New (School) Beginnings

Hi Friends,

Welcome to the new school year! We moved two of our kiddos to a more integrated school this year (my eldest will wait another year before we move her to a more integrated middle school), so there were a lot of changes yet again for our family and our connections to school communities. As you might imagine, I’m still working on educational equity efforts and I have learned a lot in the last year about what this landscape looks like in Denver.

I am also still connected with efforts specifically to address inequities in private funding of public schools. This article in Romper, by Sarah Jaffe, was really helpful to read. I’m still learning from advocates across the country who are undertaking these efforts in their areas. I’m also encouraged to find an appetite for addressing this specific issue in other organizations, including at our very white segregated school and at Integrated Schools, and at council and state level PTAs, as well as the school district’s foundation.

And to continue my learning about education equity in general, I’m also slowly making my way through the Integrated Schools podcasts. Every time I make the time for these, I am struck by how so many smart people are working on these issues and I am encouraged to continue my efforts. We are not alone. I also read more about Community Schools, in this article from The Hechinger Report by Emily Woods.

While I didn’t have a lot of personal inspirational work in the last month or so, I have been reading some really great things that have challenged my thinking. I finished reading Debby Irving’s Waking Up White, which I highly recommend, and her website has some great resources, including “21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenges” that I encourage you to check out. I learned about an organization called Braver Angels, which encourages conversations across lines of division for greater understanding and compassion.

Please also remember that Service Never Sleeps is holding its next Allyship Summit this October 26–27. You can learn more and register here.

I am wowed every day by the impactful updates from Anti-Racism Daily, particularly these:

- Don’t have a plantation wedding. This update includes ways to reconsider how Thanksgiving is celebrated by you and your loved ones this year. Read it now, even though that’s a couple of months away, because it will likely take intentional rethinking and convincing if you want to make changes to your traditions.

- Support equitable school funding.

- Reflect before reaching out. I needed to be reminded of this because it’s so easy, when something happens in our country, to reflexively reach out to people to “show” you’re a good person instead of taking a few minutes to reflect and really think about why you’re reaching out.

Use this new school year to identify the one or two things you want to throw your energy into and bring others along with you! Let me know if I can help.

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow. In Solidarity.

Isolation Undermines Survival

Hi Friends,

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to live in a community, but not to be in community with our neighbors.

What I have observed and experienced about affluent White parenting is how isolating it is, how competitive and closed-off it can be as families hoard information and resources and scramble to get “the best” for their kids. These tendencies reach beyond parenting and into white supremacy culture generally.

Something about the affluent part is key. A friend talked to me about growing up in poverty and how community was naturally built because everyone depended on each other, for childcare, for errands, for basic necessities, for job opportunities. They had these struggles in common and they worked to alleviate the challenges for each other, as a group. Isolation in that context had clear negative consequences.

My experience of becoming affluent has led to an understanding that the more financial security we have, the less we need each other for support because we can just buy it/hire it/delegate it. We are more isolated from our community because we are self-sufficient, we have everything we need. Except we don’t.

We lose one of the most valuable things about being a human being. We lose connection. We lose meaningful relationships based on mutual respect and love and interdependence. It takes effort to find connections with our peers that go beyond hoarding and wealth and competition.

I read an article about how people survive during and after natural disasters and while wealth can make a difference, “it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a disaster, and recovery in its aftermath.” As climate change threatens communities all over the world, our ties to our communities will prove to be our lifelines in many different ways.

It’s also about being White. White supremacy culture teaches individualism, pushing the idea that anyone can succeed if they work hard and that success is only because of an individual’s actions or choices. This is an isolating way to see the world, encouraging competition and severing interconnectedness. This is not how humans have survived for hundreds of thousands of years and it is not how we will continue to survive the many challenges ahead of us.

I’m slowly reading Debby Irving’s Waking Up White and she writes partially about how White culture encourages people not to depend on each other, to be self-sufficient because that’s what success looks like. To depend on others means to be a failure in some way. And yet, one of the contradictions of white supremacy culture is that one of the reasons White people have the privileges they do is because of the way White people support each other, with bank loans, job recommendations, educational opportunities, and a myriad of other ways that the systems in place support the hopes and dreams and efforts of White people over those of everyone else.

White people end up being doubly isolated by white supremacy from those outside of our segregated communities and by our own individualism within our communities.

So many things are isolating us from each other right now. The pandemic and remote work has been isolating for many people in ways that are obvious and in much smaller ways. Our focus on our phones and on technology in general can make us feel like we’re connecting with people, but it is more often negative and undermining of our love for humanity than it is positive and love-affirming. We often pay more attention to our devices than to others in our household.

Our interactions with people tend to be more transactional — the delivery person, the ride-share driver, the mail delivery person, the wait-staff, the person scanning our groceries. How many times in the last month have you tried to connect in a meaningful way with one of these people? How does your conversation contribute to your connections with each other?

I’m making a lot of assumptions and generalizations here, and maybe you have a robust, interconnected community, and if so, that’s wonderful. Keep it going. But I’m an introvert and I know there are a lot of potential barriers to what I’m suggesting here. So please, however you feel comfortable, choose at least one or two people to connect with in a more meaningful way than you have before. And if that goes well, choose another one or two. Make a point of showing some love and kindness to someone outside of your current community. And look inside and consider the connections you have inside your community. Are these relationships what you want them to be?

Are you living in a community as an isolated household, or are you in community with your neighbors and fellow humans? If you need inspiration, I suggest Crowded Table by The Highwomen. It brings me to tears. Every time. We cannot have solidarity if we don’t even know each other.

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow. In Solidarity.

Reproductive Justice is Part of Liberation

Hi Friends,

Little did I know when I wrote about grief last time, that it would only be compounded further only a few weeks later. I hope you are taking time to process what you’re feeling and that you are kind and patient with yourself.

I need to take my own advice. Having my kids home for the summer has meant that I find fewer opportunities alone for me to openly process my outrage, my grief, my refusal to accept a world in which my (currently female identifying) children will have fewer rights than I have had in my lifetime. I can tell that my emotions are close to the surface and ready to be freed. After I dropped my kids off at camp for the day and got back in the car this morning, the tears started falling, even before my music (a “Power Mix” I created in November 2016) turned on.

My mantra for this work, “Listen. Amplify. Follow. In Solidarity.” applies to all justice work, including reproductive justice. Please seek out local organizations that are helping people get the access they need to health care services. Large national orgs have huge endowments and are not as dependent upon donations as small, independent nonprofits are. Support those who are already doing this work, however you are able.

Whatever your stance on abortion, it is undeniable now (if it ever was) that women in our country are oppressed, alongside/overlapping with additionally marginalized people who will experience increased oppression more acutely than White women will. A majority of the population in the United States is now overtly oppressed by the racist, sexist, and misogynistic systems in place.

White, straight, cis-gendered men have the most power in our culture and must be part of liberation work, just as White people must be part of anti-racism work. To use a comic book cliche, with great power comes great responsibility. So the question becomes, are you an oppressor or a liberator? Will you ignore or deny oppression or will you work in solidarity with those who resist it? Just as with anti-racism work, if you are silent then you are complicit.

If you’re ready to take action, here are some suggestions:

- White Awake training for White Men

- See this Teen Vogue article for guidance in supporting community organizing and collaborative work.

- If you’re thinking about how to be an organizer in your community and how to work towards a community where everyone is welcome, consider Garrett Buck’s questions.

- How to Show Up For Abortion Access

- Work on supporting related issues like affordable child care, universal healthcare, paid family and medical leave, contraception access, expansion of SNAP programs, a federally funded school lunch program, a permanent child care tax credit, and maternal mortality rates especially for marginalized populations.

Whatever you feel about abortion, the work needed now is about inclusion.
The work needed now is about how we take care of each other.
The work needed now is about finding common ground to ensure that everyone has what they need.

The work needed now is not about vilifying everyone who disagrees with you. From a newsletter by Loretta J. Ross (7/14/22, emphasis mine): “As Fania E. Davis said in The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice: Black Lives, Healing, and US Social Transformation (Justice and Peacebuilding), ‘A punitive, vengeful response harms us psychologically.’ It also harms us as a society if we continue to inflict harm on each other with our unhealed and unaddressed traumas. We must protect the human rights of the person who was harmed, as well as those of the person who committed the harm. We must recognize that harm to another is also self-harm because of our interrelatedness.”

If we want a better outcome, a better life for everyone in this country, we have to stop attacking each other, find common ground, and work together to make it happen. White supremacy is doing everything it can to divide us. Do not let it.

Please also invest your time and energy in voting rights efforts, bolster up our democracy so that a small minority of people cannot dictate their values and priorities to a majority that does not agree with them. Change can happen on every scale, locally, regionally, and nationally. But it will not happen if we take our form of government for granted or if we spend our time yelling at each other. Take steps to engage in positive actions that reaffirm the way you want our country to be. Envision it and work in that direction. And bring as many people as you can along with you.

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow. In Solidarity.