White people talking to white people (WPTTWP)

Last night I was on Mount Olympus's Western face watching the sun gild the clouds above the Oquirrh Mountains in the most glorious pink. This morning I watched that same sun touch the highest peak of those same mountains. I saw it from the Park and Ride at 6570 South Wasatch boulevard, where a hiking meetup was taking off. 

I do not love these group hikes. But each time I am glad, after the fact, for the opportunity to talk with people who I would not otherwise have rubbed elbows with. Especially when we get to talk about White privilege and structural racism.

 In his book Democracy in Black Eddie Glaude Jr says if we are going to change the way we see Black people, "White people -- and only White people can do this -- will have to kill the idea of White people." 

It is never hard to connect a substantive conversation topic with race and power structures, since race pervades so much of our societal psyche. 

I have been encouraged by our anti-racism meetings at school to engage the topic of race when it comes up. Today the woman I was hiking near, a professor at Westminster College, said she didn't like working at her last college, Williams, because "I didn't get it about having wine and cheese parties, for students." The atmosphere of elitism was so intense that even she as an educated white person didn't feel comfortable. 

We then had a conversation about how institutions of higher ed make/fail to make attempts to create space for students of color and marginalized students who might easily feel that this school (and its bougie cocktail parties) is not for them. We mentioned some of the things Westminster does, and also how the curriculum and theoretical framework that is taught in classes makes a big difference. 

I told her what Ivy said about TikTok being a great place to find educators talking about how to be culturally responsive and anti-racist in the classroom. I also recommended and texted her the link to Zaretta Hammond's Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, which she seemed very keen on. 

Of course, this was a fairly easy conversation to have because she, like me, is a White educator who wants to do more for equity in her classroom. But any conversation we can have with those around us that normalizes talking about racism and how to be less racist, seems worth while. 

Isabel Wilkerson has a fascinating chapter of Caste: The Origins of our Discontents which illuminates how flimsy a term "white" is, and how recently its meaning has been debated. Just 120 years ago, in this country, when Italians immigrated they were not considered White. 

A Black man initially accused of miscegenation was released when the court found out the woman was Sicilian - it was no longer a marriage between White and Black. 

In 1894, 11 Italians were lynched in the South for Jim Crow-type offenses, facing the same punishment Black people would have faced. Different states at the time determined "Whiteness" by vastly different formulas.

Maybe "killing the idea of White people" is not as far off as I thought when I initially read Glaude's directive. He advocated, and I advocate, WPTTWP.

The F*ck it Diet

 Last night I was thinking that if someone asked me to list the most influential books of this year, I would have a hard time. I read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the 1972 seminal work by Walter Rodney. That changed the way I saw whiteness and Europe's legacy in the world forever. 

I read The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, which changed the way I think of the environment and human impact on the globe forever. 

Now I'm reading The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner, which is taking the wool out of every tenet of our diet culture, with massive implications. 

It seems to me that cultivating anti-diet thinking is as radical and as hard as cultivating anti-racist thinking. So deeply ingrained are diet beliefs (even if they are wildly contradictory, like some of our racist beliefs) that it must take consistent, deliberate and brave examination of them to change how we think and act. 

Dooner includes several writing prompts and action exercises in the book. I'm listening to the audiobook, but the prompts are available in a PDF. I was scrolling through them this morning. I've been writing responses to them in the order that they appear - I'm a very good student after all. Today I came across this one: 

And I scrolled right past it. Who needs a five minute rest. That little action revealed my own beliefs about silence and rest. Even as a Quaker I immediately dismissed this as something that people tell us to do but which is not actually important. Then I thought, hey, I have the time, I'm not meeting my friend for breakfast for two hours. Let me spend five minutes lying on the couch. 

And I did. I thought about my body for a few minutes. Then I thought about other things. I crossed my ankles. I watched the baubles on the wall sway in the breath of the heater. Then the timer went off and I bounced back up, ready to resume the useful part of my day. 

Maybe I should do that every day.