Day 46 - Anti-Racist Language Isn’t Helpful

Lately lots of organizations are adopting the language of being anti-racist. I want to push back on this because I think it does the opposite of what we think it doing.

The first thing that it does for me is it announces that the organization is creating from the wound instead of a healed space because a healed person would never claim anti anything. When we are coming from a healed place we stand for something rather than against something.

Race work isn’t an intellectual exercise. It is rooted it our wounds, we can’t just learn the rules and shift completely. We can change behavior for a short period of time but it doesn’t shift things in the long run because trauma wants to be healed and it will alway float to the surface. We can’t give what we don’t have and most of us don’t have deep love and compassion for ourselves so there is no way we can give it to others.

Anti-racist work allows us to focus our energy on the other instead of centering ourselves in the work. It also has us giving attention to what we say we want less of instead of focusing on what we want more us and that doesn’t work because energy follows attention.

So what we end up doing is creating the same thing we have always done just in a different iteration.

Quanita