July 11, 2016
If you watch the videos of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile’s murders (which I do not encourage if it will be triggering for you, but I DO encourage if you are not Black and you have been feeling numb to and overwhelmed by the most recent violence as I have been), you will see White or light skinned police officers shooting two different Black men in two different cities in the arm and stomach from less than six inches away. How do you pull the trigger on someone whose face you are looking at while your body is pinning theirs down on concrete (for selling CDs on a sidewalk) or while they reach for their driver’s license (after being pulled over for a busted tail light) as you asked them to?!? Seriously. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN. I mean I can answer it intellectually, with structural racism and implicit bias reasons. But it is a deeply spiritual human question as well. I hear panicked fear in both of these White or light skinned cop’s voices after they have pulled the trigger in these videos; as if they did something they had no control over, or they surprised themselves, or they know their career is in jeopardy, or what, I can’t know for sure. My stomach turns. You will also see Philando’s fiancee being a stronger woman than I could ever imagine myself being in the same situation (and her daughter too…), dealing with the unspeakable, handcuffed right after the shooting and kept that way in the back of a car before an ambulance even arrived, and while her fiancee died. That fear I heard in the police officers’s voices makes me so sick and sad. It is pathetic. It is deep White rage and White fragility and White supremacy twisting our souls into ugly fractions of what they could be. We White people have got to get our shit together. This is too much, too long, too sick, too inhumane. #BlackLivesMatter
NOTE: I have made some minor edits to this post as of 7/8 because it seems that one of these cops may not be White, but a light skinned man whose ethnicity I do not know yet. Anti-Black racism is a persistent problem in all non-Black groups, and White rage and supremacy do not plague only White people.
December 16, 2015
Our eyes met and locked a split second after we noticed the feet of two young men sitting next to each other in the circle – both had a pant leg rolled up to show an ankle monitor. In the same circle, sat two sheriffs with guns and tasers strapped to their hips and covered by their untucked shirts. It was day three of our training, Moving Forward in Addressing Race, Power and Privilege, and we were now harvesting the fruits of many hours of challenging mental, emotional and spiritual work.
“I have learned to see that not all police officers are rude and mean,” shared a 14 year-old Latina girl. “I have learned that some officers care about me and want to be fair; this is the first time I’ve been in a space where I felt heard by adults (in the system).”
Having law enforcement at the table with an openness to change is important. Systems are made up of individuals. Individuals centered on equity values and skilled in moving policy forward, in partnership with multi-sector networks towards common goals, can create long term change.
“I have gained sight and vision where before I was blind,” shared a white male law enforcement officer, “and I am willing to give what ever it takes personally and professionally to our cause.”
This same individual had entered into the circle two days before carefully monitoring his every word, letting us know that he was stretching to understand what others were saying. This man’s perspective was literally transformed over the course of three days; it was an amazing shift to witness. Lifting the veil that usually hides the ways in which white people have benefitted from racism and other forms of oppression, as well as the ways that white people unintentionally reinforce discrimination and mistreatment can be shocking.
Why does confronting racism in the juvenile justice system matter?
- The U.S. stands out in its use of youth incarceration. We incarcerate youth at higher rates than anywhere in the world: five times the rate of South Africa; 15 times the rate of Germany and 30 times the rate of Italy. With more than 75 percent of youth locked up for non-violent offenses, the U.S does not have an alarming crime problem; we have an alarming incarceration problem. And it’s a problem primarily for youth of color. We know that our current youth justice system is not equitable, excellent, or used sparingly and appropriately. Nearly 55,000 youth were incarcerated on any given night in 2013, most (87 percent) for non-violent offenses. The majority (66 percent) were youth of color. Nationwide, youth of color are significantly more likely to be incarcerated than White youth. In 2013:
- Black youth were 4.6 times as likely;
- Native American youth were 3.3 times as likely; and
- Latino youth were 1.7 times as likely.[1]
- An adolescent who has spent time in secure detention is far less likely to attain a high school diploma or consistently participate in the labor force in the future.[2]
When the youth of color created and performed a skit to illustrate the everyday harassment they face at the hands of police in this room full of adults, some of whom have a role in incarcerating them, all involved were transformed. The unfair treatment of people of color and at the hands of law enforcement is and has always been a life or death issue, and while public outcry lifting up this issue is important, finding ways to build bridges across this divide is even more crucial.
In our circle sat law enforcement, juvenile justice system-involved youth and parents, detention center and juvenile probation staff, non-profit leaders, leaders in the school district and staff from the district attorney’s office. We were all there with a single purpose, to decrease the disproportionate level of incarceration of African American, Native American and Latino youth. This was a crucial moment: a group of 30 people living and working in the same county with a rich diversity of perspectives, roles in the community and life experiences spent three whole days learning about the history and current manifestations of racism, listening to each other’s stories, and beginning to build a deeper level of trust.
“I hadn’t wanted to build relationships with the people in this group. I thought I could do the work with you and not necessarily like you. Many of us came to this table thinking that we were not playing a part in the negative impact we were having on youth. My biggest learning is that we need to have a level of trust and if we do not allow the education and vulnerability, we will not be open to own the part that each of us is playing in the dynamics of racial disparities. Without the relationship building and trust we can not move the work forward.” – Committee Chair
Nine months before this day, we met this group because they were in the midst of an intense racialized conflict between two leaders at this table, and the group’s long-time work had come to a halt. Years of tensions bubbling between “community” folks and “systems” people, between white folks and people of color, had risen to the point of ugly accusations and deep hurts. People who had been leading this work were seriously considering walking away.
How did the group get to this point? Years before, community stakeholders in this county formed a committee to address the overrepresentation of youth of color in their county’s juvenile justice system. New partners were asked to be part of that committee, including community stakeholders who had never been included in justice system reform. Traditional meeting locations and times at the courthouse were changed, and Judges, public defenders, prosecutors, juvenile probation and detention staff began going to meetings in the community, sometimes in the evenings, with youth and families who were directly impacted by the justice system. Although the disproportion of youth of color in the system was acknowledged by all, the initial strategies developed by the subcommittee for reducing that overrepresentation had limited impact and fell apart quickly. Furthermore, a lack of a common understanding of racial and ethnic disparities or agreed upon manner to communicate through hard conversations about racism had caused a divide between system stakeholders and community partners.
The dramatic shifts we saw the group take were rooted in the hard work by many people at this table and those that had supported them in the past. For five years they learned to work together as well as build cooperation across sectors. We supported the group to take a step back, rethink assumptions, account for the impact of their actions, and recommit to repairing relationships and backing up each others’ integrity and leadership. The stakeholders now have a renewed capacity to honor their commitment to the youth in their community, address institutional and structural racism together, and are in the process of implementing new practices within their Juvenile Probation Department informed by young people themselves.
“We talk about restorative justice for young people, but we also went through a restorative justice process ourselves. We are more able to have the difficult conversations about racism and I think this has shifted the power in the group. I feel I can bring my full self to the space now.” – Committee Chair
We, the trainers in this scenario, are two people who have devoted our lives to holding space for people to do the deep, challenging, and life-affirming work of understanding how racism operates and of actualizing a commitment to racial equity. As we led this training, it was not lost on us the vast differences we too were bridging. One of us is a formally undocumented immigrant who grew up in poverty and has been deeply targeted by oppression, and the other is a white person whose ancestors migrated to the U.S. with legal privileges from various parts of Europe in the 1600-1800s and has benefited from countless race and class-based advantages.
We are trained in different methodologies for leadership, collaboration and racial equity. One of us is a VISIONS Inc. trainer who has learned how to manage and support individuals to process and shift at personal and interpersonal levels while at the same time shift the culture and structure that lead to disparate racial outcomes. The other is a consultant and trainer at the Interaction Institute for Social Change who has supported groups that have a desire to do racial equity work but are unsure how to make it real. Many such groups have gone through an anti-racism training and then get stuck in a soup of spiraling emotions and an inability to translate the learning into action. Others have made some progress toward reducing racial disparities and are coming up against the roadblocks of cultural clashes that prevent a deeper level of cross-sector collaboration and change. Bringing the sets of tools both organizations have developed to a group that was ready to take their work to a new level of depth was the magic sauce that allowed for the incredible learning and shifts people experienced at this training.
“And now it’s time to get real again and roll up our sleeves, because [even though we have been working on this together for years already] this is just the beginning. There is still a tremendous lack of accountability in our system, a lack of consistency and practice. There are a few people in the entire system that get it – and so we got a long way to go. It is so refreshing and healing to be where we are now and we can take that medicine to keep going. The truth is that young people in our state are being mistreated. I am not going anywhere and neither is the institution we are trying to reconstruct. Language development, protocol, procedure, culture — all of that needs to be a continuous part of the work going forward.” – Committee Chair
During these three days, a few lessons about what it takes for this work to be successful became clear to us:
- Break out of our silos – people from all parts of a system need to be at the table, including a critical mass of those most affected by the inequities (in this case that meant having more than one or two system-involved youth of color participate)
- Take the time to build a shared understanding of what racism is, and how it operates at the internalized, interpersonal, institutional, structural and cultural levels as well as at the intersection of these
- Make room for people to share their stories, and to show up as complex human beings (beyond job titles)
- Create a space that allows people to show up with their minds, bodies, and spirits (an interactive learning environment that requires everyone to show up with vulnerability and openness is required; lectures and surface level activities don’t cut it)
- Lean into disagreements and misunderstandings in order to build trust and a deeper level of collaboration, which makes the real work possible
- Commit to the long-term nature of this work
In our country, images of young people of color being killed or harassed by law enforcement are commonplace. Growing numbers of youth and men of color in prison continue to skyrocket. As the Movement for Black Lives grows across the country, racial tensions simmer. People of color are afraid for their lives. White people are afraid to acknowledge the ways racism continues to define our country and to courageously and non-defensively do their part to undo racism. Bringing young people together with adults who work in the juvenile justice system and other adults that are part of extended ecosystems of support and contact is crucial to address the racial divide that has continued to divide our country and that has maintained the disparities that ultimately hurt us all.
What does it take for people of color, adults and youth to feel safe to fully speak about the negative impact of racism on their lives and for white folks and adults to hear this with out reacting defensively and sinking into guilt? What will it take for young people of color, those most affected by the juvenile justice system, to be seen as experts about the way racism plays out in the current system and about how to create a system where young people of color are not unduly punished for their mistakes, but treated like human beings?
About the Interaction Institute for Social Change: IISC increases the collaborative capacity of individuals, organizations, and institutions so they can find solutions to social problems. Over the past 25 years, we have developed a lens through which we facilitate social change and we bring it to every engagement. IISC invites groups and leaders to shift power dynamics, focus on building networks, and magnify love as a force for social change. Using this collaborative change lens, we see leaders overcome challenges and have astound-ing impact.
Never before have people with such varied histories been so intimately connected, whether because they live in a densely populated urban area or because they are linked online. Communities are struggling together with immense complex problems, from childcare to climate change. This makes being willing and able to facilitate meaningful discussions across differences one of the most important leadership skills of the 21st century.
Solving complex problems means understanding they have a systemic nature. Powerful leaders offer ways to investigate the root causes, in order to look for high leverage solutions and engage non-traditional allies.
IISC is building Big Democracy, the collaborative infrastructure to facilitate sustained engagement by leaders in their organizations and cities.
About VISIONS Inc: Founded in 1984, VISIONS, Inc. (www.visions-inc.org) is a non-profit training and consulting organization, specializing in diversity and inclusion. We have offices in Dorchester, MA; Rocky Mount, NC; and Fresno, CA; and are supported by our highly skilled and diverse team of consultants located throughout the United States and abroad. VISIONS mission is to:
- equip individuals, organizations, and communities with the tools needed to thrive in a diverse world.
- remove structural and cultural barriers that prevent full and equitable participation.
- help create environments where differences are recognized, understood, appreciated, and utilized for the benefit of all.
We realize this mission by implementing a time-tested, insight-driven, process model of consulting and training that supports our clients in becoming catalysts for change and effectively engages all people in the deep, challenging, and rewarding work of authentic inclusion, personally and within their organizations and communities.
[1] The W. Haywood Burns Institute for Juvenile Justice Fairness and Equity, http://data.burnsinstitute.org/about
[2] The Sentencing Project, http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/jj_Disproportionate%20Minority%20Contact.pdf
March 10, 2015
Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on 3/8/15 by Jen Wilsea
The news channels have been flooded for the last few days with photos of the Obama family crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the very bridge that Alabama state troopers and local police would not allow peaceful voting rights activists to cross as they attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965. That day is remembered as Bloody Sunday because police attacked the marchers with tear gas and billy clubs, resulting in the hospitalization of many protestors, including John Lewis.
Hour after hour ticked by as I stood on the main street in Selma on March 7, 2015. The sun was hot and I was getting sunburned. I stood in the middle of a sea of overwhelmingly Black Southerners waiting for our Black president to arrive. Words can’t describe the calm yet electric feeling in the air. It was powerful to wait, and to see the Edmund Pettus Bridge just a few blocks ahead, knowing that at any moment President Obama would stand there and speak to this crowd, this mostly Black, Southern crowd. Read More
January 19, 2015
“Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. we must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution”
Recently I have been blown away by the ability of people, in the midst of racialized tension and harsh accusations, to move through insults and injuries, listen deeply to one another, account for the hurtful impacts of their behaviors, and recommit to a new level of partnership and trust. I have witnessed this kind of healing among a multiracial group of people including government employees and grassroots community leaders I am working with in a U.S. city. These folks are coming up against the same big barriers I believe all of us doing racial justice work are coming up against: people acting from unspoken and deep-seated sets of cultural values that are seemingly at odds and a lack of common language to understand how racism is playing out in our communities. Without addressing these barriers, it is too easy for us to take things personally, become defensive, and continue believing that folks who don’t think exactly like us are wrong or inferior. We can go along collaborating and making surface-level reforms, but I think it is time for us to do the deeper work.
Image from TransformativeSpaces.org”On the Eve of Reclaim MLK” Read More
September 2, 2014
This post is a continuation of “We are in the midst of a crisis in this country.”
Over the last few days, Black activists from cities across the U.S. joined the Black Life Matters Ride, traveling to convene for a historic weekend in Ferguson, Missouri as part of a national call to end state sanctioned violence against Black people. We have a lot to learn from what’s going on in Ferguson right now and it seems that a window of opportunity is opening for the moment to become a movement, one that is about Michael Brown’s death at the hands of a white police officer and that also about so much more. We need to get to the root of these problems if we are going to end state sanctioned violence against Black people once and for all, rather than end up with yet another version of Jim Crow era state-sanctioned lynching.
If we could only eliminate police officers with racist attitudes from police forces, wouldn’t that take care of this problem? I am afraid it would not.
What will it truly take to end state sanctioned violence against Black people?
First, we need to start collecting national data on police stops and use of force and thankfully there are folks working on that.
Second, we must uproot much more than explicit racial prejudice. Some of the most illuminating research about police violence I know of is being done by Dr. Philip Goff, president of the Center for Policing Equity. Goff reminds us that attitudes only predict 10% of behaviors. Behaviors are actually much more heavily influenced by unconscious brain activity and biases. I’ve heard Goff present his research a couple of times at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation America Healing Conference and I was surprised to learn that explicit racial prejudice is not the biggest predictor of police officers’ use of deadly force. Instead, over 80% of incidents that involved police use of deadly force were preceded by threats to the officers’ masculinity. Masculinity threat is a more reliable predictor of a police officer pulling the trigger than racist beliefs. In the U.S., men of color are stereotyped as hyper-masculine, so it is impossible to separate masculinity threat from conscious and unconscious racial biases.
As a white person, I am challenging myself not to demonize or otherize white police officers who are committing violent acts against men of color. Why? Because we need to ask what is going on in the minds and hearts of people like Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown, and Johannes Mehserle, the former San Francisco BART police officer who killed Oscar Grant. The moment I distance myself from white people like them, I am in danger of reinforcing the notion that racist violence is something I can blame someone else for, thus extricating myself from both the problem and the solution. White brothers and sisters, none of us is free from this haze of fear and disillusionment until all of us is free from it. We have got to have conversations about both the conscious and unconscious dimensions of racism, and about the interdependency of white supremacy and patriarchy. We white folks have got to take responsibility for engaging other white folks in these conversations. And we have to do this until we no longer hear things on the mainstream news like “You know who talks about race? Racists.”
June 27, 2014
Transgender women of color are finally making a (positive) splash in the mainstream media. Janet Mock, a writer, has been getting accolades for her new memoir, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More; Laverne Cox, an actress in Orange is the New Black, was recently on the cover of Time magazine; and CeCe McDonald is increasingly being recognized as a trans activist leader.
On June 5, 2011 in Minneapolis, CeCe McDonald and her friends were passing a bar on the way to a grocery store when they were accosted with homophobic, transphobic, and racist slurs. CeCe defended herself with a pair of fabric scissors in her bag. She was accused of murder even though she acted in self-defense, jailed for defending herself against bigotry and violence that transgender people often face. The judge rejected considerations of how gender, sexual orientation, race, and class played into the situation; statistics that trans people are more at risk for hate violence; the swastika tattoo on the attacker’s chest and his three previous convictions for assault; as well as the meth, cocaine, and alcohol present in the attacker’s system.
In this Democracy Now! clip from February 19, 2014, CeCe (after her release from prison) and Laverne talk about why black trans bodies matter. It is a must watch for anyone who cares about human beings and wants to better understand what is at stake in the movement for trans liberation. As a cisgender (in other words, non-trans) queer white woman, I am inspired and humbled by these two fierce trans women’s words.
“I know what is like to always have this guard up because you don’t know when somebody will literally try to kill you for just being who you want to be…. I’ve yet to hear of a trans woman who has just lived her life happily….” CeCe McDonald
Why do we insist that there are ok expressions and not ok expressions of masculinity and femininity?
When will we stop policing people’s gender expressions?
When will we start allowing ourselves to see people who challenge mainstream notions of gender not as freaks who are offensive or dangerous, but as beautiful people with unique gender wisdom?
Many trans people are warriors on the front lines, fighting for liberation from restrictive and false gender norms. When will we wake up and see that this fight is one that all of us, people of all gender identities, will benefit from?
Laverne calls us to the future we can all be a part of creating if we choose to:
“How do we create spaces in our culture where we don’t stigmatize trans identity, where we create spaces of gender self-determination? It is so often acceptable to make fun of trans people, to ridicule trans people. When we look at the epidemic of violence against trans people so many people think that our identities are inherently deceptive, inherently suspect, and that we should be criminalized because of that. In Arizona they were trying to criminalize going to the bathroom last year. How do we begin to create spaces where we accept trans people on trans people’s own terms and let trans people lead the discussions of who we are and what the discussion about what our lives should be?” Laverne Cox
Keep an eye out for the release of the documentary, FREE CeCe, to learn more about CeCe’s story and the culture of violence experienced by trans women of color.
