Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Re group commitment Diversity, Inclusion, Bias

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Feb 27, 2023, at 11:59 AM, Kathleen Lowry <kathleenlowrylpcclmft [at] 
> gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I am wondering about an online book club on anti racism. Anyone interested?

We did this during the pandemic using Zoom and it worked very well in terms of 
discussion. It didn’t continue beyond the reading and discussion of Ibram X 
Kendi’s "How to be an antiracist” which we read chapter by chapter. One reason 
is that a group needs a moderator/facilitator (like Fred) who keeps the group 
going and on pointe. A leader/supporter who manages the mechanical issues as 
well.

This workshop in 2021 was where/when I realized how completely different our 
life experiences are. That in 2021, so many people had not had any personal 
experience with friends of another culture or ethnicity. One person was just 
becoming aware through her church’s program of sheltering the homeless during 
the hot summer weather of the realities of being homeless. Part of the surprise 
was that these were cohousers, not founders but people who had lived here a 
number of years but had so little breadth of social exposure.

Several of us continued reading the new titles in the area of antiracism and 
shared them with each other. The website Jude Foster posted a link to is 
incredibly thoughtful and complete. I hadn’t known of it before. It’s an 
example of a person, Tema Okun, working over 20 years to perfect the expression 
and presentation of a subject. It’s incredible how intensive the central essay 
is — how much it contains of assembled wisdom on poor thinking presented in a 
format that makes it an easy reminder to consult. The attitudes and behaviors 
are presented as characteristics of White Supremacy Culture, but they are the 
typical stumbling blocks of all thinking about cultures — or in simpler words: 
daily living. 

https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/

I particularly appreciated the “antidotes.” After defining the characteristics 
of a particular characteristic of supremacism — either/or thinking, progress 
defined as “bigger”, worship of the written word, etc. — she includes ways to 
behave to counter/reverse/dilute/overcome these values and judgments. Things 
each of us can do moment to moment to redirect the flow in better directions. A 
stunning compilation from many sources.

In reference to reading about racism, a book I want to mention because it was 
such a surprise to me is “The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten 
Black Pioneers & the Struggle for Equality” by Anna-Lisa Cox of Harvard’s 
Center for African American research. It is a remarkable work of detailed 
accounts of the many, many Black farmers who owned large-scale plantations and 
businesses in the 18th and 19th centuries. The scale of their work did not 
protect them from the atrocities of racism but the fact that it had existed is 
not discussed anywhere else to the extent that the atrocities are. 

I’m not saying that “life wasn't all that bad” but only to focus on the 
dehumanization is to miss the history of human strength, resourcefulness, 
ingenuity, and accomplishment. You see traces of it when reading histories of 
notable Black leaders with mentions of several generations of landowners, 
doctors, etc., but Cox's work includes maps, numbers, and original sources 
which make it more tangible and fodder for more reading. She also discusses the 
daily social life of the enslaved families which included visits from one 
plantation to another on Sundays and holidays to keep in touch with those who 
had been sold away and to find companionship.

“Bone and Sinew" isn’t a whitewash of the lives of formerly enslaved people. If 
anything the extent of brutality against those who had achieved success on the 
"white man's standards” is even more appalling. It was a damned if you do and 
damned if you don’t culture they were living in.

One thing I have to say as a writer is that the book is not as readable as the 
works of many contemporary books on Black history. What I heard myself saying 
as I read was “The author was told by her editors that she had to write the 
book in stories of individual farmers and their families or no one would read 
it.” But she isn’t really a storyteller so some of the biography-based stories 
lack the kind of detail that lends personality to history. 

It also means that the endnotes are unusually rich in information and are well 
worth reading. To someone who likes reading history the good stuff has been 
relegated to the 50+ pages of closely printed endnotes. It isn’t a long book 
but is filled with information that provides a stronger image of Black culture 
in the 18th and 19th centuries than many do.

Endorsements by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ibram X Kendi, Peter H Wood, and Paul 
Gardullo.

(PS:  This post gives evidence of several attitudes and behaviors that Okun 
identifies as characteristics of the white dominant culture: supporting the 
idea of one central leader, praise of something as "superior," personal pride 
in my own judgment of something as superior, references to numbers as proof of 
value, a personal evaluation of an editor’s skill with no professional 
credentials to back it up, calling up endorsements to support my own 
conclusions. I’m sure there are others.)

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org