I am excited to be part of the 2011 class of anti-racist white folks participating in the third Anne Braden Anti-Racist Training Program by the Catalyst Project.
I just completed a move to San Francisco in part because I sought more training and connection with this kind of work. In small town Durango, Colorado, I felt disconnected from a larger movement and any sense of history of social change work that I was part of. I felt alone, isolated, like I was one of just a handful of people who cared about anti-racist work as part of the larger struggle for any kind of social change.
It’s amazing to be immersed among so many people committed to anti-racist organizing, so soon after my move to San Francisco (I started the training less than 48 hours after I arrived). I didn’t anticipate the way that I would be challenged by being immersed in new issues that are of primary interest to white community organizers in the Bay Area – issues like the anti-imperialist movements for global justice that have grown out of the Seattle WTO protest in 1999, Jewish Anti-Zionist and Palestine solidarity work, and anti-war work organizing with soldiers and veterans.
In small town Durango, these issues are present but not central to the issues we struggled with as a community. Part of that feels like our isolation from state, national, and international politics – it can feel disengaging to be several hours and mountain passes away from decision makers on these issues. Part is also the make-up of our community – Native American sovereignty and Latino immigration issues were the pressing issues that people of color were organizing around.
But I also have felt a certain internal laziness about learning more about these issues. They are complicated by a lot of different voices. They require taking a strong side. Many of these issues have a long history that must be understood – sometimes hundreds or thousands of years.
I am realizing that it’s not that I struggle to take a side on anything. I struggle to take a side when I can’t actually have conversations face to face with people who are most affected. I have really fought to unlearn binary ways of thinking about the world. Now if I can’t hear multiple sides and understand the complexity of how different people are viewing an issue, I feel paralyzed to take a side just based on my gut reaction or what one person is saying.
I sometimes feel like an ineffective ally because I need to know more to take a strong position, and I have only a limited capacity about how much new information I can take in at a time. I am trying to give myself some space for learning, understanding, and finding my own way on these new-to-me issues. It’s hard when I feel internal pressure to impress my new radical anti-racists friends by being down with all the right politics.
