I am taking the 21-Day Racial Equity Challenge. Each day I will be taking time with the prompts, and I will be sharing my reflections/thoughts. I encourage our audience to take this challenge with me to start your own self-reflection journey, start understanding and building empathy for people who are not like yourself, learn more about racial inequity in our food system, and ultimately learn how we can better support the Black people in our community.
If you feel comfortable, I encourage our audience to share your thoughts and reflections in the comments below. Our social media pages have several thousand followers, and I want to leverage our platforms as a space that encourages learning, that feels safe and inclusive. So here we go, let’s dig in.
Click here to read the previous blog post.
Day 06: Catch-Up and Reflections
Day 07: Week One Catch-Up and Reflections
The objectives of both of these days were to reflect on the past prompts so I went back to Day 05 content because it's very relevant to understanding what's going on today - protests, defunding police, supporting Black businesses, removing historical statues.
Robin DiAngelo in a 2019 presentation makes great points about how the “default system” in America is against Black people. ”State sanctioned organized crime against African Americans. It begins with kidnapping and 300 plus years of enslavement, torture, rape, and brutality… Bans on testifying against Whites, which made it technically legal to murder Black people in this country… Employment discrimination, educational discrimination, bias laws and policing practices, white flight, subprime mortgages, mass incarceration, school to prison pipeline, disproportionate special educational referrals, testing, tracking, school funding, bias media, voter suppression, historical omissions, and so much more. African Americans are not and have never been in the position to do this to the White collective.”
The people who formed American government, wrote the laws we still follow today, didn't consider BIPOC lives. BIPOC voices weren't welcomed at those tables (into positions of power) and that's why so many systems (government, health care, education, food equity, etc.) continue to fail Black people.
Being silent on these issues is saying that you support the systems in place that are oppressing Black people, and that doesn't sit right with me. While other employers are silencing their staff or people are getting fired for their beliefs, I'm grateful that Boston Organics has supported me in writing these blog posts.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post. Click here for more prompts, and click here for more resources. Feel free to share your own reflections and thoughts in the comments below. Please keep in mind that we are all lifelong learners, our experiences are all unique, and this is a safe-inclusive space.
