How might we transform how we relate to each other?
Accountability to Black and indigenous communities starts with our accountability to ourselves and each other.
“Accountability is not a destination, it is a skill we can build and practice. It is an art, a craft, an alchemy we can learn how to wield, just as we have learned how to wield hurt and shame and fear. If accountability is a skill we value, then we must make room and make commitments to practice it ourselves each day, each week, each year.”
Mia Mingus
Sample Agenda for Transforming How We Relate to Each Other
As you gather with your team or group, the agenda below can serve as a template that you are encouraged to refine and adapt to your needs.
1. Check-in: Read the poem “Running to Freedom” in “Blooming in the Flower City” by Brandon Stroud. At the end of the poem, you will find a prompt. Reflect and discuss.
2. Manifestations of Racism small group discussion: We recommend using a platform such as Jamboard to document responses to the questions below so that small groups can see each other’s ideas in real time.
a. Read the passage of Faylita Hicks’s “A Century of Disg(race)” that begins “Several months later as I was preparing this essay, in April 2021…”. With the Proposition B example that Faylita highlights in mind, what is one example of the way that your institution supports or enacts acts of racism?
b. How do the practices of you, your team, your workplace reinforce and perpetuate that example of institutional racism?
c. How do these institutional and individual acts of racism impede accountability to each other (as colleagues) and communities of color? 3. Maintaining Accountability small group discussion:
a. What does accountability (or lack of) look like within your institution’s community relationships now? How do institutional supports of racism create barriers to accountability? What about individual and collective practices? b. What’s needed for your institution to move toward accountability to the communities of color that are directly impacted by your work?
Resources
Additional resources for identifying manifestations of racism and maintaining accountability.
Manifestations of Racism
Acts of racism are supported by institutions and are nurtured by societal practices that reinforce and perpetuate racism. (PISAB)
RESOURCES
- Just Say Black
- A Day in a Life: How Racism Impacts Families of Color
- A Day in a Life: Imagining a Country without Racial Gaps
- Racial Equity Here toolkit | LEARN
PUTTING IT IN PRACTICE
Environmental Racism is one manifestation of racism
RESOURCES
- Building Economy for People and Planet
- Environmental Racism
- Indigenous People and the Environment
- Tools for Ending Racism in the Environmental Movement
- Supporting Indigenous Leadership
- "Connecting Racism and Care of the Environment" by Alysia Tate
- "Racism and Care of the Environment" by Berta Ramos-Ramirez PUTTING IT IN PRACTICE
- Movement Generation’s Course Correction: Just Transition In The Age Of COVID-19
- MG’s Course Correction session 3 on bioregional governance
Militarism is one manifestation of racism
RESOURCES
Maintain Accountability
Organizing with integrity requires that we be accountable to the communities struggling with racist oppression. (PISAB)
RESOURCES
- A Beginner’s Guide to Anti-Racist Results Based Accountability
- Accountability and White Antiracist Organizing
- Accountability tools
- Building Accountable Communities video series
- Practices of Accountability PUTTING IT IN PRACTICE
- The Transformative Power of Practice
- Caring About Thriving, particularly the Accountability questions