLOVE chants and songs [3] each time we convened our strange alchemical kindergarten where, as a teacher, I often felt like just another five-year-old.

As the car turned into the center, I saw an old church perched on a hill. The modern addition next door to it was reserved for us. We gathered our bags, newsprint, music, and materials from the car and entered the Hall. When the site manager appeared, she shot us a concerned look. The Hall was double booked. After some negotiation, she proposed that we use the old sanctuary in the morning and switch to the Hall in the afternoon. She opened a small door into the Church so we could check it out. Everything in me tightened. I couldn't imagine a more awkward space for a workshop on racism, especially one that involved dancing. Bodies moving around in an old Puritan citadel? We had no other choice.

Soyinka is rarely surprised at things to do with racism. She teaches activists about racism. I also know her as a dancer, choreographer, improviser, soul sister, and a gorgeous, sometimes furious woman with a Maya Angelou-sized spirit. She stands tall, Black, and proud, wrapped in beautiful fabric with brass, African-shaped earrings. Anytime Soyinka walked into a room, it changed. Strangers stopped her on the street to ask for prayers. Perhaps it’s because her acquaintance with the world's sorrows required her to pray without ceasing and gave birth to her repertoire of BIBOLOVE songs.. Raised in Berkeley by a black nationalist, artistic, disabled, vegan mother during the rise of the Black Panther Party, her mother bequeathed a bounty of wisdom about food, cultural care, religious diversity, and artistic expression to Soyinka. Initiated by the Divine at the deepest levels, love vibrates relentlessly in her alongside too many traumatic dismissals and soul whippings, including those of white people who killed her brother and stole her home.

To be in New England with Soyinka was a lesson all on its own. But, to see her jaw drop when we stepped into the sanctuary took me aback. She and I stood literally underneath a soaring pulpit and looked out on a sea of boxed-in white pews,[2] our workshop space.

The frigid air was challenging enough for two dancing bodies. Add that the Federal Meeting House-style sanctuary was in serious disrepair. The only places to move were the tiny space below the pulpit and in the aisles. Nothing in the space wanted us to be there.

Churches are not meant for dancing.

Decades before, as a doctoral student in worship and the arts, I'd learned that Christianity took its architectural cues straight from the Roman Imperial playbook. When Constantine made Christianity a state religion, he turned the communal table and ritual space into a throne room. Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan worship continues Constantine's tradition and adds Protestantism's austere insistence on words, a trait that historian Karen Armstrong calls idolatry.

I'd danced in countless sanctuaries, including the nave of Coventry Cathedral and the cinderblock linoleum-floored church I once pastored. I befriended pews, steps, aisles, pulpits and fonts. As a member of Body and Soul Dance Company, I loved glorifying my faith as a dancer even as I knowingly struggled with being a subversive body in Christianity's "ethnic domain," [3] imprinting us with heavy ideas about who we are.

As I aged, I took my improvisational gifts as far as possible and dedicated my life to fostering freedom. I learned to question how words, architecture, and images shape and block the body's wisdom.

Looking into the old Roxbury Church, its message was blatant. Parishioners were put in boxes. Eyes were trained HIGH UP on a similarly boxed-in preacher. Everyone and everything was securely in place. There were latches on the pew boxes. The listening ears had little choice but to bend to His Word, often for hours. Such was the embodied dance of Puritan congregations where the choreographer placed all the agency and power in the preacher's body. His dance was constrained. His voice boomed from above.

In my sacred lineage, we see why we have that classic Western picture of God as "He who speaks from above." Did the colonizers who replicated their sanctuaries as the standard for organizing any meeting of Church and state know they were carving neuropathways in my lineage as deep as the Grand Canyon?

The epigenetics of racist behavior doesn't just endure in people of color. It's painfully present in white bodies when we are unconsciously bound to old patriarchal templates. While our so-called democracy still refuses forms of wholesome wisdom, it is white versions of reality that rumble and roil as our inarticulate, unstoried bodily anxiety grows.

Despite our dismay, Soyinka and I began to play. The old sanctuary became the day's object lesson on changing the race dance.

Thank goodness for improvisation! Within moments, the organizers found space heaters. We introduced InterPlay's dependable, flexible movement and story-telling forms and began walking, stopping, and running through the aisles, connecting in solidarity. We laughed and found a humor that helped us befriend one another. Movement disrupted the old patterns of religious embodiment. We also noted how difficult it was to feel free in the kind of space that still shapes public schools, courtrooms, businesses, religious centers, and government buildings.

Once connected, we led participants into brief storytelling, nudging them toward encounters with racism and where they'd learned to address racism in family and community.

When the participants partnered up, I looked around and saw the cool yellow light bouncing off the upper-level windows. I surveyed the old brown wood floor and latched doors on each pew. Then, my eye caught sight of a brass plaque under the pulpit. I got close enough to read it, then heard myself audibly gasp. The inscription credited Rev. Thomas Weld as the founding preacher of the Church. It also named him as a key player in the trial and excommunication of Anne Hutchinson.

I already knew that Thomas Weld hated Anne as an outspoken woman and leader of the Antinomian or Free Grace Controversy. [4] With an unconcealed vile contempt, he stalked, shamed, tormented, and chased Anne across New England and through his religious tracts everywhere she went. When she met her violent death, he celebrated.

As I stood face to face with one of the hidden cornerstones of white patriarchy, the damn broke. The anguish of generations roared through me. The Puritan roots and the belly of racism and sexism were literally the writing on the wall of colonial White New England.

At the break, I called Soyinka over. Trembling, I said, "Read the plaque!" Others in the room couldn't understand what came over me. They read the words but didn't know the story or what it had to do with me.

Anne and my ancestors are not saints. While they longed for a living grace and were active resistors, they remain accountable as members of the widespread movement that assumed permission to inhabit Indigenous land, led entire populations to their deaths, and endorsed clerical authority as more important than the people, white words as more valuable than a person’s experience, doctrines and laws as more important than mystic knowing, and "well-bred" men as the assured masters of women and laborers.

On the other hand, each time I uncover more about Anne and her followers, I wonder where we'd be if the Lovers of Grace had held sway. Unfortunately, neither grace nor freedom won the day. Wealthy male landholders did. Lording it over, everyone with hate and ugliness was still emblazoned on the church walls of white mythology last I looked.

The day Anne was excommunicated, she spoke up. She pronounced her source of knowledge as a divine revelation and said to those gathered, with her friend and mentee Mary Dyer on her arm,

"You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul; and assure yourselves thus much… if you go on in this course you begin, you will bring a curse upon you and your posterity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

Her fighting words ring in me. My struggle to ensoul a Free Grace once led me to renounce my ordination, one of the hardest things I've ever done and something almost no one ever hears about in the Church: the intentional washing of one's hands to release a vow. I did so in faith, not hate. I understand Anne's ferocity.

Next week, I’ll share my act of renunciation and dive deeper into Anne’s story and how it intersects with resistance to taking up arms against the local Pequot people.

The Dancing Center

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