Day 4: Facing White Familial Legacies
Hello my beloveds,
I remain so grateful about how many of you are showing up for these offerings, insights and invitations. And, I want to say something else . . .
. . . the way this experience is set up means lots of what I offer here may sound individualistic. There are reasons for that—I don’t know each of you or your local or life contexts, nor where you may be in your antiracism journey. And since this isn’t set up as a communal course format, where we talk to each other, I can’t speak to specifics about engaging community or collective work where you are.
But, make no mistake, every action challenge here is offered with the aim to point us toward joining with others. And/or it’s an invitation that aims to better equip us to show up well when we do join with others. Antiracism is collective work—work to do together—even while we have individual responsibility and choice about taking it up each day in our own lives, using our specific skills, gifts and spheres of influence.
And today we are thinking about our connection to communities as a second day of focus on generational legacies--specifically, about white embeddedness in white families, in white relationship-networks, in white community.
Over time whiteness in our familial systems has developmentally set us up to experience real challenges when we begin to realize “racism and white supremacy is a crisis, and I want to be part of doing something meaningful about it.” Besides doing our part to co-create different conditions for the next generation (something Dr. Lucretia Carter Berry is going to point us to in a few days), we need to practice engaging our own families, right now.
The temptation to comply with white silence and avoid meaningful conversations about race and racism is profound. We are pressured to keep quiet for the sake of avoiding conflict or to subdue our justice commitments if they make our families uncomfortable. We are also pressured to live with under-complicated (even false) messages about our familial ancestors. White silence maintains white cohesion.
In today’s video I describe some ways my family “kept quiet” about some of our racial legacies and I encourage you to generate “productive instability” in our family systems.
That’s also your concrete action for today. Find one question or one family story and decide to ask it or ask about it. (If you need help finding the courage, call those same two friends you called on day two!).
“Mom, what was our family doing when redlining came to our home city in the 1950s?”
“Grandpa, what did you and our family at the time think about the civil rights movement?”
“Sibling, you know how every time our sister-in-law says that racist thing at the summer gathering no one says anything? I’m going to say something this time. Will you have my back?”
Notice how it feels to ask and what seems to happen when you do. And then: do it again. Changes happen over time, and I guarantee you if you practice repeatedly breaking white silence and challenge white cohesion in your family—new things will grow.
See you tomorrow.
Jen
Day 1: Make a list of at least three specific ways you want to grow your lived commitment to antiracism.
Day 2: Talk with two people about what you need to do to interrupt, intervene or challenge a racist dynamic or situation and get their support in envisioning how to do it.
Day 3: Explore through the work of these projects (read about them, watch the videos) Acts of Reparation and the Community Remembrance Project as a way to contemplate generational legacies, learn about current efforts for remembrance and repair, nourish your own moral imagination for where you may be called to plug in.
P.S. Save the date: Join me and others who took part in this experience for a live conversation on Tuesday, July 9th at 5:00 PST/6:00 MST/7:00 CST/8:00 EST as a way to wrap up and reflect on our 12 Days of Action. We’ll follow up with the link shortly.
P.P.S. It’s not too late to sign up for 12 Days of Antiracist Action! Share this sign up link with your friends and we’ll help them get caught up: https://mailchi.mp/10b7b14d2037/murwtz2krf
