Collective Action

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Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism–from Ferguson to Charleston

by Jon Greenberg | July 2015
There are no doubt complexities that come with White Americans working for racial justice. White privilege can lead to a chronic case of undiagnosed entitlement, creating poor listeners, impatient speakers who talk over others, and people unaccustomed to taking orders. Nevertheless, the movement for racial justice needs more White Americans to get involved. And it’s our responsibility to help each other get involved–and get involved productively. A list of articles and links to help on your journey.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [White Privilege]

Whites Only: SURJ And The Caucasian Invasion Of Racial Justice Spaces

by DiDi Delgado | Updated April 2017
White-led racial justice groups have displayed problematic behavior, lack of accountability, and outright anti-Blackness. White folks need to ask themselves if they’re doing this work because it’s a moral imperative, or because they want accolades and kudos to soothe their white guilt. If it’s the latter, then they’ve picked the wrong hobby.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [Accountability]

Black Activists Don’t Want White Allies’ Conditional Solidarity!

by Stacey Patton | February 2017
White allies have a long history of centering themselves in Black-led racial justice movements and telling leaders how to protest. In 1964, during Freedom Summer, a number of White participants often showed up to explain to Black organizers and community members what should be done. … That’s what people don’t get about “white fragility” and “white tears.” White people aren’t getting upset because they feel some affinity with whiteness as a racial construct, but because white references family and loving relations. So to call into question white privilege and call for the end of whiteness is to call their existence, their families, their friendships, and their power into question.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Privilege] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts]

Gaslighting: State Mind Control and Abusive Narcissism

by Vanessa Beeley | May 2016
Gaslighting as an abuser’s modus operandi, involves, specifically, the withholding of factual information and its replacement with false or fictional information designed to confuse and disorientate. Gaslighting involves a step by step psychological process to manipulate and destabilize its victim. It is built up over time and consists of repetitive information feeds that enter the victim’s subconscious over a period of time, until it is fully registered on the subconscious “hard disk” and cannot be overridden by the conscious floppy disk. Put more simply, it is brainwashing. “Overall, the main reason for gaslighting is to create a dynamic where the abuser has complete control over their victim so that they are so weak that they are very easy to manipulate.” ~ Alex Myles
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [Silencing POC]

Building Accountable Relationships with Communities of Color: Some Lessons Learned

by the Pax Christi Anti-Racism Team | November 2007
One benefit White Pax Christi folks are discovering as a result of engaging with Communities of Color during the Peoples Peace Initiative process are the new insights and wisdom that have deepen their understanding of the challenges of peacemaking in this new century. As a result, White Pax Christi groups around the country are becoming more committed to transformation Pax Christi into an anti-racist multicultural Catholic movement for peace with justice. TAGS: [Collective Action] [Accountability] [2000’s]

75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

by Corinne Shutack | August 2017
Note that the author is a white woman and what seemed in 2017 to be “good ideas” such as requiring on-duty officers to wear body-worn-cameras, in practice, at least by itself, have led to worsening injustices. Other ideas may have better withstood the test of time TAGS: [Collective Action] [Teachers] [Policing] [2010’s]

Tackling Racism in Hartford

by Steve Nelson | November 2017
Are you saying that all white people are racist?” After a short pause … “Yes.” This exchange was between a white New York teenager and a workshop leader on racism. It is among scores of powerful moments in a film called I’m Not Racist . . . Am I?I’m proud that the Calhoun School, which I headed until last June, produced the film in partnership with Point Made Films, a leading documentary film company.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Culture]

We Can’t Train Our Way to Racial Equity

by Heidi Schillinger |November 2016
Change, reflection, and applied learning are values I strive to model in my own journey towards racial justice. This is one of my “show what you’re learning, not what you already know” moments of living the Color Brave Space norms. I now realize many mainstream organizations are approaching “training” as the destination for their racial equity work. This realization and discomfort are affirmed through employee surveys, where overwhelmingly the most common response to what their organization is doing to advance racial equity is training. Believing we can train our way to racial equity is fakequity.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [Teachers] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts]

Adoption Is A Feminist Issue, But Not For The Reasons You Think

by Liz Latty | April 2017
Mainstream feminism — feminism by and for middle and upper-middle-class white women — has historically gotten behind adoption. Feminists have supported the rights of single people and same-gendered families to adopt, the rights of adoptive families in contested adoptions, and policies intended to get children into adoptive homes faster. What’s missing from mainstream feminism is any explicit support for families of origin: the parents who have to lose their children, the families that must be dismantled in order for adoptive families to be built. The adoption industry is a business. It generates billions of dollars each year and requires other people’s children in order to stay profitable. Here’s the toughest truth yet: Those children are almost always the children of poor and working class people.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [White Privilege] [Economics] [Accountability] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [White Supremacy]

Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”

by BLACKPAST | August 2012
…But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision af!d our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy. When I speak of women of Color, I do not only mean Black women. The woman of Color who is not Black and who charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both waste ourselves fighting the truths between us. If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister’s oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [White Privilege] [White Defensiveness] [Individual Change] [White Blindness] [Accountability]