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Before You Proceed...
This website exists to educate, challenge, and inspire. This website is sensational, as understood by Sara Ahmed, and seeks to make you feel things. Discomfort and disgust are central, but so are curiosity and excitement. We are telling a story, one systemically excluded. The story of Indigenous History, Black History, and how you fit into changing this community.
Continue your adventure below.
The following is an excerpt from Resmaa Menakem's My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts. We felt it was appropriate to include as a warning before you continue navigating our site. If you're interested, it's available for purchase here.
"If the persistence of white supremacy in twenty-first century America surprises you, this [website] will give you a startlingly different understanding of why. You will discover the vital force behind white supremacy is in our blood–literally–and in our nervous systems. However light or dark our skins, we Americans must all contend with these elemental forces.
If you are not surprised that widespread white supremacy continues to injure America, but have no ideas or little hope for overcoming it, keep reading. This [website] offers a profoundly different view of what we can do, individually and together, to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide. This process has little to do with ideology, politics, or public policy and everything to do with neuroscience and the body.
If you see white supremacy as a belief system or ideology, [on this website] you will discover only a fraction of it exists in our cognitive brains. For the most part, white supremacy lives in our bodies. In fact, white supremacy would be better termed white-body supremacy, because every white-skinned body, no matter who inhabits it–and no matter what they think, believe, do, or say–automatically benefits from it.
If you are convinced that ending white supremacy begins with social and political action, do not read this [website] unless you are willing to be challenged. We need to begin with the healing of trauma–in dark-skinned bodies, light-skinned bodies, our neighborhoods and communities, and the law enforcement profession. Social and political actions are essential, but they need to be part of a larger strategy of healing, justice, and creating room for growth in traumatized flesh-and-blood bodies.
If you believe America's racial tensions lie not in white supremacy but in its dark-skinned people and the power they wield, do not read further. The pages ahead will trigger your trauma reflexes and make your life more painful than it already is" (Menakem).
Now that you've decided to continue, here is how to navigate this site:
We'd like to curate your experience here. To start, please go to the settled bodies tab where you will find resources about settling your body (from Menakem) and dealing with discomfort. Next, we would like you to explore the provocative statement attached to this QR code by going to the page on whiteness to orient yourself on this website. Then, we ask that you examine the indigenous land acknowledgement tab where there is a land acknowledgment (as the title implies) as well as resources for further education. After this, we give you an opportunity to learn about the history of segregation and oppression of Black bodies in your community. And finally, we've provided you with tangible action steps moving forward.
On the action page, you will also find an anonymous space to leave questions, comments, or reflections. We encourage you to share your thoughts.