Photo Credit: Richard Chicoine iCopyright 2009 at the National Art Gallery/Ottawa
How do we discriminate?
Let's examine the Under-Belly
"It all starts with uncertainty...not be resolved until we can listen to people's experience of things like racism and sexism-just listening without trying to defend ourselves...." - Margaret Wheatley
Provocative???
I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious n each day.
White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks."
Peggy McIntosh is Associate Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research for Women. This essay is excerpted from her working paper. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.”
Do we have your attention yet? Confederation College's Frances Trousse will be presenting "White Privilege" at our next CLD. Be ready to launch into a dialogue which, for many of us, will be the first time we have seen our own reflections in the spider web of myths about discrimination and racism.
The full text is here:
Your assignment...
Keep a "white priviledge" diary for 1 week...
chat with your family, friends and co-workers (ask "appreciative inquiry questions)...
wonder "conciously" about how your views of our community might be changed through this lens...
Yours in leadership,
Maggie
3 comments:
No matter how strong our leaders are, we all need to practice responsibility and discipline ourselves. We must look at our own habits and begin to alter them. We can’t hire out our practice and have somebody else do the work, but we can do the manual labor with delight and decency. True relief lies in finding what lies under the chaos and negativity—our inherent awakened nature. The notion of fearlessness is finding it now.
“You hit it out of the ball park!”
“We have to buckle down to get this done!”
Have you ever wondered what your neighbour, colleague or co-worker is really trying to tell you?
Looking through “Cross Cultural” lens: I think everybody should be aware of Cross Cultural communicating in a culturally diverse Country like Canada: It is important to understanding of how silence, emotions, gestures, personal space and sense of humour can impact our communication with different cultural groups.
it is different again being Anishinaube...we are different than any other cultural/ethnic group within what is now called Canada. One of the differences is every race, nationality,peoples are all visitors, immigrants to Canada and the Anishinabek are not. We are not to be blanketed with a cross-cultural blanket as is the case in so many thougts, occassions, instances etc. We have little and limited recognition of our origins ie. s35 and what little we have is being slowly taken away from us through racist government policy. But these policies would not pass if the whole Canadian public were aware of our differences and quit trying to assimilate us and accept our differences like it is acceptable to be from Africa, UK, India etc.
I challenge all of you to think and ask yourselves the next time you see an Anishinabe youth...ask what do you think his future will be like? And why did you think that way? Where are your thoughts coming from?
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