Volume 25, Number 2    September 2003

CTA on a journey to dismantle racism - starting with ourselves

Call To Action has begun a program of anti-racism training given by Crossroads Ministry.  Crossroads is an interfaith and community based anti-racism training organization based in Racine, Wis., which helps develop new models of leadership to dismantle racism and build anti-racist multicultural diversity within institutions and communities.  The ministry was founded in 1986 as an effort to develop new directions in understanding and combatting the root causes of institutional racism in the United States.

In an intensive workshop May 1-3 in Chicago, national board members, staff, and some regional leaders took the first steps with Crossroads to analyze what can be done to develop and implement strategies to dismantle racism within CTA's structure. Trainers were James Addington and Carmen Valenzuela, co-directors of an umbrella organization of church councils in Minneapolis-St. Paul that oversees the Minnesota Collaborative Anti-Racism Initiative.

The training was rooted in history. Using giant horizontal chart paper on four walls of the room labeled for four periods of history since 1492, participants were asked to build a "Wall of History of Racism and Resistance to Racism." It was an exercise in collective memory. With racism on the top half and resistance to racism on the bottom, the CTA crowd wrote down people, places, and events of racist history, and of the long struggle against it. The time periods were 1492 - 1865 (colonialism, genocide, slavery), 1865-1954 (Jim Crow, reservations, braceros, concentration camps), 1954-1972 (civil rights, American Indian, and farmworker movements), and 1972 to the present - the post-civil rights era.

What different people remembered - whites and persons of color, men and women, young and old - made for a fascinating tapestry of history and its interpretation. Participants worked together, and got to know each other in a new way. What was the point of the exercise? "You can't understand racism in 2003 in the U.S. without knowing how it got this way," said Addington. "Much of today's racism can be traced back to conscious decisions in the past." Added Valenzuela, When we do our work against racism, we will build upon the foundations of resistance that have been laid by those who went before us."

The heart of the workshop was developing a clear, shared, common understanding of racism.  Prejudice, discrimination and bigotry are elements of a racist society, but it is the enforcement of these elements that creates racism.  In this country whites dominate and control the institutions that create and enforce American cultural norms and values. Hence, Power/influence + prejudice/discrimination = RACISM.

The next step in the program will be an intensive training process which equips teams with strategic skills to lead CTA toward long term and permanent transformation.  The CTA anti-racism project is being headed by CTA vice-presidents Amy Sheber Howard of Denver, Jeanette Rodriguez of Seattle, and Lena Woltering of Belleville, Ill.

 

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