How do we go forward? (ep.18)
This last week I digested quite a bit of the suggested readings from this list and I am becoming increasingly more aware of my white supremacy in everything I do.. whether I’m watching an episode of Humans and seeing the clearly & intentionally chosen racial characters, looking at jobs at companies with an ALL White executive team, or walking the streets and seeing almost all in the service industry are POC. It’s all around us, all the time and with our position, it’s up to us to change it.
I recognize that simply putting in time to read more on these topics does not dismiss me of this born into privilege and that I’ll need to adopt and reframe my thinking and my actions every single day until they are habit so as to actually make change in a society and system desperately in need of a complete re-build.
So I’m starting with the natural way I know how to set a habit, incorporate my intention to help fix this enormous problem with something I organically do each day - that being, sharing content that inspires, educates, enlightens, challenges, and moves me in the hopes that it’ll do the same for anyone reading.
📝 What Resource I’m Using
Guide to Allyship - Shoutout to Michael Tennant for making me aware of this one!
^I know it’s hard to get you all to click on things but I urge you to reconsider on this one.
“An evolving open-source guide to help you become a more thoughtful and effective ally. There are already quite a few great guides out there, and I acknowledge their existence. What’s different about this guide is that I want it to be contributed to by people from all walks of life. I want this to be a resource where anyone who is considering becoming an ally understands the pros and cons of what being an ally entails. I want you to understand that you’re in collaboration with people whose very lives can change overnight because of systemic oppression.”- Amelie Lamont
A few quotes I want to highlight:
“Being an ally doesn’t necessarily mean you fully understand what it feels like to be oppressed. It means you are taking on the struggle as your own.
“A marginalized individual cannot easily cast away the weight of their identity shaped through oppression on a whim. They must carry that weight every single day, for better or for worse. An ally understands that this is a weight that they, too, must be willing to carry and never put down.”
“There’s a lot of discussion about what an ally is or is not. It’s even harder to define as the word gets carelessly tossed around by people who don’t experience oppression. In fact, as I’ve grown older, I’ve moved away from the word “ally”. But I do believe that there is an opportunity to better define the word. The best definition of an ally that I’ve found comes from Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist in her article for Marie Claire, “On Making Black Lives Matter.” In it, she notes:"
“Black people do not need allies. We need people to stand up and take on the problems borne of oppression as their own, without remove or distance.”
“We need people to do this even if they cannot fully understand what it’s like to be oppressed for their race or ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, class, religion, or other marker of identity.”
“We need people to use common sense to figure out how to participate in social justice.”
“As an ally, you need to be willing to own your mistakes and be proactive in your education. If you refuse to acknowledge that your words and actions are inherently shaped and influenced by systemic oppression, you’re setting up yourself to fail. Just as society will not change overnight, neither will you. ”
🎦 What I’m Watching
Not a new documentary and yet reveals so much of what continues to be such an enormous and disgusting cycle of racial inequality at large through highlighting the injustices within the US prison system.
^A list of all the “Unarmed Black Victims Killed by Police”
A few quotes of the documentary I wanted to highlight below:
“We have a criminal justice that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent. Wealth not capability shapes outcomes”
“The prosecutor says you can make a deal and we’ll get you three years or we can go to trial and get you 30 years. Take that chance, feel free. 90% of the people locked up have plea bargain and that is one of the worst violations of human rights that you can imagine in the United States. You have in this country people pleading guilty when innocent because the thought of going to jail for the mandatory minimums is too excruciating.”
“Throughout American history African Americans have repeatedly been controlled through systems of racial and social control that appear to die but are reborn in new forms tailored to the needs and constraints of the time. After the collapse of slavery a new system was born.. convict leasing, which was a new form of slavery and once convict leasing faded away a new system was born, a Jim Crow system that relegated African Americans to a permanent second class status and here we are decades of the collapse of the old Jim Crow and a new system has been born again in America. A system of mass incarceration which once again strips millions of poor people, overwhelmingly poor people of color of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement.”
“And so instead of talking about it, we just tried to move on, after the civil rights act was passed, we tried to play it off and because we didn’t deal with it that narrative of racial difference continued and it turned into this presumption of dangerousness and guilt that follows every black and brown person wherever they are.”
📚 What I’m Reading
White Fragility - Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
A few quotes from the book I want to highlight:
“Robin DiAngelo kicks all the crutches to the side and demands that white folk finally mature and face the world they’ve made while seeking to help remake it for those who have neither their privilege nor their protection.”
“The United States was founded on the principle that all people are created equal. Yet the nation began with the attempted genocide of Indigenous people and the theft of their land. American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their descendants. Women were denied the right to vote until 1920 and black women were denied access to that right until 1965. The term identity politics refers to the focus on the barriers specific groups face in their struggle for equality. We have yet to achieve our founding principle.”
“The decisions made at the high tables affect the lives of those not at the table.”
“Race will influence whether we will survive our birth, where we are most likely to live, which schools we will attend, who our friends and partners will be, what careers we will have, how much money we will earn, how healthy we will be, and even how long we can expect to live.”
“To challenge the belief in race as biology, we need to understand the social and economic that drove science to organize society and its resources along racial lines and why this organization is so enduring.”
“Race is the child of racism, not the father. We first exploited people for their resources, not according to how they looked. Exploitation came first, and then the ideology of unequal races to justify this exploitation followed.”
“Prejudice is foundational to understanding white fragility because suggesting that white people have racial prejudice is perceived as saying that we are bad and should be ashamed We then feel the need to defend our character rather than explore the inevitable racial prejudices we have absorbed so that we might change them.”
“One the rationalizations for inequality are internalize, both sides will uphold the relationship. People of color may hold prejudices and discriminate against white people but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism, the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual. Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into laws, policies, practices, and norms of society.”
And if you needed any more to get your eyes wide open, these stats should do the trick…
👀 What Article Hit Me To the Core
The Problem of White Efficacy - Rebekah Frumkin - Thanks for this one Mari. And thank you everyday for sharing your helpful thoughts and resources as we all try to find our own ways of navigating this.
“After years of attempting to ignore that the system from which I had personally benefited desperately needed to be razed, my brain had finally self-cannibalized in a livid, disastrous mania. It was clear that I could no longer mark myself apart from systems of oppression simply by completing actions against them. It would be the daily reckoning with my own whiteness, the void-staring, the realizations about the surreal qualities of my life, the surreal nature of my privilege…. that would set me on the course towards the anti-oppression work I had to do. This work, I knew, would have to be quiet, and enduring, and seamless with my daily life.”
“Now is neither the time for white direction nor white heroism, though it is the time to examine why we want to direct and be heroes. I think we want to, as Jeff said, “wash our hands of this country’s stink”—the enormity of whiteness’s wreckage is difficult for any mind to process, especially a white mind desperate for relief from the task of processing it. It’s easier to indicate our rage and grief quickly and digitally, to mark ourselves safe, like we do on Facebook in the midst of a disaster, from the ideology of white supremacy and therefore from the justifiable rage of BIPOC.”
“The historical problem of whiteness cannot be reduced to such a mise en abyme: it’s more like a house of mirrors, where at one point we will look normal and human and at another point grotesque and alien. This is what reckoning with whiteness and our fake world is like. We look normal and human to each other, but the world we live in—safe, financially stable, easily navigated, protected and served by police instead of brutalized by them—is grotesque and alien, a sort of Disneyland of plundered wealth and culture. It’s our job to knock it down and distribute our resources among those living in the real world.”
“Instead of fetishizing the heroism of a sudden, robust response to tragedy, we might consider building said response into our daily lives. Just as we brush our teeth, feed the dog, and go to work, we should consider spending some amount of time engaged in actualizing the abolition of prisons and the police.” This might take the form of conversations we have with one another, or with our parents. This might take the form of a journal entry about some unsettling white thing we’ve noticed in ourselves. This might take the form of quietly donating to a bond fund. This might take the form—as I have learned recently—of repairing our mental and physical health. This might take the form of going to small rallies of twenty or thirty people. This might take the form of reading a book or watching a movie and having a discussion afterwards. This might take the form of teaching a class. One such action every day will build us up, guide us, and inform the direction of our sudden, robust responses: the giant protests, the maneuverings to protect Black organizers from the cops, the arrests.”
“When these practices become seamless with our lives, we stop wanting to be good. After all, am I good because I’ve brushed my teeth? Good because I sat down and wrote some words today? Good because I ate dinner? These are things I do because I need to, and they bear no moral character. We are most efficacious when we are not striving to be good but rather striving to move forward.”
🏢 What Company I’m Watching
Read up on how Adidas is making a lasting commitment to change…
📱What App I’m Using
Provides a guide/list of Black-owned restaurants near you.
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