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Ways to work toward reconciliation

Listen and Learn
As you embark on this journey, you must learn how to listen and accept what people of color have to say about their lives. It is easy, as a white person, to assume that people of color are looking for something that isn’t there [racism] because we have been taught that racism doesn’t exist. Shorten the gap between the racial communities in this country and listen to what they have to say rather than assuming that your limited worldview speaks the truth about theirs (Shearer 62).

Healthy Racial Identity
In order for anyone to be able to interact in a positive way in multi-cultural environments and reconciliation, it is necessary for individuals to develop a healthy racial identity. Healthy steps to developing a healthy white identity:
1. Contact: Coming into contact with otherness, no longer surrounded by the norm
2. Disintegration: Growing awareness of white privilege and racism, first hand experience and educating others of stereotypes and racism
3. Reintegration: Guilt and denial becomes fear and anger, often towards people of color. Being part of the white group—not an individual.
4. Pseudo: Independent stage, intellectual understanding of racism. Interracial relationships are successful—white individuals must confront their whiteness. Find new ways to think of whiteness beyond victimizer. Find need for white allies.
5. Immersion/emersion: Getting involved and educated about white allies
6. Autonomy: Whiteness as part of personal identity. Positive feelings energize a person to confront racism and oppression in daily life.
Tatum, Beverly. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Basic Books. 2003

Tangible ways to work through each stage:
Contact: Become a part of a church that isn’t predominantly white. Put yourself under the authority of a non-white person. Immerse yourself in an environment that initially makes you feel uncomfortable due to cultural differences.
Disintegration: Spend time talking to people about white privilege, share with them what you are learning, start debunking the stereotypes that exist in dominant thought.
Reintegration: Just realizing this is a natural stage is the 1st step. Don’t get mad or frustrated at yourself for having these feelings. Just push through and begin to interact on the “Pseudo” stage even if you don’t feel ready. And keep talking! To friends of different races, mentors, and friends of your own race.
Pseudo: Read books and articles about white privilege, the history of racism, structural racism [see our list of books and articles on our resources page].
Immersion: Check out the white allies page. Start thinking about what other people are doing with their lives and how they were able to make an impact. Seek out other students on campus who are also working for racial reconciliation. Ask those of us on cabinet for suggestions. See our section below.
Autonomy: Look for things that define your own white identity: music, European ethnicity, ancestral heritage, foods.

Five stages of racial identity:
1. Pre-encounter: absorption of values of white culture more than their own cultural group
2. Encounter: acknowledge impact of race, new awareness of race
3. Immersion/emersion: strong desire to surround one’s self with symbols or racial identity
4. Internalization: Security in one’s racial identity; willing to get out of racial group and create meaningful relationships
5. Commitment: committed to concerns of race, positive sense of racial identity, prepared to perceive and transcend race.
-Tatum, Beverly. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

Immersing Yourself in Fighting Racism
What it takes:
1. Understanding the nature of structural oppression
2. Choosing to align with victims of oppression
3. Believing that it is in one’s self-interest to be an ally
4. Committing to the practice of personal growth
What is required:
1. Repentance: for any sins of racial attitudes, behavior, or arrogance because of one’s own race. Forgiveness; own up to the wrong done rather than deny. Even if you were not personally carrying out slavery you are still benefiting from the economic gains.
2. Be quick to take pride and appreciate any success.
3. Realize those we ally with are capable of taking care of themselves.
4. Be able to acknowledge and articulate how one’s patterns operate in practice, without self-blame.
5. Expect to make mistakes but do not use it as an excuse for non-action.
6. Know that each side in an ally relationship has a clear responsibility for their own change whether or not the other person changes.
7. Know that in the most empowered ally relationship that person(s) in the traditionally dominant role initiates the change toward personal and institutional equality.
8. Know that one is responsible for humanizing or empowering one’s role in the institution, particularly as that role relates to minorities.
9. Promote a sense of community where you work.
-Shearer, Mody. Enter the River. Herald Press Scottsdale, Pa. 1994.

Resources:
Students on campus who would love to talk to you:
Solidarity Cabinet:
Nora Howell
Ben Rey
Angela Redfield
Sarah Soung

Books/Articles:
Round 1
“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peggy McIntosh
(http://www.case.edu/president/aaction/UnpackingTheKnapsack.pdf)
Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, Beverly Tatum

Round 2
Divided by Faith, Michael Emerson
White like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, Tim Wise

Round 3
America's Original Sin: A Study Guide on White Racism Sojourners, Sojourners
Being White: Finding our Place in a Multiethnic World, Paula Harris and Doug Schaupp
Being White: Stories of Race and Racism, Karyn D. McKinney, Routledge Honky, Dalton Conley
Enter the River: Healing Steps from White Privilege toward Racial Reconciliation, Jody Miller Shearer
Healing America's Wounds, John Dawson
Lifting the White Veil: An Exploration of White American Culture in a Multiracial Context, Jeff Hitchcock
One Church, Many Tribes, Richard Twiss
Overcoming our Racism: The Journey to Liberation, Derald Wing Sue
Racial Conflict and Healing, Andrew Sung Park
The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege, Robert Jensen Understanding Whiteness, Unraveling Racism: Tools for the Journey Judy Helfand and Laurie Lippin
Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race, Frances E. Kendall
Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, Paul Kivel
What White Looks Like, African American Philosophers
When Affirmative Action was White, Ira
White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training, Judith Katz
Working Toward Whiteness: How American's Immigrants Became White, David R. Roediger

Leading people in Racial Reconciliation
White anti-racist role models:
The following are white people who have spoken out against racism throughout history:
Tim Wise—Author of White Like Me, among the leading white anti-racists in the country today.
http://timwise.org/
Lillian Smith—White woman in the south who denounced segregation and Jim Crow laws
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-463
Helen Joseph—worked against the apartheid in South Africa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Joseph
Ruth Frankenberg—Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis
Mab Segrest—Department Chair of Gender Studies at Connecticut College
http://www.conncoll.edu/academics/web_profiles/segrest.html
Chude Pam Parker Allen—Civil Rights activist who continues her work today
http://www.crmvet.org/vet/chude.htm
Guy and Candie Carawan—Civil Rights activists, participants in several sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement; today they lead workshops on related issues in Tennessee
http://photo.ucr.edu/projects/carawan/
Southern Poverty Law Center—A law firm started during the Civil Rights Movement that continues to fight for social justices in the south. They have put several KKK members behind bars.
http://www.splcenter.org/
Viola Fauver—White Activist who was murdered while helping in the protest march from Selma to Montgomery during the Civil Rights Movement.
http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/violaliuzzo.html
Spider Martin—Artist and photojournalist who captured some of the most significant events in the Civil Rights Movement and brought them to the attention of the American public.
http://www.spidermartin.com/about.html
Glen Kahrein—Circle Urban Ministries
http://www.circleurban.org/pages/circlerockpartnership.shtml
Wayne Gordon—Lawndale Community Church—Founding Pastor and current President of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA)
http://www.lawndalechurch.org/Wayne%20Gordon%20Biography.htm

Activists of color:
SNCC—Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee
John Perkins—Author and racial reconciliation activist in the south.
http://www.jmpf.org/
Congressman John Lewis—Led Bloody Sunday. http://www.house.gov/johnlewis/bio.html
Japanese American Citizens League
http://www.jacl.org/
Rev. Rah
Noel Castellanos
http://noelcastellanos.blogspot.com/
Raleigh Washington
http://www.roadtojerusalem.org/bios/raleigh-washington-bio.htm
Tom Skinner
http://www.skinnerleadership.org/
Andrew Sung Park. A teacher at United, in Dayton. Author of Racial Conflict and
Healing: An Asian-American Theological Perspective
http://www.united.edu/directory/park.shtml
Dolphus Weary
http://www.afajournal.org/2005/february/2.05weary.asp

Websites:
Tolerance.org

A quick film about what it means to be black in this country:
http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/6/index.php?id=2#
Film referring to argument: if someone doesn’t intend to be racist, then it’s not racist :
http://www.reappropriate.com/?p=588