No spiritual person or community with a devotion to the work of justice will want to be seen as in favor of racism. What is an anti-anti-racist or a person who even unknowingly works to oppose healing this disease?

Longfellow said, “In this world, a man must either be anvil or hammer,” meaning that one either shapes or is shaped by society. We are all adversely affected by the toxicity of racism. Racism is real.

Therefore:

• We acknowledge that we come from a white society that plundered, looted and dehumanized, and commodified black and brown bodies from the beginning up to today.
• We acknowledge that we have been given subliminal messages from the dominant white supremacist culture and indoctrinated in its belief system about race that taught this was okay or at least that was the way things are.
  • We commit to working to address this in a number of institutional and interpersonal settings.
• We acknowledge that often people who are the most active in bringing positive energy and spiritual commitment to this work are marginalized, or dismissed, or shunned.
• We acknowledge that sometimes they are even undermined by the very communities designed to further anti-racism work.
• We acknowledge that often the thinking seems to be to shame anti-racists into silence, and that this idea is essential to the promotion of racism.
  • We commit to considering ways of giving support and encouragement to those laboring in this vineyard, both individuals and spiritual communities.
• We acknowledge that the structured language of racism depends on a kind of primordial unawareness that does not allow its action to be clearly perceived, and thus is unnoticed and unvoiced.
  • We commit to working together to shine light on these hidden places within our hearts and move our society to wholeness, goodness, and love.

  Who better? — WE can do better.

  • Who better than us to repudiate the terror of racism?
  • Who better than us to provide the needed voice that racism is not an abstract but real terror?
  • Who better than us can provide the needed voice to deny the insatiable desire of those who would reduce a person of a different religion or skin color
  • Who better than us to challenge that racist acts can be dismissed as just a misunderstanding.

  George Fox in 1683 said “And let not prejudice boil in any of your hearts, but let it be cast out by the power of God, in which is the unity and the everlasting kingdom; that ye may all witness your being made heirs of the same kingdom of peace”

  This is an example of a spiritual person addressing the issue with a religious perspective. The spiritual dimension must come first and foremost.

  That of God within connected each of us soul to soul. Unexamined oppression keeps us apart, interrupts our union, our integration with each other and with our Creator. Diversity is the Divine. Yes, looking at the stuff on this website can be painful but pain is the byproduct there is a higher purpose; it’s not about the pain it’s about the healing.
  Our desire is to honor and nurture the Light within, to be of service to this process of spiritual unfolding.
  Love is the song.

                                     Rachel Carey-Harper   5/29/2020

(Note: you might use the above as a starting point for drafting your own acknowledgement and commitment and have everyone date and sign)