Q: As a leader of an organization with a mission to serve and represent a community of color, how do I help white members of the group feel valued, yet also address their unease with their limitations of advancement and defensiveness anytime “white” is spoken in a negative context?
A: This question needs a book, not just a post! LOL
A few thoughts. Continue reading
Posted with permission from Chris Crass
All over the country I’m talking with white anti-racists who are struggling with the tensions of centering Black voices and leadership and the slogan “white silence is compliance.”
I’m talking with experienced white anti-racists all over the country who only want to take action if a Black activist personally asks them to do it. I’m talking with white anti-racists all over the country who both feel the enormity of this heart breaking and powerful Black Lives Matter movement time, and are blocked from moving forward out of fear of becoming part of the problem. Here are five reflections shared with the goal of helping us step up and bring other white people with us. Continue reading
Posted with permission from Chris Crass
Notes to a white anti-racist on struggling to find her place to speak out, because she doesn’t want to be speaking for POC:
For me it’s not about speaking for POC communities, but when it comes to racism, I’m speaking primarily for white communities, for white kids who I don’t want to see grow up in this evil white supremacist system, for white people, many of us working class who have been screwed over generationally by ruling classes who have stoked the flames and encouraged white hatred, fear, resentment of POC communities and mobilized white racism to both keep POC communities down as well as white working class and poor communities down. Speaking out for white communities robbed of the humanity of POC, while having our own humanity twisted and distorted in the service of mobilizing wealth and power to the 1%.
So I bring in the leadership, voices, experiences of POC, not to speak for them, but to bring lessons, vision, insight, and history from POC (as well as white anti-racist history and insight) into white society, with the goal of freeing white people from the death grip of supremacy systems, and joining as many white people as possible to multiracial movements for collective liberation (which includes all or mostly white groups/institutions/communities doing justice work with a racial justice vision/culture in alliance/solidarity with POC efforts). We need tens of thousands of white people, courageously and passionately, winning over the hearts and minds of white people, so we can all get free. Continue reading
ask a white person 