Well, a couple weeks after the fact, here is my attempt at a brief report from the Doing Our Own Work Anti-Racism seminar: intense!

No but seriously, I am so excited and so weighed down by it at the same time. The seminar is only ten people including the two faciliators. We meet over three different weekends at a retreat center and are assigned an accountability partner of sorts within the group to keep in touch with once a week on our thoughts, struggles and progress. What we did mainly in this first session was expose and dismantle the subject of 'white privilege'. We read all kinds of good articles beforehand and did this crazy exercise where they asked us what being white means to us until we just couldn't think of any more answers.

One of the main things I gleaned from that that I will share with you is that I am one of those white people with no culture or heritage to speak of. I do not know my geneology or European traditions or whatever. I think (maybe?) that I am part Irish/German/Swiss. But I don't know the first thing about what that means. SO I think maybe those of us who have no heritage to consider within our identity are that much more vulnerable to the marketed 'culture' all around us, the culture of the world in all it's Target/McDonalds/Gucci/GAP/Costco glory. yuck. But seriously, people I think want to know where they came from and what they can claim as their own, and if you got nothing to claim, you are searching for something to fit into. And I just wonder if the ways that the world plays on my consumer and beauty insecurities might be partially due to that amorphous/non-existent part of my cultural identity, you know? I am thinking and praying about that.

So I suppose one of many goals for me in these seminars is to really think deeply about how I have developed as a person, failures and successes and consider how much of that might come from this socially developed issue of race. One of the other points we gravitated around was that often talk of racism focuses on DISadvantages of people who aren't white in our society, but not so much on the advantages we have that we really didn't earn:
I.E.:
- seeing people that looked like us in our textbooks, art, and religious symbols
- being able to succeed without being called a credit to our people (yikes)
- knowing we can go anywhere and find people who look like us
- not being followed or distrusted in places of business
- being able to criticize culture and not be treated as some sort of threat
etcetcetc.

I have been thinking about this a lot and talking with a lot of people, some of whom I have butted heads with a bit, but I am realizing how MUCH this subject interests me. I feel like it is the first social justice issue I was ever exposed to because of my childhood and education experiences and so I am so pumped to work with it more, hopefully even incorporate into my ministry studies, but that is the part that scares me. It seems too big, and I too small. So pray about that for me, but also give thanks that people are out there trying to educate people like me. :)

Gotta go to staff lunch. Love to all of you.