Kelsey Blackwell does some serious emotional labor to explain something important to white people.
People of color need their own spaces. Black people need their own spaces. We need places in which we can gather and be free from the mainstream stereotypes and marginalization that permeate every other societal space we occupy.
In integrated spaces, patterns of white dominance are inevitable.
Our hope lies in an empowered collection of voices that can help guide us toward being the community we long to be. This requires that white people step aside to support spaces in which PoC members of the community are invited to feel, to be, and to touch our humanity on our terms, in a way that feels not like colonization but like coming home.
White people do not experience the systemic racism that makes it hard for them to find jobs, housing, healthcare, and justice in the legal system.
the facilitation of separate organization for disadvantaged social groups, and a commitment to building consensus with institutionalized dissent.
pursuing collective liberation (a humane and inclusive society) means fully acknowledging difference and empowering its respectful expressions within a collective.
“When you express gentleness and precision in your environment, then real brilliance and power can descend onto that situation,” says Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. “If you try to manufacture that presence out of your own ego, it will never happen. You cannot own the power and magic of this world. It is always available, but it does not belong to anyone.”
Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
The only thing I want to hear from white people about race is, I’m sorry. I didn’t see. I didn’t listen. I’m working to see and listen now.
We live in a world where if we are unconscious about who is not in the room, we will inevitably create a society that privileges white, affluent men and disadvantages everyone else. This is the society we have now.
If your community is mostly white, it is not by accident.
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