Day 28: Black Music

Dear Family and Friends,   


Can it really be Day 28?   This has been quite a journey for us and hopefully an enlightening one for you as well.   I’m not sure what we will do on Wednesday when we aren’t calling each other at 11p to write our next day’s thoughts and activities together.   I (Beth) will feel some relief but mostly I will miss it.  Will you?   


Anyway, today is Sunday so a little downtime is prescribed.  ; )   Today we will revisit something mentioned way back on Day 2, as an additional activity.   Today we’re exploring some Black musicians / musical artists, we are excited to add some artists we know and to discover new artists and develop a new appreciation for diverse genres as well.  We like to listen to music while we; go for a  walk, have a dance party, are crafting and cleaning.  We’ll be seeking specifically Black and Brown artists, with an eye toward independently produced and local artists.     


And while we are focusing on Artists of Color, we’re looking for a virtual performance of some kind by a Black Artist as well.  We’ll be looking for a virtual dance or music concert, an art gallery offering,  a storytelling event, some spoken word or maybe a play reading.   


Day 28

How to Participate: 

  • Select your favorite streaming platform or purchase the music and create a playlist on your device. How to create a Spodify playlist.

  • Search for Black Artists or add your favorites and see what spotify suggests.  We’ve listed a couple of our favorites below. 

  • Artists get paid per stream so listen regularly and share your playlist with others or buy a song (they get more per purchase than per stream) or donate directly to the artist. 

  • Enjoy! 


Camerin already started her playlist including artists: Swats, Autumn Rainwater, and Jason Jet.

Beth is listening to Alicia Keys and John Legend piano faceoff on Youtube which she missed on Juneteenth.  And to Babyface and Tony Braxton.  Join me or find something equally relaxing and inspiring to enjoy.

Please share your playlists so we can create an awesome library of music together.  Also we’d love to hear about any monuments or building names you discovered yesterday.  

Looking for a different anti-racist action for your Sunday, here are some ideas: 

Start planning for regular anti-racist action after June 30th: https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/whiteaffinitygroup.pdf 

Our awesome cousin/nephew Will McKinnon is a lawyer and offers insight on laws as they relate to racism on his Instagram.  His analysis is thoughtful and well informed.  He’s collected a few here to share.  Enjoy!: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EQQDtslg4TLRw_3iCsh_qtDgaYBE6ZSO-eIeHnnLF60/edit 


Happy Sunday!


Peace,

Beth and Camerin 


Word of the Day: Caucusing (Affinity Groups): 

White people and people of color each have work to do separately and together. Caucuses provide spaces for people to work within their own racial/ethnic groups. For white people, a caucus provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege, and to increase one’s critical analysis around these concepts. A white caucus also puts the onus on white people to teach each other about these ideas, rather than relying on people of color to teach them (as often occurs in integrated spaces). For people of color, a caucus is a place to work with their peers on their experiences of internalized racism, for healing and to work on liberation.

SOURCE:

https://www.racialequitytools.org/act/strategies/caucus-affinity-groups


Blog: https://day1ripples.blogspot.com/


Reminder to White People: 

You will continue to mess up re racism.  So continue to be teachable, open to correction from POC, and vigilantly monitor yourself for defensiveness and white fragility.  You never “arrive’ as an ally, you must continually “practice" allyship. - @itsjacksonbbz



Upcoming Virtual Events: 

Reading/ Watch/Listen List: 


Resources: 

 

Yesterday's Actions and Reflections from the group: 


  • Follow up from yesterday’s reflection: "reparations garden”  There's a group here who was looking for white allies who had yards and were willing to commit to tending a garden that would produce veggies for families living in food deserts. It's been great for me. I've learned a lot and have ended up expanding the garden.

  • I had a long chat with a co-worker on Friday about the White perspective on the current situation. It was a good long talk, but I also know that my efforts to be supportive were far from perfect. But I appreciate that she reached out and I also appreciate that she opened the door to future conversations for us both to learn. Allies... we may not be perfect out the gate, as we are trying to deprogram generations of thought and systematic and cultural privilege, but we have to show up and do the work to change not only the world’s view, but our own. The learning never stops!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 1: Ongoing Practice

Dear Friends and Family,  Here we are again at the beginning, because for us as white people, we have to recommit every day to being anti-racist.  Our priviledge affords us the opportunity to forget, to get caught up in our daily lives and once again overlook the injustice being enacted on our Black and brown sisters and brothers. We hope these weekly emails will serve as a friendly reminder that there is still work to do and we can and must be engaged on a regular basis in the work of anti-racism.  It must be part of our on-going, regular thought processes, of awareness and action.  In some ways it feels like it’s been longer than a week and in others it feels like just yesterday we were exchanging daily emails, ideas and resources.  In the last week, we have slept more and regained a little balance in our lives but we also miss you.  We miss this community of supportive white folks dedicated to equality and equity and we are excited to create this weekly ...
Read more

Day 27: Hate vs. Heritage

Dear Friends, Family and Neighbors! Four days left! That’s nothing, we got this! We’re excited to start marinating on how we can keep the momentum going in our own lives and hope you are too.  We hope these 30 days are a habit building first or next step in our journeys to become anti-racist.  But we recognize that this will be a lifelong journey.   Today we are looking into the monuments of the confederacy in our own neighborhoods and cities.  This could include physical statues, road names, park names and building names.  We will identify two or three named after confederate soldiers, slave owners or white supremeists.  Then we will do some independent research on the individual after whom the monument is named.  We are also interested in when the monument was erected or the building was named.  We then plan to look into what was going on in terms of race relations in the country at the time the monument was created or the building was name...
Read more

Day 25: To reform or reimagine

Dear Friends and Family.   What if racism is so built into the fabric of what we identify as America, that in undoing racism we have to reimagine who we are as Americans and what we stand for as a country?  As we continue on our journey to understanding the depth of institutionalized racism, this is a question that has popped up for us.  Will it be enough to reform the systems in place or do we need to dismantle them and create something new.  Per Angie’s video (also see addendum below) from yesterday: What if all the vessels are built for only one kind of coffee mug, what do we need to do to make sure all the mugs can fit?  These ideas are challenging, but so is the prospect of living in a world that undermines our most basic value: that all people are created equally.   This Ted Talk by Bettina Love illustrates the learning she saw in elementary school children when their cultures were valued and not stifled.  She posits that Hip Hop cult...
Read more