Whiteness was a trade. The trade was never grieved. And an ungrieved loss cannot imagine, it can only defend or destroy.
Quotes:
" No one was white before they came here, and becoming white cost people their own history. James Baldwin
“We need ritual because it is an expression of the fact that we recognize the difficulty of creating a different and special kind of community. A community that doesn’t have a ritual cannot exist. A corporate community is not a community. It’s a conglomeration of individuals in the service of an insatiable soulless entity.” Malidoma Patrice Somé
myisha t. hill, Heal Your Way Forward: The Co-Conspirator's Guide to an Antiracist Future - the guidepost of the Heal Your Way Forward Collective
James Baldwin, "On Being White... and Other Lies," Essence (April 1984). The spine of the episode.
Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community (Swan/Raven, 1993; reissued by Penguin/Arkana, 1997
Sobonfu Somé, Falling Out of Grace: Meditations on Loss, Healing and Wisdom (North Bay Books, 2003)
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995), and Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks (1998). Whiteness as an acquisition, with dates.
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (1991). What the trade paid.
Thandeka, Learning to Be White (1999). How the trade is transmitted inside families.
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands (2017). The untransformed trauma European peoples carried here before they carried it out on others.
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (2017), and Imarisha & brown, Octavia's Brood (2015). Imagination as political capacity, which is your segment 5 in reverse.
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