Eliminating White Racism
at the Raised-Poor Women’s Workshop
Gwen Brown (the International Liberation Reference Person for Raised-Poor People) asked me to lead a morning Eliminating White Racism group for white women at the workshop that she and Diane Balser (the International Liberation Reference Person for Women) led for raised-poor women. I wanted to make sure that the women had a chance to discharge, and I only had an hour to work with.
We had time for three mini-sessions, and I asked the women to stay in the same three-ways for the whole time. For the first mini, I asked them to think about the Global Majority women who were meeting in another room and the introductions we had done the night before. (Gwen had asked us what strengths we had from being raised poor and where we had struggles from it. As each woman had spoken, other women all over the room—women of the Global Majority and white women alike—had been nodding their heads and communicating that they understood both the strengths and the struggles.)
The second mini was about our families. We put together what I call our “orders from headquarters” to not feel bad about ourselves with the likelihood that racism was one of the places where we were vulnerable to feeling bad about ourselves and our families. I reminded the women that enough of our ancestors had done enough things right that we had been able to grab on to and use RC and decide to take on [confront and do something about] racism.
The third mini was about the effect of racism in the world. I remembered hearing from Barbara Love (the International Liberation Reference Person for African Heritage People) that whenever we white people have an interaction with a Person of the Global Majority, we should not assume that the Person of the Global Majority is having the same interaction, or sees it in the same way we do. Rather than explain that any further, I had someone read an excerpt from Dorothy Marcy’s wonderful article in the April 2018 Present Time, “What African Americans Want from White Allies.”
The women (almost all the white women at the workshop) were able to use the mini-sessions well. They asked me to do the group again—which I did on Sunday morning, with one change. Since we had been working, discharging, and connecting with everyone else at the workshop, for the first mini I asked them to discharge on their relationship with one of the women of the Global Majority.
Richmond, California, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion
list for leaders of raised-poor people