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The First BD101-RACE!

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Greetings Dear Ones, just coming up for rejuvenating air after the most amazing healing circles at the first Beyond Diversity 101 - RACE!  What an honor to be one of the holders of this workshop vision ~ for an equal number of people who identify as white and people who identify as black to go all the way in!  To go down to the roots of what has been and open together to the truth we find there.

So, what do we have to lose when we open to seeing, to speaking, to acknowledging?  No, really, what do we have to loose?  What parts of ourselves or our sense of self, starts to come unglued?  Coming unglued is not a cool feeling, period.  No matter what we sense as the precious reward to come on the other side of coming apart…No matter how much we feel the pull to heal – to re-member who we truly are; as the horrific lies fall away, there is a instinctive reflex to hold on to what has given us form or identity.  There is an instinct to hold on to inferiority and there is a determination to hold on to superiority.   It takes courage to face this cultural conditioning.

But ah, the 28 of us who just spent the last week together stepped into that courage, to enter a holding space for facing and in some cases breaking this conditioning.  Black folks worked with Black folks – holding up the mirror to say, “Ah, my sister, my brother, I think that you may be slipping back into those well worn grooves that say ‘we are a mistake’ and ‘we are undeserving’.”  White folks worked with White folks to say, “Damn, looks like we are doing it again.  We are acting as if people of color are here to meet our needs.”  We came together at times mixed Black and White, to BE together ~ to notice still unbroken patterns of white supremacy and to notice growth and to stretch into new behavior.

As one sister said to the BD101-RACE group, “this U.S. experiment has failed, we need a new project.”  After this declaration, it seemed the whole room took a huge breath together and released an “Ashe ~ yes!”  Later in the workshop, Lisa Graustein and I gave the assignment to dream into new projects, new ways of being and new ways of doing – to work with others to clarify and expand ideas.  We found that some people developed and left with very specific plans of action while others harvested the earliest bits of their visions. 

We left the workshop space honoring and holding each other in support for the rugged heartwork before us.  We recognized that we, as Black folks and as White folks are in desperate need of radical truth-telling (about the past and about now!) and that in that truth-telling we find healing.  We need to stand in and for justice, willing to love so deeply that we can withstand the forces within and around us that will most assuredly resist the dismantling of white supremacy. 

I witnessed in this first BD101-RACE a kind of community-holding and relentless practice in liberation-ways that prepare us to answer this call.  I felt the ancestor's approval and Great Spirit’s anointing as we stepped more fully into wholeness.   ~ Ashe!

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