Training opportunities

The Leaven Center
In March 2000, The Leaven Center was opened as a retreat and study center for people engaged in movements for social change. The Leaven Center is a place of beauty where you can find rest and nourishment for your body and spirit. It is also a context for bold and innovative programming that addresses significant issues of our day. The Leaven Center was born of the conviction that the spiritual life cannot be divorced from an active concern for the world, and that those who work for justice need resources for spiritual renewal and vitality.

White Privilege Conference
The annual White Privilege Conference (WPC) serves as a yearly opportunity to examine and explore difficult issues related to white privilege, white supremacy and oppression. WPC provides a forum for critical discussions about diversity, multicultural education and leadership, social justice, race/racism, sexual orientation, gender relations, religion and other systems of privilege/oppression. WPC is recognized as a challenging, empowering and educational experience. The workshops, keynotes and institutes not only inform participants, but engage and challenge them, while providing practical tips and strategies for combating inequality. 2007 conference dates: April 18-21.

For people in the Boston Area
Race, Education and Democracy Lecture and Book Series
The Race, Education and Democracy Lecture and Book Series, a collaborative effort of Simmons College and Beacon Press, will annually bring to Boston a prominent scholar to deliver four to five public lectures on the topic of Race, Education and Democracy. These lectures will form the basis for a book, which will be published by Beacon Press.
This Lecture and Book Series aims to reestablish in the public imagination the historic connection between public education and the possibility of a robust democracy, against the backdrop of the issue of race in America.
The Series, aimed at a broad audience, will present educational issues in all their complexity, in readily accessible language. The Series proceeds on the assumption that public education is at the center of American public life and that discussions about critical educational issues need to occur in the public sphere and engage Americans from many different backgrounds in thoughtful and complicated conversations.

Online resources

Challenging White Supremacy Workshop Resources
Extensive resource page from the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop organizers. Their website also links to a number of other anti-racist and anti-opressive websites and gives guidelines on how to run workshops on challenging white supremacy.

Congregational Services - Anti-Oppression Resources
Download this handy resouce guide to Jubilee Workshops, Transformation Teams, JUUST Change Consultancy and more!

James Loewen's Fight to Get Heard
Article by Lauren Zanolli about James Loewen's book "Sundown Towns" and the difficulty in getting it published and publicized.

Links to Anti-Racism Scholarly and Activist Sites
Good list of AR/AO links!

National Multicultural Institute
Founded in 1983, the National MultiCultural Institute (NMCI) is proud to be one of the first organizations to have recognized the nation's need for new services, knowledge, and skills in the growing field of multiculturalism and diversity.
NMCI's mission is to work with individuals, organizations, and communities in creating a society that is strengthened and empowered by its diversity. Through its initiatives, NMCI leads efforts to increase communication, understanding and respect among people of diverse backgrounds and addresses some of the important systemic issues of multiculturalism facing our society.

Office of Racial and Ethnic Concerns
The Office of Racial and Ethnic Concerns is part of the Umitarian Universalist Association's Identity-Based Ministries.

Race - the power of an illusion
Three part video series from PBS about race in society, science, and history. There's an online guide to the series, background readings, resources, and much more.

Tim Wise
Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S., having spoken in 48 states, and on over 400 college campuses, including Harvard, Stanford, and the Law Schools at Yale, Columbia, and Vanderbilt. He has trained teachers as well as corporate, government, media and law enforcement officials on methods for dismantling racism in their institutions, and has served as a consultant for plaintiff's attorneys in federal discrimination cases in New York and Washington State.
Wise is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, NY: Soft Skull Press (2005); and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White, NY: Routledge (2005)

Tolerance.org
Tolerance.org is a principal online destination for people interested in dismantling bigotry and creating, in hate's stead, communities that value diversity. (Read more about how we define "tolerance.")
If you want to know how to transform yourself, your home, your school, your workplace or your community, Tolerance.org is a place to start — and continue — the journey.
Through its online well of resources and ideas, its expanding collection of print materials, its burgeoning outreach efforts, and its downloadable public service announcements, Tolerance.org promotes and supports anti-bias activism in every venue of life.

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D., associate director of the Center for Research on Women at the Wellesley Centers for Women, is also the founder, and co-director with Emily Style, of the National S.E.E.D. (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project on Inclusive Curriculum. The SEED Project helps teachers create their own year-long, school based seminars on making school climates, K-12 curricula, and teaching methods more gender fair and multi-culturally equitable.

Intercultural Press
Good site for books on diversity.

Other links

Diverse & Revolutionary Unitarian Unviersalist Multicultural Ministries (DRUUMM)

Antiracist-UU listserv

ActiveSolidarity.net

Anarchist People of Color

Colours of Resistance

Diversity Inc.

InnerAction: Tools for Change

Prison Activist Resource Center

UU Leaders Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression Multicultural Website

White Anti-racist Community Action Network

Articles

Becoming an Ally
Excerpted from Becoming an Ally - Breaking the Cycle of Oppression
by Anne Bishop Published by Fernwood Publishing, Halifax
Most people in our society do not yet see the connections between different forms of oppression, or even have a general sense of how oppression works. Therefore, we still find ourselves dealing in most instances with one form of oppression at a time, and in a given setting, we are either in the role of oppressed or ally.
The PDF file of the monograph is available at http://www.classism.org/documents/BecomingAnAlly.pdf

Silenced Knowings, Forgotten Springs: Paths to Healing in the Wake of Colonialism
by Helene Shulman Lorenz, Ph.D. and Mary Watkins, Ph.D.
We have each been educated in a system that grew out of, and reflects, 500 years of colonialism, and are struggling for awareness in a new era of globalization that leaves increasing numbers of people hungry and disenfranchised. Our cultural legacy is profoundly imprinted by the often silenced after-effects of the genocidal war against Native Americans, the dislocation and forced slavery of Africans in America, and the oppressive labor conditions of the poor. But how do we carry these kinds of knowing inside ourselves and in our relations to others and the world? When the dictionary describes colonialism as "the practice or manner of things colonial," what does this mean personally, psychologically and culturally? How has colonialism left its wounding imprint on our individual psyches, on the ways we imagine and interpret our life experiences? What are the paths to awareness and healing of these wounds?

Claiming Our History, Warts and All
by David Pettee
David Pettee is the Director of Ministerial Credentialing for the Unitarian Universalist Association. This essay is part of an ongoing conversation on issues of truth and reconciliation which have appeared on UUA.org beginning in January 2007.

Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building
by Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, and Donna Bivens
"...one of the major contradictions in our work: the intention to bring resources (people, ideas, time, money) into a community or a neighborhood to make something better, and how the ways we go about this work can maintain or even reinforce the power inequities and racially biased policies and practices that created the problems in the first place."

Flipping the Script is a monograph designed for people who work in communities to identify and address issues of white privilege, oppression, racism and power as they play out in this work. It is for community builders, grant makers, technical assistance providers and others who are trying to develop more equitable and thoughtful partnerships with community residents and organizations.
Flipping the Script is written by Maggie Potapchuk - MP Associates, Sally Leiderman- Center for Assessment and Policy Development and with Donna Bivens - Women's Theological Center and Barbara Major - St. Thomas Health Clinic.
The PDF file of the monograph is available at www.capd.org

White Supremacy Culture, from Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups,
by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, ChangeWork, 2001
This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations. Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. The characteristics listed below are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group. They are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking. They are damaging to both people of color and to white people. Organizations that are people of color led or a majority people of color can also demonstrate many damaging characteristics of white supremacy culture.

Race is always part of the story
by Robert Jensen
An except from the book The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege. In this particular excerpt, the author shares two ways of talking about personal life history which are both true, but read very differently as the one makes a point of acknowledging white privilege while the other doesn't.

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
by James Loewen
From Maine to California, thousands of communities kept out African Americans (or sometimes Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, etc.) by force, law, or custom. These communities are sometimes called "sundown towns" because some of them posted signs at their city limits. While some might think this is a thing of the past, this book uncovers a divverent story.

Tools for White Guys Who are Working for Social Change
by Chris Crass
Checklist to help evaluate white male privilege and how it affects interaction with others. Chris works with the Catalyst Project and contributes to The Anarcha Project.

Towards a Radical White Identity
by Susan Goldbery and Cameron Levin
Our attempts to dismantle dominance and oppression must follow a path other than that of either vilifying or obliterating whteness... Whites need to acknowledge and workd through the negative historical implications of "whiteness" and creat for ourselves a transformed identity as White people commtted to equality and social change. Our goal here is to neither diefy nor denigrate whiteness, but to diffuse power.

A User's Guide to White Privilege
by Cynthia Kaufman
Picking up where Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" left off, this essay looks further into the ways that racial privilege manifests itself in the lives of white Americans. It explores some of the reasons that white privilege is hard for whits to see and it explores the question of how white people can act responsibly given the unavoidable realities of racial privilege.
The PDF file of the essay is available at http://www.cwsworkshop.org/resources/WhitePrivilege.html

Videos

Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible A film by Shakti Butler, Ph.D. (50 minutes) 2006 World Trust Educational Services, Inc., Oakland CA
This film features the up close and personal stories of white activists and their ongoing journeys of transformation. Participants will talk about being unconsciousness about their learned and internalized sense of white supremacy.

Independent Lens
Airing weekly on PBS, the Emmy award-winning series Independent Lens is like an independent film festival in your living room. Each episode introduces new documentaries and dramas made by independent thinkers: filmmakers who are taking creative risks, calling their own shots and finding untold stories in unexpected places. Many excellent films about race, identity and multiculturalism.

Letters From the Other Side
Interweaves video letters carried across the U.S./Mexico border with the intimate stories of women left behind in post-NAFTA Mexico. By focusing on a side of the immigration story rarely told by the media or touched upon in our national debate, "Letters From the Other Side" paints a complex portrait of families torn apart by economics, communities dying at the hands of globalization, and governments incapable or unwilling to do anything about it.

Books

Privilege, Power and Difference - Allan G. Johnson
This brief supplemental book provides students with an easily applied theoretical model for thinking about systems of privilege and difference. Writing in accessible, conversational prose, Johnson joins theory with engaging examples in ways that enable students to see the nature and consequences of privilege and their connection to it.

The Covenant with Black America - Travis Smiley
The Covenant With Black America is made up of 10 chapters on the issues identified by the public. They include economic disparity, health, education and environmental justice. While the completion of the book marks the end of one journey, it is in many ways the first step for those who want to move forward toward real progress in improving Black communities.

Inhuman Bondage,The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World - David Brion Davis (Oxford University Press, 2006)
The book makes two points clear: 1.) from the beginning of European settlement (invasion) of the Americas, slavery was directly or indirectly the basis of the economy, from Canada to Argentina. 2.) In the colonies and the US of A, slavery was practiced north and south until well into the 19th century. And northerners, especially New Englanders, were deeply involved in the slave trade. In fact, until the invention of the cotton gin, a requirement for plantation-style corporate slave farming, there were more slaves in New Jersey and New York than in any southern state. And after the gradual abolition of slavery in the northern states, most of the nothern economy was still dependent on southern slave labor.

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory - David W.Blight (Belknap Press of Harvard U. Press, 2001)
This covers the 50 years following the end of the Civil War, and considers the sell out of Reconstruction in favor of Reunion. It is an important work, laying out the selling out of full equaility for Black Americans in the effort to re-establish the Union. One form of oppression, slavey, was replaced by another, Jim Crow legal segregation, which was jot linited to the states of the former Confederacy.
Uprooting Racism - Paul Kivel

Uprooting Racism explores the manifestations of racism in politics, work, community, and family life. It moves beyond the definition and unlearning of racism to address the many areas of privilege for white people and suggests ways for individuals and groups to challenge the structures of racism. Uprooting Racism's welcoming style helps readers look at how we learn racism, what effects it has on our lives, its costs and benefits to white people, and what we can do about it.

AR/AO Sermons and articles by UU Ministers and lay leaders

Latino Identity - Rev. Jose Ballester

Traces of the Past - Jill Cowie

The Failure of Diversity - Josh Pawelek

Racism and Spiritual Death in the USA - Josh Pawelek

Living at Risk - Jason Shelton

American History Too Infrequently Taught - Nancy Witherall

Guilt is Not the Answer - Nancy Witherall

I Don't Want to Sit Around and TALK About Anti-Racism... What Can We DO? - Nancy Witherall

Lemonade Anyone - Nancy Witherall