Anti-racist Learning Groups for non-Black People of Color
(2020)
During Summer and Fall 2020 I will be facilitating anti-racist learning groups for non-Black People of Color. The development of these groups emerged from non-Black People of Color expressing a desire for an affinity group to share experiences, dialogue, and learnings about issues of race and racism. These groups are intended to be beginner discussion and learning groups grounded in books written by Authors of Color.
These groups are a part of Critical Whiteness Learning Groups facilitated by Carolyn Hetrick that operate under four foundational premises:
First, this will be a community focused on developing critical understandings of how whiteness operates systemically and how white people, in particular, can learn and practice anti-racism.
Second, this will be a community that acknowledges that racism and anti-blackness are systemic and enduring in the United States and that white supremacist ideologies have shaped the systems, institutions, and cultural interactions that white people take for granted as normal and acceptable. We can and will absolutely explore how these premises are true and grapple with how we mediate these premises in our daily lives—but if you are looking for a space to debate the existence of racism and white supremacy, this isn't it.
Third, this will be a community that focuses on engaging questions of racism and whiteness with an understanding that white people must engage this work in order to heal ourselves. In other words, the work of this group will absolutely value and affirm the lives of people of color, but we will not take a "savior" stance in our work. This work is about how white people engage ourselves and each other.
Fourth, this group supports learning. We will work together to develop norms for holding ourselves and each other accountable to and supporting one another in growing our knowledge and shaping skillful anti-racist action.
The non-Black People of Color learning groups accept these foundational premises and also view the work and process of engaging questions of racism, whiteness, and anti-blackness as central to the work of healing and justice for non-Black People of Color. Our work is similarly urgent and differently experienced.
In these groups we will interrogate the ways in which white supremacy and anti-blackness in particular have shaped systems, institutions, and our own engagements with the world.