How To Create Your Personal Anti-Racism Practice

You probably know I’ve been hyping creating a mindfulness practice for a while now. I strongly believe that basically everyone needs one if you live within the construct of capitalism. In part my enthusiasm comes from the fact that mindfulness is the only thing that has allowed me to actually come back to this work, attempt to rebuild my business, and survive posting literally anything online as an antiracist educator. 😮‍💨

Despite meds, therapy, exercise, policing the food i eat, getting better sleep… the ONLY thing that has allowed me to continue this work (or, more accurately, pick it back up!) is creating a mindfulness practice. Turns out, doing a bunch of research on all the horrific ways colonization and supremacy have destroyed entire civilizations isn’t ideal for one’s mental health. Creating a mindfulness practice has given my nervous system the bandwidth to come back to this work, avoid burnout, and know when to step away.

An anti-racism practice is very similar to a mindfulness practice. It’s setting aside some time to intentionally reflect, foster growth, and create a discipline.

So! Here are some easy ways to jumpstart your anti-racism practice.

First, write down some areas of your life that you want to focus on for your practice. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

• Personal

• Friends & Family

• Career

• Parenting

• Community

• Finances

• Education

Next, write 2-3 goals based on the areas of focus you chose. Some examples below.

Career:

• research what kinds of barriers to entry exist for underrepresented folks in my industry and what people are doing to mitigate those barriers

• set up meeting with boss/HR to discuss planning an anti-racism training for the team

• find 10 Black, Indigenous, AAPI folks in my industry to connect with on LinkedIn

• find and follow 15 underrepresented people of color in my field on social media

• join an ERG and volunteer

Community:

• find one Black/brown led organization to volunteer with once a month

• sign up for email list to learn about local Black/brown organized events occurring that I can promote, sponsor, or provide support for

• spend five hours a month at the sub/urban community garden

• connect with three Black and brown owned businesses to promote on my social media pages

• contact the city and find out how to support tree-planting efforts to mitigate heat islands in neglected neighborhoods

Personal:

• Join an anti-racism book club

• Donate 50% of quarterly bonus to Black and brown led mutual aid efforts

• Use my lunch break every Friday to learn about anti-racism, watch a video, listen to a lecture, read a book

• Visit a Black/brown owned business or restaurant once a week and invite a friend

• share new Black or brown artists i discover to my friend group, group text, or online community

Finally, pick a regular, recurring time to follow through on your commitment.

Some of your goals might already be time-bound (volunteering, attending a lecture, when you get your tax refund in the US). Others will be easy to schedule (read a book by an author of color during my lunch break everyday). But some of them will take some intention (ask Meghan to get lunch at Nacheux next week.)

Then, all you have to do is show up.

Ok but seriously. And this is important. Don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t pulling everything off perfectly, if you miss a day, if you miss a month. If you miss two or three months. It’s OK. Being kind to yourself is a prerequisite to this work. Because. I said so. ;) And because perfection will absolutely hijack your growth.

Love + reparations,
Tori

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Want more? Go download your FREE copy of the White Homework Everyday Anti-Racism Journal. It’s full of challenging reflection questions and prompts to help you grow.

Carolyn Bryant is America

On a sunny August day in 1955, Carolyn Bryant told a lie and had a child murdered. An all-white jury determined that, while Emmett Till had been brutally beaten, tortured, and lynched, there was no crime committed.

It’s odd, but I think about Emmett Till often. There is not a reason, I am not connected to his life or murder in any way. Yet I often find my mind drifting to his short life, and injustice after injustice was heaped upon him. From the false accusation and being tortured to death, to his killers making money off of his murder after they were found not guilty. To Carolyn Bryant, living out the rest of her days in peace and tranquility, never suffering so much as social stigma for her choice that resulted in murder.

I think about how if those white men had committed that same crime against a dog or a cow, they might have been arrested. Cruelty to animals is illegal. In the white American consciousness, we don’t even rise to the rank of animals.

It is on days like today that it’s difficult to maintain faith that we can force this country to live up to her own goddamn values. It is days like today when the sentiment “burn it all down” resonates in my nervous system, even while I acknowledge that burning a house down with people inside is perhaps just as unethical as the mess we’re all currently living in.

Like Carolyn Bryant, the United States throws her flagrant mockery of justice in our faces by simply continuing to thrive. Undisturbed. Unbothered. Enjoying life. Completely erasing the lives that were taken in the process. There are pools to swim and tans to collect and drinks to imbibe. No one here is guilty. Stop obsessing over the past.

Good vibes only, babes.

As an abolitionist, I did not want Bryant thrown in jail. I believe revenge and justice are mutually exclusive. I reject that ideology that says harm + harm = justice. Locking humans in cages does not become moral or righteous simply because we have collectively decided that someone is bad. But I have to admit I at least wanted her to feel bad. Apparently even feigned remorse is too much to ask.

As a human, the idea that one can simply get away with murder and enjoy the rest of their life, unbothered, is hard for me to stomach. Even as I’m writing this, tears in my eyes, I feel the simmering of a migraine starting.

It is on days like today that I have to reflect deeply on my ancestors, who somehow managed - through sheer force of will - to survive this shithole country. I am related to people who survived the middle passage and forced marches in chains, while pregnant and menstruating, from Virginia to Georgia. My ancestors’ stories still exist. Their lives and experiences are encoded in my DNA. I carry their trauma, their resilience, their defiance in my body.

America is Carolyn Bryant. Beautiful. Unbothered. Guilty as sin.

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If you found this piece valuable, please forward it to a friend and consider joining Pay The Rent Club where we crowdfund rent for families of color as a form of reparations.

The Case for Reverse Racism

Yesterday I was running errands in Portland and made a stop at Oblation, a cozy, gorgeous print shop in the Pearl District. I was looking for some Christmas cards in order to tip some of the kind and beautiful service workers I interact with on a near-daily basis. I came across a cheeky card which read, “All I want for Christmas is books, socks, and the global rise of the matriarchy.” I chuckled and immediately pulled out my phone to take a picture. 

As I was fishing in the back pocket of my overalls, I was questioning my perspective on this sentiment. While I found it funny and smart, I wasn’t sure if I fully agreed. Do we - those us who consider ourselves feminists, womanists, and similar - really want to repeat the patriarchy with different people in charge? How was a photocopy going to be meaningfully different from the original? 

Christmas card in a display which has two little holly leaf bunches and reads “All I want for Christmas is books, socks, and the global rise of the martriarchy”

Almost as soon as I’d asked myself those questions I completely forgot them. I put my phone away and continued searching for cards. 

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In an absolutely iconic role, Daveed Diggs playing Thomas Jefferson in the musical Hamilton sings Newton’s third law of motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. (The Hamilton soundtrack was on so often in our home that as I watched Diggs’ performance as Frederick Douglass in Good Lord Bird, I had to continually remind myself that the person he was playing was NOT Jefferson. The voice just throws me off.) While Newtonian physics had nothing (or everything?) to do with the advent of the first two political parties in the US, I often “try on” the theories and laws we know about the physical world as a way to orient and inform my own personal ethics. 

What is an equal and opposite reaction to racism, sexism, transphobia? If this were the lens we brought to bear in the fight for liberation, would this exercise reduce harm or increase it? In the interest of ideological consistency, how is the matriarchy less destructive than the patriarchy? A concerning number of white Americans seem convinced that the only alternative to white supremacy is Black supremacy. 

Equal and opposite reactions, huh? 

When (usually white cis) men advocate for “sitting down and having a respectful conversation” about subjects like “Why do Black people exist?” or “what if trans people actually don’t deserve rights?”, I generally reply with, “I will not debate my humanity.”

In less professional contexts, I hyperbolically retort, “Given the harm that white men have caused in this country and globally, wouldn’t the world be a better safer place without them?” 

On a moral level, I think these questions are harmful. And I strongly believe the data also shows they’re harmful. I don’t ask myself these questions because I am advocating for the mass enslavement of white Americans. Nor do I believe in the rights of women to brutalize men to whatever limited extent those events could even occur. There is no reason to “thought-experiment” our way through “What if women started sexually preying on men” first because we do not need to imagine a world MORE violence and because there is no applicable inversion. As Amanda Montell writes in her brilliant book Wordslut, there is no opposite to the word “bitch.” Why is that?

Why, for example, is there no anti-white slur corollary to the n-word that Black and nonwhite people can deploy against white people to bring them shame and dehumanization from the time they are in preschool? So many of the white people I’ve interacted with online and in person sincerely don’t seem to understand why they aren’t allowed to say it. 

But the context must be considered. What was the anti-white slur that Black people screamed at the white people they were lynching, while the cops just stood around and watched or pretended not to see what was occurring? What was the slur that reinforced the racial hierarchy to remind white people on a daily basis that they were never going to be fully human, much less franchised citizens of the country? 

There is no corollary to the n-word because centuries of spontaneous, unmitigated anti-white terrorism committed by Black people never happened. As I frequently remind white people on Twitter, once there has been a slur used against the white people strung up in trees by Black vigilantes (for several centuries) then you will absolutely be permitted to say the n-word. Until then, take several seats. 

Equal and opposite doesn’t serve us as a helpful reference point in building a world built on liberation. Equal and opposite is revenge, not restitution. Equal and opposite is the multiplication of destruction, harm, violence, trauma. We are not advocating for or pursuing revenge. Where would that leave us anyway?As the (perhaps apocryphal) Gandhi quote claims, An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. 

So rather than doing a thought experiment in Black revenge or “reverse racism”, we’re going to do a thought experiment in liberation.

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This summer I drove out from Portland across the Columbia River to Washougal, Washington to visit one of my dearest friends. We clicked from the moment we met and almost 15 years later we still have the sweetest rapport. 

He was born in Vancouver, Washington but was raised in the south. His parents both worked with disabled and high needs children in the local school district and were the 1970s version of white antiracists in the south. Because of this unique positioning in the world, he was both the tall popular football star and the defender of the bullied Black and queer kids in his mostly white high school. He never wavered in his commitment to advocating for vulnerable people and using his privilege to protect those with less. 

Despite knowing all this, I was caught off guard when my friend started recounting his frustration with white men as a cohort and their inability (or mere refusal)  to understand that the process of creating equity in the world was not going to look or feel like fairness. “C’mon guys, you’ve pulled the pendulum so far in your direction that of course it’s not going to feel just if we overcorrect by putting women [+ anyone not a cis man] in charge of everything. It’s going to feel like harm.” 

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My personal ethic is predicated on harm reduction as the simplest metric for determining the way forward from white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. I feel like I am constantly yelling about how essential it is to triage when we are doing this work. Because the devastation is vast and overwhelming, but “start where you are” is not always the most effective or worthwhile course of action. Before you can start treating the victims, you have to subdue the shooter. 

The man with the gun is not going to feel good when they are thrown to the ground and disarmed. 

The billionaire hoarding wealth is not going to feel good when most of what they have accumulated goes into the community in order to end homelessness and hunger.

The parent abusing their children is not going to feel good when they are restrained so their children can be protected. 

The politician taking bribes is not going to feel good when they are required to work retail in order to protect their constituents from their greed.

To the people who benefit from and enjoy the harm, exploitation, and havoc they commit, being constrained is going to feel very bad. It is going to feel like oppression. 

To the powerful people who benefit from the economy’s structural exploitation of Black, brown, poor, and undocumented workers, being required to earn the same wages they suppressed is going to feel like punishment. 

To the white people whose family and ancestors stole homes, land, wages, property, having to return those assets is going to feel like an extreme injustice, because they didn’t actually commit the theft. 

They merely benefited from what was taken long before they were born. 

The end of patriarchy is going to feel like matriarchy. 

A post-America built on the equity and liberation of all people is at first going to feel like reverse racism to those with privilege.

But you are not being harmed when advantages gained through violence are removed from you by force. 

Liberation is going to feel very bad to people who benefit from inequality. Do you want to know why? Because your nervous system codes privilege as safety. A hard lesson but one worth learning. 

So yes, your body is going to be telling you that the loss of privilege you are experiencing is not the creation of equity but in the infliction of harm. 

The good news is that feelings are information, not instructions. 

And, I am told, facts don’t care about your feelings anyway.

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Hi there, thank you so much for taking the time to read this essay. You support means the world to me. If you’re able and you find my work valuable, please consider making a small donation to help me continue to share and educate. You can give instantly on any of your normal apps or better yet, join White Homework and become a patron. Whether or not you can give, would you take one minute to share this post with your friends, family, and colleagues? Thanks again.
Xx, Tori
Venmo: @Tori-Douglass
Cash app: $toriglass
PayPal: www.paypal.me/toriglass

How To Prove Black Lives Matter

Black History Month 2021

How We Prove Black Lives Matter

I firmly believe that perhaps the most important way to celebrate Black History Month is to secure Black futures. I grew up in poverty, I remember listening to my parents try to figure out where our next meal was coming from. Several of my earliest memories are of sitting on the dirty beige bedroom carpet (because we didn’t own a vacuum) listening through paper thin walls while my parents yelled at each other about not having enough money for food and rent.

In my teens, at the cheapest grocery store in town, my tiny mother would fidget with her food stamps, trying to keep them hidden from the people behind us in line. I would try to stand to her side, so the shoppers behind us couldn’t see what was happening. 

The first time we kids followed our mom into the food pantry in North Portland, we were excited. The inconspicuous building was about the size of a convenience store, with old beige and black flecked linoleum. The walls were a weird mint green color which made the low ceilings covered in fluorescent lighting seem harsh. Mom told us we could each choose one food item, and then walked away to look at the offerings. We kids knew better than to make a scene but I excitedly whispered to my sisters that all of this good food was FREE.

One stormy, dark Christmas week, there was a knock at the door of our tiny duplex. A stranger stood in the doorway, with arms full of presents. Five sets of dark brown eyes watched as several armloads of presents came in. When Christmas rolled around, the five of us woke up with bright eyes and puffy hair, and raced up the stairs. All of our gifts were from the stranger in the doorway.

That evening, full to bursting with spiced cider, in my ratty old footsie pajamas with holes in the toes, I made a promise to God that if I ever got the opportunity, I would be that stranger in the entry.

Even a little bit of breathing room is a gamechanger for a family that has lived for years or decades trying to scrape by. I know firsthand the massive difference that one stranger can make in the life of a family. I also know that, as the African proverb says, we can go farther together than we could ever go alone. The parable of the man on the beach covered in starfish applies: we can’t save everyone but we can certainly save some.

And that matters.

Black lives matter. 

But it is incumbent on all of us to embody the truth of that statement. 

Head over to Pay The Rent Club on my patreon. We are paying the rent for a multigenerational Black family for a year. It’s a brutal time for all of us, so if you have the means, please consider chipping in. Every little bit helps.

White Christians, Black Lives, and Mike Brown

I originally published this on my old Wordpress blog two years ago. I’ve made a few edits for clarity and fixed some typos. Who I am and how I write have changed a lot but the sentiment is still very much the same.

I would also like to take a moment to honor the man in the above photo, Edward Crawford, one of the leaders of the protest in Ferguson, Missouri. He died in 2017.

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The Day I Learned White Christians Hate Me

Dear White American Evangelical Christians,

It’s taken me three years to write this. Oh how I wish you could understand how hard the last few years have been for me, and millions of others. I wish you had the ability to sit with racial discomfort without lashing out at me for more than 30 seconds. I need to tell you a story, but honestly, I don’t know if you have the strength to sit with it. I need to tell you how your racial hatred has driven me away from the God you claim is love.

A mere three years ago, in what seems like a past life, I was attending Mars Hill Church. I was unhappy there but we were leading a community group and bailing wasn’t really an option. Then some tremors started.

To be clear, these rumblings had always been there, but they got pushed to the side (or “under the bus”). This year they bubbled to the surface.

This was August of 2014. My oldest son was about to turn two I was on vacation with little cell service, texting friends every time we got to a town with the newest, ugliest updates. The church was imploding under the weight of a small minded man with a massive ego enriching himself off his flock.

Everyone in my particular faith circle (Reformed Evangelical Christians) was talking about the rumblings. Everyday evangelical Christians inside and outside my faith circle were logging on to Facebook to see their pastors post the latest gossip, respond to criticisms of Driscoll, vote to remove him leadership, or to defend his actions. By their tone, it seemed they all had an opinion that was desperately needed, completely unique, and God-breathed.

And then, like a silent tectonic slip a thousand miles beneath the surface, on August 9th, 2014, at 12:01 pm local time, Darren Wilson executed the alleged petty thief Michael Brown.

Water mysteriously began to pull away from the shore.

The tension — the ugly foundation splitting under the pressure — was rising to the surface at the speed of sound. An orphan tidal wave, was the description given by Japanese survivors of the tsunami which traveled 5000 miles in a few hours. It appeared from nowhere, was caused by nothing. We didn’t hear a thing. And it still devastated us.

I returned home from vacation with a little tan, a happy heart, and a hyperactive baby boy in my womb. After dinner, bath time, and snuggles with my two year old I sat down with my laptop to check social media.

In the least poetic terms I have available to me, what I saw changed me forever.

The city of Ferguson, Missouri was on fire. I withheld judgment. After all, I had been the victim of police abuse for no reason. And I had enough empathy to know that Black Americans were not just “carrying on about nothing,” as everyone on the political and cultural right likes to claim.

But then I saw the white Christian responses.

The pastors, the Christians, the evangelicals, the Republicans, and the associated gawkers, turned their godly terror, their white makes right holy war, their righteous indignation, from questioning a pastor’s behavior to questioning the value of allowing black people to exist in America.

Of course he deserved it.

He was a thug.

Good riddance.

I would have shot him too.

The wages of sin is death.

It was the conservative evangelical jihad against the evil of blackness — black people, poor people, black culture, black communities — in America. Literally ALL THEY KNEW ABOUT MICHAEL BROWN WAS HIS SKIN COLOR AND HIS ZIP CODE. And yet they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the country was better off without him.

The unmitigated flow of white racial terror in the form of verbal abuse from the hearts and minds of white Christians was staggering. The fire-hose of vitriol directly towards people who looked like me, with no regard for empathy, sympathy, understanding, coming directly from white congregants was like nothing I had ever seen before.

They will know we are evangelicals by our racial hatred.

Dear white evangelical Christians,

I sincerely believed you loved me because God loved me. Now I know for a fact that you do not.

I learned that night that white Christians do not love me. Oh, you claim you do. But I am a black woman in America. I am not stupid. I hear what you say. I see what you write. I observe how you behave. What you said and wrote and did in the wake of Ferguson, without a drop of empathy or compassion tells me everything I need to know about how you see me and how you value me. I know better how you feel about black Americans than you do. Your selective racial ignorance and racial “colorblindness” are nothing more than whitewashed self-deception.

How do you hate me? Let me count the ways.

I know you hate me when you jump to defend cops.

I know you hate me when you jump to defend roadside executions.

I know you hate me when you say, “He probably deserved it.”

I know you hate me when you call me a liar because my experiences are different than your own.

I know you hate me when you tell me I am exaggerating when I speak of racist encounters I have had.

I know you hate me when you have to send a white person to vouch for me before you’ll believe me.

I know you have chosen ignorance when you ask from your suburban sofas and rural pickup trucks, “Why would they destroy their own town?”

I know you hate me when you are more concerned with broken windows than black lives.

I know you hate me when you post blogs condemning black Americans’ behavior while failing to take into account anything but skin color and “culture”.

I know you hate me when you’re indifferent to my experiences.

I know you hate me when you assume my behavior coupled with my melanin count means I deserve to be shot over a broken tail light.

I know you hate me when you are indifferent to my increased health risks.

I know you hate me when you speak over me because your opinion is more valid than my experience.

I know you hate me when you scream at black mothers heading into abortion clinics but are silent about black mothers dying in childbirth.

I know you hate me when you devote time, money, and energy to shutting down Planned Parenthood but do absolutely nothing for underfunded schools.

I know you hate me when you try to keep me from voting.

I know you hate me when you tell me I’m too loud, angry, or black.

I know you hate me when when you claim you’re entirely innocent of your grandparents’ efforts to halt desegregation.

I know you don’t love me because you’re already writing a comment to tell me about how this doesn’t apply to you and #NotAllWhiteChristians

I am a black woman in America: your white Christian hatred is as plain as the day you donned white hoods.

I tell you the truth, Whatever you did to the least of these you did to me.

Can I let you in on a little secret? However you feel about Michael Brown, alleged thief, alleged thug, alleged “Black Life Doesn’t Matter”, that’s how you feel about Jesus.

You see, Dear White Christian, your love for the Lord is permanently capped at the amount of love you have for the people in society who you like the very least.

For you, Dear White Christian? Your love for the Lord is capped at the amount of love you have for Michael Brown.

You can never love God more than you love your black brother or sister. It’s simply impossible. You can’t put two gallons of water in a one gallon bucket, and in the same way you can’t love God more than you love Michael Brown. It doesn’t work that way. The dimensions of your love for God are only as big as the dimensions of your love for Michael Brown. Alleged thief. Alleged thug. Alleged Black Life Doesn’t Matter.

In the words of the late comedian and rapist Louis CK, when someone tells you you hurt them, you don’t get to decide that you didn’t.

Dear White evangelical Christians,

I see your sheer disdain for my existence as you force a smile across your face on Sunday morning. I am a constant reminder that that past is never fully in the past. The white-on-black wrongs of the past and the present must be corrected before America gets the right to move on. That the shame you claim you don’t feel because you’ve “never owned any slaves” is a rot in the gut of this nation that you refuse to remedy.

The hand cannot say to the foot, I don’t need you.

I hear you constantly telling me how I need to behave if I want to be allowed to exist. White mainline Christians mostly silent in the face of racism, much as you were when the police turned a blind eye to the weekly lynchings across this “great” country.

Good intentions do not negate harm caused.

Evangelical Christians, I learned this lesson from you as you scorned the poor and castigated the single mother while Democrats were (sometimes) trying (and often failing) to help. Your intentions are meaningless because they don’t negate harm caused.

If I meant to back out of your driveway safely, and I accidentally ran over your child in the process, my intentions are meaningless in the face of your suffering.

Yet this callous indifference and outright disdain is how I see white Christians respond America’s racial history. I see you attempt this every day.

“I didn’t mean to run over you child, therefore the pain you feel is irrelevant.”

Dear White Christians,

That is not how this works. The fact that you don’t know this makes me think you’re not the ones who should be driving the conversation on this topic.

They will know we are evangelicals by our racial hatred. By indifference to suffering. By our refusal to examine systemic causes. By our fragility and constant projection.

You put your ignorance on full display with your insistence that your knowledge of race relations, most of which originates from movies, oral tradition, and talk radio, and none of which originates from actual experiences with black people in black spaces away from your airtight white bubble, is more valuable than people who have lived the very experiences you condemn.

I have more to say on this topic, but for now I will stop here. If what I said makes you uncomfortable, please sit with that discomfort for a while. Do some self-examination. Ask yourself how many people who are directly affected by your opinions about race and racism in the United States have ever invited you into their homes for dinner.

Dear Michael Brown,

I’m sorry. I’m sorry we as a country are so invested in protecting the feelings and spaces of white people that we can’t even have a conversation on how to improve this country. I’m sorry that the American dream wasn’t designed for people who look like you. I’m sorry that this country says one thing and does the complete opposite to black people. This country doesn’t deserve to call itself the greatest when it treats you with disdain.

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Hi there, thank you so much for taking the time to read this essay. You support means the world to me. If you’re able and you find my work valuable, please consider making a small donation to help me continue to share and educate. You can give instantly on any of your normal apps or better yet, join White Homework and become a patron. Whether or not you can give, would you take one minute to share this post with your friends, family, and colleagues? Thanks again.
Xx, Tori
Venmo: @Tori-Douglass
Cash app: $toriglass
PayPal: www.paypal.me/toriglass