Grace is a Black body worker and mother. Emma is a white preschool teacher. We work together teaching and facilitating community education classes.
While we work with folks for anywhere from a few weeks to multiple years, our arc stays consistent. With much experimentation, reflection and revision, we have found this sequence to be most effective.
We start slowly with an intention to move, as adrienne marie brown often names, at the speed of trust*. We attempt to do this first, by being transparent about who we are and why we do this work. The first session is full of information and is an orientation to the rest of the work. Just like if you want to learn to walk a tightrope, you might not start 50 feet in the air with no net—you’d start closer to the ground. Similarly, we want to give participants a framework so we can support each other and feel grounded even as our conversations bring us out of our comfort zones. We set expectations and offer invitations about how we want to show up and interact. We offer a history of the creation of race and talk about the somatic effects of that history on our bodies.
Sharing a history of the creation of race in a preschool vocabulary is a way for us to model some language we use with children early on in the class. That being said, we don’t begin with talking about what words to use. The words are very important, but the words are hard to find and use authentically unless we have clarity about what we are trying to describe, and we have skills to keep our body regulated while doing so.
We often hear “I froze” when people tell stories about interacting with kids around race. That often is due to a somatic nervous system response that inhibits people’s ability to engage. We try to center our physical body, with all it’s sensations and emotions, in everything we do. Race is stories ascribed to bodies.
We then move into reflecting on our own stories and racial environments, as well as those of the children we care for. What are their everyday experiences of race at home, at school, walking outside, going to the doctor? What life experiences do they have and how do they talk about those experiences? We spend time together considering all the ways we can ground this work in our children’s own lives, and their own words. Race is never simple something someone else has.
Then we start exploring and playing with our own words. We share words we use with children. And we support folks to start putting their own words together through roleplaying. The role playing is an effective somatic practice that helps us build resilience and gain fluency. This part of the class is an attempt to support people in their own reconditioning around race. It’s like why we practice fire drills instead of just reading the fire drill plan. We give our body space to actually practice, not just plan or prepare. By the last session, participants are interacting and are mostly working with each other during class with our scaffolding and support.
We don't give scripts or offer the right thing to say. We aim to support grown ups to build a practice of listening, watching, discerning and asking questions to enable them to expand their capacity to tell more whole and honest stories about race, power, humans, land and money and so on... We believe that talking alone won’t transform our systems of racism. But we perhaps have no chance to transform those systems if we can’t talk.
*Originally coined by Steven Covey