As Living Cities has deepened our racial equity work, building on all of the labor of past and current colleagues that got us to this point, we’ve been able to have focused conversations about intersectionality, and the many different ways that we can engage in anti-racist work as staff.
Recently, we’ve been having conversations as a staff about about accountability, recognizing the need a shared organizational language and understanding about the ways in which we are accountable–as individual people and in our roles–to our work, to each other, and to our communities. . Our Colleagues Operationalizing Racial Equity (CORE) team devised a curriculum to address those needs.
We believe that accountability and healing are inextricably linked, and are both fundamental to our racial equity work. As we worked to integrate healing justice in our racial equity work, we also began internal conversations about how we personally address microaggressions in our lives and at work. We talked about how we’re accountable to interrupting microaggressions. These conversations were coming up in formal and informal ways within our organization. In response, we hosted a staff workshop about microaggressions as a form of violence, what our accountability to interrupt that violence might be and what interrupting that violence might look like. We compiled resources for staff that bring greater clarity around identifying microaggressions, building accountability for interrupting microaggressions, and options for interrupting the violence that results from them.
Staff found the resources and workshop useful, so we decided to share those activities for anyone working to deepen their own racial equity analysis and practice. This resource has been designed for Living Cities staff based on our internal needs; please feel free to adapt this resource for your own use.
We are also working on organizational guidance to support staff in interrupting microaggressions and violence in our events, convenings or meetings. If your organization has any, and wouldn’t mind sharing, please email us at racialequity@livingcities.org
List of resources we used to create this worksheet:
Tool to interrupt microaggressions
The People’s Response Team and AFSC Chicago Do’s and Don’ts for Bystander Intervention
My Grandmother’s Hand : Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
