asymmetric collaboration
asymmetric collaboration
Interracial Collaboration does not mean symmetry. We are not the same and becoming the same is not the goal. We share values, but we operationalize those values in different ways.
Kai
I work, research, and create for racialized communities, for queer communities, and for Disabled and chronically ill communities. What does it mean to do that while in a deep collaboration with a white able-bodied person? I choose my partnership with Sarah again and again precisely because she does the work that isn’t mine to do. We share values and visions, but we both know our work is radically different because we are different and the world treats us differently. Our collaboration gives me the freedom to cultivate what matters to me, and I trust that Sarah is carrying the water to a different plot of land, an also vital plot of land, but one that is not mine to tend. Our relationship allows us each to stay where our own values, desires, and expertise is needed. We struggle with this reality when one of us is asked to talk, teach, lecture on our own. Not every room Sarah chooses to work in is a room I want to or consent to be in. But the truth is, our work is always in relationship because we are always in relationship.
I focus on gathering BIPOC/people of the global majority/racialized people around rest, community and care. Together we listen to ourselves and each other, because community is everything. Together we create a place where rage can be purged from our bodies, community and power are built, and healing becomes action. It’s also a place to find respite and connection.
Friendships are created here that can sustain folks working in predominately white institutions or living in white communities. We build power when we link our bodies in support, in witness, and in healing. One becomes two and two becomes three, and three becomes more and more.
I remember a gathering I ran that included many folks without my educational privilege, who had never encountered words like ‘embodiment’ or ‘somatics’ or knew anything about performing arts training. One of them told me that when she was stressed, she would take a fast walk around her neighborhood and would swing her arms intensely, almost punching the air to move her feelings through her body. That’s the kind of brilliance we can share with each other: our personal quiet practices of tuning our ability to listen to ourselves, one minute at a time.
Sarah
It might seem hardcore that Kai and I lean into race the way we do–we both want something else besides race for the world. But we both know we have to tend to what race does in order to get there. When we ask people in our workshops to work with us separately in the White Working Group and the BIPOC Rest Circle, it all comes bubbling out: denial, fear, frustration, shame, relief, or maybe excitement about actually spending some time collaborating as white people or being together as people of color holding race and racism.
We have had many predominantly white organizations come to us for trainings. Since we know that we don’t want white people to hoard the benefits of anti-racisting resources, we have asked those organizations to open up the BIPOC Rest circle to participants beyond them for free. This request alone often provokes change and self-reflection in the organizations we work with, and sometimes when they come through and the BIPOC circle is full of folks from all over, real power starts to get built; not only in that group, but across the region.
White supremacy has purposefully kept white people ignorant and unfeeling of the ways that we are complicit in racist harm. We cannot do the work of anti-racisting alone. We can and should do this work in a group of other people who benefit from white privilege. In a White Working Group, we can:
1) Protect BIPOC from the emotional labor of white people processing racism. It is a gift that we might redistribute this labor to fellow white people.
2) Share explicit examples to each other of how we are working on our own racism in our bodies, relationships, and communities.
3) Provide encouragement and accountability in order to sustain our commitments to anti-racisting.
So much of anti-racist action is about showing up humbly and willingly to the process of repair. We are tasked with repairing the enormous ruptures of systemic racism and repairing the individual ruptures of racist harm against the BBIA in our lives. Repair cannot be rushed, and it requires ongoing commitment. Real trust gets built over time. As adrienne marie brown asks, ”Can we move at the speed of trust?”
We cannot do this work alone. Learning that my body is my accountability partner in anti-racisting has been invaluable. When I get hot and sweaty, feel frozen, want to run, want to scream in tense racialized moments, these are all biomarkers, messages from my body that I have been hijacked into perceiving Black and Brown people as a threat. My ability to feel and recognize these signs and find my breath, my feet, my belly, my thinking, feeling, listening self can flood back in. This is all nervous system studies stuff, this is all somatic abolition stuff, I think the Practice Progress twist might just be the gratitude in the connection to my body, that I am not alone in my conscious mind in my anti-racisting work. My body, my guts, are really my partner in this work.
We cannot do this work alone. I also look to our partners in the more-than-human world, like water, trees, mud, the sky who are also entangled in the impacts and healing processes presented by racism, colonisation, and capitalism as team members in anti-racisting. This connection to place and other beings moves the ego around, and focuses me onto the tenderness of our interconnectivity.
“We need spaces where we can simply be—where we can get off the treadmill of making white people comfortable and finally realize just how tired we are… Valuing and protecting spaces for people of color (PoC) is not just a kind thing that white people can do to help us feel better; supporting these spaces is crucial to the resistance of oppression. When people of color are together, there can be healing. We can reclaim parts of ourselves that have been repressed. We can redefine ourselves and support one another in embracing who we are.”
Kelsey Blackwell, Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People
“Whites who are sincere should organize themselves and figure out some strategies to break down the prejudice that exists in white communities. This is where they can function more intelligently and more effectively, in the white community itself, and this has never been done.”
—Malcolm X, interview with Jack Barnes and Barry Sheppard, Young Socialist (March-April 1965)