White matters

I’ve been facilitating some community conversations about racism in response to the unintended impact of a comment made by a white person.  Feelings of pain, betrayal, confusion, and anxiety wrestle with the forces of denial, protectiveness, and guilt, as the community stumbles its way through this.

Some relationships have ruptured and others are strained; among the white people and between people of color and those who are white.

We’ve been having discussions about racism over the last year or so.  It would be so much easier if we were just talking about these things in the abstract instead of having to experience them ourselves. Yet, this is the work that creates change if we are willing to be vulnerable enough to let crumble those places within ourselves that have been socialized to perpetuate racism.

For many of us, that crumbling requires a total shakeup of the way we’ve viewed ourselves, others, and the world. It calls us to chaos to enable something new to be born. If we resist the natural response to run from it and instead choose to embrace an openness to it, powerful possibilities for change are created.

Talking on its own will not get us where we need to be if racial justice is to become a reality. We must let our foundations be shaken so that a new reality can heal and sustain us as we together create a world of racial equity.