A Movement in Three Acts

Ryan Albritton
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

Yesterday, for the 6th or 7th time I found myself embedded with a new group of people attending a 2.5 day Analyzing and Dismantling Systemic Racism training facilitated by an organization called Crossroads. Yesterday was the final day of this workshop and I was joining a few of my friends from the St. Louis Food Policy Coalition. The progression of the training is somewhat like a walk through time, starting with a look at the history we aren’t taught in school that has codified racism throughout the past 500 years (the focus is on racism in America though it existed and still persists in all parts of the world). It is always eye-opening, though not at all surprising, to witness so many people learning about our real history like they never have before—one really does have to independently research in order to find the truth. Indeed, even the language our history texts use is misleading as most [White] Americans don’t consider what was done to Native Americans to be genocide, but given that the pre-Columbian population of the Americas was somewhere around 12 million (some estimates go as high as 75 million), and in 1900 the Native American population was less than 300,000—not many other words can describe that than genocide. Some of our own local history always stuns several people as well. St. Louis has it’s own special brand and history when it comes to systemic racism, for example, in 1916 voters enacted legal housing segregation by a 3:1 margin, which held that no one could live on a block made up of 75% of another race. This led to redlining and early cases of White flight when many of the “gated” communities at the western edge of the city were built. St. Louis was also host to the first rent strike in the nation, which was organized by Black residents of Pruitt-Igoe.

If day 1 is a look at the past, day 2 is focused on the present and specifically all of the ways in which systemic racism misshapes our identities—all of us are harmed by a system that sees us as resources to be exploited for wealth generation rather than the humans that we are. Power dynamics are explored as well as racial socialization and internalization. We White people are socialized from the day we are born to be superior and perfect and that plays out in all kinds of harmful ways (both to us and to people of color) and People of Color are socialized in oppression. This dynamic plays out in a spiral as we often fail to even see what we are doing to each other and ourselves because of the very “roles” we’ve been assigned since birth. The day concludes with a caucus in which everyone separates into their respective caucus—people of color and white—and each discuss the ways in which their socializations have been playing out in their lives so that they may practice interrupting such behaviors. Finally the two caucuses come back together to report out and be accountable to each other. This practice is meant to strengthen the trust among our community so that we may begin to make actual progress dismantling racism in our lives together.

Day 3 provides a vision for a transformed future grounded in the history of the resistance movement. One of the main takeaways from this is the interconnectedness that exists. Once again, our history lessons often focus on a couple events but provide no analysis of the through-line of human struggle and the real strategy employed to make change throughout history. The journey from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown v. Board, for instance, was a 60-year chess match that involved lawyers, judges, governors, activists, artists, and mothers and fathers who wanted something better for their children, both white and of color, working together to push the system where it hurt until they finally got the decision they needed. The precedent has been set, change can be made, but the movement must be ever-diligent as the system adjusts around such change—in some places (like St. Louis), it was over 20 years before segregation was actually ended, and even then that just furthered de facto segregation in white communities. Often our imaginations are anchored in our reality so much so that when we are asked to imagine a transformed world where racism and oppression don’t exist, we can’t think past what is now. Through poetry the workshop facilitators ask that we clear our minds of the present and imagine a hopeful future. We then begin to assess our own organizations and build out a few concrete next steps that we can take to get to that future vision. The workshop’s overall focus is on the power that organizations have to push for change as they control the resources we need in society. By committing organizationally to anti-racism, there is tremendous power to change the status quo. Don’t think that our individual actions and mindsets are off the hook, though—our institutions are made up of individuals after all.

Each time I have attended this workshop, I have allowed myself to go deeper into my own racialized sense of self and each time the organizations I have been with have left with some concrete actions to take on the road to systemic change. I have been inspired, devastated, enlightened, and moved by these experiences. Our personal work will never be finished, but I am lucky and privileged to have the analysis that this workshop provides.

I wrote and read the poem below at the end of one such workshop, several months ago. I am honored to say that the Crossroads trainers tell me that they have kept it and revisit it from time to time during trainings. My greatest hope is to help inspire true imagination in others so that we may dream and move faster towards a better world.

Mass produced cultural appropriation
The American Dream
catcher
in the Rye
grown from fields of Slaves’
labor
through the night to birth
a nation
of immigrants
scared of immigrants
former servants holding slaves
A People’s pride chained away
in ships
of pain
ship lives drained
to fill boxes to build
the ships of today
the ships of today
filled with bombs and batteries
mined by people mined of power
to move mountains once wild
into kitchens, tame
mountains once sacred
turned inside-out
thrown away
now fill
the land
around our cities
mounds of trash
grow taller
than the mounds
of a sacred past
a past full of people full of pride
wiped away
replaced
by a story of stuff
the stuff of lies that provides
the comforts for all
the story we’re told
to dream with eyes closed
to the truth
that we hold
the truth that the world
always will be
in the hands of the people
who let themselves see
the world as it was
the world that will be
when we stop living the lie
and set ourselves free

Ryan Albritton

Written by

Writing my way out one day at a time. Stories about food, rants about culture, Anti-Racism, some poetry too.

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