I asked my colleagues for suggestions about grassroots leaders and organizations doing great things in the world. One suggestion was Boston-based Reflect & Strengthen, which turned ten in 2011.

They describe themselves as “a grassroots collective of young working class women from the urban neighborhoods of Boston who take a holistic approach to organizing in order to create personal and social transformation. Our programming focuses are political education, healing from trauma, creative expression, community building, and organizing to end racial disparities in the juvenile justice system.”

What I find beautiful is that they got started because they needed a community in which to heal and think critically about their lives and communities and they didn’t see many resources that spoke to them. “[T]he founding members were determined to maintain a space where we could be our whole selves and process the violence, lack of access, incarceration, self-hatred, and trauma we experienced because of our race, class, gender, orientation, and citizenship status.” Ten years later, they’re still maintaining that space. All I want to say is “you go!”

Check out their vision, values, herstory, events and programs at Reflect & Strengthen.

“In the 1960s all hell broke loose… The media called it a “riot.” The black community called it a revolution… Rebellion was an explosion of anger. Revolution was a tremendous leap forward, a tremendous evolution of consciousness and responsibility; a whole new way of thinking…We have the opportunity to change our thinking and our philosophy by understanding what is really happening; what time it is on the clock of the world.”

Listen to how Grace Lee Boggs, philosopher and activist and members of the Detroit community are “Becoming Detriot” – redefining what it means to face up to the challenges confronting us as individuals, cities, states, a nation and even as a world community and figure out “how to use the negative to advance the positive.”

This is the 26^th official celebration of the national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember the struggle to establish the holiday and wonder what Dr. King himself might think of what it has become.

At today’s MLK Day celebration in Newton, MA, Representative Barney Frank cautioned against making two equal errors as we assess our current reality. The first is to look at the progress we’ve made and forget that there is more work to do. Clearly racism has not been thoroughly eliminated and the principles of human dignity and justice are not fully realized in our society. The second is to look at the work before us and declare the gains we’ve made unimportant. Just as clearly, life in the U.S. is different in 2012 and better in some important ways than it was in 1968. A third way acknowledges the real achievements and the struggle and sacrifice through which they were achieved, and also acknowledges that the struggle against racism, violence and poverty continues.

Dr.  King lost his life working for dignity and equality for working people—sanitation workers in Memphis. In the his last speech, he encouraged the people to work together for justice. “When we have our march, if it means leaving work, if it means leaving school, be there. Be concerned about your brothers … Either we go up together or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness … The question is not ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?’ … The question is not ‘If I stop to help this man in need what will happen to me?’ The question is ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That is the question.”

Representative Frank also reminded us that while Dr, King will be honored rhetorically all across the country today, both he and the movement and principles for which he lived and died will likely be dishonored in practice when Congress opens for business tomorrow. How are we bringing our annual remembrance of Dr. King and the Freedom Movement into our daily practice?

Let’s heed Dr. King’s exhortation in that same speech. “Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination and let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.”

What am I missing because I’m not looking for it?

The Black Mesa Water Coalition is an inspiring group of Navajo and Hopi young people who organized to protect the Navajo aquifer which was being depleted by coal production and transportation processes. They are a great example of people power, coming together and winning important gains for their community. And, they are an important reminder about the many ways in which Native people in the U.S. continue to face structural barriers to their own well-being. As we move the conversation about structural racism forward, I have to ask myself, as a black woman who grew up on land that was taken from the Wampanoag people, how can I be an effective ally?

We’ve been having a good conversation at IISC about ways to challenge and re-frame race discourse in ways that are truthful, loving, compelling, welcoming and so much more. Last week, I posted a video from Jay Smooth about shifting from a discussion about “being” to a discussion about “doing.” Let’s keep the conversation going.

In response Jen Willsea wrote, in part, “I recently learned to say that a person HAS bipolar, rather than IS bipolar…Racism is not inherent to our beings, just as bipolar does not define a person who suffers from it; it’s not their fault that they have it and it doesn’t make them a bad person. Likewise, bipolar isn’t something you can completely get rid of if you have it, and neither is racism. Living with it and being a productive member of society with love and compassion for yourself and others requires careful attention, being really self aware, and rigorous about healthy habits. Maybe it’s not that we ARE racist, but that we HAVE racism??… So, if all white people have racism then, it just doesn’t let us off the hook… [W]e need to remember we got it (racism), it’s not our fault, and to contribute to the liberation of all of us, we gotta do a lifetime of learning and growing.”

What difference would it make to the way we think about racism at any level—internalized,  interpersonal, institutional or structural—to think of it as a condition (like having bi-polar) and to think about discourse and action focused on racism like getting at something that’s stuck in someone’s teeth?

Video blogger and hip-hop radio host Jay Smooth makes an eloquent case for understanding that being good does not require us to be perfect, and that learning to live with our imperfections is a way forward in contemporary race discourse. I’d share a few of his comments, hoping this will inspire you to find the time to listen to the whole talk.

“Are you saying that I am racist? How can you say that. I am a good person! Why would you say I am a racist?”

And you try to respond “I’m talking about a particular thing you said.”

“No, I am not a racist.”

And what started out as a “what you said” conversation turns into a “what you are conversation,” which is a dead end that produces nothing but mutual frustration and you never end up seeing eye to eye or finding any common ground…

“We tend to deal with this conversation about race in the all or nothing binary, either you are or you are not racist. … We’re striving to meet an impossible standard. If anything less than perfection means that you are a racist, that means any suggestion that you’ve made a mistake, any suggestion that you’ve been less than perfect is a suggestion that you are a bad person. And so we become averse to any suggestion that we should consider our thoughts and actions. And it makes it harder for us to work on our imperfections. When you believe that you must be perfect in order to be good, it makes you averse to recognizing you own inevitable imperfections and that lets them stagnate and grow. So, the belief that you must be perfect in order to be good is an obstacle to being as good as you can be… It would make us better at being good if we could recognize that we’re not perfect and embrace that…

Race is “a social construct that was not designed to make sense… it was designed to justify indefensible acts, so when we grapple with race issues, we’re grappling with something that was designed for centuries to make us circumvent our best instincts. It’s a dance partner that’s designed to trip us up! Based on that alone, you’ll never bat a thousand when it comes to race issues…

“As we are all imperfect humans… we all have unconscious thought processes and psychosocial mechanisms that pop up, there are many things in our day to day lives that lead to developing little pockets of prejudice or to be unkind to others without any conscious intention to do so…just like plaque develops up on our teeth… We need to move away from the tonsils paradigm of race discourse [we’ve had it removed once and for all] to the dental hygiene paradigm of race discourse.

“And in general, I think we need to move away from the premise that being a good person is a fix, immutable characteristic, and shift towards seeing being good as a practice. It is a practice that we carry out by engaging with our imperfections. We need to shift towards thinking of being a good person the way we think of being a clean person. Being a clean person is something you maintain and work on every day. We don’t assume that because I’m a clean person I don’t need to brush my teeth. And when someone suggests to us that we’ve got something stuck in my teeth we don’t say “What do you mean, ‘I’ve got something stuck I my teeth.’ I’m a clean person!…”

“Beyond the persistent conversational awkwardness of race, there are persistent systemic and institutional issues around race that are not caused by conversations and they can’t be entirely solved by conversation—you can’t talk them away—but we need people to work together and coordinate and communicate to find strategies to work on these systemic issues… there are so many disparities … that is worthwhile to iron out these conversational issues, if for nothing else so that we can get a little bit closer to working together on those issues…

“If I could have one wish, it would be that we would reconsider how we conceptualize being a good person. And, keep in mind that we are not good despite our imperfections. It is the connection we maintain with our imperfections that allows us to be good. Our connection with our personal and collective imperfections—being mindful of those personal and common imperfections—is what allows us to be good to each other and be good to ourselves.”

“This is no easy task and race may be the most difficult place to apply this … I’m hoping we can shift away from taking it as an indictment of our goodness, and move towards taking it as a gesture of respect and an act of kindness, when someone tells us we’ve got something racist stuck in our teeth!

“In any given situation, what you are determines what you see; what you see determines what you do.” Haddon Robinson

Given how much we are different, how much we see differently, and how that leads us to act differently, I am constantly amazed that humans get anything at all done together! This quick video about “colorblindness” reminds me of the connection between being, seeing and doing. I see and want to be seen as a black woman, not have my blackness or womanness overlooked as though overlooking them were somehow a virtue.

How does what/who you are inform what you see and what you do?

I’ve thought a lot about how either/or thinking reinforces hierarchies of oppression. As Tema Okun recounts in The Emperor Has no Clothes, “Inherent in western culture is the very act of defining ‘us’ in ways that claim superiority over an opposite and increasingly threatening ‘them.’”

Listening to a recent news story about the Penn State scandal, I was struck by how this same kind of thinking keeps sexual and human rights abuses under wraps. Townspeople were struggling to make sense of the alleged cover up or ignoring by Coach Paterno and President Graham Spanier of alleged crimes against children. Could these men – whom they thought to be good men – actually have looked the other way? And if so, could they be thought of as ever having been good men at all? People have rushed to redefine these former icons as “bad men,” and by implication, to continue to define themselves as “good people” who would certainly have behaved differently.

Sadly, history teaches us that “good people” do sometimes stand by and do nothing while others are abused or worse. Individuals and groups have great capacity for good, evil, indifference and more. Whether we’re confronting racism, abuse of children or other forms of oppression, we would do well to get beyond the binary that keeps us simply blaming and labeling individuals as good or bad. If we don’t examine and dismantle the systems and norms that enable these behaviors to persist, along with the ways that some folks benefit from leaving the status quo intact, we risk the lives of future generations and guarantee that we will simply repeat the exercise of “finding the bad guys” ad infinitum.

What are your ideas about how to get from here to there?

The Acting Steering Committee list reads like a who’s who among U.S. civil rights and social justice activists: James Lawson, Vincent Harding, Dolores Huerta, Nelson Johnson Joyce Johnson, Mel White, John Fife, Phil Lawson, Arthur Waskow, Grace Lee Boggs, Joan Chittister, George Tinker, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Bernice Johnson Reagan, Marian Wright-Edelman.

Listen in to hear their voices and see the legacy they are bringing forward. Here are a few snippets to whet your appetite:

“Occupy wall Street is one of the most beautiful, significant and powerful movements emerging in this century in our country”

“It really offers some hope”

“It is so time for this.”

“In the words of Fanon, each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its own mission and then fulfill that mission or deny it. I think in this case, they are trying to fulfill it… to address the deep inequities in our society based on the financial arrangements of our society, inequities that lead not to life but to death.”