This past Saturday I helped lead an antiracism workshop at a church in San Francisco. The workshop was based on a workbook entitled Do the Work! written by East Bay activists W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz. You can meet the authors and hear them describe the book in a short YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROLxmkqcIQc.

If you watch this video, you might get the impression that the book is less serious than it is. While parts of it are playful (coloring pages, crosswords, etc.), it tackles difficult topics such as privilege, race as a social construct, how to respond when someone makes a racist comment in front of you, and how to respond when you see someone being mistreated or harassed. Still, the tone of the workbook is encouraging, hopeful, and even empowering.

Just a few of many eye-opening lessons from Saturday’s workshop:
1) Of the approximately 20,500 human genes identified by the Human Genome Project, ZERO determine a person’s race. Each human has 3 billion base pairs of genetic letters, and while visible traits are determined by genes, the vast majority of genetic variation exists within what we think of as racial groups, not between them. We’re all 99.9 percent genetically identical. That’s why race is more accurately described as a “social construct” rather than a biological one.
2) Each table group was invited to answer 15 questions that appeared to have come from a civics exam. Even with two lawyers at my table, we couldn’t answer all the questions. When we’d finished, we learned that these 15 questions were part of a 68-question “literacy” test administered to determine whether people were qualified to vote in the State of Alabama in 1965. The county clerk had the (usually racist) discretion to decide whether to ask one question to prove a person was literate, or to require someone to take the entire test in a limited amount of time. Seven wrong answers disqualified a person from voting, and we agreed that most of us surely would have failed it. Although literacy tests like this were banned by the Civil Rights Act in 1965, generations of Black voters were disenfranchised by such tests.
3) We watched a powerful video demonstrating the impact of privilege. A facilitator lines up college students for a race, saying the winner gets a hundred-dollar bill. Before saying “Go!” he has the participants take two steps forward if certain statements apply to them. For example, “Take two steps forward if you had access to a private education,” “…if you never had to worry about your cell phone being shut off, “… if you never had to help Mom or Dad with the bills,” “…if you never wondered where your next meal was coming from.” All these statements are about things that the students themselves have nothing to do with; they didn’t earn them. When the facilitator is finished reading these statements, most of the white kids are many yards ahead of most of the people of color. Folks at the workshop agreed this video isn’t perfect. A few comments thoughtlessly stereotype both the Black and white students, and it’s questionable whether kids of color should be used as object lessons to teach white kids about privilege in the first place. Nevertheless, the lesson is chilling, and brought some folks at our workshop to tears. You can see that video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJAgPF5FNTQ.
4) Bell and Schatz explain that we each have one or more “lanes” or contexts in which we have more influence than we might realize. Our lane might be a job, a volunteer space, a church, a family, and so on. That lane is where we can begin to do the work of dismantling racism and white supremacy. After answering the question, “What is my lane?” we were invited to answer five more questions: 1) Who else is in it? 2) What’s my role and what are my skills? 3) How does white supremacy show up? 4) What’s being done about it? and 5) What can I do about it? It’s so easy to think, “Well, there’s nothing I can do, just little old me,” but thoughtful consideration of these questions helped us to recognize there really are contexts where we can speak up, where we can help those without voice to have a voice, where we can help the ignored or excluded to be included, and where we can begin to break through the layers of denial that hold racism and white supremacy in place.

The most important lesson, however, is “You don’t have to know everything before you can make a change. You don’t have to do things perfectly to make a change. You just have to be willing to learn, and to try.” [Do the Work! p. 3]

My thanks to Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco for hosting this workshop. I am challenged to do the work!