Unpacking Race March 2017 Week 4: Intersectional Solidarity

In March 2017 T.O. Philly held its popular workshop series about race and undoing racism. Between sessions we posted videos, articles, radio pieces, and writing prompts for participants. These are archived here, along with a few terms and activities shared in each session:

• WEEK 1: Learning to Love Discussing Race
• WEEK 2: Courageous Conversation
• WEEK 3: Mapping Racism
• WEEK 4: Intersectional Solidarity
• WEEK 5: Images of Transition

After unpacking various systems of racism in last week's Unpacking Race workshop, we talked more about intersectionality and solidarity via these definitions: 

Intersectionality: “Various ways in which race and gender and other identity markers—such as language, age, class, national origin, sexual preference, ability—interact to shape people’s individual and collective experiences... The intersection of racism and sexism—and other structural oppressions—factor into people’s lives in a way that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately.” — Kimberle Crenshaw 

Solidarity: “Meaningful resistance to dominator culture that demands in all of us a willingness to accurately identify the various systems that work together to promote injustice, exploitation and oppression... There can be no love where there is domination. And any time we do the work of ending domination, we are doing the work of love.” — bell hooks

Some exercises we used to explore intersectionality and solidarity included Person to Person, Gravity Statements, and The Three Wishes in which Images of Oppression can be modified toward becoming Images of Liberation. These techniques lead us into this week's journaling assignment.

HOMEWORK

1. WATCH this short animation about microaggressions:

2. LOOK AT this video "Stop Being An Ally" recently published by This Matters. What are ways that this video challenges you? What are ways that you rise to these challenges?

3. READ the articles about some spaces and communities to which people can bring anti-racist dialogue and organizing:

• "How to Tackle Anti-Blackness as a Non-Black POC" by Almass Badat fro gal-dem magazine.
• "Rural White Folks Need to Speak Out against Racism in our Communities" written by Rachel for the website Country Queers.
• "What 'White Folks Who Teach in the Hood' Get Wrong About Public Education" written by and Kenya Downs for PBS,

4. JOURNAL about race. Additionally, try following one or more of these prompts:

• REFLECT on the Image Theatre we made. Which scenes or characters were familiar to you? How realistic or fantastic (fantastic meaning "in the realm of fantasy") were the edits that people tried? How could these dynamizations be applied to the real intersectionalities of race in the wider world?
• INTERSECT race and another stratum. Write about each as it relates to you. How are these similar? How are these different?
• GRAVITATE a statement or idea by writing it in the middle of the page, and then draw a circle around it. Where are you in relation to it? Where have you been in the past? Where would you like to be? Where do you see others? Plot these as points nearer or further from the initial idea and write about each. Do your words fall toward the idea? Away from it? Do they circle around it? Do they form new ideas that have their own gravity?