An Anti-Racism Triad

Reflection by Nancy Willbanks

For the past year and nine months, I have been meeting monthly in an anti-racism triad. We each had participated in one of the several book groups reading My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem (link to Bookshop.org) under the auspices of Music That Makes Community in 2021 and 2022. (See more about forming a triad in this article: When White Bodies say, "Tell me what to do.") 

We meet on zoom. I knew Jeremy from Monday Morning Grounding, and I didn’t know April at all, before we started meeting. We made a commitment for a year, and we are still meeting because we all find the hour and fifteen minutes we spend together each month valuable. We live in Massachusetts, Arizona and South Dakota. We juggle competing schedules and time zones. We are all in ministry and ordained. Jeremy and I are pastors and April is a chaplain at a community hospital. Jeremy is in a community where the BIPOC population is primarily from the Lakota tribe, while April sees a broader range of ethnicities in the hospital setting, including Native Americans, Latinx, and Black. In my neighborhood, the BIPOC people I see or interact with are Asian (including my daughter), Black, and Latinx.   

Each month we share some of our own noticings about racism that we have witnessed or heard or read about, and we share a somatic practice, often from My Grandmother’s Hands, and we share a song. Sometimes in between our meetings we text.

Last week April texted a link to an interview about a new book from WBUR, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America by Coleman Hughes, and that interview (https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/02/27/can-colorblindness-lead-to-equality-in-america) was the launching point of our conversation this month. We have all done a lot of reading of the authors, like Ibram X Kendi and Robyn DiAngelo, whose premises Coleman Hughes seemingly disagrees with: 

"My beef with the general line of thinking is that what I call neo-racism, this new kind of anti-racism, rather than agree with the ethos of the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, which says that race is only skin deep and that ultimately, we are one human family that is not divided in any meaningful or important way by skin color. It says instead that race is deeply meaningful, deeply important, indelible. And that we should all be meditating on the deep importance and meaning of our racial identities and inscribe racial discrimination in public policy, essentially for all time.”

Hughes would rather aim, as did Dr. King, for the idea that a person should be judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin:

“So my alternative, which I think is much, much better, is exactly what Martin Luther King wrote in his book, Why We Can't Wait, where he acknowledges, absolutely we have to address the legacy of slavery. Absolutely, we ought to care about racial inequality, but the way we ought to address that is with a broad based, anti-poverty, class-based policy, which by definition will disproportionately help Blacks and Hispanics. Because Blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately likely to be poor, but it will be done on the basis of socioeconomic class, not on the basis of race.” 

In our discussion, we began to notice that this sets us up, particularly in a capitalist society, to be judged worthy on how much money we make. Jeremy commented that if we looked at true productivity, that would be about how much product we actually make, the work of our hands. The irony then is that most wealthy “working” people, CEO’s and upper management, are coming up with ideas and plans and maybe answering emails, but not working with their hands, but as April noted, they make their money by thinking, smoozing and making connections. There are different standards for being productive, when in fact, I suggested that wealth and class, like race, gender, sexual identity, religion, just become another way for us to “other” people who are not like us, and all of those ways of dividing people are ways for one group of people to maintain power over others. 

We noticed that as pastors and chaplains if we use as measures of our productivity things such as how many people come to church or how many visits we make, we miss the real impact of our ministry which is much harder to measure: did you bring comfort to the lonely, sick or dying, did you help someone deepen or enrich their spiritual life, did you offer someone an idea or practice that will help them love their neighbors? For April, as the only part-time chaplain at her hospital since recent budget and staffing cuts, there is pressure to make visits short and see more people, and not talk to staff or facilitate interdepartmental dialogs with and about patients, that will actually improve patient care and quality of life. Productivity by itself, we agreed, is not enough.  

I talked a bit about my daughter’s recent experience with different cultural values around time and punctuality, which are closely related to productivity and how different cultures have different priorities and values. 

Jeremy, who is taking a course called Breathing Underwater with the Center for Action and Contemplation, offered that contemplation is equally necessary. He said our meeting time was contemplative, and that while our gathering might not be considered “productive,” because there is no product, but for all of us it’s very valuable. I concurred and said that in our meeting we nurture relationship, which unfortunately, has historically been regarded as “women’s work” and not seen as important. 

April mentioned a visit in the hospital that she made recently with a Black man with prison gang tattoos on his face, and said that our meetings have made it possible for her to be present with someone like that and talk honestly and openly about racism and his life when before she might not have spoken so openly with him.   

We closed our meeting with a song from April, and with the practice of Slow Rocking (My Grandmother’s Hands, p. 143-144; reprinted below). We noticed how that practice settled our bodies.

After we left zoom, our conversation continued via text:

Monday

April:

I keep pondering how racism really is just about drawing a line that others us in order that somehow and some do not have it’s simply one more way to exercise power

I felt our time together was a very productive ha ha

I also continue to ponder whether contemplation and production are truly opposites or if they’re partners 

Jeremy:

I like the idea of those two being partners  

April:

OK last one I promise 

I'm just laughing to myself because I just turned on my audible book while I'm driving and the title of this chapter is functioning from presence 

Tuesday morning

Nancy:

I am reading Daniel Wolpert’s book, Looking Inward, Living Outward for a book group, and he uses “effective” in the ways we were using “productive”: from chapter 3: “Humility is the practice of returning again and again to the truth of our limitations. We recognize that saving the world—creating the present kingdom—is not our job. We cannot manage our own way to the beloved community. Blessing, the deep encounter with the Spirit with whom we cooperate in social transformation, arises as we let go of our need to control and our delusion that we are tasked with fixing everything. Humility prepares us for actions that the world derides and deems ineffective because they run counter to our enslavement by the empire.”

Wolpert, Daniel. Looking Inward, Living Outward: The Spiritual Practice of Social Transformation (p. 43). Upper Room Books. Kindle Edition.

Jeremy:

…run counter to our enslavement by the empire…

Wow! 

Nancy:

I know!

April:

Powerful.  

I wonder what actions….  

Nancy:

In this chapter he uses the beatitudes as examples of those actions: people who take the time to mourn; people who are peacemakers 

April:

Beautiful

Tuesday afternoon 

April:

Jeremy:

lol! Our dryer broke and I just put out laundry on the fence!!!

Nancy:

Some productivity is necessary. 

April:

I wanna visit THERE!   

Jeremy:

Both of you are welcome to visit and would have a place to stay

We could hang laundry together!  

April:

Well, now There’s an invitation!  😂😂😂

We do share our dirty laundry!!!

I’ll stop there, even though our texts didn’t.

Who are you having deep, honest and productive conversations with? Do you have people in your lives with whom you can have conversations about both productivity and contemplation? Do you make space to notice and be curious about what is going on in the world around and how it impacts you? Do you have people with whom you can have hard conversations about race, class, sexism, homophobia? Do you have people who share songs and practices that settle your body with you?

If not, especially if you are a white-bodied person, I encourage you to take up Resmaa’s challenge to commit and engage with a couple of other people in a triad. Our experience is that the relationship, the learning, the settledness, and spiritual, emotional and intellectual growth and connection are well worth the time.

Settle yourself:  

SLOW ROCKING 

Get comfortable and take a few slow, deep breaths. Then, slowly rock your upper body from side to side, or forward and back. 

If you like, play or hum a slow, soothing tune and rock to its beat. 

Feel free to experiment with standing versus sitting; with rocking side to side versus forward and back; with a range of different (but always slow) speeds; and with sitting in a variety of seats and positions. Discover what feels best to your body. 

When you are done, stop and notice what your body is experiencing. 

Alternative: Keep your body still, but let your head and neck rock slowly from side to side.

--
Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW. My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (pp. 143-144). Central Recovery Press, LLC. Kindle Edition.

Songs that inspired and informed this reflection:

What Do You Notice? 
Nancy Willbanks
https://allourdays.substack.com/p/what-do-you-notice 

What do you notice?
What do you notice?
What do you notice here?
What do you notice?
What do you notice?
What do you notice now?

What do you notice when you see yourself
and the world with fresh eyes?
What do you notice when you stop and look:
Oh, a surprise!

What do you notice?
What do you notice?
What do you notice here?
What do you notice?
What do you notice?
What do you notice now?

Nancy Willbanks has been attending Music that Makes Community events since 2017 and local practice groups since 2018, and during the pandemic has been a regular at Monday Morning Grounding, Heart Songs, and the My Grandmother’s Hands book group and follow-up gatherings. A second career minister, Nancy was ordained in 2011 and served as Minister to Youth and Families at Old Cambridge Baptist Church from 2011-15. From 2017-2023, she was the Pastor (half-time) at the First Baptist Church of Littleton. During her ministry in Littleton the church revised their 1980's by-laws and governance structure, voted to become a Welcoming and Affirming Congregation, completed a $100,000 Capital Campaign for renovations to the sanctuary and bathrooms, pivoted to a very interactive Zoom worship during the pandemic, and then to hybrid worship, and in 2022, the congregation celebrated its Bicentennial year. She also served as the President of the Greater Littleton Interfaith Council for 2021-2022, and, since January 2022, has been the treasurer of the Board of Directors of the Conference of Baptist Ministers in Massachusetts. In 2023, Nancy is transitioning her ministry to focus on both to write (after writing daily reflections during the pandemic for 2+ years) and to create/be a part of worshipful, intersectional, healthy community gatherings that provide space for people, especially those who work on Sunday mornings—like pastors and church musicians—to be nourished, to worship, to learn, and to re-fill their wells.  (To see Nancy's complete bio, click here)

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