Community Dialogues

I have decided to offer a Community Dialogue series available to those who share affinity in the struggle for collective liberation. My intention is to create a regular (virtual) meeting space where organizers, movement workers, and community builders can gather to check-in, report back, and share support for each other.

This offering is borne of my own desire to connect in a space like this. I'd previously engaged in a similar series through the White Noise Collective, a no-longer active collective of anti-racist activists working through their own internalized wh!te suprema¢y together. Their dialogue practice and community agreements were informed by their years of practice together, and by Paulo Freire's definition of a "true dialogue." 

The White Noise Collective's Dialogue Practices/ Agreements:

• Speak from your own experience 

• Don't assume about other's lived experiences or identities. Seek understanding of each other's  experiences or identities. Seek understanding of each other's experiences and ideas (and acknowledge that a full understanding might be impossible).

•   We learn best when we are uncomfortable.

  • Privilege conditions us to expect comfort and to conflate comfort and safety (ie. white fragility).

  • We don't learn when we are comfortable or when we are unsafe.

  • We have to push ourselves into discomfort if we want to learn/unlearn. 

• Strive for "both/ and," let go of right and wrong, binary thinking.

• One person talks at a time.

• Expect and accept a lack of closure.

  • Plan to leave with more questions than answers. Goal is to leave unsettled, with better tools and understandings, not to find the "right" way or all the answers.

• Move from certainty to curiosity.

• Understand the difference between intent and impact.

  • Assume good intentions of others.

  • Be accountable for your impact.

• Strive for balance between theory and lived experience. 

• Make space for the personal, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic - simultaneously and intersectionally.

• Allow yourself to be both self-critical and self-loving.

• Be humble and horizontal - everyone in the room has something to learn and something to share. We are student-teachers, and teacher-students. 

  • Facilitators are responsible for trying to get us where we're going, but everyone brings knowledge.

  • Facilitators are not experts. We create these spaces because we want to learn about these things.

• Stories stay. Learning leaves. 

• Practice speaking and pratice listening. Work especially on the one that is harder for you.

• Take care of yourself so you can stay present.

• Cultivate praxis; reflect, take action, and reflect again.