Excavations with Connie Chen Hospicing Whiteness: Learning How to Die So We Can Live
Mar 5, 2026
Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms, a post-Christian scholar and public theologian exploring para-ontology and embodied practice. She uses hospice as a metaphor for letting whiteness die. Short, vivid conversations cover disembodiment, somatic grief, choosing depth over algorithmic fame, Black joy as disruption, composting identity, and building fugitive, embodied communities.
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Whiteness As A Logic That Refuses Death
- Whiteness is a logics-driven identity that resists death and reflection.
- Tamice Spencer-Helms explains whiteness as an ideology baked into systems and bodies that produces dissociation, psychosis, and refusal to look in the mirror.
Watching A Daughter's Birth Illustrated White Grief
- Tamice compares watching her daughter's birth to observing public grief in white progressives.
- She noticed similar somatic devastation and disorientation, linking birth and death as parallel portals requiring embodied presence.
Do Hospice Work Not Surface DEI
- Do do hospice work: help white people die to whiteness rather than teach performative antiracism.
- Tamice urges grieving, somatic work, and uprooting logics across body, fear, and epistemology instead of surface-level training.
