The Personal Story Behind Our Free Allyship Workbook
Today I'm sharing more about the personal journey that inspired me to create our free How to Audit Your Influences workbook, designed to help those who aspire to act as more effective allies learn how our media consumption may be impacting our unconscious biases — and make a plan to do something about it.
Click here to listen to me read this blog post.
For most of my life, the vast majority of my closest friends have been, like me: white, Jewish women. I’m grateful for these relationships, especially since these are two parts of my identity that are marginalized in our society, and building community helps me feel solidarity and the joy of these identities. It’s also helpful to be friends with other white Jews as we work together to understand what it means to be racialized as white, unlearn racism, and act as effective allies to people of color (POC). But as I got older, I started to come to terms with how white my friend group was. For a while, I sat with it, feeling shame I wasn’t sure how to process.
Then 2016 came around, and the majority of white voters (54%), including white women (47%) voted for an openly misogynist, racist, ableist fascist for US President. And the 2018 midterms rolled around, and we saw the same patterns (plus voter suppression targeting POC) cause Stacey Abrams to lose her first bid for Georgia governor to another openly racist, misogynist white man. As much as I wanted to be angry at other white women for these election results (and I was, and I still am), I also saw it as a call to look inside the house: I know I can’t effectively work with other white people to unlearn the racism in which we’ve been socialized and act as effective allies to uproot white supremacy, if I’m not actively working on that within myself.
My reflections on the racial makeup of my own friend groups had been a clue to me that I had (and will always have) work to do. And when I looked around with curiosity, I came up with two hypotheses. First, that I just wasn’t putting myself in many contexts where I came into contact with POC peers. (I tended to socialize in mostly predominantly white spaces.) Second, when I did come into contact with POC peers, something about the manifestations of my unconscious, implicit racism was stopping me from developing deeper relationships with them, and them with me.
When we think about how implicit racism works, this is deeply sad but not surprising: I grew up going to predominantly white schools and living in predominantly white places. My exposure to POC was largely through the media, which is quite racist in its portrayal of POC. So despite growing up in a home and in communities that taught me explicitly that racism was bad, my brain hadn't been implicitly wired to respect POC to the same degree as white people. (This is true for most of us, about most marginalized groups* – and yes, it’s heart-wrenching.)
I knew I’d cause harm if I just went out and tried to make friends with more POC for the sake of diversifying my friend group. The idea of that felt inauthentic, and, frankly, pretty gross. So I decided to do two things:
Attend more events and join organized groups that would have more interracial attendance and POC leadership, and
Work on my own racism by making sure I was more routinely consuming media created by POC – an ethical way to rewire my brain.
For the latter, I looked at the media I was choosing to consume, starting with the books I read. (I love curling up with a good novel.) Unsurprisingly, I found that I had been reading mostly white authors – and actually largely male authors. So I decided that for the next year, I was going to exclusively read novels written by women of color (WOC). Throughout the year, I noticed that I also had been predominantly reading authors from other oppressor groups: straight authors, cisgender authors, able-bodied authors, thin authors, etc. So as the year went on, I expanded my goal: read novels written by WOC and/or other non-males who belong to at least one additional marginalized group.
It’s now five years later, and, while I went back to reading some novels by cis, straight, able-bodied, thin white people, they’re fewer and farther between than they once were. That’s for a few reasons:
WOC write some damned good novels that I just don’t want to quit;
When I read novels written by people who have a marginalized identity I don’t share, it helps me understand the world around me differently, which then helps me engage differently with people in my real life, and;
When I read novels written by people who have a marginalized identity I do share, it does the same thing: it helps me unlearn my internalized oppression, and feel solidarity, community, and empowerment in areas where I might otherwise feel alone.
It turns out there’s some actual brain rewiring happening here: Through intentional exposure to media I enjoy, I’m teaching myself to value and take seriously people who the media and world around me have been teaching me my whole life are not worth valuing or taking seriously.
Today, the results of this exercise affect the makeup of my regular podcast feed, how I choose what plays and art exhibits I prioritize getting tickets for, what news digests I prioritize reading, what music I prioritize exploring, and so much more. I find that as a result of prioritizing the media I consume in this way, I think and act differently. For example:
When I’m in a meeting or spending time with friends, I’m more likely to notice and speak up when someone says something harmful or that assumes their experience of the world is universal.
When I’m engaging with someone who’s part of a marginalized group I’m not part of, I have more context to be able to take them more seriously, feel much less compelled to ask them to do the unpaid labor of explaining their experiences to me, and much more readily and naturally act in solidarity with them.
And finally, when I’m engaging with people who share my marginalized identities, I have more tools to help us both identify the ways in which our challenging experiences aren’t our fault or our responsibility to fix, but rather indicate a problem with systemic oppression and with the way people in other groups need to step up and do their work to treat us with more respect and dignity.
As I teach workshops on effective allyship, I find myself sharing this story as a tool for others to use in unlearning oppression, and often hear back from folks that it’s had a big impact for them. So when we were brainstorming tools to offer folks to do on their own, this felt like an obvious choice.
Today, I’m thrilled to offer you the opportunity to download our newest free offering, designed to help those of us who aspire to act as more effective allies learn how our media consumption may be impacting our unconscious biases — and make a plan to do something about it.
Click here for your free download. Don’t hesitate to be in touch with any questions – happy auditing!
*Footnote: This is, in fact, part of the very definition of systemic marginalization and oppression.