Aspiring Anti-Racist Reflections

I once had a friend who responded to everything by making it about herself. I would start to share something I was going through. Something hard. Something confusing. Something that mattered to me. And before I could even finish my sentence, she would pivot. Immediately. “Well that reminds me of this time when I…” And suddenly, the conversation was no longer mine. At first, I tried to make sense of it. Maybe she was trying to connect. Maybe she was going through somet

There are certain words that can change the temperature of a room. Privilege is one of them. You can feel it the moment the word is spoken. Bodies shift. Arms cross. People begin explaining themselves before anyone has asked a question. Because somewhere along the way, many of us learned to hear the word privilege as an accusation. As if someone is saying: You’ve never struggled. You’ve never worked hard. Your life has been easy. But that is not what privilege means. Privileg

There is a moment I’ve come to recognize in myself. It doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it doesn’t look like anything at all. But I can feel it. It shows up as a small tightening in my chest. A prickly feeling under my skin. An almost immediate urge to explain myself. I have learned to recognize that feeling for what it is. Defensiveness. For a long time, the only defensiveness I recognized was anger. The white man shouting “All Lives Matter.” Someone raising their voi

One of the newest roles in my life is Auntie. I have a four-year-old nephew and a nearly two-year-old niece, and getting to watch them move through the world has been one of the most unexpected teachers in my life. Children explore everything with curiosity and joy. They run fast, they ask questions about everything, and they learn the rules of being in community in real time. When I’m facilitating conversations about anti-racism, I often start with a story about my nephew on

The rooms always smelled like coffee. Church basements. Library meeting rooms. Sanctuary spaces after Sunday service. Nonprofit offices with folding chairs stacked in the corner. Fold-out tables pushed together to make long rectangles or big circles. Flip chart paper taped to the walls. Across organizing spaces in my city, we gathered to talk about justice. We talked about housing, transit, mental health, disability rights, education, mass incarceration. Systems that were fai