Swirling in Whiteness

The more I look around, the more I find. My eyes are wide open and I am still on the hunt. I wish I had more time to dedicate to this learning right now, but I'm still finishing my masters work. This summer I will be able to dig in and really get to work.  I found an amazing podcast called The 1619 Project . Nikole Hannah-Jones is a New York Times writer who founded the project. The stories in the podcast bring up a lot of different topics that demonstrate how everything we know today has links to slavery. This is why we can't just move past what happened. It's still happening! Music, mortgages, business loans, health insurance. This is just the beginning. There is mention in the podcast about a book that is coming that will dive even deeper. It's heavy, but necessary for people like me to understand. Systemic racism runs deep in so many institutions, and we are never going to get past it unless we can bring it to the surface and call it out.  I'll be watching for t...

I have not abandoned my search for knowledge regarding racism and calling it out wherever it exists. I've had to take a break from it this fall while I was doing my job as a teacher. It takes so much energy to teach and doing it virtually during a pandemic makes it even harder. I think many people from all walks of life are finding the same thing about their lives. Things are just harder. People's hearts are broken in all sorts of different ways and we have to be there to support each other, to be gentle with each other.  I just finished reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. In a nutshell, it gives the story one might hear if they asked the question: What would happen in the lives of two light-skinned Black women (twins) who could pass for Caucasian went their separate ways in early adulthood? One lived as a Black woman and the other lived as a white woman. One had a daughter with a Black man and one had a daughter with a white man. Many examples of racism appear through...

I finished reading  The Skin We're In by Desmond Cole last night. It enlightened me on a number of subjects, reminded me of some recent events, and made me aware of some events I didn't know had happened. It helped me solidify some ideas and unlearn/relearn some things. I still have some questions though. I'm here to learn and I want to be able to call out specific examples of systemic racism, so here are some of the examples Cole discusses in his book.  Carding is a police policy that includes stopping individuals for no apparent reason and collecting their personal information and the people they associate with, which is then stored in a database for no specific reason to be used for whatever reason in the future. I don't begin to understand who conceived of this policy, but I'd like to learn more. I hope to learn more about this topic from Robyn Maynard's book Policing Black Lives . Where did it come from? How would anyone think this would do anything but cr...

I've been thinking about the metaphor I described in my second post -- how all this learning is like taking a sip of something new, swirling it around in my mouth, and then experiencing the complexity of it. I know this isn't anything new, but what hit me today is a slightly different way of looking at this. I take in a new awareness of something or learn something new, and then I see how that learning bumps up against or mixes with what I already know, and then with the clarity I find I am forced to unlearn something or build on something. The fact that once you know you can't pretend you don't is so profound here because every little bit of learning I do seems to be changing the landscape of my schema in some way, big or small. It doesn't matter as long as I keep going. That's why I'm here. 

As I started working my way through the course work for my masters degree, I began to develop an understanding that there are many different ways of knowing the world. The way we roll in the western world is quite normalized for us, so it's difficult for us to understand that it is, in fact, Eurocentric.  A good example of this is our school system in Canada, which includes bells and schedules and cohorting by age. Ringing bells and following schedules in schools was incorporated into the school system by Europeans in order to train children to be able to punch a clock when they became adults and joined the workforce in the newly industrialized world. It hasn't changed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, regardless of the fact that the world is quite different now and many adults don't punch clocks. (The late Sir Ken Robinson explains this well in his Ted Talk .)  And this isn't the way the entire world works, as much as we would like to think that it is. ...

Without an understanding of the history involved, it's difficult to understand the reality of systemic racism. I have to keep reminding myself of this. I didn't learn the full history of indigenous-settler relations in school. I learned what the dominant group wanted me to learn. So I had no idea until adulthood about the horrific acts committed by settlers against indigenous people in North America (and around the colonized nations of the world).  I grew up with police officers around me, and I was never taught about the connection between slavery and policing. Or indigenous people and policing for that matter. Without an awareness of the history there, it made it difficult for me to process the reasons why people connect colonization with policing. But police were first employed to keep runaway slaves in check. And to control the indigenous people.  Here's a quote from Desmond Cole's book The Skin We're In :  "But Abdirahman tried to run, and at that moment t...