Wellness Moment — racism is the real illness we face
Today I’m taking a little departure from the usual Wellness Moment. Our own health and wellness as we navigate remote work, work-life balance, and self-care during the pandemic crisis is important. Events over the last week have caused a need to shift attention and focus to the health and wellness of our communities and our nation.
As we’ve watched the protests across the country this weekend, and perhaps participated in them, we are reminded that it is not only the murder of George Floyd that is being protested. Rather Mr. Floyd’s murder was only the most recent in our nation’s history of abuse of people of color. Our nation is racist. The systems and structures that we all operate within every day are racist. It isn’t enough to say, “I don’t use bigoted terms or personally mistreat people.” It isn’t enough to be personally “not-racist.” Racism is the default in this, our home. It’s the real illness we’re fighting as a nation. That’s a hard thing, and it’s an ugly thing. But it’s also a true thing.
This weekend I was reminded of the words of Eli Wiesel in his Nobel Prize speech, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.”
We are being called by this moment, as we have by many before, to resist the default, to be anti-racist. We’re called to be in our discomfort, to make choices and take actions against what has been historically accepted. We must, now more than ever, make equity the very center of all that we do; gender equity, LGBTQ equity, economic equity, and we must not shy away from building our work around creating, supporting, and sustaining racial equity. We already know all the reasons, moral and economic, for this. We cannot build equitable communities without addressing the racism that has been built into the systems that form the very infrastructure of our society.
We need to continue to center the universe where it belongs in this moment and as we move forward. As we imagine and shape what our “new normal” will be, let it not be of more racist and harmful rhetoric and policies, let it not be more of the same. We can begin by asking, with every project or program we undertake: Who?
Who is benefited and who is harmed?
Who is left out?
Who is making the decisions and who is most affected by them?
Who holds power?
We can take this same approach with us away from work, too, in how we vote, where we shop, the art and media we support and consume, the conversations and perspectives we elevate.
It’s our responsibility to rebuild in a way that is healthy and sustainable for everyone, to recover to equity.
And those of us who are privileged because of race or gender or orientation or class or education, or in any other way, can take ownership and responsibility for our own education on inequity and injustice, and elevate the perspectives and experiences of those who aren’t.
Here are a few places to start:
· The Groundwater Approach, which defines the Goundwater model that informs our understanding of systemic and structural racism
· Harvard Implicit Bias Assessment, to begin our own internal assessment
· The All-In Cities model, on building an equitable economy from the ground up
· Racial Equity Tools, for knowledge resources on racial equity fundamentals and building out the work
If you’re looking for more specific resources, let me know, and I’ll help how I can. If you have other resource recommendations, please share them!
