you’ve taken the hardest step, and you should be proud of that.
We know that admitting that you have a lot of work to do on your allyship journey can be overwhelming, intimidating, and hard to prioritize, but this is your first step towards becoming a better ally. We will be here with you along the way, and we encourage you to identify a group of your peers to take this journey with, since accountability is the hardest part.
Over 4 phases you will have the opportunity to learn more about the following topics:
Racial justice
Unconscious bias & the psychology of racism
White privilege
Empathy and racism
“I” statements
Within each of these topics, you will complete exercises like journaling, having hard conversations, and doing lots of self-reflection.
Remember, allyship is not a quick fix – you are embarking on a lifelong journey!
the comfort zone: focusing on status quo
Currently in America, we are seeing civil unrest and the challenging of the institutions the country was founded on. Generations of Americans are suddenly feeling as if their eyes are opening, and are coming together in masses to change the status quo. People who are protesting, having hard conversations with their families, standing up at work, calling out companies for performative allyship, and modifying their buying habits are coming to terms with the oppression of people of color, and more importantly, their role in this white nation.
You may think to yourself, "there is no racism in America anymore, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and I don't see the color of a person's skin."
Oof. Lots to unpack.
Let's go piece by piece. That thought (or any of them alone) are fueled by the need to preserve the status quo. It's essentially saying "I don't feel affected by racism, so I choose not to acknowledge it."
How about this piece from Vox that notes how Black Americans feel in the presence of police officers?
"There is no racism in America anymore." In a piece by Justin Worland for TIME Magazine, he includes a statement made by then President Johnson: "For decades, the truth of systemic racism has always been swept under the rug, lest it make white Americans uncomfortable and hurt the electoral chances of those with the power to address it. In 1968, the Kerner Commission, initiated by President Lyndon Johnson to study unrest in American cities insisted that ‘white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.’ The results of the Commission were largely ignored."
What emotions does this evoke from you?
Do you find yourself disagreeing with the statistics, or does it open your eyes up to a facet of racism that you hadn't really thought about?
While we know that the topic of the police is touchy at this point, we offer you another statistic from Vox. They note that "Ipsos’s polling found that 33 percent of Black Americans said they are in dire financial straits at the moment, nearly double the number of white Americans who reported the same — 18 percent."
Let's reflect on this for a minute: Black people are telling us (on many different topics, in many different studies) that they feel oppressed in this country, so why, as white people, are we so resistant? Why is our first instinct to fight or defend ourselves? Why do we find that we often fall backwards into how we feel, how this impacts us, and what we want from the situation?
You might not like the answer, but it's the right one: Because you're racist. Because you benefit from the current systems that are rooted in white supremacy, and because it's hard to think of giving away your freedoms.
Let's move on to the next part of the argument: "The Civil Rights Act was passed, so racism isn't a problem anymore."
First, let's identify what the Civil Rights Act accomplished, according to History.com:
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act barred race, religious, national origin, and gender discrimination by employers and labor unions, and created an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with the power to file lawsuits on behalf of aggrieved workers.
Additionally, the act forbade the use of federal funds for any discriminatory program, authorized the Office of Education (now the Department of Education) to assist with school desegregation, gave extra clout to the Commission on Civil Rights and prohibited the unequal application of voting requirements."
These are great advancements! But what can we takeaway from this?
Acts were passed, but white people continued to attempt to find loopholes to deny Black people their rights, like making it hard to access government funds or be able to vote.
This act was passed only 54 years before today (2020)
Even though these acts have been passed, we still don't see equality in the workplace (3.3% of Black people are in executive level positions, with less than 1% of CEO's in Fortune 500 companies identifying as Black. Black people make up 14% of the workforce, and this number of Black executives trails far behind).
Finally, let's address the last statement: "I don't see the color of a person's skin."
Although generally well intentioned, saying this phrase to Black and other POC, there are a few things that are insinuated in that statement. White people generally mutter the phrase in situations where they find themselves trying to tell others that they see them as equals, but because of the trauma Black and POC have been through, this phrase can cut deep.
Kiara Goodwin wrote and article describing what's it like as a Black woman to hear this phrase, summing it up in 3 buckets:
You don't see me.
You don't hear me.
You don't understand me.
How would you feel if you were getting to know someone, and these 3 feelings washed over you? It would impact your ability to feel confident, safe, worthy, among others. So as we continue on this journey of allyship, it's up to you to start thinking of things from other people's perspectives and understand what behaviors YOU personally can change.
Otherwise, you are guilty of maintaining the (racist) status quo.
unconscious bias & the psychology behind it
Unconscious or implicit bias:
How many times have you heard these phrases recently? Why do we feel like we hear it everywhere?
Unconscious bias (which can also be used interchangeably with implicit bias) influences our beliefs, which then inform our behaviors, which manifest in the actions we take.
The kinds of biases have been around since the beginning of time, but have evolved significantly along with the human species. In the past, unconscious biases were strictly used to make decisions about living or dying, and an easy way to understand that is to think about cavemen. When hunting and gathering, unconscious biases would inform everything they did, from whether or not they should eat scavenged berries, to how to react if approached by an animal that could kill them.
We often think of these kinds of unconscious biases in terms of 'fight or flight,' or our responses to conflict. When in this mode, we have tunnel vision, don't use reasoning or empathy, and are focused on nothing more than survival. Unconscious biases are split second decisions made on little information, so we can see how they come into play in terms of racism.
So considering that we currently live in a society where most of us don't have to forage for our dinners or worry about running into a lion on the street, how do unconscious biases come into play today?
UCSF's office of Diversity identified that —>
Verywell notes that unconscious biases present themselves for a few reasons:
We tend to seek out patterns. Implicit bias occurs because of the brain's natural tendency to look for patterns and associations in the world. Social cognition, or our ability to store, process, and apply information about people in social situations, is dependent on this ability to form associations about the world.
We like to take shortcuts. Like other cognitive biases, implicit bias is a result of the brain's tendency to try to simplify the world. Because the brain is constantly inundated with more information than it could conceivably process, mental shortcuts make it faster and easier for the brain to sort through all of this data.
Experience and social conditioning play a role. Implicit biases are influenced by experiences, although these attitudes may not be the result of direct personal experience. Cultural conditioning, media portrayals, and upbringing can all contribute to the implicit associations that people form about the members of other social groups.
While we may not feel the impact of these unconscious biases, they are ultimately affecting our abilities to progress in our allyship journey.
Action items:
Watch this 3-minute video about unconscious bias
Read this article and identify 3 things that your found impactful
Keep a list of times you identify when you are using unconscious biases in your daily life
Lately, we hear the term "white privilege" thrown out a lot, and there's no doubt that we have all seen it manifest in a few ways in society. But mainly, you've probably seen reactions of anger when it's mentioned. White privilege is unconscious, invisible, and pervasive. Often times, it's present regardless of intentions, because it's so deeply ingrained into American society.
Francis E. Kendall, author of Diversity in the Classroom and Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race, comes close to giving us an encompassing definition of white privilege: “having greater access to power and resources than people of color [in the same situation] do.”
Let's identify some ways that white people have privilege over Black people. Niloufar Haidari provides 50 everyday examples, and we've included the 6 we found most impactful:
in the media
On the 23rd of March, 2015, a newspaper in Iowa ran two stories about two separate burglaries. The images used for the three white men from one burglary were yearbook photos. The other story, about the arrest of four Black men, used their mug shots.
terrorism
Since September the 11th, white supremacists have perpetuated more acts of terrorism in the United States than any foreign threat. None of these people were labelled "terrorists", nor were white people asked to apologise on their behalf or to publicly denounce them, the way communities of colour are asked to.
george floyd
Minneapolis Police killed George Floyd during an arrest based on allegations he had used counterfeit money. Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white supremacist who murdered nine members of a Black church group in a targeted hate crime, was not only arrested alive and unharmed, but was later taken to Burger King because he said he was tired and hungry.
prisons
In 1982, Willie Simmons was sentenced to 38 years in prison for stealing $9. Alabama's Habitual Offender Law – used against Simmons in this case – makes no distinction between violent and non-violent crimes, meaning you can be sentenced to life for a charge as minor as drug possession. Under this law, three out of four people sentenced to life without parole are Black, despite the fact Alabama's population is only 26.6 percent Black.
brock turner
Brock Turner, a white college student who violently raped an unconscious girl, was given a six-month sentence due to his "previous good character". He served three months. Compare this to the Central Park Five, a group of innocent Black boys scapegoated for the rape of a white woman, who served between six to 13 years for a crime none of them had committed.
health care
Studies show that white people are more likely to have their pain taken seriously. Ingrained racial prejudices against Black people mean doctors are less likely to believe their claims of pain, leading to BME groups experiencing more illness, worse outcomes and more premature deaths compared to whites, while Black patients are half as likely to be prescribed pain medication. In the UK, Black women are five times more likely to die during childbirth than white women.
Yeesh. Those examples are hard to read.
Let's revisit the emotion wheel right now to identify how you're feeling, and take a minute to dig deep and understand what's setting you off. Did you have hardships growing up, and you feel like you had to work just as hard as anyone else in order to get where you've been?
We hear you, and
As a white person, we encourage you to really internalize this statement from Kendall's article:
What's the overall lesson here?
If you are white, you have benefitted from the color of your skin since before you were born (did you know that Black and POC mothers are 2-3 times more likely to die from childbirth?). You may not have had the perfect life, but you were never, under any circumstance, discriminated against because of your "pure" white skin.
Action Items:
Read this article from tolerance.org that answers the question "What is white privilege, really?"
Read through all of Haidari's examples of white privilege
Journal about 3 things that you personally have benefitted from because of your white skin
Watch this video about everyday white privilege
Empathy.
It's a word we're hearing constantly, in almost every facet of our lives. Empathy at work, empathy for teachers, empathy for those who have Coronavirus. But one way we don't often hear about empathy is in the context of racism.
Is empathy important in your journey towards allyship?
Yes. Fuck yes.
While you're in your comfort zone, take a moment to read part of a statement from Lee Pelton, President of Emerson College, on Juneteenth this year:
Let's pause and reflect on all of this. As a white person, have you ever experienced any of this? Ask yourself what your response would have been if you had to retreat to an alley to place your food order; we can bet it probably wouldn't be good.
One of the big reasons we don't have empathy when it comes to racism, is because as white people, we can't even begin to imagine what that would be like. Sure, at some point in time we may have experienced prejudices or judgements, but we have not experienced racism.
No debate. racism is not a debate.
Pointer for your allyship journey:
a BIG part of your growth will be suppressing the need to debate and have your point heard, and actively listening instead.
Action Items
Take this empathy assessment
Read this article and watch the featured video
As part of our human nature, we speak in "I" statements when communicating with others.
This way of speaking shares our feelings, experiences, and beliefs in a way that is centered on ourselves, sometimes relying on anecdotes or drawing out emotional displays.
"I" statements are appropriate in most situations, but part of what you will learn in this section is about those times it is inappropriate to rely on "I" statements. One of those situations is when discussing anything related to racism, especially when in the presence of Black people. Due to extensive oppression of people of color in America, white people are used to being centered on their own experiences, and disregard others not like them because they lack the ability to do so.
If you’re trying to talk about what white-centering is, we suggest using this excerpt from a piece by Ijeoma Oluo as a starting point —>
So what are we getting at, exactly?
"I" statements are a really easy way to measure your journey of allyship. When engaging with others about race and racism, if you find yourself engaging in the conversation and using a lot of these kinds of "I" statements, you're likely missing the mark of being a genuine ally. If you feel that your opinion needs to be heard and validated in this kind of exchange, we're here to say, your privilege is showing.
Here's your challenge:
Throughout this journey of allyship, keep yourself accountable by counting your "I" statements when talking about race. As you progress through different stages of your allyship, you will notice that your "I" statements become more few and far between, until you find yourself centering the conversation on Black people and their voices.
This is a process, but you can do it! Get yourself a journal to keep track of your use of "I" statements over time. While, we know it will be uncomfortable at the start, your reframing of this topic will definitely serve you well in your allyship over time.
Action Items:
Have at least 1 conversation with a white person about race.
While you have this conversation, take note of the following:
What topics did you cover about race?
How many times did you say "I" while talking? (We suggest that your friend keeps a tally for you so that you can freely talk.)
What feelings did you have during this conversation? (We suggest you revisit the emotion wheel.)
Read the following article:
Journal about the following:
Why am I here?
What do I want to get out of this journey?
What is my end goal?
What does success of this journey look like?