Anti-Blackness and Transformative Organizing in the Time of COVID-19
In Funders Together’s commitment to racial equity, we shared that, in partnership with philanthropy that is committed to preventing and ending homelessness, we would “commit to learning more about the systemic racism and anti-black, anti-native, and other forms of violence and oppression that is our nation’s history and our present so that we can educate ourselves and our members about how this results in disproportionate homelessness among people of color.”
We are excited to deepen our own knowledge and learn alongside our members in this two-part webinar series on white dominant culture, anti-blackness, and transformative organizing. Through this webinar series, we hope funders will deepen their understanding of how we can shift the way we work in our organizations to create more equitable grantmaking practices that will benefit our grantee partners and people of color experiencing homelessness.
During this webinar series, participants will learn how white dominant culture shows up in our organizations and grapple with how to pivot to new ways of working and being. We’ll engage with concepts like principled struggle and liberation and further our knowledge about how anti-blackness, racial capitalism, and transformative organizing can bring us further into the discourse on the four levels of racism: internal, interpersonal, institutional, and structural.
Learning objectives include:
- Develop a deeper understanding of key terms, concepts and definitions that are critical to racial equity, liberation, transformation, the Black radical tradition and white dominant culture.
- Do a deep dive of knowledge and context around white dominant culture practices and how they show up in organizational practices and how to identify anti-blackness when it comes up in our organizational practices
- Reflect on how to connect these learnings to your grantmaking organization and work to prevent and end homelessness
Webinar 1 | May 28, 2020
Webinar Resources
- Webinar slides
- The Black Joy Experience Resource Guide
- White Dominant Culture & Something Different worksheet
Funders Together Resources
- Funders Together’s Commitment to Racial Equity
Chat Box Resources
-
Book: The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power by Desmond Cole.
- “Canada has a self-perception of being "better" than US on anti-black racism. It is just as insidious here, but more covert. I would encourage reading from Canadian writer Desmond Cole. His writings are eye-opening:
- Racism in Canada thrives and pretending otherwise nourishes it, say people who live it,
- Article: White Women Aren’t Afraid of Black People. They Want Power. Dame Magazine, July 30, 2018.
-
Article: Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing. Andrea Michelle Smith, 2016.
- Describes the different ways white supremacy shows up in different communities of color and why/how it’s used as rationale to support power and power hoarding
- Book: How to be an Antiracist. By Ibram X. Kendi
- Book: From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen
- Please read on the life of Regis Paquet, an Afro-Indigenous woman who was murdered by police in Toronto last night.