For years I've said that what this work requires is the development of a consistent, demonstrated antiracist practice.
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For years I've said that what this work requires is the development of a consistent, demonstrated antiracist practice.
And I've never codified what that actually means.
Not because I didn't know. Because the clarity I needed to say it plainly took thirty years to develop. So here it is.
A consistent, demonstrated antiracist practice rests on exactly two things. Everything else, the communities, the frameworks, the events, the tools,
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For years I've said that what this work requires is the development of a consistent, demonstrated antiracist practice.
And I've never codified what that actually means.
Not because I didn't know. Because the clarity I needed to say it plainly took thirty years to develop. So here it is.
A consistent, demonstrated antiracist practice rests on exactly two things. Everything else, the communities, the frameworks, the events, the tools,
are paths and methods for how well someone gets at fulfilling these two requirements. They are not the practice. They are how the practice is developed.
The first is a strong why. A personal, sustaining reason for doing this work that is deep enough to survive pushback, discomfort, and the myth's constant pressure to revert. Without it, understanding doesn't translate to behavior change.
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are paths and methods for how well someone gets at fulfilling these two requirements. They are not the practice. They are how the practice is developed.
The first is a strong why. A personal, sustaining reason for doing this work that is deep enough to survive pushback, discomfort, and the myth's constant pressure to revert. Without it, understanding doesn't translate to behavior change.
You can read every book, attend every training, and use all the right language, and still choose comfort over accountability the moment they conflict. The why is what makes the practice durable when it becomes costly.
The second is a practiced capacity to ask "what am I missing?" The deliberate, ongoing orientation toward what your position inside the myth makes invisible. Toward the void. Toward the full reality of systems, institutions,
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You can read every book, attend every training, and use all the right language, and still choose comfort over accountability the moment they conflict. The why is what makes the practice durable when it becomes costly.
The second is a practiced capacity to ask "what am I missing?" The deliberate, ongoing orientation toward what your position inside the myth makes invisible. Toward the void. Toward the full reality of systems, institutions,
and policies as experienced by the people those systems were not designed to protect. Without this, the why becomes self-referential. It collapses back into the myth's framing, because you're still only seeing what you've always been positioned to see.
That's it. Two things.
Everything else makes you better at both. But without both, whatever you're doing isn't the practice.
More on what that means, and what it costs when either one is missing, in the next post.
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and policies as experienced by the people those systems were not designed to protect. Without this, the why becomes self-referential. It collapses back into the myth's framing, because you're still only seeing what you've always been positioned to see.
That's it. Two things.
Everything else makes you better at both. But without both, whatever you're doing isn't the practice.
More on what that means, and what it costs when either one is missing, in the next post.
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