A “Sisterhood” to End Racism
From a talk by Dvora Slavin to the white people attending the “Talk to Co-Counselors on Zoom” by Barbara Love and Tim Jackins, June 2020
Welcome to the European-heritage white people’s meeting. We are 539 out of about eight hundred people. We are a large percentage of this gathering. I know we are pleased that there are so many of us, but I know we also look forward to the day when the number of People of the Global Majority in RC matches their percentage in the world.
Welcome again my white comrades, my loves, my brothers and sisters. We are in an incredible period. There are opportunities everywhere we look. They are all around us, and we get to go after [pursue] them and make a difference.
STAYING TOGETHER
There are several things to keep in mind as we do this. One is our relationships with each other. This is where we can anchor ourselves. We need each other while we build relationships with and become comrades to People of the Global Majority. So let’s stay together. Our white distresses often pull us to go off alone and be disconnected. Let me say it again: stay together.
Diane Balser (International Liberation Reference Person for Women) recently led a women’s workshop in my Region. The word “sisterhood” stood out for me. I invite us all, men included, to make a “sisterhood” of white people to end racism.
We get to claim deep connections with everyone. Anytime we try to connect with someone, it’s a contradiction to wherever we’ve been separated. Keep in mind that racism is about separation, isolation, and disconnection. The more we stand against any separation, the more we dismantle racism.
DISCHARGING OUR CHRONIC DISTRESS
Also, as Barbara Love (International Liberation Reference Person for African Heritage People) said, we need to do three things. The first is discharge, the second is discharge, and the third is discharge. For us as white people, this means discharging our chronic distress, which is experienced as racism by People of the Global Majority.
FACING THE EFFECTS OF RACISM
Racism is brutal. It is absolutely brutal to the people targeted by it. It is brutal to white people in a different way, but it is also brutal to us. We get to face what happened to us as white people, the brutality that came at us. I’ve been calling racism the pandemic that attacked us as little ones and continued to attack us as we grew up.
Our early defeats and isolation are the seedbed for racism. Racism found a place to plant itself in those early hurts, and as we discharge them, we free ourselves from it.
We also get to look at how racism left us limited in a million and one ways. What are the things that confused us when we were little and continue to confuse us? We need to work on the early heartbreak. We need to discharge the terror. We need to go for [pursue] the outrage. This is not the time to allow numbness to take over. This is not the time to have muted sessions.
I think many of us have been able to discharge hard here. I myself have found ways to scream and cry and storm about how racism has hurt our brothers and sisters of the Global Majority. We get to discharge on this.
TAKING ACTION
Then we get to take action to end racism. This means different things depending on what our lives look like, but we have an opportunity to put our minds and bodies out in the world in bigger and bolder ways. I’m talking to each one of you, not the person in the (Zoom) box next to or above you. You are needed. You, personally, are needed out there. We need to take everything we have learned in Co-Counseling about ending racism, being allies, and healing the damage of racism to our minds and bring it to others. You, white person, are needed out there.
We are learning what it means to be an ally. We are not doing it anywhere near perfectly yet. We don’t need to do it perfectly, but we do need to get out there. We will make mistakes. Rest assured, you will make mistakes. Don’t let that hold you back. We will learn together as we go.
As we go out there, we will encounter situations that tell us about reality and what we need to face. We can’t just sit in our Co-Counseling sessions. Now is not the time to limit ourselves to that. You probably don’t feel ready, right? Neither do I. But let’s not wait until we feel ready.
It may be that you are ready. But you are not going to know that without going out. Maybe you are not ready. Well, you’ll find out what you need to discharge to get more ready. We need to go out and see what is going on [happening], for example, with the incredible worldwide demonstrations against racism and for Black Lives Matter.
We get to find the place where we can do this. And we can take each other with us—if not in person, then in our minds and hearts. We don’t have to do any of this alone. But now is the time to do it, and to share what we know from RC.
Building, taking action, moving forward mean that we need to have deep and enduring relationships with People of the Global Majority. We get to have these relationships. We get to take back what we were told we couldn’t have. We also need the relationships to keep our actions honest and grounded. So a big part of taking action is making new relationships as well as deepening the ones we already have.
We can make lots of new relationships as we are marching, six feet apart and masked because of the pandemic. We just have to learn how to shout as we march, and virtually reach for each other.
(Present Time 201, October 2020)