Coming back to this blog after not having posted for almost half a year is hard. My mind says I should have a good reason – and I don’t. My mind tells me that I should have something profound to say – and I don’t. Even coming up with a heading seemed treacherous. I’ve learned a lot since the selection of Donald. Mostly, I’ve learned that I don’t know a lot. This journey has been humbling. And yet when I was looking at someone else’s vision earlier today, I realized that maybe I do have something to contribute. Most people don’t look at marriage as something that bestows a privilege. Maybe I can add that to a vision. At minimum, I can use my work to update my vision. So here’s a start, using questions from a workshop I attended as a framework.

Where does your passion to take action to end racism come from?
I think my passion comes from a profound dissatisfaction with the world we live in and a yearning for what it could be like. The world I envision, as a sketch to be fleshed out, is built on deep democracy, the kind feminist pragmatists wrote about, whose ideas I incorporated in my thesis. This democracy is filled with cooperation and collaboration, community, dance, and joy. This democracy is not corrupted by capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. This democracy does not center hierarchical institutions such as corporations and the nuclear family, instead it centers institutions that support democracy like cooperatives and intentional families.

How can this rooting sustain you in taking action toward racial justice for the long haul?
The most important thing to remember is to remember the most important thing! This vision and rooting myself in it can only sustain me if I remember it and notice how it is already emerging in my life. So, I want to create ways I can reconnect myself daily to this vision. And I want to remember to live this vision consciously by building (and noticing!) communal outlets of pieces of that vision.

What are ways that this rooting might not sustain you or lose your passion for taking action about racial justice?
It might not be concrete enough. The path from where we are to the vision might not be clear or too meandering (I get impatient easily!). I might lose hope that we’ll ever get there because my vision is big. Something also became clear to me during the workshop: I often don’t see the connections, the support, I do have, so I might be more focused on the vision than on the ways it is already realizing in my life. It is experiencing how this vision is emerging in my life that sustains me the most.

What are some capacities or skills or practices that you think might help you to sustain your passion to fight for racial justice for the long haul?
I want to set up ways I could practice reconnecting to this vision in community. I also am recommitting to my meditation practice, which can undermine my tendency to isolate myself (including in a group by focusing on what makes me different from the rest of the group instead of seeing what connects us).

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