Your proximity to whiteness was never going to save you.
But neither will your proximity to blackness, however we can create an anchor and safe haven.
This week I was attacked online.
I commented on a reel about how I have come to realise that the Portuguese people, whom I live among, are not white.
I came to this conclusion because colour and the conditions of Empire that shape people’s nervous systems are all I think about.
White is a construct, architectured by Empire to create division and control. It determines whose lives and needs are worth the most. A hierarchy and a system that can be bought into. Play by the rules and just maybe, we’ll let you sit at our table.
I know all the rules, and I am really good at playing the game.
So are you.
We know what outfit to wear and how to do our hair, so we look professional. We know how to fix our features so no one knows what we are really thinking. We know exactly when to laugh and when to bite our tongue in every interaction.
We perform whiteness so well, we even fool ourselves. Until one day, we get too comfortable. Maybe we’re tired or agitated, or maybe we’ve spent so long with these people that we actually believe them to be our friends and we say something that betrays the fact that we are not white.
And we watch how quickly they turn on us. Suddenly we are the problem because we are no longer one of the struts holding up the house of whiteness. And we realise, we were never white; we were never going to be white; we were just one of its soldiers.
Your proximity to whiteness was never going to save you.
I write about this like it happened yesterday, when in truth, it happened years ago (and years and years, because I am a slow learner and I experienced this more than once).
This week, however, I was attacked by a black woman.
Because although I am not white, I am also not black.
While Empire lumps us all into the same category of “black”, not everyone sees it this way. I’ll admit that when I first started this work, it would anger me to hear people with skin lighter than mine talk about oppression and racism, because of course they did not suffer as I did. They looked white.
There is a certain type of grief that comes with being rejected by people who carry the same wounds as yours.
I am not black, and I am not white. I am a bridge.
And bridges are held together by tension.
A black mother, a white father, a black birth land, a white upbringing, a black home, a white husband.
Both and neither and all.
I have the choice to collapse it all into grey, but instead I choose to hold the tension, to let it expand me and create the integrity to build something new, of colour, in the dark cracks of the Empire.
When things like nasty comments on Instagram posts happen (and they do and they will again), I have something tangible to come back to.
A physical representation of the world I want to live in. It lives in the hallway of my new house (that I also built an altar to so I could call it in).
I have curated it, I tend to it daily, and I spend time at it, chanting, praying, meditating, and intentionally building out the energetic architecture of the world I want to live in.
A collaboration between me and the divine. Me, the architect; God the builder.
In a world of uncertainty, the altar is my anchor.
Next Sunday, the 21st of June 2026, I am running a free 45-minute session as a demonstration of the practices and processes my 1:1 clients get when working with me.
Solstice Altar
Sunday 21st June 2026
12 noon WEST (Lisbon, PT), 9 pm AEST (Melbourne, Aus), 6 am CDT (Houston, USA)
Not Decoration. But Architecture.
How to build an altar for the solstice.
A FREE 45-minute LIVE Online session.
Bring:
An image or object representing your deity or chosen sacred figure
Something from nature for the solstice
Something from your lineage
Water
This is the beginning of a larger body of work.
For those who want to go deeper, the Build Your Temple container is open.
This session is designed to be live; however, a recording will be made available within 48 hours of the end of the session and will stay live for 7 days until the 29th of June 2026.
No AI was used to produce this article.