Facebook Publication Date: 2/18/2022 17:02

I was moving away from being a well-read racist and starting to grasp that racism was about behaviors and actions — about impact — in late 2019. I set a goal for 2020 Q1 to find an antiracism mentor / coach / tutor, a person of color who was in the business of getting white people like me onto the right track and helping us stay there. I allowed myself to be sidetracked by the pandemic, and then the state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd happened… I finally answered the cry of the Black community: “How many will have to die?” Mr. Floyd was the last one for me, the last of a hideously, racist-ly long list.
Like so many of us last summer, I found the Lace on Race antiracism community in a very racist way: a list, assembled and published by a white woman, who included Lace’s information without asking her, possibly without ever having participated in the community. And my first comments here — I’m a perpetual scholar, so I was in a seat in the front row, ready to listen and take notes and complete assignments and ace the test. Lace offered me my first experience of hesed that day, patiently dealing with the reality that I was so entrenched in my white supremacy and my white centering that I didn’t come close to understanding the mission of the community.
It’s the most critical lesson I learned: that antiracism is fundamentally defined as acting to lessen and mitigate the harm endured by Black and brown people, perpetuated by white people (including me) and white supremacy. It isn’t about making myself a better person, or making the world a better place; though both of those things are anticipated side effects of antiracism work, it’s not what it’s *about*. Antiracism must always be about holding actions, behaviors, thoughts to that core principle, and only keeping those which are or can be brought into alignment with it.
All of them. Even — especially — the things that are foundational to our deep self-concept, unconscious and uninterrogated. As Lace says, “We change the world by changing ourselves.” I feel very attuned to Lace’s methods here, because I entered already believing that changing myself is my superpower. But from my place of race and class privilege, from my habit to center myself, I wasn’t seeing beyond myself to the reason it all matters.
My vision now is to take this changing of myself and push it outward to change the world: to lessen and mitigate harm endured by Black and brown people, perpetuated by white people and white supremacy. My hope is that the Lace on Race community, and the new Center for Racial Equity, will aggregate ourselves into a formidable matrix that magnifies and amplifies Lace’s method out into the world.

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