Lace on Race

Christina’s Hope & Vision 2022

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.

Join the discussion in the Bistro.

Lace on Race › Forums › Christina’s Hope & Vision 2022

  • Author
    Replies
  • February 19, 2022 at 12:22 am #12845

    Rebecca McClinton
    Member

    I arrived to Lace on Race from that same list, and about the same time Christina did. I remember us commenting together hours or days apart as we worked our way through the onboarding info. I remember feeling some jealousy that it seemed like she was grasping all the concepts so easily, knew just what to say, had already done so much more work and had such a bigger knowledge base than I had. I say that to display my whyte woman clenches…while Christina describes her clenching of her scholarly self-improvement approach that was getting in the way of the work, the one getting in the way for me was comparison, yet another version that focuses attention back on me from where it should be. Focusing on deficits and what I don’t have in this work distracts every bit as any other thing, and leads straight to offending from the victim position. We each have to show up as we are, eye to eye both with ourselves and with others, getting out of our own way, in whatever way that may be, so that we can get out of others way…shifting focus back to what will actually move the stone not create more barriers in front of it.

  • February 23, 2022 at 10:55 am #12862

    Emily Holzknecht
    Member

    I came from a different list (one by a white woman I know personally). Anti-racism was in part action for me before Lace on Race, primarily through my work, but in many ways there was a disconnect between the well-read racist part of me (which to be honest wasn’t particularly well-read) and the action part of me. The not so “well-read” part of me was really seeking the ways of thinking about the world that were most stimulating to my mind – entertainment to satisfy the white supremacist part of my thinking that if one is “clever” enough and “knows” enough and can speak convincingly to other white people about “clever” ideas, that is somehow remedying. Nonsense to make white people feel good while upholding the system. I am still, of course, prone to that, to seeking what seems stimulating and clever to me, so that is something I always have to be reflecting on and reorienting myself towards the North Star.

  • Author
    Replies

Log in to reply.

Christina Sonas

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *