Hi everyone,
Here are a few final questions we could talk about in the lead up to Ijumaa's webinar "
Let's Talk About Whiteness in ECE"
- Who taught you about positive racial identity when you were young, either explicitly or through how they moved in the world?
- If you are white, did you have models of positive white racial identity when you were growing up?
in response to the first question I think about my mother's friend Cleo. She had moved to our northern Wisconsin town to attend college and was one of the first black women I knew who talked openly and comfortably about race. It made a huge impact on me.
Later, I began to see my parent's and older sibling's efforts to move against racism as a role model for how to be white in a positive way in the world. I remember when I was an older teen, my dad came home from a meeting that had been attended by a group called something like "equal rights for all" . The title sounds great, but it was a group working to deny treaty rights to Anishinaabe (also known as Chippewa) tribes in the area. Everyone seemed to be in agreement with this group, so finally my Dad stood up and said, "It sounds like everyone here is in agreement with this policy. If that is true, I need to leave the group, as I cannot be a part of this". When he did that, the majority of the group stood with him, saying that they couldn't be a part of it either. I had never thought of my father as an activist and he wasn't- but that day he stood up in a meaningful way. I saw him in a new way when he came home to tell us about it. Since then I've seen that integrity as a white man as a part of my heritage and tried to live up to it.
I hope others will share their stories here as well. I'd love to hear about positive ways to think about white racial identity that aren't based in superiority.
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[Meg] [Thomas]
[Early childhood consultant
Co-facilitator for Diversity and Equity Interest Forum
[St Paul ] [MN]
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