The news has a tendency to give us reasons for bad things happening to good people. Like why was Trayvon Martin walking with a hoodie on?  What would the news have reported if he wasn’t African American? There is so much implicit  bias that we aren’t  even aware of and it is so sad. It continues to create this divide of hatred and misunderstanding, it continues to wear away at the fabric of our society.  We need healing and reconciliation if we want to move forward. The more enlightened we can become to those implicit biases with in us, the more we can begin to heal.  

Kristin Lin, editor of the OnBeing Project was quoting Isabel Wilkerson’s book  The Warmth of Other Suns this morning. Read this through a couple of times: 

“Wilkerson also models how understanding history can be an act of compassion — to bear witness to the humanity and the struggle, the persistence and the beauty of generations past. “You think about those cotton fields, and those rice plantations, and those tobacco fields, and on all of those cotton fields, and tobacco plantations, and rice plantations were opera singers, and jazz musicians, and poets, and professors, defense attorneys, doctors. [The Great Migration] is the manifestation of the desire to be free and what was lost to the country. Because for centuries, for 246 years of enslavement … these people were miscast into an artificial hierarchy as to what they were permitted to do, or risk death if they did not do that,” she says.” 

So if you’d like to join me in reading “White Fragility” by Robin Diangelo we will be beginning on Monday, July 6th. This will be an email/Facebook study. I will post some ideas each Monday and you can read and respond on your own timing.  Let me know. Thanks!