Using the Episcopal Church’s Becoming Beloved Community vision, we frame a path for Episcopalians to address racial injustice and grow as a community of reconcilers, justice-makers, and healers who share a passion for the dream of God. Because this is the work of spiritual formation, and not simply completing a training or implementing a set of programs, we encourage individuals and congregations to embrace the journey ahead as a long-term commitment. It may be helpful to imagine a labyrinth as you reflect, act, and reflect again. After all, on the road toward reconciliation and healing, we travel around corners, make sharp turns, pass fellow travelers, and double back into quadrants we have indeed visited before, each time discovering a fresh revelation or challenge.
With a resolution approved by the 143rd Diocesan Convention, all persons holding any office in the Episcopal Diocese of Western Michigan must have taken an anti-racism workshop within the last three years.
Upcoming Diocesan Workshops
Despite legal changes and racial integration, the sin of racism still pervades our society. These workshops will examine racism – how it has become embedded in our culture, structures, and unconscious biases. We will examine our own role in the maintenance of systems of privilege. Come prepared to learn and to engage in dialogue with fellow participants.
Apply for Approval of a Congregational Training
WORKSHOPS for racism training and skill development must be, by definition, “working places.” This means that:
- Level One participants are not just sitting and listening to presenters, reading a book, or viewing a film, but should be engaging in focused conversations on critical topics pertaining to racism, participating in question and answer sessions and interacting face-to-face with persons not from their own parish. It is this diversity of viewpoints and experiences that will demonstrate the importance of this ¨work¨ for everyone.
- Level Two participants must also include role-playing activities in which they assume situational identities where they must interact and respond to racist comments and conversations.
- Level Three workshops should focus on parish planning for diversity and inclusion.
Workshop facilitators should be encouraged to plan for these types of interactions with activities that get participants involved and out of their seats. It is expected that due diligence will have been done to ensure that facilitators have the proper training to conduct these sessions.
The EDWM Commission for Dismantling Racism requires prior approval of any parish activity related to racism training and skill development that is designed to meet the diocesan ¨Acknowledgement Certificate of Work toward Racial Reconciliation.¨ Workshop approval requires completion of the attached application, as well as a listing of objectives that reflect the particular phase that the workshop is being designed for. To make it possible that your workshop will be accepted, please complete the following form and submit it six to eight weeks before the event to:
EDWM Dismantling Racism, Mary Simpson, dismantlingracism@edwm.org
You should receive a reply of approval or request for further clarification within fourteen days.
Resources for Dismantling Racism
Recommended Curricula
- Sacred Ground Dialogue Series from The Episcopal Church. Click here to learn more about the series.
- Dismantling Racism Online Training from the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing, offered twice per month. Click here to learn more and RSVP.
Recommended Reading for Adults
- What Does it Mean to Be White (Robin DiAngelo) – Speaking as a white person to other white people, DiAngelo clearly and compellingly takes readers through an analysis of white socialization. Weaving research, analysis, stories, images, and familiar examples, she provides the framework needed to develop white racial literacy. She describes how race shapes the lives of white people, explains what makes racism so hard to see, identifies common white racial patterns, and speaks back to popular narratives that work to deny racism.
- The Warmth of Other Suns (Isabel Wilkerson) – In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.
- White Picket Fences (Amy Julia Becker) – Amy Julia Becker welcomes us into her life, from the charm of her privileged southern childhood to her adult experience in the northeast, and the denials she has faced as the mother of a child with special needs. She shows how a life behind a white picket fence can restrict even as it protects, and how it can prevent us from loving our neighbors well.
- A Lesson Before Dying (Earnest Gaines) – Gaines’ novel helps one see, through a black man’s eyes, the daily, and lifelong degradation and deprivation inflicted on fellow human beings. It is a novel that tells a deeper story, one that leaves the reader longing for a systemic change.
- Color of Compromise (Jemar Tisby) – Jemar Tisby, president of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, and a history graduate student, offers this brisk and accurate survey of how the church in America helped create and maintain racial hierarchy from the beginning until now. Tisby writes with an eye toward racial reconciliation and advances the conversation from the story of history to a call for action
Recommended Reading for Young People
- The Story of Ruby Bridges (Robert Coles) – The year is 1960 and six-year-old Ruby Bridges and her family have recently moved from Mississippi to New Orleans in search of a better life. When a judge orders Ruby to attend first grade at William Frantz Elementary, an all-white school, Ruby faces the angry mobs of parents, finding her strength in God and in her community.
- The March 1, 2, & 3 (John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell illustrator) – Congressman John Lewis is an American icon, one of the key figures of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper’s farm to Congress. This book tells the first part of the story in the genre of graphic novels.
Recommended Films
- 13th – Filmmaker Ava DuVernay explores the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the fact that the nation’s prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans.
- 42 – In 1946, Branch Rickey, legendary manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, defies major league baseball’s notorious color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to the team.
- Do the Right Thing – The wall in a pizzeria in Brooklyn becomes a symbol of racism and hate to people in the neighborhood, and tensions rise.
- Harriet – From her escape from slavery through the dangerous missions she led to liberate hundreds of slaves through the Underground Railroad, the story of heroic abolitionist Harriet Tubman is told.
- I Am Not Your Negro – In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, “Remember This House.” The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind only 30 completed pages of this manuscript. Filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished.
- Just Mercy – After graduating from Harvard, Bryan Stevenson heads to Alabama to defend those wrongly condemned or those not afforded proper representation.
- Loving – Interracial couple Richard and Mildred Loving fell in love and were married in 1958. It was the state of Virginia, where they were making their home and starting a family, that first jailed and then banished them.
- Mudbound – Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband’s Mississippi Delta farm, a place she finds foreign and frightening. Ronsel Jackson, the eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, now battles the prejudice in the Jim Crow South.
- Selma – In 1965, an Alabama city became the battleground in the fight for suffrage. Despite violent opposition, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) and his followers pressed forward on an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, and their efforts culminated with President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
- The Banker – In the 1960s, two entrepreneurs hatch an ingenious business plan to fight for housing integration-and equal access to the American Dream.
- The Hate You Give – Starr Carter is constantly switching between two worlds — the poor, mostly black neighborhood where she lives and the wealthy, mostly white prep school that she attends. Facing pressure from all sides of the community, Starr must find her voice and decide to stand up for what’s right.
Liturgical Resources
Service of Holy Eucharist following the completion of Sacred Ground.
Other
Certificate of completion for parish use.
CONTACT PERSON
Mary Simpson, Data and Resource Coordinator